Transportation for America

OK, truth: Raise your hand if you find federal transportation legislation intimidating and incomprehensible.

Transit agencies can have a hard time finding the money to expand rail lines and busways. While federal grants for road projects require a 20 percent local match, transit projects need to get 50 percent or more from local funding sources. The byzantine federal funding bureaucracy creates high hurdles, especially for smaller agencies without on-staff expertise in applying for and managing these grants. Loans and private sources of funds are also difficult, since they need to be paid back, and transit tends not to make back its capital outlays from the farebox.

Last fall, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) proposed diverting all transportation enhancements funding, which goes primarily to bike and pedestrian projects, to bridge repair. "With nearly 25 percent of our nation's bridges deemed either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, we need to make their reconstruction a priority over errant beautification projects," Sen. Paul said.

David Burwell is the director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was also co-founder and CEO of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and a founding co-chair and president of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a national transportation policy reform coalition. 

Rep. James Lankford, a Tea Party Republican representing Oklahoma City, probably wasn't responsible for any of the 118 pedestrian deaths in his district between 2001 to 2010. And it's unlikely Rep. Steve Southerland of Panama City, Florida was behind the wheel when any of the 164 people were killed while walking in his district during the decade.

Now that the Senate has passed a transportation bill and everyone's waiting to see what the House will do next, Transportation for America has done us all a great service and compared the Senate's bill to the House's -- well, to the last thing the House showed us before things fell apart for John Boehner's extreme attack on transit, biking, and walking.

The Senate is finally making progress towards passing their two-year transportation bill, but the big question seems to be what's to come in the House -- and not even the House knows.

Last month, the Senate's notorious vote-blocker, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, tried to obstruct Senate process until they voted on his measure to take bike/ped funding out of the transportation bill. He failed.

Although SAFETEA-LU doesn't expire for another two weeks, the FAA reauthorization expires in two days, and Reid said that if Coburn doesn't change course, "we cannot get to this bill prior to Friday when the FAA expires.”