Obama supports additional $50 billion for transportation

Designed to create more jobs

Steve Hawley, Dec 09, 09.

President Obama, in a speech on Tuesday, supported the idea of additional spending for roads, transit, bridges, and ports to create more jobs in the next year, according to the Journal of Commerce. While the president did not give a specific dollar amount in the speech, a senior official said the amount under consideration was roughly $50 billion.

The funding could come from leftover financial bailout money, although the official stressed that the administration would work with Congress to determine the funding level. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) dedicated about $48 billion to transportation projects earlier this year. Of that total, about 60 percent went to highway projects and about 40 percent to rail and transit projects, a significant improvement over the current federal transportation bill, which allocates about 80 percent of federal money to highways and just 20 percent to transit.

Last week, US Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, who chairs the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, proposed an additional $69 billion in transportation spending to create more jobs. Oberstar said that the ARRA transportation funds created 211,000 new jobs and indirectly supported an additional 130,000 jobs.

Streetsblog Capitol Hill provides additional analysis of the president’s proposal, noting that the president specifically endorsed “merit-based infrastructure investment that leverages federal dollars.”

Obama had previously expressed some skepticism about the job-creating ability of infrastructure projects, but in his speech, he stated, “I recognize that by their nature these projects often take time, and will therefore create jobs over time. But the need for jobs will also last beyond next year, and the benefits of these investments will last years beyond that.”

Full text of President Obama’s speech