How can transportation support rural livability? This is one of the most vexing questions facing the transportation industry in the 21st Century. But before we can answer that question, we first must answer the fundamental question: what is rural livability? Unlike urban or suburban living, each of which give rise to instant and consistent images within us, rural life is hard to pigeonhole into one set typology.

Is rural life typified by a family farm in Nebraska, Iowa or Mississippi?

Is it living on an unpaved road in an isolated part of northern Vermont?

Is it living in a small village on the mid-coast of Maine, the bayous of Louisiana, the lakes region of Minnesota or the foothills of the Sierras?

Is it living in one of the 19 Native American Pueblos of New Mexico?

Or is shopping, visiting or even living in one of the many great small cities that support rural living, such as Santa Fe, Charlottesville, or Portland, Maine?

The reason defining rural livability is such a challenge is that many of the places mentioned above, plus many more, exemplify rural livability. Rural areas function as systems — not as one hierarchical unit like a tree with an anchoring trunk and connecting branches, but more like a forest of trees with overlapping canopies and intertwined roots. In urban areas, the “forest” is denser and easier to perceive as an integrated entity. The connecting “root systems” that make up rural communities spread out over much more space, making it harder to clearly define their boundaries and relationships. But the connections are no less real, and farms depend on villages, which depend on each other, which depend on small cities, which depend on farms, which depend on tourism, which depend on local business.

Everyone knows what a city or a suburban town looks like, but rural life resists quick stereotyping. Compounding this is that in rural America, it is far more necessary for life to adapt to the local environment and realities: how families deal with water for instance, is very different in the high desert of New Mexico versus the verdant hills of northern Vermont. In cities and in suburbia, the economics of large scale development allow us to overpower nature, bring water into cities, reshape mountains and watercourses, bring all ranges of food into our homes at all seasons. In rural America, the definition of community is much more closely tied to the confines of the landscape, and folks more closely embrace local realities.

So is it any wonder that transportation experts are struggling to decide how we will support rural livability? If you can’t define it, how can we support it? Furthermore, since rural living

Phoenix, 1885 || Image: Gary Toth

encompasses a wide range of formats, our industry’s tried and true “one size fits all” project driven approach of building more roadway capacity just doesn’t fit into rural America — not all of it anyway. And we are just beginning to accept that the “one size fits all” formula applied after World War 2 to America’s “urban/suburban” areas produced unintended consequences and may not be sustainable in the long run. After all, much of what now comprises metropolitan Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver and other major metro areas was considered rural just 50 years ago.

In the midst of this vacuum, officials representing “rural” states are pushing back on the Obama Administration’s Livability program. They fear that “Livable Transportation” applies only to urban areas which means no more funding for transportation in their districts and states. This fear is understandable, since most of the solutions that have been developed to adjust 21st Century transportation involve de-emphasizing auto travel and fostering walkability and transit. Doesn’t that mean no more roads for Kansas, Iowa, Alabama and South Dakota?

In a word: NO! Or at least it shouldn’t.

But, it also doesn’t automatically mean YES. If by “yes” we are continuing to assume that building more highways is the only transportation response for supporting rural areas. In the 21st Century, rural America is presented with an opportunity that was not available to transportation and community planners of the 1950s, 60s and 70s: a body of knowledge from which to draw lessons learned — both good and bad — about where our 20th century approaches worked and where they didn’t, and the unintended and undesirable consequences can be avoided in the future.

One of the biggest lessons that we learned was this: if transportation and land use are planned separately, the high speed mobility fostered by major roadway expansions will lead to auto oriented community development with remarkably consistent metrics:

-High consumption of open land and rural landscapes
-Cookie cutter development which bears no resemblance to existing towns, farmsteads, geography or natural assets
-Separated land uses, which make transit or walking all but impossible
-Loss of the sense of uniqueness of the existing place
-Loss of the opportunity for everyday socialization that typified rural communities and those that have recently been built for cars (the Project for Public Spaces would describe this as the disappearance of the art of placemaking)
-Congestion, congestion, and more congestion
-High infrastructure costs for new roads, new sewers, schools, new sources of water, etc., caused by the spreading out of development leading to inability to leverage what has already been built

Is that what rural America wants? The photo below shows a scene now all too familiar in rural America, where housing built to satisfy the America dream (for some) destroys the pastoral dream that they were seeking by moving there. It also alters the

American Suburbia || Image: Gary Toth

dream for the original residents. The institutionalization of suburban style subdivisions has not only altered the landscape forever, it has severed the connections between the roots and canopies that made up the rural community “forests.”

Yet instinctively, when well-intentioned rural officials react to the current transportation debate, it is natural for them to push for more roads. Why not? The strategy of building more roads to support quality of life — whether it works or not — has essentially been the only approach that today’s leaders have ever experienced. We have come to believe that transit is too costly and inefficient to be useful in rural areas, brought on by the belief that there have been marvelous consequences to building new roads. Most of these apparent benefits are direct and easily understood during our daily lives: trips to beaches and resort areas become day trips; purchasing a home in the “country” while still commuting to our job was made feasible; travel to shopping centers for diverse and inexpensive goods became available. We were able to eat tomatoes in the North in winter, get fresh seafood every day in the Midwest, and so on. The problem is that we are only just beginning to get the feeling that the costs of these benefits to rural areas has been too high.

So in places like Central Illinois, the legislature mandated that the state Department of Transportation widen US 50, and did so BEFORE a study of the consequences was made. In South Carolina, a study is continuing of a multi billion-dollar extension of Intestate 73 to the low country. In New Mexico, officials successfully obtained a TIGER grant to widen US 491, although staff will privately admit that the traffic numbers don’t support the need for more lanes. This is inevitable, and as the saying goes: “if the only tool you have is a hammer, then all of the world looks like a nail to you.”

There is another saying, often attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Most of the negative consequences — congestion, skyrocketing costs of infrastructure, environmental damage, etc., are experienced indirectly and build slowly over time. People do not clearly link the negative outcomes that we face today to the transportation choices we made 20, 30 and 40 years ago. We ignore the growing body of evidence revealing that a single minded focus on building more highway capacity ultimately destroys the very rural environments that they were supposed to serve.

The good news is that transportation and community planners — rural and urban alike — now have the tools to help us better understand how different transportation and community investment programs can shape the way they will live in the future. What these tools reveal is that with a thoughtful approach to integrating transportation and land use we can have our cake and eat it too: we can have growth and yet maintain the lifestyle that we like. We can take the best of our 20th Century planning and investment practices and adapt them to help us succeed in the 21st Century.

Scenario planning tools, for example, can forecast the consequences of investment in different modes of transportation, investment locations and pricing strategies. When combined with visualization tools, citizens in every region can define in words,

Visualization of how “business as usual” growth would fill the Utah countryside with development || Image: Gary Toth

pictures and numbers what rural livability means to them. They can them shape their transportation investments and strategies and community and land use plans to create the outcome THEY want. They can come to understand that doing the same thing that many of us did in the past will create the same outcomes, and that the biggest threat to rural landscapes and lifestyle is an uncontrolled business as usual approach to growth.

Scenario planning is in its infancy but when it has been deployed, it has been fabulously successful. The statewide “Envision Utah” process conducted public values research, held over 200 workshops and involved more than 20,000 residents in deciding their own future. Since the completion of the vision several years ago, they have continued to partner with the participating communities to monitor and steer the rural and urban growth into patterns that the residents themselves desire.

Similar scenario planning efforts have been successful in regions such as the central Virginia region around Charlottesville; the mid coast of Maine; Sacramento; and in rural northwest New Jersey. In each process common themes emerged: residents viewed sprawl as a threat to their rural communities and came to realize that a single minded focus on expansion of highways as the primary way to use transportation to support rural areas was a major contributing factor to the threat. The best types of transportation investments blended improvements across a spectrum of modes and were strategically located to encourage a more sustainable, livable pattern of regional growth.

So how can transportation agencies and professionals support rural livability? There is no one answer. But the support starts with the industry helping both professionals and elected officials to understand that precanned or preconceived solutions, whether they are roadway expansions or walkable mixed use development, can be equal threats to rural areas if those solutions are not sensitive to the context. And the only way to properly learn the context is to engage residents of rural areas in planning initiatives that help them clearly define their desired future with a full understanding of what that means. Professionals must help communities facilitate their self-determination instead of dictating outcomes. To accomplish this, a number of fundamental principles need to be followed:

-Both politicians and professionals must ween themselves off of their craving for one big solution to “address the problem once and for all.” In rural areas, transportation solutions will need to be packaged in ways that address the communities unique context and desires for the future. These could range from simple wayfinding to building a bus shelter to rightsizing a Main Street to safety improvements to regional roads to even widening highways.

-Solutions MUST be Context Sensitive! For example, widening or realignment might be appropriate in between villages but not within the village core.

-All system expansion, whether it be highway or transit, must be carefully examined to consider its potential to shape future development patterns –- for better or for worse.

All of the above must be grounded in well designed planning processes that engage residents in the region, commuters, businesses, private developers and public agencies.
Placemaking is the key to creating great communities. Design and planning must support the social connections that are essential to the identity and quality of communities of all shapes and sizes.

Politicians and professionals must understand that transportation is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. The end result which we must strive for is a livable, sustainable community that is supported by its transportation system, not defined by it.

So back to the original question: how can transportation support rural livability? While there is no one answer, the above principles must be used to develop a portfolio of transportation solutions sensitive to the unique contexts of rural communities and mindful of how the secondary and cumulative effects of those “solutions” will affect the long term quality of life of the people throughout the region. Sometimes we will need to shrink roads and slow down traffic; sometimes we will need to widen them and speed up traffic. Sometimes we will need to invest in bus service and sometimes we will need to build new rail. One size will not fit all. A single minded mission to channel most of rural transportation investment into bigger and faster highways to create “accessibility” will be as damaging if not more so than building no new roads at all.

ABOUT

GARY TOTH

An experienced transportation professional, having worked over 36 years in transportation, and environmental planning, and the integration of both into land use and community planning. He has been a leader in Context Sensitive Solutions since the beginning of the program in the 1990s. Now retired after a long career at the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT), he is the working Senior Director, Transportation Initiatives with the Project for Public Spaces. As a member of the T4America Coalition, the Sustainable Urban Design Working Group of the American Public Transit Association, the Strategic Highway Research Program’s Technical Coordinating Committee for Capacity, and FHWA’s ITS Advisory Committee, he remains in the middle of transportation reform in America. In 2008, Gary authored the Citizen’s Guide for Better Streets, a stakeholder oriented guidebook intended to share insider transportation tips with citizens. The Citizen’s Guide was used as the basis for a webinar series that he delivered in 2009 in support of the AARP’s Livable Communities program. He is the primary instructor for PPS’s Streets as Places training program, held at PPS in Manhattan, as well on the road. He has also developed a Healthy Living by Design training module for the Center for Disease Control’s Strategic Alliance for Health, as well as a Streets as Places training module for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street program.

HANNAH TWADDELL

A Principal with the Charlottesville, Virginia office of Renaissance Planning Group. With 21 years of public and private sector planning experience, she specializes in helping communities to envision and plan their desired future by coordinating strategies for economic development, environmental preservation, transportation, and urban design. She has developed regional and corridor-level transportation plans for a wide variety of places, ranging from older industrial cities in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey to growing regions, towns, and rural communities in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. At a statewide scale, she recently assisted Virginia with the update of the statewide transportation plan, and designed a web-based toolkit on transportation and land use planning for the Montana DOT.

At the national level, she co-authored a study of best practices in rural land use and transportation planning for the National Academies Transportation Research Board; helped develop a nationally distributed course on land use and transportation planning for the National Highway and Transit Institutes; and assisted AARP with a research project on “complete street” design for older drivers and pedestrians. She speaks regularly at national conferences, provides occasional research and training assistance to the Federal Highway Administration, and serves on the Metropolitan Planning and Policy Committee of the Transportation Research Board.

1940s WPA poster, showing various infrastructure projects that could benefit a community at the time || Unknown, WPA

Tom McNamara, Blueprint America

The Dallas Cowboys left town for a new stadium before the start of last year’s season. And the Dallas suburb of Irving, where the NFL team played from 1971 to 2008, is planning for life after football with a new transit-oriented development. At the same time, a new stadium just down the road has no transit access at all — except for a one-day, temporary rail line to be built for Super Bowl Sunday next year.

TRANSIT: ‘THE TALL T’ IN TEXAS

With a population around 200,000, Irving is a part of the North Texas Metroplex (nearly 7 million live there) — sprawl-land, U.S.A., to an outsider, but a part of the country that also has been building one of the most extensive mass-transit systems outside of the Northeast Corridor. That said, Texas was seen as the big loser when federal (stimulus) high-speed rail dollars were awarded earlier this year. It only received a $4 million grant for planning a project in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (with Irving in-between) as opposed to the hundreds of millions to even billions other states won.

When Texas Stadium is razed April 11, plans are already in place to redevelop the 80-acre site (with an additional 320-acres surrounding) located at the busy intersection of Texas highways 183 and 114, which about 150,000 cars pass through daily.

With new construction a least two years out, a city-contracted developer is looking for tenants in the meantime. And with the site’s proximity to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit light rail line to be installed next year, the area is primed for high density development — with plans for housing and condominium towers, a corporate or medical campus and an entertainment venue already in the works.

TEXAS TEA IS OIL, TOO

Older professional sports stadiums typically were built around highways and parking. Old Texas Stadium is a perfect example. But as the years went on, local mass-transit connected fans not wanting to pay big bucks for parking (or wanting to knock back a few drinks) to their teams. It happened in Irving and it happened in most sports-towns across the country. At the same time, almost all newly built stadiums now incorporate mass-transit, biking and walking (Target Field, the new Minnesota Twins stadium in Minneapolis, for example).

Don’t even ask how much the pizza costs || Arlington, Texas

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, however, built a $1.2 billion, 80,000-seat stadium 15 miles outside of Irving in the Dallas suburb of Arlington — the largest city in the country (population nearly 400,000) without a public transit system. The city recently tried a commuter bus system, but it met with little success. Arlington has even voted against tax increases several times in the last two decades that would have financed some form of public transit. Still, the city did increase the local sales-tax by a half cent in 2005 to pay for the new football stadium. On game day, as a result, area fans can spend hours in traffic and pay upwards of $60 for parking. And that’s just to get to the game — tickets to watch the game are even more expensive.

The lack of transit in the city can be seen in other ways, too. Rail connects Dallas to the east and Fort Worth to the west, but goes out of its way to avoid stopping in Arlington. And when the city hosts the Super Bowl next February, it will divert freight rail lines to set up a one-day rail stop — at a cost of $250,000 for a temporary public transit line, moving a projected 10,000 fans to the big game. The following day: Arlington will again be the largest city in the country without a public transit system.

For more on Blueprint America’s coverage of Detroit, watch “Beyond the Motor City.”

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced on Wednesday the winning projects to be funded under their Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program, which was created to oversee the dispersal of $1.5 billion included in the stimulus plan a year ago. In other words, a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy. While the DOT’s function is to oversee the flow of transportation dollars from Washington, the TIGER program’s function is to do it better (as it relates to stimulus funding and as it relates to finally using an acronym that is also Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s nickname).

President Barack Obama with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood || photo: White House / streetsblog.org

The TIGER program put in place specific criteria designed to reward states and cities that came up with “great projects” that, under normal transportation funding laws and requirements, would otherwise have been overlooked. “TIGER grants will tackle the kind of major transportation projects that have been difficult to build under other funding programs,” said Sec. LaHood. “This will help us meet the 21st century challenges of improving the environment, making our communities more livable and enhancing safety, all while creating jobs and growing the economy.”

Outside of an earmark by a member of Congress, a typical transportation project is funded and selected according to formulas based on, among other things, population of an area, whether it is rural, urban or in-between, whether it is for highways (projects benefiting personal automobile transportation) or mass-transit (everything else), if there are matching local funds, if it is “shovel-ready,” and so on. In most cases, the merit of the project has nothing to do with it — it is a numbers game. And the number transportation advocates, be it for the open road or the fixed-rail, most often call on is 80/20 — 80 percent of federal transportation funding goes to highways while 20 percent goes to mass-transit. The DOT has in recent years tried to shift the focus of roads over rail through programs such as “New Starts” and “Small Starts,” which favor small, mass-transit oriented projects. While the TIGER program will still fund highway building, it continues a growing trend in Washington to find ways to award new-transit, especially if it is “green.”

The DOT, not surprisingly, was flooded with more than 1,400 applications from all 50 states, territories and the District of Columbia requesting funding for almost $60 billion worth of projects — 40 times the amount available through the TIGER program.

In the end, 51 projects were selected:

· Modern streetcar construction to support vibrant urban corridors in Tucson, Dallas, Portland and New Orleans and light rail in Detroit;

· Bridge replacements in Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Indiana that can support multiple modes of travel;

· Port and freight-rail projects to spur economic growth in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and Ohio;

· Innovative highway funding and operations in Texas, North Carolina, Colorado, South Carolina and Arkansas;

· Bicycle and pedestrian networks in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and a complete streets project in Dubuque, IA;

· The long-awaited rebirth of New York’s former Penn Station as Moynihan Station.

:::TIGER GRANTS (part one):::

:::TIGER Grants (part two):::

President Barack Obama with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood || photo: White House

Or, once you’re sorry you better be safe.

That is the line U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is taking after introducing Tuesday the Administration’s plan to take over safety regulation of the nation’s subway and light-rail systems. This follows, among other recent incidents, the June 22 Metro crash in Washington, D.C., that killed nine people and injured dozens more.

[read LaHood's  draft legislation here]

“Everyone in this region woke up the day after that crash and said: ‘Who’s responsible for safety?’ And there was no one,” LaHood said, testifying before a House transportation subcommittee.

Federal officials put the cost of the proposed legislation under $100 million — a modest number in this time of nearly trillion dollar bills on the floors of Congress, including a proposed six-year, $500 billion transportation bill in the House.

A plan that is expected to take three years to implement, it would give federal authorities the ability to bring lawsuits and seek criminal sentences in scenarios similar to the D.C. Metro crash. Others testifying before the subcommittee said that the number of safety monitors of rail-transit agencies across the country would triple or quadruple as a result, including more skilled workers.

According to The Washington Post:

“Federal personnel and approved state workers would have the power to conduct inspections, investigations and audits. They could test equipment, subway cars and train operators. They would be given subpoena power and could obtain restraining orders and injunctions, seek civil penalties and pursue criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for safety violations.”

Graphic: Federal Transit Administration

Although the plan would add more eyes, it is not clear it accomplishes much in addressing these safety problems. In D.C., for example, while the cause of the accident was determined to be a lapse in Metro’s fail-safe crash-avoidance system, the train involved was also outdated — one of the oldest still in use throughout the country. And to fix that problem, it will take more than an infusion of $100 million. According to the Federal Transit Administration last spring, over a third of the equipment in the nation’s seven largest rail transit agencies, including D.C., is rated in marginal or poor condition. Replacing all that equipment, including station rehabilitations, would cost roughly $50 billion. Moreover, maintaining it would cost an estimated $5.9 billion a year.

No matter if there is increased attention on rail-transit safety, it does not solve the fact that, for example, transit authorities in D.C. were well aware they were using outdated equipment. In fact, Metro — like most mass transit agencies throughout the country — verging on operating in deficit, raised extra funds by selling its trains to private companies that, in return, leased them back. But, as Blueprint America previously reported last March, the leased trains had to remain in service until a specified date, or the agency could face financial penalties.

[watch the Blueprint America report here]

At the same time, under current transportation law, there is no way to pay for the $100 million safety plan. In response, Administration officials said they hoped to offset any increased costs by trimming other programs.

Finally, this move by the Administration is not dissimilar from a move by Congress over a year ago when a $50 million investment in technology improvement grants in rail safety was authorized after the Los Angeles commuter rail accident.

President Barack Obama with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood || photo: White House / streetsblog.org

UPDATE

Late Wednesday, the Senate, in conjunction with a House vote last week, passed a one-month extension of the 2005 transportation law, which would have expired at midnight.

*  *  *

At midnight Wednesday, the federal transportation law funding national highway and transit programs will expire. Amid a lack of consensus in Congress on what to do—as the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has been at odds with both the Senate and the Obama Administration—the current law will almost certainly be extended for one-month. However, it is a short-term fix — an even shorter-term fix than the three-month extension passed in the House last week or the proposed 18-month extension in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The federal transportation law is supposed to be re-authorized every six years, although extensions have become commonplace in this process.

House and Senate appropriations committees agreed to the one-month reprieve as a legislative failsafe in order to keep federal transportation funding mechanisms going at 2009 levels, including the Highway Trust Fund, until lawmakers can complete the new budget. The House approved the resolution on Sept. 25. The Senate is expected to pass it sometime before the Wednesday deadline.

That said, there is nothing to suggest that the Congressional impasse that led to the one-month extension will be solved in just a month’s time. The current transportation law, which was finally passed in 2005, had a dozen similar extensions. Simply, Oct. 31 could look a lot like Sept. 30.

Still, more important than Congress and the Administration agreeing on a three-month or 18-month extension is a consensus on a new transportation law. Already, House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar (D., Minn.) has introduced a $450 billion dollar bill that not only increases current federal transportation funding but also restructures some funding practices and reorganizes the Department of Transportation. But, as Congress remains in similar gridlock over healthcare, the Administration has opposed any action on Rep. Oberstar’s legislation. As a result, the majority of the Senate, led by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has sided with the President. Moreover, neither the Senate nor the Administration has put forth their own bills to reauthorize federal transportation funding. Though Rep. Oberstar’s bill was introduced in June, nothing guarantees it will be the legislation that passes one-month, three-months or 18-months from now.

More to lose down the road

Even if the one-month extension is approved in the Senate Wednesday, a measure to dissolve $8.7 billion in un-obligated federal highway assistance will be triggered Thursday unless lawmakers act to correct the matter. But, as the one-month resolution is a conference report, both houses must pass it without amendments.

The 18-month extension proposed by Sen. Boxer would repeal the measure, but action on her bill is unlikely to happen before the deadline. There is no companion language in the House extension.

The loss of the $8.7 billion could lead to project cancellations nationwide. Some states can draw on their own reserves to continue work. Overall, states could lose some $3 billion.

With Congress back after a summer recess, President Barack Obama, in an address before both the House and Senate on Wednesday, again made clear that the government’s business at this moment is health care reform.

As a result, major climate legislation has been delayed twice in the Senate by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif), Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. At the same time, similar legislation in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee — a $450 billion bill to overhaul transportation funding and policy nationally — has not been put off, at least by Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar (D., Minn.).

But the Senate, led by Sen. Boxer, has legislation in place — and much farther along than the House transportation bill — to authorize just under $30 billion to extend the current transportation law by another 18 months. This would effectively delay Rep. Oberstar’s legislation with or without his support.

One way or another, action on federal transportation policy needs to come by the end of the month as the current law, which funds transportation projects and programs from mass transit upgrades to road and bridge repair to high speed rail development, expires Sept. 30.

Last month, while on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, Rep. Oberstar said:

It is disappointing that after eight years of a Bush administration that said no to robust investment in transportation now the Democratic administration says ‘well not now … 18 months’. The nation doesn’t have 18 months… People need jobs now.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman continued:

We’ve reported our six-year bill out of subcommittee and the week when we come back after Labor Day we’ll report it from full committee… I expect to have it on the floor by the third week of September; $450 billion over the next six years and the administration’s either going to come along or we’re going to roll them over.

Still, a report Thursday by The Wall Street Journal suggests that Rep. Oberstar sees passage of his bill unlikely this fall and that an extension of the current transportation law is likely.

As the House version of a new transportation bill to reauthorize and reform the current federal transportation law, which expires at the end of September, remains in the House, the Senate has made two significant moves in the past week to postpone the debate for a new law.

When Rep. Jim Oberstar (D., Minn.), Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced the new legislation last June, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood proposed, as an alternative, an 18-month extension of the current law, which funds highways, roads and mass-transit nationally. Simply, the Obama Administration, as it works to manage the recent economic stimulus, which has struggled to have the effect that was intended, and overhaul the country’s healthcare system, sees a transportation reform bill — that would increase federal funding some 60 percent from the current law and potentially raise taxes during a recession in order to do so — as one cause too many.

Last week, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed the Administration’s endorsed 18-month extension of the existing transportation law. On Monday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) introduced legislation to replenish the nation’s Highway Trust Fund — $26.8 Billion of, essentially, deficit spending. It would allot $22 billion for highways and $4.8 billion for mass-transit.

While the Highway Trust Fund, which is the revenue source for transportation and infrastructure projects, will become insolvent sometime in late August or early September, it is only an aspect of transportation law. But, teamed with the 18-month extension approved last week, it would solidify that legislation’s funding.

Still, the Senate Highway Trust Fund plan, also endorsed by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D., W.V.) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), would reform how the fund functions by restoring its ability to keep the interest it earns.

In the late 1960s, backed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Highway Trust Fund was made available to the government’s unified budget, making the money not exclusive to transportation projects — it has even been used in the years since to balance the federal budget.

In 1998, then Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bud Shuster (R., Penn.) pushed through legislation that closed off the Highway Trust Fund. Still, in order to do so, the interest accrued by money in the Fund had to be forgone for transportation projects — that money could still be used in the federal government’s general fund.

At the same time, Rep. Oberstar recently suggested that the U.S. Treasury owes the Highway Trust Fund $21 billion, including interest, as a result of that agreement in the late 1990s.

While the current Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman would be likely to endorse the provision to protect the Fund’s interest, the overall legislation is at odds with his transportation bill.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), pictured in the front, second from right, at the Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension Project in Los Angeles last February. Sen. Boxer is also the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee || photo: The Los Angeles Times

On Wednesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed an 18-month extension of the existing federal transportation law as the new transportation bill remains waiting in the House. Though the new bill has already had some debate and mark-up in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar (D., Minn.) introduced the legislation last month, the bill also needs to be heard before the House Ways and Means Committee so the funding portion of it can be determined.

That said, the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures will hear the argument for the new transportation legislation on Thursday, July 23, next week. While testifying witnesses have not been named, seemingly the case will be made for the Ways and Means Committee to take a break from the revenue portion of the Healthcare bill, which, according to Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D., NY), is the Committee’s only focus.

Overall, Congress’ concentration on Healthcare has come from the top — President Barack Obama, who also wants the extension of the current transportation law. Still, only the transportation legislation has been able to make significant progress against the Obama Administration’s agenda.

Rep. Oberstar has had no problem being at odds with the President, though both are of the same party. The Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman has gained the support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif) and some ranking Republican members in both the House and Senate. Most recently, Sen. George Voinovich (R., Ohio) was the lone dissenting vote as 18-month extension passed in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Sen. Voinovich said, “Everyone realizes the current law is inadequate to get the job done.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has been outspoken in her support for the delay of the new transportation bill as she has even set-back her own climate reform bill until at least September.

Even now, as Rep. Oberstar tries to push his new transportation bill through Congress, he is up against an 18-month extension of the current law that has already passed a Senate Committee.