Streetsblog New York City

The sun rose this morning on a landscape considerably different from the one described by not one but two articles Streetsblog published yesterday.

Harry Reid will face his next tough vote as early as Tuesday. Photo: Office of Harry Reid

Senate Bill Gets Bigger, Better, But Harder to Move

Senator Harry Reid took a lot of business into his own hands yesterday, unveiling his updated version of the Senate’s “two year” bill (it’s really only ever been 18 months), and incorporating the Cardin-Cochran amendment that grants metro areas greater control over bike-ped spending.

Why now? A couple of potential roadblocks fell and Reid probably saw an opportunity. First, the Senate voted down Roy Blunt’s contraception amendment. At the same time, Egypt let the American NGO employees there leave the country, clearing a second “non-germane” amendment to the transportation bill. That only leaves a Keystone XL pipeline amendment… and about a hundred more.

Reid’s inclusion of Cardin-Cochran is good news in that it eliminates the need for a separate vote on that particular amendment. However, Reid’s strategy also sets up a cloture vote on the entire package, which could come as early as next Tuesday. Cloture requires 60 votes to pass (the Democratic caucus controls only 53 seats), and so far, Reid is only 1-for-2 in cloture votes on the transportation bill. If this next vote fails, he will still have to find a way of dealing with the remaining amendments.

He will find it very difficult to bring Republicans over to his side, and it may be getting harder to keep the Democrats in line. Members of both parties are tiring of Reid’s tendency to “fill the tree,” using his authority as majority leader to prevent others from amending the bill (which he also did yesterday).

Two Democrats already broke ranks to vote for the Blunt amendment yesterday, so you can’t say Reid doesn’t know what he’s up against.

House Bill Shrinks to Nothing, Still Stinks

First it was a six-year transportation bill. Then it was a five-year drilling, transportation, and pension reform bill. Then, just for the first half of this week, it was an 18-month bill.

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Majority Leader Harry Reid has incorporated much of the Ben Cardin/Thad Cochran amendment into the so-called “manager’s mark” of the Senate transportation bill. The move means that the amendment’s provisions letting local governments directly access funding from popular bicycle and pedestrian programs will be included in the bill without having to come up for a separate vote.

Without the Cardin-Cochran amendment, cities and towns looking to invest in safer streets for walking and biking would have been left at the mercy of their state DOTs, which could have prevented any bike/ped funding from being spent. The adopted provisions would put funding directly in the hands of local agencies, making it harder for state highway departments to funnel resources away from walking, biking, and complete streets.

The full Senate bill, including the Cardin/Cochran provisions, could face a cloture vote as early as Tuesday. Streetsblog will have more in-depth analysis later in the day of what this means for the Senate’s efforts to pass a transportation bill.

Congress is in recess, and the House’s atrocious transportation bill has been dismembered and delayed, but if you want to preserve funding for transit and active transportation, don’t let your guard down yet. There’s still plenty to watch out for as the House and Senate attempt to reauthorize federal transportation programs. As we’ve reported, there are some stark differences between the House and Senate bills. But what is scariest may be their similarities.

When two companion pieces of legislation pass their respective chambers, they are combined by a conference committee. The committee is made up of members of both the House and the Senate, and it is their job to resolve differences between the two bills. (Most recently, a conference committee forged a compromise on extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance.)

Committee members are limited in that for each provision, they must choose either one chamber’s version or the other’s — they generally do not have the power to come up with something new on the spot. Furthermore, if the two bills agree on something, that provision can’t be altered by the conference committee.

There are already good chunks of the House and Senate bill that are the same — eliminating dedicated bike-ped funding, for instance. The House bill admittedly goes much further than the Senate’s, but if the two bills were to be conferenced right now, Safe Routes to School, Transportation Enhancements and Recreational Trails would all be history. The committee would then have to choose how to weaken those programs: eliminate them altogether, like the House bill, or keep them eligible under Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program but let states opt out of them. Another critical choice: fund CMAQ from the Highway Trust Fund, as in the Senate bill, or fund it from the the smoke-and-mirrors “alternative transportation account” envisioned in the House bill.

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Image: America Bikes

We mentioned it briefly last week, but the amendment to the Senate transportation bill from Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin and Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran is a critical one to track. The amendment would give local governments, rather than state DOTs, access to most federal bike-ped funding.

The way the Senate transportation bill, MAP-21, is currently written, all funding for complete streets programs is funneled to state DOTs, and for many cities and towns this could mean losing access to funds that make streets safer.

The Cardin-Cochran Amendment would instead direct the funding to what are known as “Tier 1 Metropolitan Planning Organizations” — agencies that help decide how to spend federal transportation dollars in regions larger than 1 million people. In states that have no MPOs serving areas larger than 1 million residents, state DOTs would distribute the money directly to local communities through a grant process.

Cochran told Streetsblog the measure would protect local communities from missing out on important funds: “Our amendment would ensure that communities continue to have access to federal resources to implement transportation improvements that are meaningful to public safety, economic development and quality of life at the local level,” he said.

Meanwhile, Melody Moody of Bike Walk Mississippi has been running a local letter writing campaign to thank Senator Cochran for his support. More than most states, Mississippi, which suffers from the nation’s most acute obesity problem, needs to provide opportunities for active transportation.

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All eyes are on the House side of Capitol Hill today in anticipation of the Republicans’ grand unveiling of their American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act at 3:00 p.m. But last night, some enduring questions about the Senate’s transportation bill finally got some answers. Senators Tim Johnson and Richard Shelby, respectively the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, released a summary of the Federal Public Transportation Act of 2012, providing a preliminary guide to how the Senate will treat transit [PDF].

Banking Committee Chair Tim Johnson (D-SD) and Ranking Member Richard Shelby (R-AL). Photo: LAT

Johnson and Shelby’s bill will serve as the transit component of the Senate’s two-year reauthorization bill, MAP-21, which passed the Environment and Public Works Committee with bipartisan support last month.

In one significant policy shift, the bill would enable transit authorities to use federal funds to pay for some of their operating expenses during “periods of high unemployment.” Generally, use of federal transit funds is restricted exclusively to system expansion and maintenance, but transit agencies across the country are slashing service, raising fares and laying off workers due to the effects of the economic downturn. This bill would offer them some much-needed relief.

The bill reauthorizes close to $21 billion in transit funding over two years, protecting many popular programs and expanding new ones. The reception so far has been generally positive. Jesse Prentice-Dunn of the Sierra Club told Streetsblog that he is “encouraged” and that “the Banking Committee title appears to be a step forward for transit.”

Among the more encouraging points listed in the summary, the new bill:

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When the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously passed a two-year transportation reauthorization bill last month, it quickly became clear that bipartisan support was coming at a price. First, we learned that the Transportation Enhancements bike/ped programs would lose their dedicated funding. Now, we learn that Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loans will no longer hold applicants to as high an environmental standard — or any standard, really.

California's Highway 91 applied for a TIFIA loan. Will the T in TIFIA stand for "toll road?" Photo: Greater Riverside Chamber

TIFIA is a popular program, receiving $14 billion in loan requests despite only being able to loan about $1 billion in total this year. And under current law, the extent to which the project “helps maintain or protect the environment” makes up 20 percent of a project’s evaluation. In the EPW bill, the program is expanded by a factor of nine, but most evaluation criteria — including environmental protection — are omitted.

As Matt Sledge wrote in the Huffington Post:

Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst at U.S. PIRG, said he thinks [EPW Chair Senator Barbara] Boxer may have cut a bad deal. He argues that doing away with TIFIA’s selection criteria means the U.S. Department of Transportation will be forced to give money to any transportation project that meets bare-bones financial eligibility requirements [...] Toll roads, backed by private investors looking to make a buck off of “public-private partnerships,” will be first in line, he argued, since they have plans that are “just ready to go off the shelf.” [...]

Los Angeles hopes it will get some of that TIFIA money. Not so fast, Baxandall said. “Places like Atlanta and L.A. are hoping that the new bounty of TIFIA will allow them to finance public transit expansions, but they are likely to find the money already claimed by private toll road projects in places like Florida and Texas.”

It’s hard not to see this as a huge step backwards, despite the funding increase. It wasn’t long ago that transit advocates were celebrating an end to the Bush-era’s “cost-effectiveness-above-all-else” rule in the Federal Transit Authority’s New Starts program. Now, Baxandall says, “at a time when the nation’s transportation system is starved for funds and there is a consensus that dollars need to be spent more wisely, it is outrageous that the one program that would be massively increased would no longer try to deliver the best bang for each buck.”

The good(-ish) news is that there’s still time to make changes to the bill. The Senate Banking Committee still has to work on a transit portion, the Senate Finance Committee still has to figure out how to come up with another $12 billion, the whole Senate still has to debate it all, and the House still has to do… anything.

Last summer, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey raised EZPass tolls from $8 to cross a bridge into the city during peak hours to $9.50, with planned increases to $12.50 in a few years (cash tolls are increasing somewhat more). Tolls for five-axle trucks will rise as high as $125.

Photo: Office of Senator Frank Lautenberg

The hikes marked the first time the Port Authority had raised tolls since 2008, and the only the third since 2001. Nevertheless, congressional representatives from the area are making noise. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) teamed up today to announce a bill to increase federal oversight of road tolls.

The “Commuter Protection Act” would restore U.S. DOT’s power to determine whether tolls on interstate bridges and tunnels are “just and reasonable” and set lower maximum tolls if they deem it necessary. The agency had that power until 1987, when it was revoked during an era of deregulation. The bill would also require the Government Accountability Office to produce a report on the “transparency and accountability” of how toll rates are set.

“When it costs $12 to drive your car across a bridge in America [the rate for cash tolls], something is wrong,” Lautenberg said in a statement. “Commuters are suffering.”

Lautenberg has a strong pro-transit record, but in this case he may end up hurting transit by taking up the cause of constituents who drive into the city. For one thing, the tolls have led to a four percent drop in traffic across the Port Authority crossings, which is good news for bus speeds. Meanwhile, ridership on PATH trains has risen 3.7 percent.

It’s still an open question whether the final draft of the bill will consider transit a “just and reasonable” purpose for tolling funds. There is currently no legal definition of “just and reasonable.” Even if transit is covered, however, the bill could still do damage.

If the U.S. DOT were to actually intervene with the Port Authority, for instance, there would probably be less funding available for transit. Already, the Port Authority scrapped plans to build a much-needed new bus depot in Manhattan because Governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo scaled back the latest round of toll hikes.

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The EPW Committee passed the highway portion of the transportation bill last month. The Banking Committee will tackle transit on Friday. And today, transportation reformers applauded as the Commerce Committee passed its bill dealing with the rail and safety component, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Think complete streets policies are just for urban areas? The complete streets movement's new hero is Sen. Mark Begich -- of Alaska. Photo courtesy of Sen. Begich's office.

Deron Lovaas of NRDC said in his blog post about the bill that certain improvements to the legislation made it a standard-bearer for how transportation bills should be written:

Senators Lautenberg, Cantwell and Begich played key roles in improving the title by including a version of the FREIGHT (an acronym sparing us the mouthful of “Focusing Resources, Economic Investment, and Guidance to Help Transportation”) Act as well as a “complete streets” policy to accommodate bicyclists and pedestrians. This means that the title now has actual performance objectives, allows for funding to be used for rail as well as highway investments to improve goods movement, and that there would be an office at DOT tasked with implementing an actual national plan for freight investments.

Jesse Prentice-Dunn of the Sierra Club adds that the freight provisions “treat our movement of freight as a multi-modal system, not just a web of highways.”

The street safety (or “complete streets”) amendment [PDF] introduced into the Commerce bill by Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) deserves attention for its special focus on non-motorized modes. The amendment says the Secretary of Transportation “shall establish standards to ensure that the design of Federal surface transportation projects provides for the safe and adequate accommodation, in all phases of project planning, development, and operation, of all users of the transportation network, including motorized and non-motorized users.”

States with their own complete streets policies would get a waiver from the federal policy, as long as their policies are in compliance.

A federal law — as opposed to individual city or state ordinances — is important because “streets don’t end at the borders of their jurisdictions,” according to Barbara McCann, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition. “We’ve had many jurisdictions that have complete streets policies say that they need and want that consistency.”

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Congress has already delayed their holiday recess by a week, and members are hoping another delay won’t be necessary. Among the yet-unfinished business: an extension of the payroll tax cut. House Speaker John Boehner plans to hold a vote today on his bill, which marries an extension of the payroll tax cut to the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. While expected to sail through the House, such a partisan bill is unlikely to pass the Senate. Enter Senators Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

Senators Collins, left, and McCaskill at their press conference. Image: STLtoday

Last week, McCaskill and Collins introduced the ambitiously-named Bipartisan Jobs Creation Act. The bill begins with the payroll tax cut and wraps it in additional tax cuts, deregulation measures, and a $35.8 billion infrastructure investment program. The whole thing would be paid for by eliminating some subsidies for oil companies and by instituting a surtax on millionaires’ income—though exceptions will be made for small business owner-operator “job creators.”

The two senators are generally touting this bill as a tax relief bill first, and a pay-your-fair-share bill second—infrastructure gets third-stringed at best, but the provisions are still worth looking into.

The McCaskill-Collins infrastructure plan [PDF] includes $10 billion to capitalize state infrastructure banks and $25 billion for highways and bridges—just highways and bridges. Out of $25 billion—about half an average year’s transportation spending by the federal government—not a dime goes to transit.

By promoting state infrastructure banks, McCaskill and Collins are throwing their weight behind the Republican vision for infrastructure spending and against President Obama’s. The President and a number of other prominent figures have advocated to no avail for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, and Politico reports that they’ll try again next year—to the familiar tune of $10 billion. Meanwhile, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica has included support for state infrastructure banks—not a national one—in his reauthorization bill. The senators opted for state I-banks in this case because they are an existing program that could be expanded, while “there is no consensus yet on how to address a National Infrastructure Bank,” according to Senator McCaskill’s press secretary, John LaBombard.

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These numbers, from the Office of Management and Budget, indicate that the Highway Account of the Highway Trust fund is in better fiscal shape than previously thought. So why are senators still chasing after $12 billion? Source: OMB

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and his Finance Committee have been looking high and low for a $12 billion patch to fund the transportation reauthorization bill that passed the Senate EPW Committee a few weeks ago. According to Politico’s transportation reporters, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, has already rejected several of Baucus’s ideas.

But the question is not only, “How will we get the money?” It’s also, “How much money do we need?” The dollar amount the Senate is seeking could lavish more money than necessary on roads while leaving transit out in the cold.

The EPW Committee wants to hold transportation spending at current levels (plus inflation), which they estimate at $109 billion over two years. Receipts into the Highway Trust Fund (from gas taxes and other vehicle fees) aren’t expected to be sufficient to pay that bill. The Congressional Budget Office told the committee that the HTF is $12 billion short of the amount needed to fully fund the bill. That amount is destined just for highways, based on projections that the Mass Transit Account will be solvent through the end of 2013 – in fact, ending that year with a $1.5 billion balance.

But last month, the two top members of the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over transit, asked FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff for confirmation of those numbers [PDF]. Rogoff replied that he, in fact, found another set of numbers to be more accurate [PDF].

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