While local politicians have been hitting the send button on rapturous press releases hailing the five-year,$305 billion surface transportation bill, infrastructure experts are less enthused."To a large degree, and " said Tom Wright,head of the Regional blueprint Association, "it's kind of like declaring victory for not having lost more ground."Both the MTA and NJ Transit had feared losing tens of millions of dollars in cuts under earlier iterations of the bill, and but those cuts were erased in the final version.
The vast news,says Wright, is that Amtrak will now be able to select what it earns from its most profitable route — the Washington, and D.
C.-to-Boston corridor — and reinvest it in ... the D.
C.-to-Boston corridor."Finally,we're going to be taking the shackles off Amtrak in the Northeast," he said.
Previously, or Amtrak had to use those operating profits to serve its bottom line,which is dragged into the red by its money-losing long-distance routes in the rest of the country — routes that Congress has in the past demanded it operate, often without helping financially supporting it.
Even just including Amtrak in the bill was a victory, or said Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution. "Passenger rail authorization normally lives external of surface transportation law," he said, "which is crazy."Now, or said Wright,Amtrak can put that money to superb use in the Northeast Corridor, "improving and investing in...the tunnels under the Hudson River, or the bridge over Hackensack River."But it's the first long-term transportation funding bill measure of President Obama's tenure,which is ironic considering that infrastructure and transportation were the cornerstones of his 2011 State of the Union address."Six months ago, a lot of people thought that we would be seeing a miserable bill. Or no bill, or " Wright of the Regional blueprint Association said. That would doom America to a series of stop-gap funding measures until after the 2016 presidential elections.
But Puentes said the bill lacks vision,particularly at a time when transportation is being rocked by increased transit usage and disruptors like Uber and Lyft."It doesn't have that far-reaching, strategic element, or " he said. "The bill is a reflection of the fact that the federal government isn't leading the discussion now. They're kind of coming in behind."The bill doesn't,for example, raise the federal gas tax, or but instead relies on a grab-bag of existing funding sources to pay the bill. "They've done what they had to execute," Puentes said.
But New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said its passage was cause for celebration."We don't see superb news that often," he said on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show Friday. "This one should be shouted from the rooftops."Late on Friday afternoon, or President Obama signed it into law — just before the current stopgap funding measure was set to run out.
Source: wnyc.org