Editorial: A Halfway Relief Measure

We all got half a loaf when President Obama signed the new highway bill into law on July 6.

Now to be sure, for hungry men and women, half a loaf is a vast improvement over an empty cupboard. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to nurture a healthy domestic freight industry.

Yes, we now have a bill that provides some certainty that various highway and infrastructure-related projects can continue, with funding mostly assured. But what the new bill doesn’t do is address the crucial long-term funding needs for our nation’s highway system and related facilities.

Despite its highfalutin name — Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, or MAP-21 — the bill that the president signed is primarily an extension of the last highway bill, which expired three years ago.

MAP-21 contains $105 billion in cash for highways and transit projects over the next two years, and it finally sets in place a longer-term solution for infrastructure work. Since the 2005 highway bill expired in 2009, Congress has continued to kick the can down the road, passing short-term extensions nine times to keep roadway projects funded.

Each time the latest short-term extension was coming close to expiration, there would be a flurry of activity on Capitol Hill that ended not with a new highway bill but simply with another short-term extension.

The first thing this bill does involves jobs. As Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), perhaps the single most important force that drove the bill through Congress, said when it was signed: “With the stroke of the President’s pen, nearly … 3 million jobs will be saved and created nationwide.”

But as ATA President Bill Graves noted, the funding level contained in MAP-21 is not adequate. “If America is to maintain its place as the world’s preeminent economy, then we must do more to maintain and improve our … roads and bridges. …”

We are pleased that the highway bill does include several important provisions that ATA has been pushing for, namely a federal mandate requiring onboard devices to monitor hours-of-service compliance and a national clearinghouse for drug and alcohol abuse so that fleets can verify that their drivers have clean records.

What we didn’t get was any movement on raising federal fuel taxes to provide adequate funding for future highway projects, as ATA has been advocating for years.

Perhaps the next Congress will bake us a full loaf.