Lacking substance and funding, new highway bill gains a name
John D. Schulz, Contributing Editor -- Logistics Management, 9/11/2008
WASHINGTON—There are many unanswered questions about what next year’s highway reauthorization program will contain—or most importantly, how it will be paid for—but at least the Washington wonks have come up with its name.
It will be dubbed “MAP 21.” Officially, that stands for “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century”—at least if Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has her druthers. Boxer matters. She is chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works that has a large say in these matters.
“MAP 21” follows the Oct. 1 expiration of the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, which went by SAFETEA-LU, which expires October 1. Of course, that followed the original Transportation Equity Act of the 21st Century, or TEA-21.
In Washington, you are nothing without a catchy acronym.
But really what Washington needs is a solid, dependable funding mechanism to pay for a highway bill tab that Rep. James Oberstar, D.-Minn., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has hinted might be as high as $500 billion over five years.
What Washington really is lacking is something else, transportation leaders say. It’s called leadership.
“We have to have some national leadership that says, ‘We need to fix these problems,’” says Pat Quinn, co-chairman of U.S. Xpress, Chattanooga, Tenn., a major truckload carrier. Quinn is a former chairman of the American Trucking Associations, which has been quietly telling anyone who will listen that the industry is willing to pay higher fuel taxes, if only that money is used for purely highway purposes, as it was intended.
“At the end of the day it’s a matter of setting the right priorities and crafting innovative and effective means to address them,” Sen. Boxer said.
Boxer said the next transportation bill provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at these programs and make the changes necessary to ensure our transportation system will meet the nation’s needs in the coming years. Even lame-duck members of the Bush administration agreed.
“Long-term what we need to do is stop spending more than we are bringing in,” Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said. “Long-term we need a sustainable, supportable funding mechanism. The gas tax is not going to be that mechanism.”
Peters said she is against increasing the motor fuels tax. “We are seeing a precipitous drop in driving. We need to find new, sustainable, responsible 50-year-old mechanism that might have worked well in the past but certainly won’t work in the future,” Peters said.
As alternatives, Peters has talked about expanding tolls, congestion pricing and public-private partnerships to help offset the shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund. She also urged Congress to halt its wasteful spending ways.
The last five-year highway bill—which was passed in 2003 by a Republican-controlled Congress—had more than 6,000 “earmarks,” totaling $24 billion, or 9 percent of the total of $286.5 billion. Peters said recently that Congress “has continued to spend as if there was no tomorrow.”
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