2009 Was Supposed To Be An Exciting Year In Transportation :(

According to our friends the pundits, Congress has three big legislative priorities for the foreseeable future: Health care, climate and creating regulations that will tame those rapacious risk-takers on Wall Street.

Noticeably–and sadly–absent from that list is a new transportation bill. Earlier this year, it seemed like it would get done by September 30, when the current $286 billion bill expires. Momentum was building for a transformative replacement: a six-year bill that would rationalize the US DOT bureaucracy, realign policy priorities, set meaningful standards, and offer for an appropriate level of investment for our roads, bridges and transit systems. Everyone would have something to crow about: progressive policy advocates could wrestle a bigger share of a bigger pie for transit, state DOTs and the highway industrial complex would be well-fed anyway, and all the little people (that’s us) would get serious action on an issue we seem to care about intensely across all party and demographic lines.

Jim Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the House Transportation committee, even drafted an 800-page, $500 billion bill that offered a damn respectable starting point, including a $50 billion investment in high speed rail. For a glorious moment, it seemed like the US was ready to get serious again about a transcendently important policy area after decades of goofing off.

But then we started goofing off again and now, from the perspective of the first day of the fall session of Congress, the new transportation bill seems to be lost in the badlands that lie between public need and political will.

What happened? Let’s review.

In June, amid growing chatter from the Senate that 2009 was looking mighty busy, Obama (or Rahm Emanuel or whoever) had Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood go out and say, “Eh, let’s just wait till 2011–after the next elections and stuff.” Oberstar raged at the announcement calling it “unacceptable” and vowing to push ahead with his draft. By contrast, Barbara Boxer, the Senate’s pointperson, was “very pleased.”

The key players have been on openly divergent paths ever since. Oberstar now says he’ll hold a committee mark-up for the bill (this week perhaps?) and has a promise from Pelosi that it will come to a full floor vote later this month. The hitch, however, is coming up with an extra $200 billion beyond what the current 18-cents-per-gallon gas tax will pay for. Pretty much everybody agrees that raising gas taxes in the depths of the Great Recession is a bad idea, but Oberstar and his allies argue that there are plenty of other options–say, a small tax on energy speculators, or a bond issue paid back with revenue higher gas taxes after the economy recovers–to fund the bill. Sounds straightforward enough, right? But getting the Ways and Means committee to actually adopt one of those new funding mechanisms is a different matter, and they would need to identify a way to pay for it before it could proceed. The prospects of that look dicey.

The Senate, meanwhile, now seems to have no interest in a new bill before 2011. The relevant committees have already passed a $27 billion, 18-month extension of the current Bush-era bill, sans any reforms whatsoever. Boxer and her GOP colleague Jim Inhofe put out a statement saying, “There are just too many big questions left unanswered, not the least of which is a lack of a consensus on how to pay for it.” That old problem.

Of course, there is often a lack of consensus when the people who ought to be forging that consensus aren’t doing so. And the administration has chosen not to do so. Understandably nobody wants the political hit of raising gas taxes now, but in our humble opinion if the President said the American people, “We need to put a very small tax on energy speculators to rebuild our infrastructure”–accompanied with specific, graphic examples of what needs to be fixed–our bet is that most voters would go along with it.

The timing of the bill isn’t just a matter or pride or principle–there are some major risks in delay. The jobs picture in this country looks bleaker all the time (see prev post), and infrastructure spending is a time-honored method of putting people to work. But big projects, which create long-term jobs and long-term economic value, require long-term funding visibility before state and local governments will undertake them. Postponing the new bill until 2011 and going with an 18 month extension at old funding levels really doesn’t offer much long-term visibility–it’s a rotten in-between length of time that’ll just slow a lot of big projects down.

And what if the economy is as bad or worse in 18 months, and what if Obama’s already battening down the hatches for the 2012 election? Emanuel (or Obama or whoever) could well decide kick the issue down the road again until 2013 rather than getting involved with the gas tax.

One reason this is all kind of tricky is that in the flashing-graphics world of political news, “transportation” tends to play as a niche issue that matters only to the attendees of World of Asphalt conferences and a few crazy hippies who fantasize about aerodynamic trains. But what’s been revolutionary about 2009 is that Americans are starting to wrap their heads around the fact that “transportation” actually *is* climate change and *is* employment stimulus and *is* a foundation of future prosperity and *is* present-day quality of life. Not exclusively, of course–but meaningfully. A convergence of factors have contributed to this nascent insight: last year’s spike in gas prices, the debate around the stimulus bill, Obama’s campaign promise of an $80 billion infrastructure bank, the leadership of star-wattage state politicians like Ed Rendell and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the ever-greater attention being paid to smart transportation policy meccas like Portland, the emerging excitement over getting a real passenger rail network in this country, the lingering memory of the I-35 bridge collapse… and on and on.

Sometimes the moment is just ripe. That was the case for a transportation bill in 2009. In theory, it could still happen–Oberstar could get his house vote, the administration could see the light and decide it’s an economic necessity to get a bill passed before 2011, Obama could hold a press conference framing the new transportation bill as crucial to employment and economic competitiveness (”Look at what China, Spain, England, are doing…”), and the Senate could be persuaded to go along.

But that’s all very unlikely. More likely, is shorter term extension — an apparent compromise between the the 18-month time frame and Oberstar’s more urgent one. But how likely is an adequate funding solution–”Hey, voters, more gas tax!”–in the months leading up to a congressional election. So a short extension could easily become two or more…

Will the moment be as ripe in 2011? Or 2013, if the matter gets kicked down the road again until after the presidential election? Maybe. But at best we’ll be 2-4 years behind where we’d otherwise be, which is a rotten shame.