Why the Federal Funding Emergency Matters for Transportation Reform

Why does it matter if state departments of transportation get less money?

In light of last week's news that the U.S. DOT might have to ration its payments to states in the absence of new revenue for the federal transportation program, we posed that question to David Goldberg, communications director at Transportation for America. After all, a lot of states are pursuing wasteful boondoggles, like Kentucky's Ohio River Bridges Project and the Illiana Expressway.

Several states have said they will hold off on planning new projects until they have some certainty that they will be reimbursed with federal funds. And if Washington can't deliver those funds, good projects will be shelved as well as bad, Goldberg said.

Transit agencies will also feel the pain if Congress can't come up with a funding solution. The Mass Transit Account of the Highway Trust Fund, which provides money to the nation's transit agencies, is running low and on track to go into the red by October. "Transit agencies are starting to say, 'We better not let contracts because we don’t know where the money’s coming from,'" he said

Losing any portion of federal funding for transit agencies would be "devastating," said Goldberg, as many of them are already stretched very thin.

Furthermore, Goldberg said that if Washington can't find a solution to the transportation funding problem, it will bode poorly for attempts to solve other problems -- like enacting federal policies that make transportation safer, greener, and more efficient.

"This is an opportunity for people in Congress, for Americans in general, to consider what the point of these programs are," he said. "If we can’t take it seriously, we can’t ask for those progressive things."