Stephen Van Beek, Executive Director of Policy and Strategy for LeighFisher, looks back at 2011 and forward to old and new challenges in transportation policy. Steve serves on the FAA Management Advisory Council and is a former Associate Deputy Secretary for Intermodalism at the U.S. DOT.

1. “Yes” we have a full year of funding for aviation and surface programs, but “No” these transportation programs are not authorized for the rest of the fiscal year. The highway, transit, and some rail programs are authorized through March 31, 2012 (the 8th short-term extension since September 30, 2009), while the FAA and its programs are authorized only through January 31, 2012 (the 22nd extension since September 30, 2007). Unfortunately, this raises the specter of another partial FAA shutdown similar to the one that occurred in 2011.
2. No long-term answers are emerging for struggling Trust Funds. Over the last 25 years, the United States has made significant investments in its transportation system spurred by the Highway Trust Fund and the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which together provided growing and predictable long-term funding for highway, transit, airport, and air traffic control investments. These have been funded by dedicated funding sources such as fuel and airline ticket taxes. However, the decade-long slow growth in travel, combined with congressional inattention to aligning revenues and spending, has jeopardized the future solvency of these funds.
3. U.S. is ambivalent about Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). LeighFisher is working in mature and emerging markets around the world on PPP projects including airports, toll roads, transit, and bridges. While PPPs are providing innovative ways to generate funding and provide financing for infrastructure projects around the world, U.S. federal, state, and local policymakers are not providing public solutions and are failing to incentivize the increased use of private capital by, for instance, developing standard concession agreements, eliminating restrictions on tolling the interstates, and depoliticizing procurement processes.
4. New intermodal thinking and programs are needed. Over the last three years, the President and Congress have increased their support for programs such as TIGER (intermodal discretionary grants) that have funded a number of projects that have system benefits. In the past, intermodal projects have proved difficult to support because they fell outside the modally dominant policy architecture of U.S. transportation programs. Projects involving freight rail, ports, and transit stations are good additions, but in the latest round only 3.6% of project requests were funded, making the process more like a lottery than a competitive discretionary program. Future funding and authority for innovative finance and/or an infrastructure bank would be prudent ways of institutionalizing intermodal programs.
5. Transportation leadership is needed. At every level of our federal system, leadership is needed to provide the intellectual and political guidance to generate ideas and build a consensus around the future vision of the U.S. transportation system and how public and private capital should fund it. This type of leadership would be similar to that provided by former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan with surface transportation or aviation’s Alfred Kahn, the Nobel Prize winning economist and the father of Airline Deregulation. Notwithstanding the national benefits of increased productivity, reduced congestion, and potentially lower greenhouse gas emissions, unless and until stronger leadership emerges on the importance of transportation infrastructure in the United States, we are likely to experience the continued frustration of short-term extensions, underfunding, increased congestion, and suboptimal levels of service.