Streetsblog San Francisco

On Valentine’s Day, President Obama’s heart-shaped box of chocolates to Congress will come in the form of his budget request for 2012. It will include the president’s proposal for a six-year transportation reauthorization.

The FY2012 budget request comes as Congress is still wrangling over the budget for the rest of FY2011 (which, by the way, started October 1, 2010).

After conversations with experts about what we can expect from the president’s transportation vision, this is what we’ve come up with:

1. We don’t really know.

The administration has been especially tight-lipped about this one. Advocates (and yours truly) have begged DOT officials for the slightest shred of information, and they’re doing an admirable job defending the secrecy of the document until showtime.

2. They’re going to make the case for a big bill and funding reforms

If the $53 billion high-speed rail announcement was any indication – and it was probably intended to be one – the administration is still thinking big on infrastructure, and they’re willing to stomach the big price tag. Obama’s economic team has been pushing for it for months.

The Council of Economic Advisers came out with a report in the fall, analyzing the economic impact of infrastructure investment – and specifically calling for a range of transportation options, a fix-it-first approach, walkability, and performance metrics.

In his State of the Union speech last month, the president said he wanted to pick transportation projects based on what was good for the economy, not politicians. And just this week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner seconded the president’s call for infrastructure spending by pointing out the economic benefit to communities when good transportation options are present.

Put all that together with the announcement of $53 billion for high-speed rail and you know he’s talking big bucks (and a new way of spending them).

3. It will cost more than Congress wants to fund, but Obama might be able to convince them.

House Republicans have made it extremely clear that they’re not willing to tolerate big spending. So if Obama swings for the fences, it’ll be up to advocates to fight hard to defend big investments.

Read more…

President Obama made his long-awaited infrastructure push during his State of the Union address – with more information included in an accompanying memo released today (see below). This is what he told Congress:

The third step in winning the future is rebuilding America. To attract new businesses to our shores, we need the fastest, most reliable ways to move people, goods, and information – from high-speed rail to high-speed internet. [Applause]

Our infrastructure used to be the best – but our lead has slipped. South Korean homes now have greater internet access than we do. Countries in Europe and Russia invest more in their roads and railways than we do. China is building faster trains and newer airports. Meanwhile, when our own engineers graded our nation’s infrastructure, they gave us a “D.”

We have to do better. America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, and constructed the interstate highway system. The jobs created by these projects didn’t just come from laying down tracks or pavement. They came from businesses that opened near a town’s new train station or the new off-ramp.

Over the last two years, we have begun rebuilding for the 21st century, a project that has meant thousands of good jobs for the hard-hit construction industry. Tonight, I’m proposing that we redouble these efforts. [Applause]

Read more…

President Obama is expected to make a strong push for infrastructure spending during the State of the Union address tonight. Ahead of the address, the Transportation Equity Network organized its members and supporters to write to President Obama, telling their personal stories of why transit funding is crucial to their communities. In all, TEN will deliver 1,000 personal letters to the President asking him to support transit investments. A few have already been sent.

Here’s a sampling:

Lisa T. in St. Louis wrote:

As a high school teacher, I see how our less-than-adequate public transportation system impacts low-income families who do not have dependable personal transportation. Students and families who do not have cars are not able to participate in parent conferences, open house events, and extracurricular activities.

Jan H. of Montana wrote the president about how her hometown has been changed by car culture:

When I was a girl, there were two trains a day: east to Chicago and west to Spokane. Now, there are nothing but freeways clogged with big trucks.

Read more…

Last night, President Obama appeared on 60 Minutes to talk about the election results – a “shellacking,” as he’s called it – and chart the path forward. He talked a lot about infrastructure – and between the lines of some of his other comments are messages we should be paying attention to.

The first thing that piqued my attention was this:

In some cases, there may be worthy projects that we can’t do right now, just because we haven’t built the consensus for it. You know, that’s an aspect of leadership that I didn’t pay enough attention to in the first couple of years.

Obama seems to indicate he’s going to shy away from big legislative battles for a little while. It makes you wonder what “worthy projects” he’s going to sacrifice. It also begs the question: what does that mean for his $50 billion infrastructure push?

Well, he didn’t say anything specifically about that. Most advocates think the chances of lame-duck passage of any infrastructure spending (beyond the continuing resolution keeping spending at 2010 levels for the first couple months of next year) are, roughly, nil.

But President Obama still holds out hope for consensus on infrastructure spending.

60 MINUTES: Look, the Republicans aren’t interested in spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure right now. They don’t want stimulus programs.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, you know, again, historically, rebuilding our infrastructure is something that has garnered Democratic and Republican support. I want to have a conversation with them and see if that’s still the case. What I just mentioned in terms of providing tax breaks for companies that are investing here in the United States. That’s not a traditional liberal position. That’s a traditional Republican position. That’s a Chamber of Commerce position.

Read more…

The critical multi-year transportation bill, which lawmakers have sidelined since last summer as they’ve quarreled about how to pay for it, looks to be back on the agenda after President Obama’s pugnacious Labor Day speech, in which he called on Congress to ramp up investment in transportation. The broad outline of Obama’s plan calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, constructing 4,000 miles of rail, and rehabilitating 150 miles of runway over the next six years.

While that may look like a lot of road spending compared to rail, transportation reformers see cause for optimism in the use of the word “rebuild” — which implies that the emphasis will be on fixing existing roads instead of constructing sprawl-inducing new highways. The outline also calls for “significant new funding” for the creation of new transit projects, and for ramping up investment in “safety, environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness, and livability.” Those criteria have all been hallmarks of the US DOT’s TIGER program, which distributes competitive grants to local transportation agencies from what has been a relatively small pot of money.

Congress typically authorizes a major transportation spending bill every six years, but political gridlock over the raising the gas tax or securing other funding streams has stalled the reauthorization of the bill since it expired in 2009. In the interim, lawmakers have passed a series of stopgap spending measures to keep the transportation system functioning, even as Jim Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has lobbied hard for Congress to take up the full bill.

Monday’s proposal represents the first serious effort from the President to tackle America’s transportation policy inertia, which is preventing any significant progress from the highway-oriented status quo. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are undoubtedly eager to pass a bill that will show voters they’re doing as much as possible to address high levels of unemployment, which are making a Republican rout of the mid-term elections look increasingly likely.

Predictably, the GOP does not look willing to lend a hand. Republicans have already lined up against Obama’s proposal, and another protracted and nasty fight over a major White House initiative looks likely. Immediately after the announcement, House Minority Leader John Boehner released a statement opposing the plan, and on Tuesday he released another one calling the plan an “exercise in futility.”

Read more…

President Obama did triple duty last night for the re-election campaign of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), visiting three fundraisers to send a stark message about polls that show the environment committee chair holding a single-digit lead against her GOP challengers despite a formidable cash advantage.

In remarks from one appearance that were released by the White House, Obama touted Boxer's "work to pursue a clean energy future" by helping to craft a climate change bill in the upper chamber -- albeit one that was effectively supplanted by a non-cap-and-trade measure crafted by three other senators.

"California has been a leader in promoting hybrids and cleaner burning fuels," Obama told the crowd, "and appropriately, you have in Barbara Boxer a subcompact senator with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy."

But that energy may not be enough to propel Boxer to victory without a tangible win to tout for recession-weary Californians, as E&E News reported this morning. From its subscription-only writeup of the Obama-Boxer fundraising swing:

Shaun Bowler, a professor at University of California, Riverside, said Boxer has three factors to blame for the uphill fight: an anti-incumbent mood throughout the country; Attorney General Jerry Brown's (D) lackluster campaign for governor; and Obama's sagging approval ratings. ...

To Bowler, Boxer needs to show evidence of a major victory before the fall, but he is unconvinced that a climate bill would resonate with voters.

Cue Antonio Villaraigosa?

Read more...

The connection between walkable development and grocery shopping may not seem immediately apparent — until you consider studies conducted
in cities from Austin to Seattle that showed the share of trips taken
by foot or by transit rises as local food outlets move closer to
residential areas.

Even in transit-rich New York, a highly touted new Costco is laying off employees as shoppers avoid its not-too-walkable location. On the flip side, farmers’ markets are seeing new growth and serving more lower-income shoppers in Milwaukee, Oakland, and other areas.

Now the White House is getting in on the action, with $400 million included in
its fiscal year 2011 budget to support development of new food outlets
in urban communities where the nearest grocery store is often a
half-mile or more away — the neighborhoods that policymakers call "food deserts."

The White House proposal is modeled after a Pennsylvania effort that has steered more
than $57 million in grants and loans to develop 74 local food markets
in lower-income areas of the state. The Obama administration’s version
would be anchored by $250 million in New Market Tax Credits, which give
developers incentive to launch new projects in economically distressed
areas.

While the $400 million budget plan is not being
directed through the U.S. DOT, it could have a significant upside for
urban transportation officials looking to improve access to transit and
create new opportunities for walkability.

The White House officially unveiled its $3.8 trillion budget
for the fiscal year 2011 this morning, seeking $1 billion to continue
its high-speed rail investment and $530 million for the transportation
leg of the Obama administration’s inter-agency push to promote sustainable planning on the local level.

The budget also proposes a $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, a rechristened National Infrastructure Bank that would use federal money to leverage private capital for large-scale projects improving the nation’s built environment.

The $530 million request for the three-agency sustainable communities partnership, which got $150 million
from Congress for the current fiscal year, would go directly to the
U.S. DOT for "comprehensive regional and community planning efforts
that
integrate transportation, housing, and other critical investments,"
according to the White House budget office.

The
administration requested $160 million in total for the two other
agencies involved in the partnership, the Environmental Protection
Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

As promised to Congress in December,
the White House also set aside funding for the implementation of its
plans for a new federal role overseeing rail transit safety. The U.S.
DOT would receive $30 million in today’s budget to train new inspectors
and help cities such as Washington D.C. come into compliance with
minimum safety standards.

On the controversial question of
the cash-strapped highway trust fund — which is expected to run out of
money this spring, not long after the expiration of the latest
short-term extension to the 2005 federal transportation law — the
presidential budget maintains its insistence on waiting until 2011 to fix the nation’s transport funding crisis.

In the budget’s U.S. DOT section, the White House writes:

Read more…

In his
State of the Union address last night, President Obama hinted at what
many in the transportation world have anticipated
all week: Florida’s emergence as a winner in the race for a share of
the White House’s $8 billion (and growing) high-speed rail fund.

But Florida will not be the biggest beneficiary of the
administration’s first rail rollout. The state taking home the most
high-speed aid today is California, which snagged $2.25 billion to begin
the process of linking Anaheim and San Francisco. Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s administration had
sought more than double that amount to begin its $42 billion rail
project.

Florida is set to receive $1.25 billion for Tampa-to-Orlando rail
service, while Illinois is getting
about the same amount to begin environmental studies on a Chicago-to-St.
Louis route and improve speeds between Alton and Dwight to 110 miles
per hour (mph).

Other states celebrating this morning include Wisconsin, which got
$810 million for upgrades to trains between Madison and Milwaukee; North
Carolina, winner of $520 million for improvements of service between
Raleigh and Charlotte; and Washington and Oregon, which got $590 million
to boost the rail link between Seattle and Portland.

House infrastructure committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) hailed
today’s first rail grants as "a transformational moment," adding: "The
development of high-speed rail in the United
States is an historic opportunity to create jobs, develop a new domestic
manufacturing base, and provide an environmentally-friendly and
competitive
transportation alternative to the traveling public."

The president and Vice President Biden are set to officially
announce the rail winners this afternoon. (A full list of all winning
train corridors is available
here.)

But after a process marked at times by parochial jockeying for
funds and concern
over whether federal aid would be awarded in too piecemeal a fashion,
it was not surprising to see Republicans seize upon the potential
pitfalls of the high-speed program.

Rep. John Mica (R-FL), whose district in Central Florida is among
today’s big winners, released a statement that started out on a positive
note but quickly shifted to a scathing critique of the administration’s
rail vision for
lacking maximum speeds that approach those in Europe and China,
where bullet train passengers rocket along at 150 mph and faster.

Read more…

When it comes to re-centering the Washington bureaucracy to better
accommodate cities’ needs, the first year of the Obama administration
has brought its share of progress (a three-agency partnership set to spend $150 million on sustainable development) and hiccups (a White House urban affairs office with lots of talk but little action).

Now
the next milestone is the White House’s 2011 budget proposal, set to
hit the streets early next month. And in his speech to the U.S.
Conference of Mayors yesterday, the president vowed that metropolitan
areas would get their fair share of attention. Obama outlined three
goals in his speech:

First, we’ll build strong, regional backbones for our economy by
coordinating federal investment in economic and workforce development,
because today’s metropolitan areas don’t stop at downtown. What’s good
for Denver, for example, is usually good for places like Aurora and
Boulder, too. Strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions,
and strong regions are essential for a strong America.

Second on the White House’s list: beefing up funding for the
sustainable communities alliance struck by the Environmental Protection
Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and U.S.
DOT. "We need strategies
that encourage smart development linked to quality public transportation that bring our communities together," Obama said, echoing his Transportation Secretary’s push for more competitive TIGER transportation grant money this year.

Obama described the third plank in his urban agenda as "creating neighborhoods of opportunity":

Many
of our neighborhoods have been economically distressed long before
this crisis hit, for as long as many of us can remember. And while the
underlying causes may be deeply rooted and complicated, there are some
needs that are simple: access to good jobs, affordable housing,
convenient transportation that connects both, quality schools and
health services, safe streets and parks, and access to a fresh, healthy
food supply.

Read more…