The Bay Bridge in the San Francisco-Oakland area was closed last night after a crossbar and two steel tie rods fell from a section repaired last month, damaging three vehicles and causing minor injuries to one driver. Structural engineers and inspectors are working to determine how long repairs will take.

NOW on PBS host — and Blueprint America collaborator — David Brancaccio will be a guest on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss the incident and the overall state of America’s infrastructure (Live: Wednesday, October 28 at 9:25 pm EST).

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In a report from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, political wrangling can often get in the way of critical infrastructure improvements Case in point: The rebuilding of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Originally aired: September 29, 2009

Originally aired: May 29, 2009

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.

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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.

Rep. James Oberstar, Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee

Every six years the law authorizing national transportation policy and funding needs renewal. The current law expires Sept. 30 — in nine days.

Without some kind of action, legislation to extend the current transportation law by 18 months — already in place in the Senate and endorsed by the Obama administration — would almost certainly have to pass in order ensure transportation funding past the end of the month.

Rep. James Oberstar (D., Minn.), Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is staunchly against an 18-month delay. As a result, it is likely he will propose a three-month extension later this week.

This comes after months of pushing for his own plan, to not only reauthorize the transportation bill, but also increase federal funding (from $286 billion in 2005 to a proposed $450 billion) and restructure the practices of the Department of Transportation.

Still, with time running out to pass this new legislation, supporters of Rep. Oberstar’s bill are beginning to accept the idea of an extension of the existing law.

After months of opposing a delay, for example, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, recently said a three-month extension would be “reasonable”.

That said, three months may not be enough time to move a spending bill of this size through a Congress already in gridlock over the health care debate. The House Ways and Means Committee, which must determine the legislation’s funding, has yet to set a date to hear the bill. Moreover, the bill has not been marked up in Rep. Oberstar’s own committee.

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.

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.). /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2008/10/ba_stimulus_thumb.jpg ]]> http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/featured/the-dig-transportation-bill-running-on-fumes/808/feed/ 0 http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/reports/keep-on-trucking/overview/803/ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/reports/keep-on-trucking/overview/803/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:57:24 +0000 tom mcnamara http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/?p=803 Blueprint America — with NOW on PBS — in a report with correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at the massive amount of freight moved throughout the country — mainly by trucks on an aging highway infrastructure that’s crumbling and bursting at the seams. With projected population growth and a rebounding economy, experts say it is only going to get worse.

So as Congress begins a major rewrite of the nation’s transportation laws, many are asking if it is time to redirect freight traffic off congested highways onto more environmentally friendly and fuel efficient railroads. Sounds good, but there is a catch. Unlike highways that receive public funding, railroads are private. Should taxpayers sink public money into a private railway system? And where should the money come from?

Freight yard in New Jersey

Though the competition for investment dollars is heating up, the two systems depend heavily on each other — a train hitched with 250 trailers needs 250 trucks to move that freight to its final destination.

To try and figure out who should pay the freight, O’Brien travels to a trucking school in Central New Jersey, where he learns to back up a big rig, to Bayonne, New Jersey, where massive amounts of consumer products come to port every day, and to Washington, DC, where transportation policies are under debate.

Blueprint America — with NOW on PBS — in a report with correspondent Miles O’Brien looks at the massive amount of freight moved throughout the country — by trucks and by trains. But the aging infrastructure they run on needs more investment. Still, in these economic times money is hard to come by — if the economy is to improve, though, the freight system that moves the country’s goods needs to keep moving. /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2009/08/freight2200×100.jpg ]]>

What’s a Zombie Highway?
Rick Karr, Blueprint America correspondent

Let me answer that question with a hypothetical: Let’s pretend that the federal government has a program to help you improve your house or apartment. Lawmakers in Washington promise that for every dollar that you put up for construction, they’ll give you four dollars. It doesn’t matter how expensive the project turns out to be –- you’ll get four bucks in subsidies for every dollar that comes out of your own pocket. Until the project is finished.

In that case, would you ever have an incentive to finish your home improvement project? Or would the project keep shambling forward, like an extra in a George Romero film?

In the most recent Blueprint America piece for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, we report on a highway program that reform advocates say works exactly like the home improvement scenario.

The Appalachian Development Highway System was authorized by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. The idea was to help nine Appalachian states build about 2,300 miles of highways to improve economic conditions in some of the poorest parts of the country. The federal government agreed to put up four dollars for every dollar the states would spend.

Forty-five years later, the program has expanded to 13 states, and more than 3,000 miles –- and counting. As environmental lawyer and highway-funding reform advocate David Burwell told us, under the system –- known as “cost-to-complete” –- states have an incentive to add more and more highways to the program, build them as expensively as possible –- and never finish them, because doing so would “turn off that federal spigot of money.”

Our case study is one of the newest additions to the Appalachian system: Birmingham, Alabama’s proposed Northern Beltline, a 52-mile stretch of interstate that would wind through the hills north of the city. The cost to taxpayers would be at least $3.327 billion dollars. The State of Alabama would put up its share of $665 million, while taxpayers from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia would cover the lion’s share of the remaining $2.662 billion.

Advocates for the highway say Birmingham needs it to boost economic development. They point to the growth that sprung up along the city’s southern beltline. They also argue that the new road would speed traffic through the region.

Opponents look at the growth along the southern beltline with horror, and argue that it’s exactly the opposite of what Birmingham needs. “We have built enough Interstates to kill our inner cities,” says Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford. “We don’t need more interstates. We’re going to need high speed public transportation. But we’re always spending our money in the wrong places.”

It’s kind of our turn, so to speak.

That’s what Phillip Wiedmeyer, a leading advocate for Birmingham’s Northern Beltline, said when I asked him why taxpayers in California or Illinois should pay for the 52-mile road through the hills north of the Alabama city. (Roughly 80 percent of the road’s cost –- or about $2.5 billion –- will be covered by taxpayers who don’t live in Alabama.) The explanation behind Wiedmeyer’s claim is complicated. According to several highway funding experts Blueprint America interviewed, it’s also inaccurate.

Wiedmeyer is head of the Coalition for Regional Transportation (CRT), a group formed last year by the Birmingham Business Alliance (formally known as the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce) to advocate for “fast-track” construction of the city’s Northern Beltline. Wiedmeyer is also a former vice president of Alabama Power. He now runs an Alabama energy research center, but his official email address remains at The Southern Company, a parent of Alabama Power. CRT is one of two groups pushing explicitly for the road; the other is the Business Alliance for Responsible Development (BARD), a coalition mostly made up of large landowners, real-estate developers, and construction firms who vehemently oppose Birmingham-area environmental groups. We initially approached BARD for a pro-Beltline interview; BARD set up our interview with Wiedmeyer instead.

Let’s look at an exchange Wiedmeyer and I had early in our interview. Note that the clip is unedited, except to cut from his camera to mine:

Wiedmeyer makes a number of questionable claims in that clip.

Starting near the top, when he says:

There’s a formula that the Appalachian Regional Commission uses for developing the highways that they designated and so under the formula we get our share of it.

Wiedmeyer implies that the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) “designated” the Northern Beltline project –- in other words, that bureaucrats or experts in Washington vetted the idea of building a 52-mile loop of highway through the countryside north of Birmingham and added it to the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS). That’s false. ARC experts didn’t evaluate the need for the road, according to spokesman Louis Segesvary. “It was added to the system by legislative fiat,” he said –- that is to say, when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) added the designation to a 2004 appropriations bill, as we report in our story.

When Wiedmeyer refers to “a formula”, he’s talking about how the ARC divvies up its budget –- how much each state eligible for subsidies receives. And the Northern Beltline’s $3.327 billion budget threatens to overwhelm that formula, according to a Capitol Hill staffer with detailed knowledge of the dispute who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to comment publicly. Alabama’s share of ADHS funds prior to the authorization of the Beltline was six percent, according to the Hill staffer; with the Beltline added to the list of ADHS projects, Alabama will get 34 percent of that money. In other words, of the 13 states that are eligible for ADHS funds, one of them –- Alabama –- will eat up more than a third of the program’s available money. And again, most of that money is provided by taxpayers who live outside of the Appalachian region.

If it’s built, the Northern Beltline “will suck a lot of air out of the ADHS,” the Hill staffer said. “It’ll eat up project funds and keep other states from completing their own projects.”

That may be why House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN) proposed capping the Northern Beltline’s federal funding at $500 million in his draft of the Transportation Reauthorization (PDF; see page 168). The Hill staffer said that would force Alabama officials to seek the remainder of the funding through regular Federal Highway Administration channels, which would bring more federal oversight to the project. “The idea is to put Corridor X-1 [the Northern Beltline] back into the regular order” of federal highway programs, the staffer said.

Let’s move along in the clip. Wiedmeyer later says:

[T]he gasoline that’s bought in Alabama generates a certain amount of federal excise taxes, and those go to the Highway Trust Fund, and then those funds are then used to build the roads and bridges across America. And until recently we’ve been a donor state – in other words, we sent more than what we’ve gotten back….

This is what is known in highway policy circles as “the donor-donee problem” –- and it’s long been a source of debate and the topic of think-tank reports.

As I point out in the clip, federal data do not back up Wiedmeyer’s claim. According to a Federal Highway Administration document published in 2001 (PDF available through the Government Printing Office), Alabama has occasionally been a donor state –- in 11 of the past 35 years. Experts told me that’s typical, because states receive larger subsidies when they are in the midst of big highway construction projects and smaller ones when they are merely maintaining roads that already exist.

More recently, the data show that in 2007, Alabama actually got $1.20 in highway subsidies for every dollar its drivers paid in gas taxes. Over the life of the Highway Trust Fund, the state has received a subsidy of $1.12 for every dollar in taxes paid. That ranks Alabama 28th among all states and the District of Columbia –- right in the middle of the pack.

That actually undercounts how much of a subsidy Alabama receives, according to Ronald Utt, a senior research fellow for the conservative Heritage Foundation, because it doesn’t include subsidies for Appalachian Development Highway System roads. As a result, federal money for the Northern Beltline, I-22, Alabama State Route 24, U.S. Route 72, and I-565 make Alabama even more of a donee state.

When I point out to Wiedmeyer that Alabama is not, in fact, a donor state, he quickly changes tack:

Jefferson County –- where the Northern Beltline is going to go –- we have gotten 34 cents on the dollar from what we have sent in. So we have been –- this is a donor area.

I didn’t have county-level information at hand during the interview, so afterwards, I started digging. The Federal Highway Administration doesn’t track county-by-county data. Neither does the Internal Revenue Service. I asked Wiedmeyer to provide some backup for his claim. He sent along two documents (1 || 2) to make his case.

Four highway-funding experts who I asked to review the documents didn’t find them –- or Wiedmeyer’s argument –- persuasive.

Utt said the data, which covers the 1990s, is too old to be meaningful. “As a matter of course, if there’s only data that’s that old, I don’t use it,” he said. “I’d be skeptical about it.”

Others said the data didn’t answer the underlying question of whether Alabama deserved more in federal highway subsidies. “They’re mixing apples and oranges,” said a high-ranking highway analyst who works for a watchdog agency of the U.S. Government in Washington and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The documents look at state gas taxes and state highway expenditures. That has almost nothing to do with federal taxes and federal spending.”In other words, Wiedmeyer is conflating local and federal data.

Nothing in the data Wiedmeyer provided has anything to do with highway policy in Washington, according to a highway funding expert affiliated with a public land-grant university who spoke on condition of anonymity because he serves as a consultant to various states’ departments of transportation. “The bottom line is that to the extent [Birmingham-area officials] have a beef, they have a beef with the state, not the federal government,” he said.

Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agreed. “I have no doubt that Jefferson County is a net donor,” Puentes wrote in an email exchange after reviewing the transcript of the interview and my email back-and-forth with Wiedmeyer. “But note that the county status is not really the result of the federal law. The federal law puts so much discretion in the hands of the state that it is really an indictment of the state.”

What is more, experts said it is in urban areas’ interest to subsidize highways in rural areas. “If every county got ‘its share’, there’s not going to be enough money to maintain roads in areas where there are fewer people,” the highway-funding expert affiliated with the land-grant university said. “It’s not at all unusual for urban areas to subsidize roads in rural areas.”

In other words, “even if you don’t live there, you still have to drive through there,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Utt.

Utt and Puentes agreed that the Northern Beltline probably does not deserve billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

“I am highly suspicious that the Northern Beltline will do anything positive to help the region meet any kind of economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability, or social equity goals,” Puentes wrote. “It will likely further serve to decentralize an already decentralizing metro area which flies in the face of [Wiedmeyer's] donor/donee argument. Just giving a metro area its fair share is not enough. There needs to be rigorous cost/benefit analysis applied to all projects.”

Utt said that if the road is built, only a select group would gain. “I’ve found that behind every road project is a landowner or developer who stands to benefit,” he said.

We’ll have more on that in another post.

The most vocal opponents of Birmingham’s Northern Beltline have been environmentalists. They’re concerned that the highway will lead to sprawl and spread air pollution to the mostly-undeveloped land north of the city. But they’re especially worried about the effects that the road will have on two river basins –- the Cahaba and the Black Warrior –- which together provide most of the metropolitan area’s water supply.

Blueprint America spent an afternoon with Nelson Brooke, executive director of Black Warrior Riverkeeper, walking along Patton Creek, beneath Birmingham’s existing Southern Beltline. The stream is a tributary of the Cahaba, joining it downstream of the intakes for Birmingham’s water supply. Nonetheless, Brooke said it offered a good overview of the effects that highway construction –- and the commercial development that it causes –- have on streams and rivers.

Brooke and other environmentalists don’t want what’s happening to Patton Creek to be duplicated in northern Jefferson County. And they say the federal government is on their side: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrote in 1997 that the chosen alignment for the Northern Beltline “has the most impacts on natural resources” of any of the alternatives that the State of Alabama considered –- disrupting streams at 14 crossings, impacting more that 4,000 acres of forest, and destroying 68 acres of wetlands.

Advocates for the highway have taken aim at environmentalists: A coalition of businesses that pushes for the Northern Beltline calls the green groups “no-growthers” who want “onerous regulations”. Nelson Brooke denies the charge. “I’m a strong advocate for low-impact development,” he told me. “The type of development we are seeing around our Interstates is the exact opposite of that. It’s sprawling. It’s in total disregard of the natural environment and how it’s disrupting it. And so I would say I am anti- that sort of development, but not anti- any and all development.”

This segment was edited by Blueprint America’s Reuben Savits