Foxx to Release Framework for Transportation Policy
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Transportation is preparing to release in the coming weeks what Secretary Anthony Foxx is calling a “framework” for the nation’s transportation system over the coming 30 years.
Foxx provided few details about the contents of the document during a speech at the annual Transportation Research Board meeting here but stressed the document is not a plan, a prescription or a tactical call for specific investments.
Rather, “Beyond Traffic,” as the study is called, will lay out current trends in everything from population shifts and growth to infrastructure decline and technology challenges facing the nation’s transportation system, Foxx said.
“I think there are enough disruptive forces in transportation right now where a reset is needed, where taking a very dispassionate look at not only how much we’re investing but how were investing . . . given the country we’re walking into, not the country we were,” Foxx said.
The initial report will be a draft, and its release will be followed by a commentary period in which transportation stakeholders will be able to weigh in on every aspect of the report, he said.
Foxx said that increasingly he’s come to believe that transportation planners and officials need to ask some deep questions on policy.
“How can we move projects faster onto completion without taking away the integrity of the project itself, without disrupting the environment,” he cited as one example.
“We’ve got more manufacturing activity happening today than we have over the last 15 years, but in order to deepen those investments and the jobs that come with them, how do we create better connectivity across the system so that goods can get to the marketplace efficiently?” he asked.
“So all these things play a role and . . . I don’t think the moment we have right now is just a funding moment,” Foxx said.
The secretary added that the department will issue its national freight plan this year, a plan ordered up by Congress in MAP-21, the 2012 transportation reauthorization bill.
“But let me say that that plan doesn’t have any funds attached to it,” Foxx said. “I think Congress was wise to ask for that to be done but, again, we’re going to find ourselves trying to figure out how to get from here to there even with a plan.”
In the question-and-answer period at the event, Foxx said the Obama administration has “expressed an openness to ideas that emerge from Congress” on funding, including higher fuel taxes. He added, however, that “Congress has to do something” before the administration can consider an idea.
He also mentioned that the administration’s Grow American Act, a four year plan to pump $302 billion into transportation, would generate the funding via corporation tax reform.
