April 4, 1973
Page 10987
THE HIGHWAY TRUST FUND
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, efforts to increase the flexibility of use of highway trust funds have been receiving increasing attention recently. In its April issue, the Reamer's Digest has published a thoughtful article entitled: “We Should Open the Highway Trust Fund Now.” In this article, many of the concerns which I have felt about the highway trust fund are expressed and the necessity of opening the highway trust fund to allow its use for mass transportation is clearly identified.
I ask unanimous consent that a copy of this Reader's Digest article be included in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD as follows:
WE SHOULD OPEN UP THE HIGHWAY TRUST FUND NOW
(By Ann Dear)
A Knoxville, Tenn., widow, who for seven years depended on bus transportation to get to work, recently moved with her three children into a house bought with hard-earned savings. Then a change in the bus schedule left her stranded with no service, and she was forced to sell that home.
A student supporting a wife and child on $3500 a year moved out of Philadelphia because of "high costs and little security." Yet he now pays $1.40 a day, seven percent of his income, for public transportation from his suburban home to the city.
The effects of such deteriorating service and high fares have been dismal: more than 268 mass transportation companies have gone out of existence since 1954, and 20 more are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Companies sustained deficits of a half-billion dollars in 1972 alone. The number of vehicles has declined by 25,000 since 1950 and they provide ten billion fewer passenger rides than they did 20 years ago.
"These passengers aren't lost," says the American Transit Association. "Most are riding in from suburbia, one to a car, and sitting bumper-to-bumper on the most magnificent highways money can buy."
The necessity for an answer to our transportation dilemma is urgent.
The alternatives are clear: We can continue to be plagued by ever-increasing traffic jams, or we can create efficient public transportation – modern subway and bus systems, high-speed commuter trains – to move millions of workers to jobs and assist the one quarter of our population too poor, too old or too handicapped to own a car. As former Secretary of Transportation John Volpe has put it, we may see "our urban-circulatory systems strangled by traffic and choked by smog, rendering even our great highways useless, unless we enable public transportation to carry its fair share of the load."
At the root of the problem is the Highway Trust Fund, established in 1956 chiefly to finance our 42,500-mile interstate-highway system. It collects more than $5.6 billion a year, principally from the four-cent tax on every gallon of gasoline sold.
"Each time a new highway is opened, it produces an increase in highway use, which under the Trust Fund system generates an increase in money available for building yet none highways," wrote Ben Kelley, former public affairs director at the Federal Highway Administration, in his book The Pavers and the Paved. "The self-perpetuating circularity of the process may appall economists and transportation planners, but it delights industries dependent on highway construction for profits."
Few dispute that it has been necessary to invest billions in super-highways to carry our vast automobile traffic across the nation, but what concerns a growing number of transportation experts is the enormous imbalance that has resulted. The U.S. government over the past five years has invested a lopsided $10 billion in urban highways but only $1.1 billion for public transportation. This year, the federal transportation budget shows that for every dollar spent on mass transit, $14 will be spent on highways. It is little wonder that scarcely ten percent of the work force now uses mass transit to get to work. Half of the 40 million Americans who drive to work have no public transportation available to them!
Yet all too often cities are forced to use highway funds or lose them. When San Franciscans refused in 1964 to let the double-decked Embarcadero Freeway be extended and spoil their picturesque waterfront, the city thereby lost up to $270 million in Trust Fund money.
San Francisco and nearby communities then began funding, mostly from local property taxes (only 17 percent came from federal grants), the construction of a 75-mile mass-transit rail system, Bay Area Rapid Transit. Opened last year, the $1.4-billion, computer-controlled BART is the nation's first regional rapid-transit system to be constructed in more than half a century.
This is exactly the kind of transportation flexibility that countless other cities desperately need. Last year a dramatic effort was launched in Congress to achieve such a goal. Sen. Edmund Muskie (D., Maine) and former Sen. John Sherman Cooper (R., Ky.)proposed that the Federal Highway Act of1972 be amended to allow cities to use their share of the $800-million urban- systems portion of the Highway Trust Fund for bus or rail transportation. The remaining allocations for interstates, primary and secondary roads would not have to be reduced. This new approach was soon under severe attack by the formidable Highway Users Federation for Safety and Mobility, a spearhead of the highway lobby representing more than 600 highway-connected businesses and industries. The organization, with a staff of 50 and a budget of $3 million a year, poured out slick pamphlets and magazines, canned editorials and news releases, all extolling highways and casting doubt on mass transit. The Road Information Program (TRIP),another arm of the lobby, launched a $500,000 public relations campaign defending the Trust Fund. When Mobil Oil Corporation, in a notable split with the highway lobby, called for improved mass transit and even Trust Fund abolition, TRIP urged industry groups to protest these ads.
But highway-lobby propagandists now had to contend with a new force, a citizens' lobby called the Highway Action Coalition (HAC), formed in 1971 by Environmental Action and the Sierra Club to open up the Trust Fund for mass transit. HAC's newsletter, The Concrete Opposition, stressed these points:
Highways should be built where they are justified, but cities should have the option of using their interstate funds for transit. Urban freeways often increase rather than relieve congestion, as in the case of the Hollywood, Calif., freeway. Designed to reach a daily capacity of 100,000 vehicles within ten years, it actually was carrying 168,000 vehicles a day in just one year. Congestion is expensive: one study indicated that its annual cost to truckers in New York City alone is more than $100 million.
It is incorrect for the highway interests to maintain that highway taxes going into the Trust Fund are "user taxes," for highway-related purposes only. Under this logic, as Rep. John B. Anderson of Illinois said in a. speech to the House, all alcohol taxes should be earmarked for rehabilitating alcoholics.
The automobile-highway system contributes significantly to the nation's increasingly serious energy crisis. Gasoline used in private cars represents one fifth of all energy used in the nation. And, per passenger mile, a car consumes five times as much fuel as a train and six times as much fuel as a bus. If one fourth of urban travel could be shifted from private automobiles to public transportation by 1980, the savings in petroleum consumption would exceed one million barrels a day. In addition, the automobile is responsible for at least 39 percent of our air pollution – and up to 80 percent in some cities.
Largely because of HAC's efforts, the Senate passed the Cooper-Muskie amendment late last September. The battle shifted to the House of Representatives, where the highway lobby is traditionally far stronger. As many as 50 full-time highway lobbyists swarmed through the House office buildings. A contractors' organization, The Committee for Action, parceled out $150,000 in election year contributions to more than 60 political candidates, and donations also flowed from truckers' groups.
HAC fought back with only 12 volunteer lobbyists and funds so low its staff of three had gone unpaid for two months. It alerted a network of concerned citizens representing 19 organizations from the League of Women Voters to Common Cause to the American Public Health Association to start a messages-to-Congress campaign. No one was more persuasive than Transportation Secretary Volpe, ironically the nation's first highway administrator in 1956, who tirelessly telephoned and buttonholed Congressmen. Soon the ranks of public-transportation supporters in the House swelled to 200. But a series of parliamentary maneuvers engineered by the highway interests kept the issue of opening up the Trust Fund from coming to a vote. A bitter House-Senate conference wrangled to an unsatisfactory compromise, and all highway legislation died in late October when the House failed to muster a quorum.
As the opposing forces clash on the same battleground this year, other schemes, such as a new trust frond for mass transit or massive appropriations from general tax revenues, will be promoted. But flexibility is still vitally needed to make the wisest use of the gigantic Highway Trust Fund where money is already available. If we want an end to traffic jams, poor bus service and antiquated rail systems, we can:
1. Try to make certain that our local officials direct their planning to balanced transportation needs – and not to highways alone. (Maryland is now the only state with a trust fund under which all transportation-related taxes can be used for various transportation modes on a needs basis.)
2. Write to the Highway Action Coalition, 1346 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036, to learn how your community can work for balanced transportation.
3. Tell your Senator and Congressman that now is the time to let the Highway Trust Fund be used for public transportation. As Secretary Volpe said during last year's legislative battle: "This isn't a raid on the highway fund – it's a ray of hope for better mobility for all Americans.