Texas Transportation Summit highlights

Oberstar recalled to Congress

Jon Boyd, Aug 10, 10.

Transportation Funding
Congressman James Oberstar, Chair of the House Transportation Infrastructure Committee, cancelled his address at the 13th Annual Transportation & Infrastructure Summit in Irving, TX after being recalled to Washington for a vote. Instead, City of Irving Mayor Herbert Gears read the congressman’s statement, which said in part:

America’s intermodal transportation network serves as the backbone of our economic security and competitiveness, as well as our quality of life. It facilitates the safe movement of people and goods, and linking communities to each other and the world.

Unfortunately, in the time since I addressed this gathering last year there has been little progress on moving a long-term surface transportation authorization bill.

The lack of political will to move forward has served to delay many of the largest and most forward-thinking projects across the nation while magnifying the challenges facing the system. In 2008, the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission identified a significant surface transportation investment gap, and called for an annual investment level of between $225 and $340 billion––by all levels of government and the private sector––over the next 50 years to upgrade all modes of surface transportation—highways, bridges, public transit, freight rail and intercity passenger rail—to a state of good repair. The current annual capital investment from all sources in all modes of transportation is $85 billion.

Last year, a second commission, the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission, warned that, without changes to current policy, the revenues raised by all levels of government for capital investment will total only one-third of the almost $200 billion needed each year to maintain and improve the nation’s highways and transit systems.

The Commission also found that at the current rate, the federal highway and transit investment gap will reach approximately $400 billion in 2010-2015 and will then increase dramatically to roughly $2.3 trillion through 2035.

After the reading of Congressman Oberstar’s statement, three State Representatives addressed the summit participants. State Representative Linda Harper-Brown, who serves on the House Transportation Committee and Chairs the House Subcommittee on Vulnerable Road Users, said that Texas, “is in desperate need of stable and consistent [federal] policy.”

State Representative Joe Pickett, Chair of the House Transportation Committee said, “We should be increasing the gas tax in the state of Texas.” He said that the state is borrowing too much for transportation, and that an increased gas tax would be a fiscally responsible policy. He claimed that in the current fiscal situation, the state is only spending $700 million in cash for new construction, even though the total annual transportation budget is $8 billion. From the annual budget, $2 billion for new construction is borrowed. But some current spending applies to old commitments to ongoing projects. Pickett said $3.1 billion belongs to this category. As a consequence of the borrowing, $1.64 billion pays for all outstanding transportation debt. Thus, he says, there is not much in the budget that can go to new projects.

State Representative Phillips urged the federal government to decide on a long-term transportation bill in order for Texas to make its own commitment. The Chair of the House Select Committee for Transportation Funding also took issue with a General Accounting Office report that claimed Texas is receiving 92 cents in benefits for every federal gas tax dollar paid in the state. He claimed that the payout is closer to 78 cents on the dollar.

Representative Harper-Brown would like Congress to treat the transportation bill with greater urgency, “They are the elected officials. They know there’s a crisis. It’s their job to make a decision.”

High-Speed Rail
A transportation blog from the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph covered a morning session on high-speed rail:

This morning, a couple dozen people with a lot to gain (or lose) in the quest for federal high-speed rail dollars got together in a “stakeholders roundtable.”

Among them was the group’s moderator, Rod Diridon, a board member of the California High-Speed Rail Authority. After the roundtable, I asked Rod about Texas’ chances in getting some of the estimated $50 billion in federal dollars that will be available for states over the next five to seven years for high-speed rail. Rod noted that the competition is fierce among states that already are further along in their planning for high-speed rail—including his own California, Florida, and Illinois.

Gordon Dickson of the Fort Worth Star-telegraph reports:

The clock is ticking for Texas to get a share of the more than $50 billion for high-speed rail that Congress is expected to approve for the next five to seven years.

“You’ve got to have it coming out of Texas government leadership,” Rod Diridon, a California High-Speed Rail Authority board member, said Tuesday during a break at the Transportation and Infrastructure Summit in Irving. “Someone at the state level has to come up and say, ‘I want this to happen.’”

While Texas lags in developing passenger trains that may travel 220 mph, high-speed rail was the big talk at the opening round of the four-day summit, held for the 13th straight year in Las Colinas.

Nationwide, the effort to develop high-speed rail is gaining momentum as officials study models of similar trains from places such as Japan and Brazil, as well as incremental ways to improve Amtrak.

Texas largely missed out on President Barack Obama’s original $8 billion pledge for high-speed-rail development a year and a half ago. Since then, Congress has appropriated $2.5 billion more and may add $1 billion.

In an afternoon session, Al Engel, Vice President and High Speed Rail Director of AECOM Transportation, set the tone by echoing a question from an earlier session about the political reality of national high-speed rail network. “Is this a slam dunk, or a hail mary?” Then he posed his next question, “Is this a tipping point?” President Obama announced his plan for a national high-speed rail network in a State of the Union Address last year. What is the most important factor, he asked jokingly? Engel’s hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran stories on high-speed rail on three consecutive days.

Former Harris County Judge, Robert Eckels, suggesting a push for his home state of Texas, said it would take large markets to support high-speed rail on a large scale referring to a map displaying corridors connecting Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Little Rock, Memphis, and Oklahoma City. Currently, Eckels heads the Texas High-Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation.

Rod Diridon answered the question conclusively, leading a cheer, “We’re here to lay some rail. What kind of rail? High-speed rail!” Yet he continued with more sobering information about aour nation’s 4% of the world’s population producing 30% of the world’s greenhouse gases (GHG). He said we are among the worst in terms of GHG policy. He claimed that no transportation emits GHG like short-distance air travel, and high-speed passenger rail would be an alternative to the airlines.