Senate’s $287B Road Repair Offers Just .4% for Biking

Believe it or not, that's nearly double what the feds set aside in the last big transportation bill.

Senators John Barrasso and Tom Carper (left) introduced a $287 billion transportation infrastructure plan Monday.
Senators John Barrasso and Tom Carper (left) introduced a $287 billion transportation infrastructure plan Monday.

Two U.S. Senators are pushing a bill that would allocate $287 billion to fix the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges — with less than one percent of it set aside to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe.

The chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), and the committee’s ranking Democrat Tom Carper (D-Del.) introduced their bipartisan, five-year transportation infrastructure proposal on Monday, calling for a 27-percent hike in spending from the $226-billion package that expires this year.

But a bill that would increase road-building by $61 billion could find only $350 million more for cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, boosting it from $850 million per year to $1.2 billion, a 40-percent increase, plus subsequent annual increases for inflation. The League of American Cyclists said it was more than they expected, but the advocacy group acknowledged Congress could go further.

“If the 2015 FAST Act was a sharrow, the Senate’s first draft of the next Transportation bill is at least a buffered bike lane. The bill includes some big upgrades but we can still do better,” the bike league tweeted.

The bill includes a provision that states and municipalities with a higher than average number of traffic deaths must spend the money on bike and pedestrian safety. And there are new incentive grants for states and cities to reduce fatality rates over time. But “safety” means something different to a cyclist than it does to a Washington senator. Basically, it’s a definition of safety that considers terrorism, not everyday vehicular violence, as the main danger to cyclists and pedestrians.

As such, the bill calls for “a competitive grant pilot program to provide assistance to local government entities for bollard installation projects designed to prevent pedestrian injuries and acts of terrorism in areas used by large numbers of pedestrians.”

So much for those protected bike lanes.

The overall bill, of course, is about building and repairing roads and bridges. Barrasso and Carper said in a CNN editorial that the new funding was necessary to begin work mending nearly 200,000 miles of highways in need of repair and refurbishing 47,000 “structurally deficient” bridges to ensure Americans across the country can travel safely.

Under the new proposal, states will receive 90 percent of the funds automatically and have some flexibility to determine which projects should receive priority.

“The bill cuts Washington red tape, so road construction can get done faster, better, cheaper, and smarter,” Barrasso said in a statement. “It will help create jobs and support our strong, growing, and healthy economy.”

The infrastructure bill adds a new program to spend $200 million over five years for states to reduce traffic congestion. And for the first time ever, the proposal adds $4.9 billion in new funding to fortify roads and bridges from wildfires, hurricanes, and floods. Localities can compete for $1 billion of that pot of storm funding for projects to improve states’ resiliency efforts and design emergency evacuation routes.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Fix-It-First Bill Introduced in Senate

|
Highway maintenance has been getting short shrift in state budgets, according to a recent report from Smart Growth America. But a bill introduced in the Senate today seeks to address the imbalance between road construction and maintenance. Maryland Senator Ben Cardin’s Preservation and Renewal of Federal-Aid Highways Act would require states to develop targets for […]

Senate Offers a More Multi-Modal 2014 Transportation Budget Than the House

|
Last week, a House panel envisioned some big cuts to next year’s transportation budget. TIGER and high-speed rail would get nothing, Amtrak would get slashed, and ixnay on all that green “livability” crap. (And that’s practically a quote.) The Senate Appropriations Committee voted this morning on the budget its own transportation subcommittee put together, and the end […]

New Report Maps the Gap Between Pedestrian Risks and Federal Safety Aid

|
The top 10 most dangerous cities for pedestrians. (Chart: Dangerous by Design report) If the equivalent of one jumbo jet full of Americans died every month, the resulting public outcry would be deafening. Or would it? Anne Canby, the former Delaware transportation secretary who heads the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership (STPP), raised that question today […]
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC

Advocates Praise 'Inspired' RAISE Grantee List

|
Last Friday, the U.S. DOT wowed sustainable transportation advocates with its list of grantees for the RAISE discretionary grant program, which will funnel $1 billion dollars into transportation capital and planning projects across America — and stoked optimism for how the agency would spend the historic $100 billion in discretionary funding it just won with the passage of the latest infrastructure bill.

Two Infrastructure Jobs Bills Die in Senate

|
Two competing versions of a transportation-related job creation bill went down yesterday in the Senate. The first, the Rebuild America Jobs Act (S.1769), was a Democratic proposal, modeled on President Obama’s job creation bill, to invest $50 billion for infrastructure and another $10 billion as seed money to create a new national infrastructure bank. Given Republican […]