Streetsblog New York City

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx’s Senate hearing was, by all accounts, the one “oasis of calm” on an otherwise stormy Capitol Hill yesterday. There were no sharp exchanges, no tense moments, not even any particularly tough questions. Two weeks from today, we’ll probably be calling him “Mister Secretary.”

Foxx enjoyed smooth sailing through his confirmation hearing yesterday in the Senate and is expected to be confirmed at the beginning of June.

Cabinet nominees often spend all their time on the witness stand at these hearings dodging questions, saying they’ll “look into that and get back to you.” But Foxx gave some real answers. He was well-informed and confident, and when senators asked him how he would handle thorny issues like funding constraints and modal silos, Foxx reassured them that he had ably handled the same issues as mayor.

TIGER. Foxx spoke with authority about TIGER, having managed TIGER grants in Charlotte that he felt did a lot of good. The city got $18 million in 2011 for additional power substations and extended platforms at three stations on its expanded light rail Blue Line. Foxx said that constraints of formula funding had hindered them from building the platforms right the first time, and it was a testament to TIGER’s flexibility and multimodalism that it was able to step in and fill that gap.

Funding. Senators seemed determined to try to scare Foxx by reminding him of the funding emergency confronting the department, but he remained sanguine. He didn’t show his hand about what solutions he had in mind — and it’s Congress’s decision anyway — but he indicated that they’ll have to “think outside the box,” as his predecessor, Ray LaHood, liked to say. To his credit, Foxx did not follow Obama’s line and promise to pay for transportation with war savings.

He also had a very reasonable response to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who asked him to make sure that the sequester and any future spending cuts be implemented with a minimal amount of pain to consumers, targeting only “waste, fraud and abuse.” Foxx refused to take the bait. He said that, certainly, they would seek to minimize pain, but there would be some. If lawmakers are going to continue to cut programs, they can’t fool themselves into thinking that there won’t be consequences.

Tolling.Foxx indicated he would continue the current policy of allowing tolling only on new federally-funded roads to pay for their construction — not on existing roads to pay for their maintenance. He said tolling “has a place” but “we’re not going to toll our way to prosperity.” Maybe not, but it sure could help. Allowing state DOT’s to toll existing interstates — something many agencies want to do — could result in wringing more efficiency out of the transportation network without building expensive new infrastructure.

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Yes, traffic fatalities have been (mostly) going down, but as long as cyclist and pedestrian fatalities keep going up, we can’t truly say our streets and roads are getting safer. That’s the message from 68 members of Congress to one pretty receptive audience: Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Lawmakers say states should be making sure their streets are safe for everyone. Photo: Tiffany Robinson, Ped-Bike Images

In their letter to LaHood, sent on Saturday, the 68 lawmakers – including nine Republicans — note that between 2010 and 2011, driving got safer: Roadway fatalities dropped 2 percent overall; 4.6 percent for occupants of cars and light trucks. But bicyclist fatalists went up 9 percent and pedestrian deaths rose 3 percent in the same time period.

LaHood announced last month that U.S. DOT would be holding two bike safety summits this year. But the lawmakers want the agency to go further. And they didn’t just ask in vague terms for increased attention to safety. They got specific: U.S. DOT should create “separate performance measures for non-motorized and motorized users.”

If it sounds like they might have gotten some ideas from people deep inside the bike advocacy world, well, you got that right. Hundreds of Bike Summit participants made this their key “ask” earlier this month when they visited their representatives on Capitol Hill. Apparently their representatives listened.

SAFETEA-LU, passed in 2005, required states to set goals for reducing overall fatalities but included no specific reporting requirements for biking and walking. Without state attention, vulnerable road users have become even more vulnerable, with fatalities increasing both in real numbers and as a percentage of roadway fatalities, according to Caron Whitaker of the League of American Bicyclists.

One-third of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee signed on to the letter, giving DOT a good sense how the committee wants them to interpret MAP-21. “When Congress set performance measures areas, they were saying, ‘These are the things we are going to judge you on,’” Whitaker said in an email. “If bicyclists and pedestrians aren’t included in the performance measures, we risk being left behind.”

“In over half of all states, more than 10 percent of roadway fatalities are bicyclists and pedestrians but yet only seven states report investing in any bicycling and walking safety projects,” she added.

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Perhaps Rep. John Mica’s most remarkable legacy as chair of the House Transportation Committee is the single-minded focus he gave to attacking Amtrak. Under the guise of wanting it to succeed, Mica has repeatedly excoriated it as a “Soviet-style monopoly” and a waste of taxpayer dollars. He’s tried to sell off its only profitable line, the Northeast Corridor, and made a mockery of every aspect of its operations, right down to food service. If there’s anything he got more glee out of criticizing, it was the Transportation Security Administration.

Last year, Mica took a field trip to McDonalds to berate Amtrak for losing money on food service. Photo: WUSA

Mica’s no longer chair of the Transportation Committee. But as of this morning, he’s got a new post from which he can take shots at these agencies.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where Mica was already a senior member, is consolidating two subcommittees into a new Subcommittee on Government Operations. That new subcommittee will oversee the TSA and Amtrak. And Mica will be the chair.

In other committee news, 10 new Republicans and 10 new Democrats are joining the T&I committee. Democrats gained one seat on the 60-member committee. New Chair Bill Shuster has a track record of taking new members under his wing to bring them up to speed on the intricacies of transportation policy. No doubt, many lobbyists will take it upon themselves to do the same.

In the Senate, Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski will take over the chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee. Media reports about her leadership of that committee center around her gender — she’ll be the first woman to chair it — but more notable to transportation reformers is the fact that she’s a vocal supporter of transit. She’s fought for federal funding of all the transit systems under her jurisdiction as well as Amtrak. After the red line Metro crash in 2009, she sponsored legislation to bring federal safety oversight to local systems, a provision that was included in MAP-21. She also favors parity between commuter tax benefits for drivers and transit riders, which was included in the fiscal cliff deal that was approved late on New Years Day.

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Happy New Year, transit riders! Thanks to some shrewd maneuvering on the part of some U.S. Senators, transit commuters will be able to claim as much in tax benefits as car commuters do in 2013.

Transit commuters could have a little extra change in their pockets in 2013, thanks to the fiscal cliff deal. Photo: Treehugger

Slipped into the fiscal cliff deal approved by the House of Representatives last night was a provision to boost the tax incentive to commute by transit. The commuting costs that straphangers could claim as tax-deductible had been reduced to a maximum of $125 per month last year, well below the $240 that car commuters could claim monthly to offset parking costs.

With transit and parking benefits again equal, there will be one less pernicious financial incentive to drive to work alone, as David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington noted:

In approving this extension, [Congress was] able to give many American workers a tax cut along with helping our cities function more effectively and ending one small example of the many ways government “picks winners and losers” among transportation modes.

The equalized tax incentive for transit was extended only though the end of the year, though, so electeds will again have to act to put transit on equal footing with driving.

Politico said the provision is expected to provide up to $190 million a year in incentives for transit riders. Good to see some smart policy came out of that messy, messy budget ordeal, which will continue to play out over the next few months, with plenty of implications for how Americans get around.

In transportation circles, all eyes are on Rep. Bill Shuster, who was just tapped to head the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the House. And you may have heard about how GOP leadership appointed a climate change denier to head the House Committee on Science. But on the Senate side, there’s some good news for advocates of sustainable transportation coming out of the appointment process this week.

How will Washington Senator Patty Murray use her new post as chair of the Senate Budget Committee to shape national transportation policy? Photo: Katu.com

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) is set to take over the top role on the powerful Senate Budget Committee.

“Senator Murray is a strong supporter of transportation investments (including ports and rail infrastructure), livability programs, enhancements, and the TIGER program in particular,” said David Burwell, director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment. He added that the budget chair position “will put her in a very powerful position to craft the entire federal budget.”

Ben Schiendelman of Seattle Transit Blog said the 20-year Senate veteran is known for winning appropriations for local transportation projects. The blog has endorsed her in the past.

“She seems to be a strong transit supporter,” said Schiendelman. “She’s landed us $1.8 billion in transit funding that I can think of in the last decade.”

Bike advocates in her home state also seem to have had a receptive audience in Murray. ”She’s generally supportive and coming from a state with strong state and local advocacy, in the form of Cascade Bicycle Club and the Bicycle Alliance of Washington,” said Darren Flusche, of the League of American Bicyclists.

Her record isn’t without its blemishes, however. Murray has been a big supporter of Portland’s $3.2 billion Columbia River Crossing project, a highway bridge boondoggle, which is designed to speed commutes for residents of the Portland suburb of Vancouver, Washington, according to the Oregonian. One of the major hurdles to that project is funding, both federal, state, and local. Murray as budget chair could play a large role in deciding the project’s future.

Who wins and who loses when political wheeling and dealing takes the place of sound decision-making on transportation? Graphic: CAP

Transportation reauthorizations have typically not been a time for major discussions about national policy goals. They’ve been a time for getting while the getting’s good, a time for deal-making and pork and a lot of back-room transactions to make sure every member of Congress could go home and talk about how much federal money they were bringing home.

If MAP-21 accomplished anything it was to change that conversation. It eliminated earmarks – no small feat, as the previous transportation bill, 2005′s SAFETEA-LU, was one of the most heavily-earmarked pieces of legislation ever. MAP-21 also eliminated funding formulas, which used to hold up every bill for at least a year or two as Congress members tried to manipulate the numbers to benefit their states. And the bill also eliminated the “equity bonus” program, which ate up 22 percent of transportation funding in 2010 and was, at its heart, the exact opposite of everything reformers are seeking in the transportation bill. The explicit purpose of the equity bonus program was to reallocate billions of dollars to where the money was not needed — and it was the biggest funding program by far in SAFETEA-LU, accounting for nearly $10 billion in 2010.

Unfortunately, although MAP-21 eliminated these inefficient calculations, it froze in place the funding levels that politicians arrived at through this wheeling and dealing. The new law based state-by-state allocations on the share of the total pie each state got in 2009 – and that share was determined by how well the state fared in flawed funding formulas and the equity bonus program.

Donna Cooper and John Griffith at the Center for American Progress just published a report called “Highway Robbery,” lamenting the fact that the equity bonus isn’t truly dead – its legacy still haunts our transportation funding system.

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If you were still hoping a real bill could come out of the transportation conference, here’s a bitter pill: House Speaker John Boehner is now talking about a six-month extension of the current law.

Photo courtesy of the office of John Boehner.

That extension would expire at the end of the year, along with such a massive bundle of economic initiatives that the lame-duck session is now known by some as “Taxmageddon.” Add to that “Highway Trust Fund-mageddon” – December 31 is just about when the money runs out.

A six-month extension is, arguably, better than a one-month extension, as insiders said [Boehner] was considering previously, or a three-month extension that’s been bandied about – expiring just weeks before the election. Boehner said a longer extension would be necessary to bring the issue “out of the political realm.” The construction and manufacturing industries have also been quietly lobbying for a longer extension, even as they push for passage of a bill, to guarantee at least more certainty than a one-month extension would provide.

It seems the Speaker has been listening. “If we get up to June 30th, I am not interested in some 30 day extension,” Boehner said during a press conference. “Frankly, I think if we get to June 30th, it’d be a six month extension.”

Senator Barbara Boxer shot back, “I am very disappointed that Speaker Boehner is even talking about a long-term transportation extension, which would lead to the Highway Trust Fund going bankrupt, when all of our efforts must be focused on passing a transportation bill by the June 30th deadline.”

Boxer is more and more isolated in her optimism about the possibility of passing a bill. Even the U.S. Conference of Mayors and some governors are now calling for an extension. It appears they, too have lost hope that this conference will lead to a bill.

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The time-and-venue change for Sen. Barbara Boxer’s press conference earlier today was apparently due to the fact that she was taking care of critical business: hand-delivering the Senate’s latest offer to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Chair John Mica (R-FL) wasn’t there to personally receive the document, which EPW Ranking Member James Inhofe joined Boxer in delivering, but the submission is a significant step in the conference process. If the two houses can’t come together on a conference report — with the Senate offer being a first draft — the Highway Trust Fund’s solvency is at stake, with potentially serious consequences for key programs.

Senate sources wouldn’t get into the details of the policy proposals in the offer, but said that it “moves in the direction of the House.” We’ll have to wait and see what that means for bike/ped funding, which some House Republicans want to eliminate, and for the controversial anti-environmental amendments the House is insisting on.

The Senate’s offer included the highway, transit, and rail/safety titles but not the finance piece. Ongoing discussions about the length of the bill make it impossible to put a dollar figure to it just yet. Sources say the bill will be at least as long as MAP-21, the Senate bill which would run through next September, but it could be longer, if the pay-for can be agreed upon.

It’s up to the House now to come back with its counter. It’s the job of the conference committee to iron out all the differences between the document Boxer and Inhofe sent to the House today and whatever the House sends back.

Meanwhile, the stakes couldn’t be higher. While many stakeholders and lawmakers focus on the millions of jobs that this bill could create or save, especially in the devastated construction sector, the bigger issue is the solvency of the Highway Trust Fund. Lawmakers passing extension after extension have made the problem far worse. At this point, the Highway Trust Fund is expected to run out of money around the end of this year.

Current law doesn’t address this problem. The Senate bill pays for itself until September 2013, when the issue will arise again. But if the trust fund is simply allowed to go bankrupt, through Congress’s inaction, it could intensify pressure to eliminate certain programs. They won’t be the programs that really cost the Trust Fund money — massive road-building, for example — but rather the hot-button, small-slice issues that have caused so much heartache already in these proceedings: bike/ped and transit.

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Sen. Barbara Boxer’s noon press conference started out as a bit of a mess. The Senate press gallery announced it was canceled five minutes before it was due to start. Then three minutes later, the EPW committee sent out a notice that the event had changed locations and would start 20 minutes later. Needless to say, there was much confusion.

Sen. Boxer met in late April with the Orange County Business Council, one of the signers of a letter urging action on the transportation bill. Photo courtesy of the Office of Barbara Boxer.

When she addressed press members who checked their email in time to get there, Boxer distributed two letters from stakeholders urging Congress to pass a bill or risk millions of jobs.

The first one, from the highway lobby (AAA, AASHTO, the asphalt people, the equipment manfacturers, the contractors, the Highway Users Alliance, and, somewhat incongruously, the American Public Transportation Association) referred to the unemployment numbers released Friday:

While the overall unemployment numbers at 8.3 percent are chilling, the construction industry numbers are much worse at 14.2 percent and showing further job losses. I need not remind you that these are high paying American jobs.

We are deeply concerned about reports that suggest that progress is not being made in conference negotiations that will lead to completion of work by June 30th. We urge that serious action be taken immediately and we are prepared to work with all parties to reach a successful outcome.

The second is from 49 chambers of commerce and business councils around the country. It was less direct in calling Congress on its ineffectiveness but it refers to three similar letters the same coalition has sent Congress, starting last August, and to the nine stop-gap extensions that have prolonged the debate and precluded real action. The signers are clearly concerned about the impending deadline and the need to “invest in our infrastructure, advance mobility and save and create jobs.”

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A coalition of 70 organizations, including the US Conference of Mayors, American Heart Association, and the National PTA, have signed on to a letter from AmericaBikes urging Congress to preserve the Cardin-Cochran amendment — a provision in the Senate transportation bill that allows local agencies to directly access funds street safety projects. The letter is addressed to the 33 House members and 14 Senators on the transportation bill conference committee. Neither co-sponsor of the original amendment is on the committee.

A broad coalition wants to protect the sliver of federal funding to help cities and towns make streets safer for walking and biking. Image: Alliance for Biking & Walking

As the letter points out, the signatories represent the incredibly wide range of benefits that accrue from a well-supported biking and walking program:

Our organizations care about a diverse range of issues — transportation, safety, accessibility, economic competitiveness, historic preservation, health and obesity. And we are united in asking you to ensure that local governments have flexibility and funding certainty to address these issues by making available to them a small portion of federal transportation dollars.

Last week it became clear that a few conferees may still have their sights set on removing bike-ped funding from the federal transportation program entirely. But a recent survey showed that over 80 percent of all Americans — when controlling for region, age, education, even political affiliation — support at the very least keeping bike-ped spending where it is, if not increasing it.

“This letter and the March 2012 polling data show broad support for federal funding for biking and walking across the country,” said Caron Whitaker, campaign director of America Bikes, in a statement accompanying the letter. “Americans clearly want this small, but vital, investment in biking and walking to continue.”

“First the survey, and now this letter from organizations from all walks — folks really want to see local control over bike-ped funding,” added America Bikes Communications Coordinator Mary Lauran Hall. “The controversy is isolated and inside-the-Beltway.”

The letter arrives while the committee negotiations appear to be in danger of stalling out before members agree on the details of a final bill. The sense that talks may fizzle is mounting.

Politico Pro has reported (behind a paywall) that Senator Barbara Boxer, who championed the original bill through her Environment and Public Works Committee and then the full Senate, believes negotiations to be “at a crossroads,” indicating that GOP willingness to play ball could be waning after some initial enthusiasm.

Read the full coalition letter after the jump.

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