Senate Panel Passes Road Bill With Focus on Freight Projects

This story appears in the May 19 print edition of Transport Topics.

A $265 billion, six-year transportation reauthorization bill approved by a Senate committee last week would require states to spend some of their federal highway money on projects that improve freight mobility.

Under the plan approved May 15 by the Environment and Public Works Committee, freight would become a core element within the federal highway program, elevating its status to that of other key components such as highway safety, bridge building and air quality.

Overall highway spending would be maintained at current levels, plus inflation, pegging the authorization at $41 billion in fiscal

2015 and rising to $45 billion by 2020. Over the life of the bill, $6 billion would go toward freight-related projects.

The bill would not make any change to federal fuel taxes.

After EPW approved the bill, Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said in a statement the unanimous committee vote sends a “powerful signal to our colleagues

and to our nation that we are serious about addressing the looming funding crisis in the Highway Trust Fund.”

The fund is expected to be in the red by August, and the current transportation spending law, MAP-21, expires Sept. 30.

Ranking member David Vitter (R-La.) called the committee vote “a testament to the overwhelming bipartisan support of this urgently needed legislation.”

The bill goes to three other committees with jurisdiction over transportation reauthorization — Commerce, Banking and Finance — to write the portions addressing transit, safety and funding.

The House has not yet unveiled a bill, and Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) has said little about what the measure will contain.

Also last week, the Obama administration pressed Congress to act by focusing on the president’s four-year, $302 billion plan to invest in transportation with money from corporate tax reform.

“European countries now invest twice as much as we do. China invests four times as much as we do in transportation,” Obama said in Tarrytown, New York, during a visit to the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is being rebuilt.

Vice President Joe Biden last week traveled to St. Louis and Cleveland to address the need for infrastructure investment. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx hit the television news shows and “Infrastructure Week” events saying the funding crisis is a problem Congress has to solve.

Obama has proposed allowing states to toll interstate highways, a suggestion strongly opposed by the trucking, manufacturing and retail sectors. Current federal law bans tolling on interstates.

The Senate bill would create a long-term study of three funding alternatives based on user fees, but the bill does not specify what they would be.

Largely a continuation of MAP-21, the bill’s biggest change is the freight element.

Under the bill, states would have to develop freight plans, including investment strategies and projects, and create advisory committees.

Darrin Roth, director of highway operations for American Trucking Associations, praised the bill for recognizing the importance of freight.

“At least we know that . . . $6 billion of the program will go toward highways that have significant truck traffic,” he said.

The bill also would authorize $400 million a year in trust fund money for a competitive grant program to build projects of regional and national significance — projects Roth said could improve freight mobility.

 “This creates a new bucket of funding in the core program, and it compels states, all states, to spend it on freight projects,” said Christopher Smith, senior program manager for freight at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

How much a state would have to spend on such projects would be determined via a formula based on a state’s interstate highway miles and its miles on the new National Freight Network created in the original MAP-21.

“If you take the overall bucket for the core highway program . . . this is one more bucket in that formula,” Smith said, adding that the proposed freight mandate could leave some states with slightly less money for other core programs.

Transportation experts, though, hailed the possibility freight will become a core federal highway program.

“They are calling for each state to have a freight plan . . . They’re putting funding on the table with some ability to look at intermodal issues . . . it’s a good start,” said Mort Downey, chairman of the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors.