James Corless & Stuart Cohen

National transportation vision

Director of Transportation for America & Director of TransForm, Mar 12, 10.

Tagged with transportation, transit, infrastructure, high speed rail, highways, transportation for america

Two events in Washington, D.C., last week carried important implications for every Californian who relies on public transportation or navigates our increasingly rutted highways and besieged bridges.

First, a U.S. senator attempted to obstruct a jobs bill extending both unemployment aid and the federal highway trust fund. For the first time since it was created in 1956, the federal program that pays for transportation projects and highway safety literally shut down. For several days, ready-to-go California projects worth $37.5 million were in jeopardy, and construction firms made plans to keep their beleaguered workers at home.

A 30-day extension eventually passed, but the core problem remains: While Congress keeps our nation’s infrastructure on life support through stopgap measures and last-minute extensions, states like California suffer, and the nation as a whole falls farther behind our international competitors.

Decades ago, California led the nation into the era of freeway building, which means today we have an immense need to rebuild and repair our roads. Some major highways – Interstate 80 over Donner Pass, for example, or I-880 through Oakland – are so jarring to traverse that they could dislodge a kidney stone. In Long Beach, the Gerald Desmond Bridge has a “diaper” on it to catch falling pieces of concrete.
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The instability of funding for public transit and for rail is doubly bad news, because our future requires us to have more and better alternatives to driving everywhere for everything, as metro roads max out with population growth, and as we work to reduce carbon emissions and our dependency on imported oil. There is a glimmer of hope for a new national vision, and that brings us to the other D.C. development this week. Our own Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate committee that must write the bulk of a new transportation bill, announced that she is pulling this critical issue off the back burner at last and is pressing ahead. She held her first hearing on the bill, which she has aptly dubbed “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century.”

Already the conventional road lobbyists are lining up to battle for continuing the status quo, only with more money. We Californians owe it to ourselves and the nation to let Boxer know we will support her if she will fight for a new national vision that helps us fulfill our goals of rebuilding our aging highways; expanding clean public transportation options; building a high-speed rail system; making our communities safe for walking and biking; and reducing our dependence on petroleum and the oil companies. It would be a home run for our senator and make California’s transportation system – once again – the envy of the world.

Full story: Viewpoints: Broad national vision can patch potholes in transportation funds
Source: The Sacramento Bee, March 12, 2010

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