By Ron Thaniel
May 25, 2009

Continuing The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ push for increased transportation investments in cities, U.S. Conference of Mayors President Miami Mayor Manny Diaz urged U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to include the Conference’s Metropolitan Mobility Program in the Administration’s principles for the next surface transportation authorization bill.

In the May 7 letter to LaHood, Diaz wrote, “The mayors Metropolitan Mobility Program proposal ensures that congested areas actually receive funding, and can budget for transportation investments that compliment centers of housing and employment.”

“As local leaders, mayors own and operate most transportation assets and as such should be empowered to decide investments in their areas,” Diaz stated.

Under the proposal, cities and their metropolitan areas that “elect to opt-in” to the Metropolitan Mobility Program can elect to use their current Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) structure or newly authorized federally defined Metropolitan Mobility Authority. Through the Conference’s proposal, project selection would coordinate transportation and land use using transit-oriented development with the measurement of increasing affordable housing investment near transit and employment opportunities.

Furthermore, project selection would include measurements based on a population’s density or compactness of cities within a metropolitan area. The Conference is recommending that MPO’s and MMA’s use those performance standards and national goals to develop mobility plans to accommodate new economic and population growth.

Conference of Mayors Transportation and Communication Chair Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper told a Senate panel in March, “This nation cannot deal with our energy and climate challenges, without confronting the transportation sector.”

The U.S. transportation sector – its systems and practices – has played a significant part in growing the nation’s energy dependency on foreign energy supplies, principally petroleum, and in contributing to higher oil prices and other energy price increases. In 2007, 69 percent of the nation’s total petroleum products were consumed in the transportation sector, with petroleum products powering more than 98 percent of the nation’s transportation mobility. Currently, the U.S. is the world’s largest energy consumer and largest greenhouse gas emitter.

“America’s mayors understand all too well that our nation cannot remain economically competitive with the world if we continue down this path,” said Hickenlooper. This means going forward, all federally-assisted transportation investments in a metropolitan area must address energy and climate concerns, through needed shifts and reforms in federal policies and programs that emphasize sustainable transportation investments led by the Conference’s Metropolitan Mobility Program.

Mayors also believe that we must rebuild and modernize our transportation infrastructure in ways that are more energy efficient, less reliant on foreign oil, and more environmentally sensitive.

As proposed in the Conference’s Metropolitan Mobility Program, to accelerate the rebuilding or metropolitan infrastructure in ways that confront our nation’s energy and climate challenges, federal policy must increasingly empower local elected officials, especially in metropolitan areas, to make the decisions on how federal transportation resources are invested. Mayors believe that brining our nation’s public transportation (bus and rail) assets to a state of good repair and building new systems is essential to meeting future sustainable mobility needs of our cities and their metropolitan areas.

As a broader policy matter, the next surface transportation authorization should empower and incentivize mayors to better connect investment decisions to land use, economic development, energy, and environmental factors.

The current federal surface transportation program, which was authorized by the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) in 2005, is set to expire September 30 of this year.