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National
How Will the Next President Shape National Transportation Policy?
Though most of the 47,000 miles of the nation's interstate highways, including 2,456 miles in California, are more or less impaired and so overwhelmed by traffic that the congressionally mandated National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission (NSTPRSC) sees the need to prop up the federal highway fund by a 5-8 cent annual gas tax hike over the next five years, shift spending priorities, and ''invest $225 billion a year for 50 years in all forms of transit,'' reports Los Angeles Times writer Steve Hymon, presidential candidates ''have offered little more than platitudes'' about transportation.
Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ''have indicated that they want more mass transit.''
Among Republicans, Senator John McCain and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney have said little, with the latter convinced that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could ''lessen dependence on foreign oil,'' while Texas Representative Ron Paul and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee would likely put more school buses on the road and widen I-95 on the East Coast, respectively.
Skipping the largely forgotten federal steps toward an extensive highway network between the late 1930s and early 1950s, because World War II and later token funding impeded the plans, the writer points out that White House concern over mobility reached its ''nexus'' under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, first elected in 1952.
Influenced by his Army experience -- from a muddy motor convoy trek between Washington, D.C. and San Francisco in 1919 to the fast movements of enemy and Allied troops on German autobahns during the war -- and by the increasingly tense ''cold war'' atmosphere, President Eisenhower pushed for and eventually obtained the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act.
It authorized a 90 percent federal funding for expansion of 6,500 miles of interstates into a 41,000-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, a name codified in the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act as ''The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.''
The interstates, the Los Angeles Times writer observes, ''made long-distance travel easy, divided some cities, united others, shifted freight from the rails to the roads and made it possible to live farther from work;'' in short, they ''changed the American landscape.''
Asking experts about what ''can a president do'' to relieve road congestion, the writer received similar answers, each focused on the enormity of the task.
''If a new president came into office and made it a priority to revise the way that we spend our transportation funds and if the president spent an enormous amount of energy and political capital trying to make it happen, it might,'' said Claremont McKenna College professor of government Andy Busch, noting a problematic congressional habit of loading transportation bills with ''earmarks,'' or funds for their local ''pet'' projects.
Rand Corp. specialist Martin Wachs, who helped write the Clinton campaign's transportation policy paper without endorsing her, said the next president should try to increase the nation's mobility and counter global warming, a tough challenge given that that transportation is responsible for one-third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
''I don't think she or any of the candidates have said enough to satisfy me,'' he told the writer, hoping to hear more from all.
Both experts and others would like to see more transit investment, rail freight improvements, air traffic control upgrades and, especially, federal help for big traffic-choked cities to implement tolling as the best way to manage traffic flow.
''Policy-wise,'' stressed Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission legislative director Randy Rentschler, ''the interstate system is done, and we need to do something else.'' -- Los Angeles Times, U.S. Department of Transportation 2/4/2008
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