Reauthorization

With House GOP leadership making it abundantly clear that they would be pleased to return federal transportation policy to the 1950s, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works met today to get serious about the who, what and how of funding a 21st century transportation system.

While House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan grabbed headlines with the release of a fiscal plan that would severely constrain the federal transportation program (more on that later), the theme of the day at the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee was the desperate need to invest in infrastructure, as members of Congress provided their own proposals to the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit.

Last week’s stakeholder extravaganza in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee brought out the best and worst ideas about how to reform the transportation sector. We highlighted some of the good stuff earlier. Now for the bad and the ugly.

Editor's note: These are the highlights from this week's hearings on the upcoming transportation bill, where people made the case to Congress for sustainable transportation options. I'll follow up with the Bad and the Ugly, like those who want to kick transit out of the Highway Trust Fund.

The “Tom and Rich Show” continued on Capitol Hill yesterday. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue and AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka joined up for yet another event to show that business and labor, which don’t agree on anything, agree on a major infusion of federal investment for infrastructure.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee just spent two days listening to 40 experts from different aspects of the transportation sector and advocacy community, from engineers to environmentalists to the Tea Party. Each person had just four minutes to speak and they crammed as much as they could into their time: observations, demands, recommendations for a better transportation bill. Their ideas were widely divergent on many points, but on one, they found unity: This should not be a smaller bill than the one that came before it.

Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chair John Duncan (R-TN) can't stop mentioning that this kind of hearing has "never been done before." The subcommittee is hearing from 20 witnesses a day for two days in an effort to satisfy every interest group's need to speak before the committee gets to work crafting the next surface transportation reauthorization bill.

If today’s FAA vote in the House is a preview of the upcoming debate over funding for the nation’s surface transportation infrastructure, we can foresee fights between the House and Senate over funding levels and the loss of key public services.

Cross-posted with permission from the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.