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January 18, 2010
Notes from the Annual TRB
Meeting
The annual meetings of the
Transportation Research Board (TRB) have always been a reliable barometer
of the key transportation issues of the day as seen by the transportation
community. This year’s meeting—which attracted 10,100 participants and
featured over 500 technical sessions and workshops— was no exception. What
follows are some impressions we carried away from the conference, after
listening to some 60 presentations and holding informal conversations with
a number of conference speakers and other participants during the 4-day
meeting, January 10-13.
Our
overall impression was one of a pervasive climate of uncertainty about the
future. Conference sessions as well as
informal conversations were full of speculations concerning the status of
the surface transportation reauthorization, the potential solutions to the
funding dilemma, the fate of the climate change legislation, the future
direction of the federal high-speed rail program and the impact of the
upcoming midterm elections on pending legislation, notably the surface
transportation reauthorization and the climate change bill.
The outcome of the second job
stimulus bill was also a subject of much speculation. The bill, which
already has been approved by the House (H.R. 2847) and now awaits action in
the Senate, would inject substantial interim funds into the surface
transportation program and extend the surface transportation authorization
through Sept. 30, 2010. The $154 billion measure would allocate $36.7
billion for highways, transit and Amtrak, credit the Highway Trust Fund
(HTF) with $19.5 billion in foregone interest payments and allow the Trust
Fund to accrue interest in the future. But, as one congressional source
attending the TRB Conference told us, the Senate prospects for the
deficit-funded jobs bill appear uncertain. Senate opponents claim there is
plenty of stimulus money still in the pipeline and the bill’s requirement
to spend the money within 90 days imposes an unrealistic deadline given the
lengthy contracting process involved in infrastructure procurement.
Additionally, Senate opponents may be expected to argue that the law
establishing TARP requires unspent and repaid funds to be used to pay down
the soaring national debt. The prospect of another vote to raise the debt
ceiling might further discourage the Senate from redirecting the TARP
money.
Secretary
LaHood’s address at the TRB Annual Luncheon, announcing revised criteria
for New Starts funding, received a generally positive reception from the
TRB audience. Under the new policy, proposals
for new rail transit projects will be judged by a broader range of factors
than in the past. In addition to cost-effectiveness, the criteria will include
economic and environmental benefits, land use impact and
"livability." One beneficial effect of the revamped policy should
be a wider consideration of streetcars. This was first made possible
several years ago when the Bush Administration made streetcars eligible for
federal funding under its "Very Small Starts" category (Interim
Guidance on Small Starts, July 26, 2006.) As many as 40 U.S. cities are in
various stages of considering or planning streetcar projects according to a
survey conducted by the Community Streetcar Coalition. As we observed in an
earlier NewsBrief, "just as 30 years ago a
less costly light rail transit LRT technology began to replace expensive
heavy rail systems, so today, streetcars are offering to medium-size cities
a more affordable fixed-guideway alternative to
light rail systems." (The Streetcar Makes a Comeback,
Innovation NewsBriefs, September
2006.)
The
announcement by U.S. DOT’s Under Secretary for Policy Roy Kienitz at the annual U.S. DOT Leadership session that
the Department will be developing its own reauthorization proposal came as
welcome news. We have always suspected (and
said so in several past NewsBriefs) that the
Administration’s proposal to defer action on the reauthorization until
Spring of 2011 was motivated in no small measure by a desire to take a more
active role in shaping the future multi-year transportation legislation. As
its stands now, the Administration has had
virtually no input into the bill authored by Rep. James Oberstar’s House
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Kienitz,
who will assume personal responsibility for this effort, offered few hints
as to the direction of DOT’s thinking other than stating that (1) the
federal role in transportation should be focused on truly national needs;
(2) the bill must offer a vision "that is sufficiently compelling to
merit public support;" (3) the bill will be guided by the goals of
safety, system preservation, economic growth, "livability" and
environmental sustainability; and (4) finding the money to pay for the
program will be the key challenge. What he did not address was the time
frame for the authorization bill. The vast majority of participants we have
talked to, speculated that the bill would not come
up for congressional consideration until 2011. A few skeptics thought that
even that time frame might turn out to be too optimistic given the
political hurdles to raising the gas tax in the next, probably more
tax-averse, Congress.
The
future of climate change legislation remains in doubt. Chances of enacting tough greenhouse gas (GHG) emission
reductions during this session of Congress appear "close to zero"
according to John Stoody, aide to Senator Kit
Bond (R-MO), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Stoody participated in a panel on "Federal
Climate Change Legislation and Policies" whose general mood could be
described as sober. Several factors could be responsible for the weakening
of the prospects for climate change legislation according to observers we
sought out after the session. They include growing public skepticism about
the reality of global warming; disappointment over the inability of the
Copenhagen Summit to reach a binding agreement to reduce carbon emissions;
the revelations of ClimateGate casting doubts on
the integrity of some climate scientists’ objectivity; opposition of
14 Senate Democrats from coal-dependent states who fear that a
cap on GHG emissions would raise energy costs and utility
rates; and the impact of the upcoming congressional mid-term
elections.
Public opinion could also be
influenced by critics such as Bjorn Lomborg,
director of the Copehagen Consensus Center, who
argue that after 20 years of getting nowhere, it’s time to take a fresh
look at the problem and adopt a different approach. According to Lomborg, the only way to reduce the use of fossil fuels
without crippling the world economy is to radically ramp up green energy
technologies— to the point where one could increase reliance on them by
several orders of magnitude. As Lomberg argues:
"Instead of condemning billions of people to continued poverty by
trying to make fossil fuels more expensive, we should make green energy
cheaper." (From Copenhagen’s Ashes, a Better Way to Fight Global
Warming, The Washington Post, January 15, 2010.)
Perhaps that is why, with the
hopes of enacting a comprehensive cap-and-trade bill fading, attention is
turning to a stand-alone energy bill as advocated by Sen
Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee. Even confirmed advocates of comprehensive climate change
legislation should be willing to admit that an energy bill that would lay a
foundation for a technological solution to more efficient green energy
would be better than ending up with nothing.
Performance
measures are receiving increased attention but also are raising some
questions. The need to establish a set of
targets to guide the federal transportation program and to use a set of
performance measures to judge its success has been widely accepted, but
implementing a performance-based system has raised a contentious issue: How
should the standards be set and who should set them? A debate at the TRB
meeting disclosed a familiar split between advocates of federal versus
state prerogative. For Pete Rahn, director of
Missouri’s Department of Transportation, who spoke at a session on
"Performance-Based Reauthorization," there was no doubt as to who
should be in charge. "We don’t envision a process in which the U.S.
Secretary of Transportation would impose uniform nationwide performance
targets on the states," he said. "That function, belongs to each
individual state." Federal officials begged to disagree. National
goals should be set by the U.S. DOT in collaboration with states, FHWA
executive director, Jeff Paniati argued. But he
avoided an open conflict by ruling out any strong-armed tactics to force
compliance. States which failed to reach the national performance
standards, he said, would not lose federal transportation funding.
The
TRB meeting was marked by a new emphasis on "livability."
"Livability" was the subject of a well-attended half-day workshop
on "Livability, Sustainability and Congestion Pricing," and it
was chosen as one of the themes of the next Annual TRB Meeting. The term
"livability" owes its new popularity to the rhetoric emanating
from the U.S. DOT, HUD and EPA which have made "livability" a
prominent goal of their respective programs. But the ambiguity of this term
has raised some questions which are bound to be debated well beyond the TRB
meeting. What is the meaning of "livability" and who decides what
is "livable"? For the three federal agencies,
"livability" seems to mean denser living patterns, less
dependence on the automobile, more walking and less driving. Or, as
Transportation Secretary Ray La Hood put it, "livability" means
going the entire day without having to get into your car. But these
definitions may be too narrow for most people, whose notion of
"livability" may include living in a safe neighborhood, having
access to good schools, enjoying the privacy of one’s own back yard and the
freedom, comfort and flexibility of personal transportation.
"Livability" as a euphemism for a federal policy of giving
preference to one particular form of development and travel
behavior, and ignoring the living and travel preferences of a great
majority of Americans, is bound to meet with a cool reception from local
officials, the citizenry and the transportation community.
The 89th Annual Meeting of the
Transportation Research Board adjourned having demonstrated once again its
value as the transportation community's
premiere forum for dialogue, debate and exchange of
information.
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