Streetsblog San Francisco

Should private transit companies enjoy the same federal gas tax exemption that many public operators receive? How does the existence of private inter-city bus service affect the government's development of new high-speed rail lines? And does it matter that private transit firms are eligible for public subsidies, even if at a much smaller rate than public rail and bus agencies?

A private firm recently signed a deal with New Orleans officials to help run the city's streetcars, seen above. (Photo: NYT)

Few definitive answers to those questions were on offer today at a transit panel sponsored by the Mobility Choice coalition, which allies members of conservative-leaning think tanks with a handful of environmental advocates and urbanists -- but the discussion yielded some provocative evidence of the fault lines between public and private operators.

Principally sponsored by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), the group describes itself as adopting "a fiscally responsible, free market oriented approach to expanding competition among transportation modes for the purpose of reducing oil's strategic value."

American Bus Association (ABA) Chairman James Jalbert, whose group represents private bus and motorcoach companies, lamented that the U.S. DOT's implementation of its $10.5 billion high-speed rail program -- which is expected to receive billions more in federal funding in the coming years -- did not envision a role for private-sector firms that already provide inter-city service.

"A good-quality system that could be included in a rail project is now going to be run over by that rail project," said Jalbert, also the president New Hampshire-based bus company C&J. "We want to be part of the solution, but we need to be invited to the party."

Integrating private bus operators into proposed passenger rail projects has to start at the state level, where officials make the call on whether and how to pursue federal bullet-train money, Jalbert added. He described a potentially successful partnership between public inter-city rail and private bus companies as a shared scheduling system, where passengers could purchase tickets for rail during peak hours but an equivalent bus journey during off-peak times, when operating a motorcoach could be more efficient.

To a certain extent, hope springs eternal in federal transportation
circles. Even as state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations
operate under the latest in a series of extensions of the
2005 law that governs road, transit, and bike-ped spending, few are
willing to envision a future in which new legislation doesn’t pass by
next year.

Anti-tax protesters in Washington
state. (Photo: ConservativeThought.org)

After all, even the Obama administration — which last spring
called for an 18-month
delay in taking up House transport committee chairman Jim
Oberstar’s (D-MN) infrastructure
measure — has signaled a willingness to begin talks on broader
policy changes by next spring.

But that outcome assumes that Congress and the White House can
reach an agreement by early 2011 on how to find as much as $200 billion
to pay for a significant six-year investment in infrastructure.

Right now there remains only two practical options on the table:
paying for a new transport bill with general Treasury money, which would
amount to deficit spending at a time when White House aides profess mounting
concerns about the nation’s red ink; and raising the federal gas
tax, which the president has flatly ruled out.

What would the worst-case scenario look like? It is rarely
mentioned on the record by Washington infrastructure watchers, but
former Transportation Secretary James Burnley IV outlined it neatly in
an interview this week with
D.C. Velocity:

Read more…

Transportation groups of all shapes and sizes have been
concerned that the Senate’s forthcoming climate bill could set back
the prospects for a federal transportation measure by imposing extra
carbon fees on Big Oil — which would then be passed on to
customers at the pump, effectively increasing the gas tax for purposes
other than funding new infrastructure projects.

Sen.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) joined the White House in denying that his
forthcoming climate bill would feature a "gas tax." (Photo: MSNBC)

But
it looks like there’s no need to worry. The Obama administration
yesterday gave a statement to the Wall
Street Journal that sought to lock down any attempt to associate
the Senate climate plan with higher fuel charges: “The Senators don’t
support a gas tax, and neither does the White House."

A spokesman for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the climate proposal’s
sole GOP sponsor, also denied that the bill would include a gas tax. The
bulk of the back-and-forth is a semantic battle that reflects how
politically poisonous a gas tax increase remains for both parties in
Washington.

But it may also suggest that Graham and his co-authors are moving
away from the carbon fee they had originally conceived. Graham described
the idea to
The Hill last month as "an assessment on what they do in the carbon
world. They are creating a carbon product, they are going to pay a
fee." The cost of such a fee, he added at the time, would be partially
passed on to customers at the pump.

On the whole, the fact that the White House is already denying the
existence of a gas tax more than a week before the climate bill is set
to emerge may not bode well for its future (not to mention that of the still-stalled
six-year transportation legislation).

"So Much For Kerry-Graham-Lieberman Global Warming Gas Tax?" the
press office of Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) tweeted.

When Cabinet secretaries appear in front of Congress’ appropriations
committees, which control the annual budgets for each federal agency,
the proceedings tend to be dry affairs dominated by local concerns and
arcane fiscal debates.

Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) (Photo: Politico)

But
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s visit with Senate appropriators
today was anything but humdrum, as Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) challenged him
repeatedly to defend the White House’s efforts on sustainable
development and high-speed rail.

Bond cited a recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Wendell Cox, a conservative pundit who has penned laudatory literature for road lobbying groups, in accusing the Obama administration of frittering away taxpayers’ money on high-speed rail.

LaHood fired back, remarking wryly that Bond’s home state sought high-speed rail grants and publicly celebrated
its $31 million haul. "I got calls on this every day from senators and
governors" clamoring for an opportunity to build inter-city passenger
rail, LaHood said.

Answering Bond’s charge that the rail
funding process was less than transparent, the U.S. DOT chief threw in
a bold claim: "I don’t know of one lobbyist that darkened
our door with an application … that came to our door with the idea they
were going
to have some edge."

A November investigation
by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity found that more than 50
government entities and private companies have hired high-speed rail
lobbyists, including the AFL-CIO, the Mayo Clinic, and overseas train
manufacturers such as Siemens and Bombardier.

The sharpest
exchange between Bond and LaHood came on the topic of walkable local
development, which the U.S. DOT has worked to promote through $150 million in 2010 grants and an inter-agency partnership with housing and environmental protection officials.

"What
is livability?" Bond asked LaHood, minutes after comparing the task of
defining the term to defining pornography. (The origins of that
reference are explained here.)

Read more…

Even before the Senate environment panel pushed through a GOP protest to approve
its climate change bill, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Lieberman
(I-CT), and John Kerry (D-MA) were working behind the scenes on a
so-called "tripartisan" plan that can win enough votes in Congress’ upper chamber to make nationwide emissions cuts a reality.

(from left) Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and John Kerry (D-MA) (Photo: Getty Images)

Over the weekend, the first hints of the trio’s potential strategy were revealed to The Washington Post — and new pricing for transportation fuel could play a major role (emphasis mine):

According to several sources familiar with the process, the lawmakers
are looking at cutting the nation’s greenhouse gas output by targeting,
in separate ways, three major sources of emissions: electric utilities,
transportation and industry.

Power plants would face an overall cap on emissions that would
become more stringent over time; motor fuel may be subject to a carbon
tax whose proceeds could help electrify the U.S. transportation sector;
and industrial facilities would be exempted from a cap on emissions for
several years before it is phased in.

The concept of an across-the-board tax on fossil fuels used for transport is not new. Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson backed it in October, aligning his company with the stance of some environmental groups and causing debate over his motivations.

But
Tillerson’s endorsement proposed rebating a carbon tax back to
consumers rather than letting it "becom[e] a revenue stream for other
purposes," making it far from clear whether the three senators could
win support for giving more new money to electrified transportation.
(By way of context, electric cars received more funding in the first six months of the Obama administration than the Federal Transit Administration’s annual budget.)

Physicist Joseph Romm, who blogs on every twist of the climate debate for the Center for American Progress, described
the Post story as a "trial balloon" for the senators’ plan and warned
that the end of the cap-and-trade concept would hardly silence critics
who are working to re-brand emissions caps as a closet "gas tax":

Read more…

After touring the Detroit Auto Show yesterday with fellow lawmakers,
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) took one question yesterday: Why are
Democrats not pursuing a federal gas tax hike, given its potential to cut carbon emissions and its support from auto industry players aiming to stoke demand for efficient cars?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (Photo: mlive.com)

Pelosi’s answer was a lengthy one, but here’s how she began:

Well, there certainly has been advocacy for such a position. It does not,
certainly, have a majority in the Congress of the United States at this
time. So we want to approach this in a way that is comprehensive, that
certainly keeps in mind of concerns of the consumer, the concerns of the
industry, and of the environment.  This is not to say one idea is better
than another — it’s just to say that at the present time, there are other
initiatives that we have.

Pelosi added that she had met earlier in the day with Debbie Stabenow,
one of Michigan’s two Democratic senators, to discuss the climate bill
pending in the upper chamber of Congress. Stabenow is a vigilant
protector of her state’s auto industry and last year signaled that she ultimately would have voted no on cap-and-trade legislation.

"[W]e’re hopeful that some of the
initiatives that are in that [climate] legislation — when it passes and is signed into
law — will address some of the same concerns that a gas tax would," Pelosi said.

But
for now, her answer should be considered equally relevant to the
stalemate over the next long-term transportation bill. Without
congressional willingness to pay for the legislation, through a gas tax
increase or similar new charge, it’s unlikely to come up until next
year.

Washington transportation policymaking can often resemble an
unwieldy soup of anywhere between 50 and 535 local perspectives, as
lawmakers from different states and districts vie for a fixed (or even shrinking) amount of federal funding.

Congress isn’t eager to raise fuel taxes to pay for transportation — but what about the states? (Photo: Pop and Politics)

The
needs of northeastern states can bear little resemblance to those of
their southern or midwestern counterparts, and the mandate for
localities to "match" federal transportation funds at an 80-20 ratio
(or 50-50, for some transit programs) can prove daunting for cash-strapped areas — particularly as the dwindling value of the gas tax saps transportation budgets.

So as Congress and the Obama administration declining to debate a gas tax increase to pay for the next federal transport bill, how are the states coping?

Some
are taking the plunge that Washington won’t, debating new user fees on
fuel and driving. Others are simply spending less on maintaining
existing infrastructure that is bordering on disrepair. To get a taste
of the local developments, let’s take a quick tour of the
transportation-financing crisis as it’s unfolding outside of D.C.:

In Kansas, state lawmakers are debating alternative proposals to raise gas taxes and car registration fees to help close a transportation budget that has seen [PDF] $229 million in funding cuts over the past year.

In Virginia, planned transportation cuts over the next six years total $4.6 billion. The planned extension of Washington D.C.’s Metro to Dulles airport will push local tolls 25 cents higher this week, with a planned doubling by 2012. The state gas tax: 40th-highest in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation.

In Georgia, a new report
from the state transportation director endorses new revenue-raising
methods equivalent to a 1 percent sales tax and warns that the current
gas tax — which only meets half of existing infrastructure maintenance
needs — may fall short of federal matching requirements as soon as
2012.

Read more…