A Terrible Transportation Bill - NYTimes.com

Editorial via The NY Times

The list of outrages coming out of the House is long, but the way the Republicans are trying to hijack the $260 billion transportation bill defies belief. This bill is so uniquely terrible that it might not command a majority when it comes to a floor vote, possibly next week, despite Speaker John Boehner’s imprimatur. But betting on rationality with this crew is always a long shot.

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Here is a brief and by no means exhaustive list of the bill’s many defects:

¶It would make financing for mass transit much less certain, and more vulnerable, by ending a 30-year agreement that guaranteed mass transit a one-fifth share of the fuel taxes and other user fees in the highway trust fund. Instead it would compete annually with other programs.

¶It would open nearly all of America’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, including environmentally fragile areas that have long been off limits. The ostensible purpose is to raise revenue to help make up what has become an annual shortfall for transportation financing. But it is really just one more attempt to promote the Republicans’ drill-now-drill-everywhere agenda and the interests of their industry patrons.

¶It would demolish significant environmental protections by imposing arbitrary deadlines on legally mandated environmental reviews of proposed road and highway projects, and by ceding to state highway agencies the authority to decide whether such reviews should occur.

In 1982, with President Ronald Reagan’s blessing, Congress agreed to apportion 80 percent of the highway trust fund revenues to highways, bridges and tunnels, and 20 percent to subways, bus lines and other forms of mass transit. In 2010, this meant around $32 billion for highways, bridges and so on and $8 billion for mass transit.

The House bill would direct all the trust fund money to roads and bridges. It would authorize a one-time payment of $40 billion over five years for all the other transportation programs, including mass transit and smaller initiatives to improve air quality and ease congestion. That means that mass transit would have to struggle with others for yearly appropriations — and would almost certainly get less than the $8 billion it received in 2010.

The GOP is barking-at-the-moon crazy. Ray LaHood, Obama’s Republican Transportation Secretary called it ‘The most partisan transportation bill that I have ever seen’.

Burgess Everett via Politico

“And it also is the most anti-safety bill I have ever seen. It hollows out our No. 1 priority, which is safety, and frankly, it hollows out the guts of the transportation efforts that we’ve been about for the last three years,” LaHood added. “It’s the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.”