I’m not surprised we finally will have a new federal surface transportation bill, which will lock in transportation policy and spending at the Federal level through the year 2020 as this was actually expected. Kudos go out to the few politicians who actually managed to do their jobs on this—the transportation chair in the House seems to have a passion for Transportation and actually doing something (rare amongst Republicans) and state-level transportation secretaries also helped, lobbying Congress to do something. However, I’m disappointed at how much it maintains the status quo although there are a handful of surprises.
SOME OF WHAT THE BILL DOES
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It doesn’t cut current spending levels—including for public transportation (the last attempt eliminated Federal support for transit all together—I am glad that bill died!) $230 billion is authorized for highways, $60 billion for public transportation, $10 billion for passenger rail and $5 billion for highway safety programs. Basically, the same four to one ratio that’s existed since the early 1980s.
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State DOTs have very wide authority over what they do with the funds—this is part of the continuing devolution of funding for services at the Federal level, which began in the early 1980s. You’ll find funds for specific programs in the 1,377-page bill but unlike earmark heavy SAFETEA-LU, you won’t find funds allocated for specific projects. That is left up to the states, who farm that out to metropolitan and rural planning organizations. Incidentally, for those serious about “political revolution”---all of this planning process is done with legally required public input—but the public almost never shows up. You need to be involved here too.
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The authorization for passenger rail have never been in a surface transportation
reauthorization. This is where it should be. I wrote some months ago about a passenger rail act that was percolating through Congress and it appears most of that bill was rolled into this one. Some of those provisions are using Amtrak Northeast Corridor’s profits on that corridor, authorizing private competition on other long-distance Amtrak lines (this has existed since 2008; no one’s bitten and no one probably will), and funds for positive train control which previously had been an underfunded Congressional mandate. Still, Amtrak’s year-to-year funding still has to go through the yearly budget process. You can read my previous diaries on this and similar subjects here and here and here.
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A great deal of streamlining of environmental review and permitting is in the bill. A criticism (and I’m not supporting or denouncing the criticism here) is the NEPA (that’s the National Environmental Policy Act) process adds years and expenses to projects because it is exceptionally exhaustive. The EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) can, in some cases, run into the many thousands of pages because of how exhaustive it is.
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There’s several provisions to deal with oil trains—class I railroads are now required to report crude oil movement to emergency responders among other things in the bill. However, the oil trains won’t be going away.
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It finagles a whole bunch of funding streams to “fully pay for” the bill over five years, largely to make up for the continued shortfall in the Federal gas tax. The Highway Trust Fund will remain solvent through 2020, and the burden of funding won’t get shifted to the states. Quite a few already have raised their own gas taxes, either for drivers or on oil companies. This bill’s set until 2020 so there will be zero action on raising (or eliminating it, for those of you who hate this particular user fee) the federal gas tax until at least then. Yonah Freemark states that the bill signals Congress may just move away from the gas tax anyway and find other ways to pay for transportation. You can read his analysis here.
WHAT THE BILL DOESN’T DO
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Address climate change. Not a damn thing is in there. In fact, the provision about freight corridors appears to be multimodal but only provides funding for the highway side. That’d make things worse, not better. Congress is hostile to the idea of doing anything about climate change (witness the reluctance of the Administration to get something binding out of COP21, because anything binding would have to go through our hostile Congress and would spectacularly fail) so this isn’t a surprise but it would have been nice to see them grow up. I guess it wasn’t going to happen. It does seem likely that any climate action in transportation in FAST would have come at the expense of Federal funding for transit, which almost was axed completely.
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Allow tolling on already existing non-tolled highways. I’ll make no statement for or against tolling, just know the Federal government long has traditionally been hostile to it outside of certain conditions.
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Raise the gas tax—already discussed.
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Build your high-speed rail. California, you’re still on your own here. California is still the only state building a public HSR network at present, largely on its own dime. TX’s (between Houston and Dallas) is entirely private and FL’s between Orlando and Miami is mostly private.
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Do anything whatsoever about the remarkable amount of bloat in American infrastructure spending—there is no country where it’s more expensive to build than the US. It’s time DOTs starting asking and researching why, and it’s time for reform on that. We can blame Republicans for being intransigent (and they are, and we should) but this I feel (and so do many others) is more of an impediment than the GOP. Ryan Cooper writes:
There is substantial and growing political will behind at least a modicum of spending (particularly in the Northeast), but atrocious prices mean we get almost no value for the money. This then undercuts the general political support for infrastructure, since the projects are often obviously wasteful or enormously delayed.
That’s it for now. You can also read more analysis here. Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce a new group: Transportation Kos. If you’re into this stuff and want to write about it, follow/join the group. I am typically hands off with the groups I start so I typically make everyone an editor. Let me know if you’re interested.