Last week’s terrorist attack in San Bernardino naturally overshadowed every other event for days, including a surprising achievement by Congress.
It passed a transportation funding bill.
And we don’t mean the usual short-term, kick-the-can-down-the-road sort of bill for which Congress has been notorious when it funds highways and transit, and which sometimes have only extended the revenue stream for a couple of months.
No, Congress passed a five-year, $305 billion bill that is the longest such extension since the 20th century. And it did so in strikingly bipartisan fashion, with large majorities supporting the bill in both chambers.
It is not a perfect bill by any means. Still, the length of the extension alone is reason to celebrate, as disputes over funding had become a recurring sign of congressional dysfunction — now resolved at least in this case.
We’d have preferred Congress tap additional revenue in the form of a modest gas-tax hike to cover a greater part of the expenditures — and with oil prices at a near seven-year low, there couldn’t be a better time to minimize the impact on consumers. But there is little political appetite for such an approach, even though revenues have stagnated because of growing vehicle fuel economy. Instead, the bill plucks $70 billion in general tax revenue to supplement gas and diesel taxes.
As transportation expert Ken Orski noted in his news letter, “The ‘user pays’ principle that was the philosophic foundation of the federal-aid highway program for the past 60 years” has been discarded. And yet as unfortunate as that may be, the bill contains much that is positive, too, including several provisions that will directly benefit Colorado.
“We were able to get an amendment that allows vehicle-to-vehicle communications,” Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner told us. “One of the ways we’re going to manage I-70 traffic through the mountains isn’t necessarily going to be by adding two more tunnels through the Eisenhower-Johnson tunnels but it is going to be in part through technology. So we were able to get some language that will help the Colorado Department of Transportation work on vehicle-to-vehicle technologies.”
Gardner says CDOT would like to experiment with that technology, as well as “vehicle-to-infrastructure” technology, on both I-70 and I-25.
Gardner also pushed for provisions that adjust funding for states like Colorado with growing population and that will facilitate the buildout of the southeast rail line in metro Denver.
All in all, it’s a major accomplishment given the worrisome state of the nation’s infrastructure.
