A lot has been going on in Congress around transportation policy this week, and Tanya Snyder has been on top of it at Streetsblog Capitol Hill. Here are a few quick excerpts from her latest articles, which you can read in full on the Streetsblog site.

House and Senate agree on 6-month transpo extension

Photo by THE Holy Hand Grenade! on Flickr.

Just days after a Senate committee asked the full chamber to consider a four-month extension of SAFETEA-LU, new negotiations have replaced that idea with a six-month extension at current spending levels. The bill also extends the gas tax. …

The extension is a clean one, with no changes in policy. That means bike/ped funding, which has been under threat over the last week, will remain for the next six months, at least. And the extension will be funded by the same 18.4 cent federal gas tax the U.S. has had since 1993, which was also due to expire September 30 and which is also renewed by this action.

The extension will stick to current funding levels, authorizing $24.78 billion in spending from the Highway Trust Fund for the first half of FY2012 (which begins October 1). That’s almost $19.8 billion for highways and $4.2 billion for transit.

That’s far more than the FY2012 budget just passed by the Transportation and HUD Appropriations subcommittee in the House, which agreed to $27.7 billion for highways and $5.2 billion for transit for the entire year. Although this extension can authorize more spending than that, actual spending levels are up to the appropriators. Experts say that at this level, most of the money would go to pay states back for projects already built, and new highway project funding could be cut by as much as 75 percent.

But higher spending levels also have their down side. “Maintaining current highway and transit spending levels for any period of time deepens the Highway Trust Fund’s revenue hole,” writes Jeff Davis, noting that according to the CBO, “the Highway Account of the Trust Fund will run out of cash at these spending levels in the first few months of calendar year 2013, with the Mass Transit Account running dry a year or so behind that).”

Read more »

Rail advocates: House bill would kill Amtrak

The 2012 transportation budget passed by a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee yesterday cut all high-speed rail funding and slashes Amtrak’s operating grant by 60 percent. What’s more, it forbids Amtrak from using that money to fund short corridors. Ridership on those short corridors grew five percent in the last year (PDF). Twenty-seven train lines, including several in and out of Chicago, would suddenly see their federal funding disappear, if the House budget were to become law. That would only leave the Northeast Corridor and a handful of cross-country routes; half Amtrak’s ridership would be cut instantly. According to the National Association of Railroad Passengers, a rail advocacy group, the danger goes further than just the short corridors. The organization asserts that “the bill really would kill all of Amtrak because loss of the short corridors would cut revenues and balloon costs for Northeast Corridor and national network (overnight) trains… Overhead costs—such as for station facilities and maintenance back shops—which now are shared among routes would be dumped on the surviving trains. For example, the Texas Eagle would become the sole user of the St. Louis and Fort Worth terminals and six Illinois stations. And Amtrak’s Chicago terminal costs would be borne solely by eight overnight trains.” Read more »

Good news and bad news: Obama’s plan would work, but GOP won’t pass it

[Friday] morning brought some useful indicators about the outlook for President Obama’s jobs bill. Good news first: Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, says President Obama’s job creation plan will likely add 1.9 million jobs, cut the unemployment rate by a percentage point, and grow the economy by 2 percent. The plan includes $50 billion for infrastructure, with an emphasis on transportation and schools, and the creation of an infrastructure bank capitalized at $10 billion. … Despite Moody’s upbeat analysis of the president’s proposal, stocks tumbled [Friday] morning. According to Bloomberg, the gloom wasn’t about the merits of the plan but the likelihood of Congressional passage. “Even as President Obama made an effort to put that plan together,” said James Dunigan, chief investment officer in Philadelphia for PNC Wealth Manage­ment, “there’s not a whole lot of confidence that Congress will pass [it].” Read more »