Posts about Barbara Boxer

The outline confirms that the Senate is working on a two-year bill but does not include the dollar amount. "Consolidation" is the name of the game these days and the Senate plays along, making seven core surface transportation programs into five, including a new Transportation Mobility Program, which "sub-allocates" some funds to metropolitan areas, and a National Freight Program, which proponents of multi-modalism have long pushed for.

It preserves the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program, which funds some bike and pedestrian programs. Transportation Enhancements, another major way such programs are funded, will probably now be under CMAQ. It's unclear whether the Recreational Trails Program will move to CMAQ as well.

But although bike and pedestrian projects will still be eligible for funding, there appear to be no explicit funding guarantees for bike-ped projects, and how funding levels will shake out in the final analysis is anybody's guess.

Like the House, the Senate bill offers states "the flexibility to fund these activities as they see fit"—which amounts to a revocation of the federal commitment to funding this work. Many states, absent a federal mandate, will spend virtually nothing on bike/ped infrastructure.

Bicycling advocates had asked for dedicated funding that doesn't pit them against road projects, the same funding proportion as they had in SAFETEA-LU, and changes to Safe Routes to School. None of those features appear to be in this bill.

"It's hard to know without seeing the details, but at first blush it doesn't look good for bike and pedestrian issues," said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. "Perhaps it's to be expected that there's nothing upfront in the language about protecting dedicated funding, given that it was a topic of some contention among the protagonists. But it's pretty troubling to see no reference to any of the issues that affect cyclists and pedestrians—nothing about complete streets, nothing about dedicated funding."

The Senate bill expands and modifies the TIFIA loan program, as does the House bill, and does not mention an infrastructure bank. Boxer indicated in the fall that she was more friendly to an expansion of TIFIA than to a new entity, though more recently she has said that she supported the inclusion of an infrastructure bank in the bill.

On performance outcomes, the outline says:

MAP-21 focuses the highway program on key outcomes, such as reducing fatalities, improving bridges, fixing roads, and reducing congestion, in order to ensure that taxpayers are receiving the most for their money. States will set their own targets for improving safety, road and bridge condition, congestion, and freight movement.

"Improving bridges" and "fixing roads" don't really sound like performance outcomes, and bicycling advocates fear that, while safety is an essential goal, the fact that there are about 60 times more car fatalities per year than bike fatalities will translate into a far greater focus on car safety than bicycle safety.

By contrast, the Bipartisan Policy Center has suggested setting national transportation goals such as economic growth, metropolitan accessibility, energy security and environmental protection.

The bill does seek to improve state and metro planning processes "to incorporate a more comprehensive performance-based approach to decision making."

The Banking Committee has not yet inserted its transit language, nor has the Commerce Committee come forward with its rail language, so this outline doesn't say anything about those elements.

We understand that the full bill has not even been circulated to Democratic committee members yet, indicating that, despite the false hopes of last week, a formal bill introduction is not yet on the horizon. The committee is holding a hearing this Thursday on "issues" for the reauthorization.

Boxer has promised to hold a hearing before marking up the bill, but the bill would have to be introduced a week in advance if the hearing were going to discuss actual bill text, and there is no longer time for that if the committee is going to mark up the bill before the August recess. So Thursday's hearing will likely be a more general discussion of transportation issues, using this brief outline as a guide.

Cross-postd at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

Top committee Republican James Inhofe is all in favor of a big infrastructure bill, but his brand of support includes limiting the scope of the bill. "Our problem in getting the bill we need to get is really not as much the Democrats as it is the Republicans," he acknowledged. "'Cause I can hear it right now. They will get it to the floor and say, wait a minute, we've got museums in here and these other things."

Later he clarified that "these other things" are "state capitol domes and bike trails," which let loose a flurry of trash-talking about bike trails. "I wasn't aware there were things in the infrastructure bill that aren't real infrastructure," said Raymond Poupore of the National Construction Alliance, who was testifying before the committee. "I always thought it was just highways." And Bill Dorey of the Associated General Contractors of America added, "It's hard for me to defend a bike path."

Inhofe suggested that getting back to a meat-and-potatoes highway bill was the key to Republican support. "The best way I can get the full cooperation of the Republicans is if we took this back to the way it was originally, when we had the highway trust fund and the people who paid to use our highways would confine it to maintenance, new construction, bridges, highways then that would be sellable to the conservative community," he said.

Some Democrats did rush to cyclists' defense. Boxer herself let it be known that "to me, a bike path is a way of transport; a lot of my people use it to get to work."

And Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin "took issue" with Inhofe's dismissal of transportation enhancements. "We need to look at multimodal transportation. Yes, the overwhelming amount of dollars that are reauthorized are going to be for the traditional types of transportation, whether they be roads or bridges or conventional transit. But we need to look at smarter ways," he said. Baltimore's designer, he said, tried to connect communities through greenspace.

We're looking at ways of trying to connect communities again so they don't have to use our roads! So we don't have to build so many roads! To me, that saves money in our transportation! And it's the right investement for our nation. Every dollar that we authorize needs to be spent efficiently and appropriately for transportation in this country. But let us not be afraid to look at alternative ways that can save money, create jobs, and then have more dollars available for the expensive projects that we know we need to build such as high speed rail.

Another theme that came up was the possibility of selling infrastructure investment as a jobs bill for veterans. Susan Martinovich of the Nevada DOT and AASHTO said the unemployment crisis in the construction sector hits home for her on a personal level. "My son is a sergeant in the US Marine Corps, recovering from serious wounds," she told the committee. "He and many of his fellow Marines spent time in Afghanistan building infrastructure. Transportation is an industry that could provide jobs for these warriors. And they're jobs that they're skilled to undertake, but they're not assured to be there."

Sen. Boxer was intrigued by the idea. Poupore added that his organization has a Helmets to Hard Hats program that could be a model. Look for more talk of this in the future.

Cross-posted at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.