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By U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters
 It is hard to think of a time when transportation commanded so much attention on both political and public policy agendas or was a more frequent topic of dinner table conversations around the country.
Exploding highway congestion, lengthening daily commutes, rising fuel prices and bridges to nowhere are fueling frustration with a transportation system that simply is not working as well as it should. The American people know it and there is a growing recognition that our approach to transportation in the United States needs to change.
The good news is that next year's expiration of the current surface transportation law, SAFETEA-LU, opens an historic opportunity for the United States to move away from the failed government-centric transportation model—a model in which central planners try to determine what the market wants, levy taxes to try to meet that need and then manage design and construction.
If we get the policy right when the new bill is written, it has the potential to be as far-reaching and visionary as the legislation President Eisenhower signed in 1956 giving birth to a national Interstate Highway system, which ultimately revolutionized the American economy and way of life.
Modern technology and new approaches to financing make it possible to empower consumers—through the mechanism of the market—to set transportation priorities, instead of government planners and regulators.
Modern financing also permits states to tap into the more than $400 billion in private-sector capital that is available right now for infrastructure. With a little forward thinking, we can unleash the greatest new wave of transportation investment this country has ever seen. Or we can sit by and let that massive amount of private-sector funding be invested in China, Europe and South America—as it is today.
We can shift toward a more equitable user-fee system that charges drivers for when and where they drive. Or we can continue to rely on regressive "flat fee" gas taxes, a financing mechanism that continues to decline as drivers respond to higher gas prices by driving less or switching to more efficient vehicles.
We can take advantage of the powerful combination of modern technology and tolling and use dynamic road pricing to help our highways operate at peak efficiency. Or we can continue to maintain the myth that our roads are free, ignoring the high price Americans pay for congestion in terms of lost time, wasted fuel and the drain on the U.S. economy.
It is that simple. If lawmakers in Washington turn their backs on reform and content themselves with figuring out the funding formula—how to divvy up among the states what is left after the set-asides and earmarks—they will have failed.
The time has come to move beyond superficial discussions of how much money the federal government is going to spend on transportation and lay a policy foundation that fits our current circumstances. By retooling our policies for the 21st Century, we can do more to put transportation in the fast lane than Eisenhower ever dreamed possible.
The first step is to refocus our surface transportation program on a clearly defined federal role. When the government tries to be all things to all people, it fails to be coherent and risks being nothing to anyone.
The program Eisenhower created 50 years ago was well-defined and well-suited to its time. The goal was clear: build the Interstates and connect the country—and we did.
Since that mission was accomplished more than a quarter of a century ago, our federal surface transportation program has lost its sense of direction. It has become a breeding ground for earmarks and burdened by a proliferation of special-interest programs, goals and requirements.
When I began working at the Arizona Department of Transportation in the 1980s, we dealt with only a handful of such programs. Today, states must navigate more than 108 different programs with numerous requirements and often conflicting goals.
The time has come to eliminate the earmarks and set-asides and replace this slice-and-dice approach with a structure that effectively focuses the federal role on the three areas that are of greatest national interest: 1) transportation safety; 2) the Interstate Highway System and other nationally significant corridors; and 3) mobility in metropolitan areas.
We have made a real commitment to safety and have achieved measurable progress in reducing traffic fatalities. But with over 42,000 deaths on America's roads every year, we still have unfinished business.
Using a technology- and data-driven approach, the Department of Transportation is focusing—and must continue to focus—on stubborn issues that put drivers, passengers and pedestrians at risk, including crashes involving drunk drivers, motorcycles, work zones and rural roads.
The federal government should similarly commit to improving and maintaining the condition and performance of the Interstate Highway System and other major corridors. Roughly one quarter of all highway miles traveled in the U.S. takes place on the Interstate system, even though it encompasses only slightly more than 1 percent of the nation's highways. Further, because these highways carry fully three-fourths of the long-haul truck traffic, they are vital to interstate commerce and global trade. States must continually improve, maintain and expand these roads to keep them in
good condition and operating at peak efficiency.
Finally, the massive congestion problem in America's urban areas demands urgent and strong federal focus. Home to 65 percent of the nation's population and the source of 68 percent of all jobs, America's 100 largest metropolitan areas are its key drivers of prosperity, generating three-quarters of U.S. gross domestic product. Sadly, growing gridlock threatens to stall this economic engine.
We need to use federal dollars to encourage state and local officials to pursue more effective and sustainable congestion-relief strategies. There are proven technologies and approaches that can deliver almost immediate relief from traffic and from high gasoline prices, if we are willing to use them.
The Urban Partnership Agreements that the Department negotiated last year with Seattle, Miami, San Francisco and Minneapolis are demonstrating how relatively small amounts of federal funding can serve as an important catalyst for strategies to fight congestion through innovative combinations of technology, pricing and transit.
A good example is Minneapolis, where Governor Tim Pawlenty and local officials are putting a plan in place that almost overnight will relieve traffic on one of the Twin Cities' busiest highways. Minneapolis is converting existing HOV and shoulder lanes along I-35 West to High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes. Commuters eager to use these new, dynamically priced express lanes will pay modest tolls that vary with the amount of traffic. They also will be available for Bus Rapid Transit. The concept is a simple yet proven way to use the market to keep traffic moving, commutes reliable, gas bills lower and the air cleaner.
More urban areas are eager to follow this path. I recently joined Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
in Los Angeles to announce a new congestion-relief demonstration project featuring dynamically priced HOT lanes. Similarly, in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley has come on board with a congestion-relief initiative that combines Bus Rapid Transit and
congestion pricing for the city's metered parking spaces—downtown street parkers will soon start paying more to park during peak hours. Again, this is a simple but effective market mechanism to encourage commuters to take transit or shift their schedules to drive downtown during less busy times of the day.
This is the type of innovation the new federal transportation program should support and encourage. The program also ought to be designed to ensure that the federal government makes rational and accountable investment decisions.
We can strengthen the basis of our investment decisions by insisting on benefit-cost analysis for projects receiving substantial federal support. Further, we can improve accountability by having states and metropolitan areas set meaningful performance goals and document their progress.
Flexibility must go hand-in-hand with performance management. By consolidating dozens of stove-piped highway and transit programs into multi-modal programs, we can increase state and municipal flexibility to fund their greatest transportation priorities. Much as we did with welfare reform in the 1990s, it is time for transportation reform that encourages innovation, rather than stifling it.
Our goal is to move the federal focus away from process oversight and instead demand accountability. Process requirements that are not producing outcomes are not worth keeping. Success should be defined in terms of increased travel-time reliability, decreased delay hours and improved condition of bridges and pavement.
Finally, federal transportation dollars should be leveraged to attract new investment by states, localities and the private sector. The United States is only just beginning to follow the path that Europe, Asia and South America have successfully pursued for more than a decade and tap into the vast amounts of private-sector capital available for infrastructure.
The money is out there. Pennsylvania just received the largest bid for private toll road investment in U.S. history—a $12.8 billion offer to lease the Pennsylvania Turnpike and invest the proceeds in the state's infrastructure. To put this amount into perspective, this one transaction is worth more than two-and-one-half times the Pennsylvania DOT's entire annual budget.
Several proven strategies are available to encourage this type of leveraging, including removing federal restrictions that prevent tolling of Interstates and other major highways and encouraging the expanded use of public-private partnerships. We also can expand investment by broadening the availability of TIFIA (Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act) credit assistance and private activity bonds and by allowing greater
flexibility to create and use state infrastructure banks. The Department of Transportation recently provided TIFIA financing and authorized the use of Private Activity Bonds to help Virginia close an extremely creative transaction to widen the Capital Beltway and add HOT lanes using private financing and state-of-the-art variable electronic tolls.
Too often under the current program, federal dollars diminish other investments instead ofencouraging more. If we shape our programs right, however, every dollar we spend can bring three to four additional dollars to the table.
Just imagine where we would be today if the $286.4 billion in SAFETEA-LU were leveraged three- or four-fold and those funds had been targeted to moving goods faster and more safely over our transportation network. There is no question that our Interstates and bridges would be in even better condition today and that congestion would be decreasing in our cities, rather than increasing.
Few things affect Americans in their daily lives as directly as congestion. Few things are as important to our economic vitality as the efficiency and performance of our transportation network. We have a unique opportunity to put our transportation network back in the fast lane by creating a coherent federal role, encouraging a wise investment strategy and delivering a higher level of performance for the American people. We cannot afford to squander this opportunity to give America the transportation policy it deserves.
The Honorable Mary E. Peters was appointed by President George W. Bush as the 15th U.S. Secretary of Transportation in 2006. In her two decades of work at the state and federal level and with the private sector, she has earned a muchdeserved reputation for solving problems with common sense, innovation and vision.
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