(Source: Transportation for America)

With Congress preparing to write the bill that will determine the next six years of transportation spending, Transportation for America yesterday released a detailed plan to restructure the nation’s transportation program in order to build a smart, safe and clean transportation system that provides real choices to all Americans.

Image Courtesy: Transportation for America @Flickr

If our platform, released in February, lays out the vision and goals for America’s transportation system, then the Transportation for AmericaBlueprint contains the detailed directions for getting there.

The Route to Reform: Blueprint for a 21st Century Federal Transportation Program will serve as T4 America’s proposal for the policies and financing structures necessary to achieve real transformational change in America’s transportation system. (We’ll be highlighting and explaining pieces of the Blueprint here over the coming weeks — it’s a lot to digest at once.)

In the blueprint, Transportation for America recommends Congress include four critical reforms in the upcoming transportation authorization bill:

1. Articulate a National Vision, Objectives, and Performance Targets for the national transportation program and hold state and local transportation agencies accountable for demonstrable progress toward goals including safety, efficiency, environment, health and equity.
2. Restructure and consolidate federal programs for greater modal integration, with a focus on completing the second half of the national transportation system, providing more transportation options for all Americans and creating seamless transportation systems that meet the unique needs and connect metropolitan regions, small towns, and rural areas.
3. Empower states, regions, and cities with direct transportation funding and greater flexibility to select projects, using carrots and sticks to incentivize wise transportation investments and in return require demonstrated performance on meeting national objectives.
4. Reform how we pay for the transportation system and create a Unified Transportation Trust Fund that would achieve balanced allocations of federal funds in a portfolio of rail, freight, highway, public transportation, and non-motorized transportation investment

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell — a co-chair of the Build America’s Future campaign and one of the leading voices calling for a renewed transportation system – gave the event’s keynote speech in the same committee where the transportation bill will be written and considered first by Chairman Oberstar’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Gov. Rendell was followed by a panel that included James Corless, director of the Transportation for America Campaign; Elaine Clegg, Co-Executive Director of Idaho Smart Growth and and city council member in Boise; Astrid Glynn, former Commissioner of the New York State Department of Transportation; Andrew Cotugno, the director of planning for Metro in Portland, Oregon; andRonald Kilcoyne, the General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority.

“This report couldn’t be more correct when it says this is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Gov. Rendell said.

“If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity…nothing will change, and we’ll just bump along, funding some good projects almost by accident, some mediocre projects and some terrible projects. We won’t have national policy, we won’t move the ball forward, and we won’t do something that will improve our economic competitiveness – we’ll just keep moving along the way we’ve been moving along, and not solving any problems.”

Thankfully, Gov. Rendell echoed T4 America’s optimism in envisioning a brighter future for our national economy that could rest on a revitalized transportation system.

He called attention to a factory outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that produces railroad ties and could build a second plant and double its workforce if the country committed to building an intercity rail system. Calling The Route to Reform a “very thorough, very thought-provoking, and very detailed report,” the Governor noted that all the great ideas for building a modern transportation system won’t go anywhere without a sustained and powerful campaign to back them up.

After Rendell’s remarks, the panelists delved into the details of the report with a detailed discussion of the Blueprint, laying out the campaign’s proposals for a drastically reformed program with clear national objectives and concrete, accountable performance measures.

Download the full report, the executive summary, or the press release with more details about today’s briefing att4america.org/blueprint.