Un-SAFETEA-LU
Posted by Fred Jandt
Mass Transit magazine editor
It’s October 2nd. Do you know where your federal transportation bill is? Currently it’s in the Twilight Zone somewhere between the House and the Senate as Rod Sirling looks on in silence, smoking a cigarette and shaking his head.
I remember a time when things were rosy for transit. New stimulus money was coming in and the promise of more was on the way. Ridership was at historic levels and it looked like the public had finally made the decision that transit was a good thing for the United States. The only specter that lay looming on the horizon was the soon-to-expire transportation funding bill, but with a rail fan in the Oval Office, and like-minded folks in Congress, what could go wrong. Right?
Sorry, this is the Twilight Zone remember. Where we tell everyone we want to get people back to work and yet hem and haw about funding it. Or we try to twist a funding extension with earmarks to make sure more than half of the money only goes to four states — that’s less than 10 percent folks.
So let me get this straight. Transit puts people to work. And if it doesn’t put them to work, it is responsible for getting even more of them to work. It is an industry built around the idea of being for and by the public. Yet coming up with a bill to provide funding for it isn’t a slam dunk? Come on.
Somewhere along the way we need to get it across to our elected officials that transit isn’t a semi-private, quasi-public, maybe for-profit, service. Transit is an essential service not just for the major metropolitan areas, but for everyone. Sure the state of Wyoming has less people in it than the city of Milwaukee proper, but it still has transit agencies that are providing a service to their riders.
We can’t look at transit as a local phenomenon. Transit is a national issue. Transit funding needs to be considered on the federal level just like we do things like defense — as an afterthought. Transit bill? Bam. Funded. No questions. No hemming and hawing. No filibusters. Next.
As I wrote this, the press release came across my desk about Congress passing a one month extension of SAFETEA-LU. Cool. We can have this argument again in a month.
Transit moves tens of billions of people a year. Billions. That’s more than 20,000 times the population of Wyoming.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
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Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,
Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com
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October 5th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I agree, it’s frustrating to have a president so behind transit and still not get what we need.
Good facts, and I like the tens of billions numbers and also the paragraph about essential service…for everyone and not designed as a profit-making self-sustaining operation. Even our customers continue to not understand why fares don’t cover it all, as much as we repeat that it’s subsidized everywhere.