Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation; CP staff
As Congress confronts Highway Trust Fund shortfalls, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and 11 of his predecessors have informed federal lawmakers that their work does not end with a proposed measure maintaining highway, bridge and transit program funding levels through May 2015.
In a letter to Capitol Hill, Secretary Foxx, along with Ray LaHood, Mary Peters, Norman Mineta, Rodney Slater, Federico Peña, Samuel Skinner, Andrew Card, James Burnley, Elizabeth Dole, William Coleman and Alan Boyd note:
We are hopeful Congress appears willing to avert the immediate [funding] crisis, but want to be clear: This bill will not “fix” America’s transportation system. For that, we need a much larger and longer-term investment.
Taken together, we have led the U.S. Department of Transportation for over 35 years. One of us was there on day one, at its founding. We’ve served seven presidents, [from] Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. With knowledge and experience we can write: Never in our nation’s history has America’s transportation system been on a more unsustainable course. In recent years, Congress has largely funded transportation in fits and starts. Federal funding bills once sustained our transportation system for up to six years, but over the past five years, Congress has passed 27 short-term measures.
This is no way to run a railroad, fill a pothole, or repair a bridge. In fact, the unpredictability about when, or if, funding will come has caused states to delay or cancel projects altogether. The result has been an enormous infrastructure deficit—a nationwide backlog of repairing and rebuilding. Right now, there are so many structurally deficient bridges in America that, if you lined them up end-to-end, they’d stretch from Boston to Miami.
Bad roads are costing individual drivers hundreds of dollars a year due to side effects like extra wear-and-tear on their vehicles and time spent in traffic. Simply put, the United States of America is in a united state of disrepair, a crisis made worse by the fact that, over the next generation, more will be demanded of our transportation system than ever before. By 2050, this country will be home to up to 100 million new people. And we’ll have to move 14 billion additional tons of freight, almost twice what we move now.
Without increasing investment in transportation, we won’t be able to meet these challenges. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to invest $1.8 trillion by 2020 just to bring our surface transportation infrastructure to an adequate level. So, what America needs is to break this cycle of governing crisis-to-crisis, only to enact a stopgap measure at the last moment.
Some leaders in Washington, including those at the U.S. Department of Transportation, are stepping forward with ideas for paying for our roads, rails, and transit systems for the long-term. While we—the 12 Transportation Secretaries—may differ on the details of these proposals, there is one essential goal with which all agree: We cannot continue funding our transportation with measures that are short-term and short of the funding we need.
Adequately funding our transportation system won’t be an easy task for our nation’s lawmakers. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Consensus has been brokered before. Until recently, Congress understood that, as America grows, so must our investments in transportation. And for more than half a century, they voted for that principle—and increased funding—with broad, bipartisan majorities in both houses. We believe they can, and should, do so again.