When It Comes to Transportation Infrastructure, No Bill Is Better Than a Bad Bill
This Congress and President Trump have been unable to develop and enact a new federal infrastructure bill after nearly three years of fits, starts, and jokes about “Infrastructure Week” (I have called it “Infrastructure Weak”). This failure is not surprising given the current political dynamics. But you may be surprised to learn that this former state transportation secretary was, and remains, delighted that Washington wasn’t able to come up with a new bill.
It’s not that we don’t need one: Innovative federal transportation proposals are important and overdue, but no bill is better than a bad bill. Based on what we know about the mindset of most of the current decision-makers, every indication thus far is that they would have enacted a very bad bill into law. A bad bill would be one that adheres to the president’s original template, which was nothing more than public-private partnerships on steroids. I’m not philosophically against such partnerships, but their utility is limited and their functionality is largely tied to automobility. A bad bill would also be one that relies on the same approaches to funding that were used to help build the auto-centric transportation system of the 20th century, one that retains the same constrained thinking that has made every prior federal bill a boon for cars and roads.
My pessimism has roots in comments made earlier this year by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who upon leaving the White House after one of the president’s periodic calls for an infrastructure bill described a “big bold” transportation bill to mean one that provided federal investment in “roads, bridges, and highways.” That was it; not one single word about transit, or any form of public transportation or sustainable mobility.
Was Schumer using a mere rhetorical shorthand to describe the full breadth of investment opportunities to be provided, or was his vision for a “bold bill” really a throwback to mid-20th-century conventional thinking? One would expect a clearer and more forward-looking approach from a senator representing a highly urban Northeastern state. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to her credit, spoke at the same time about “getting people out of their cars, not being on the road so much.”
Read more: https://prospect.org/article/when-it-comes-transportation-infrastructure-no-bill-better-bad-bill
(American Prospect)