Texas Transit Association

*The Hill*, a Washington D. C. newspaper for and about the US Congress, sponsored a Capitol Hill breakfast last week to discuss transportation issues with Reps. Tom Petri (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Highways, Transit and Pipelines Subcommittee, and James Oberstar (D-Minn.), ranking member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Excerpts follow.

THE HILL BREAKFAST
Traffic congestion plagues U.S. highways, commuters
Problem creates higher costs, anxieties in 75 metropolitan areas

Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.)

At the beginning of this process, when we have to actually come up with a framework for a bill, our chairman, Don Young from Alaska, asked the staff to figure out as best they could, what the country actually needed. So they turned to something called the Needs and Performance Assessment of the Department of Transportation. …

[It is a] really good snapshot of where we are as a country in the transportation area. That is the basis for our $375 billion bill over the next six years, which essentially attempts to maintain close to the rate of growth we’ve seen in transportation infrastructure investment at the federal level that was achieved over the last six years. In the last six years, we saw the growth go up about 45-48 percent. This would, if it were to pass at that level, see growth continue, not at that rate, but closer to the 35-40 percent range at the national level, somewhat above anticipated growth in the economy and inflation, but still somewhat below the growth in usage of the transportation system that’s anticipated.

But their report said that, as a country, as a result of TEA-21 [Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century], we are no longer overall slipping behind maintaining the infrastructure that we currently have. We had been building stuff and then not maintaining it, and getting into trouble. [But] they say 28 percent of our bridges and 32 percent of our highways are not up to where we’d like them to be ideally, but overall that number’s improved slightly over the last six years.

But we are still seeing congestion increase significantly in various chokepoints in the system, and anyone who lives in the Washington area is very aware of that as you try to go between here and Richmond anytime or through the system. Despite the tremendous growth in lane miles going north out of Washington toward Baltimore and then up toward Frederick and around, that we’re just not accommodating the growth that’s necessary.

We need to have both more mass transit and more highway construction. That’s true in states in many parts of our country. That’s [why] we have a bipartisan consensus to try to accomplish [this] and why we came up with that particular number. Now, we’ve got to figure out how to get it through the process and I think we’re making significant headway in that regard.

The committee six years ago, when we were struggling to reestablish trust in the trust fund and pass TEA-21, didn’t just have meetings and try to build coalitions here in Washington but instead went on the road and our chairman, Bud Shuster [R-Pa.], had numerous meetings with transportation officials and local editorial boards and so on all over the country. … Jim and I and others on the committee have been doing that this year. … The point is to say that this is something that has relevance at the national level and in Washington, but, in fact, the real impact would be in your community.

Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.)

If you spend five minutes driving around America’s major metropolitan areas, you quickly realize that we need two things: massive investment in public transit and continued investment in improving our roadblocks on highways, that is, the bottlenecks and checkpoints that miserably slow down traffic. The Texas Transportation Institute every year does a survey of congestion in America. Their survey last year, reported in January of this year, shows that in 75 major metropolitan areas, the cost of congestion is $68 billion. That means people living in those 75 major metropolitan areas, of which Washington is one, Minneapolis-St. Paul another, are spending a week longer in traffic than they would if they could drive at posted highway speeds. They’re buying tanks of gasoline more than they would if they could drive at posted highway speeds. They’re spending $1,000 more than they would if they could drive normally. That’s a huge cost, in addition to the lost [business] and lost opportunities, families trying to get to medical appointments and to meetings with the newspaper. …

The other side of that coin is the remarkable advancement in transit under TEA-21. We reached an agreement that over time, over the period of the six years, that the investment split between highway transit would be 80-20 and that the federal share would be 80-20 for transit to match that of highways so that investment planners — states and metropolitan areas — would not always be tempted to choose the highway option because you get 80 percent federal funds for it rather than transit.

Secondly, we provided flexibility for states to shift transit dollars to the highways and highway dollars into transit. There were some who thought that the shift would all be from transit to highways. In fact, nearly $7 billion has been [moved] from highway accounts into transit accounts with the result that we’re seeing in light rail, commuter rail, bus transit and other rural transit, growth in transit movements adding one million new riders a day over the last five years, or 10 billion transit trips last year nationwide. And with good reason. Every mile, on average, of urban freeway costs $47 million; on average, a mile of urban light rail costs about $26 million and moves three times as many people. …

Every new light rail project in the last six years has not only exceeded but tripled original projections in usage. St. Louis metro rail, for example, was planned to have 12,000 riders a day, and it is well over 50,000 riders a day by now. San Jose light rail was to have 13,000 a day; they’re over 50,000 riders a day. Oracle software buys 11,000 fares a year for its employees to ride free on the light rail rather than congest the roadways and have their people arrive in a good frame of mind. Microsoft does the same in Seattle, buying 13,000 fares a year for its employees.

The reason for the success story was the guaranteed account, dedicated revenue stream that we worked out, Chairman Shuster and I were so insistent on achieving. The result was that in the five-and-a-half years of TEA-21, we’ve invested $135 billion in the federal aid to highway program, just federal funds alone, compared to 42 years of the interstate system, when we invested $114 billion in federal funds, $128 billion in all, on 42,000 miles. We built over 30,000 lane miles of highway …. and have generated 1 million new riders a day on transit.

So the need is clear. When you ask people, as I have, as Congressman Petri has done … people get it, they understand there is a stewardship issue. You see the results of the investment. … Why the ideologues at the White House and OMB and elsewhere can’t understand that is beyond me. We could have had this bill done on the floor, passed by now. … But the Republican leadership won’t do that because they don’t want to see a bill pass with an overwhelming number of Democratic votes. It would be 200 Democrats and maybe 60 or 70 Republicans, and maybe more if [House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay [R-Texas] let them all free. And the OMB. But that’s not in the offing. My guess is if we did that and passed that bill, the president would sign it and claim it as his own. … It’s just something that we have to keep pressing.