REMARKS FOR
THE HONORABLE MARY PETERS
SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION

I-70/REFORM PROPOSAL MEDIA EVENT
ST. LOUIS, MO

AUGUST 19, 2008
2:00 PM

Thank you, County Executive Dooley. And thank you, Tom [TOM BLAIR, MISSOURI DOT ASSITANT ENGINEER], for the informative briefing on I-70.

Good afternoon, everyone. It’s great to be in St. Louis today to talk about how to keep this exciting city moving forward.

The Bush Administration just released a comprehensive new plan to refocus, reform, and renew our very approach to the nation’s highways and transit systems.

For fast-growing communities like St. Louis, this plan will deliver fewer traffic tie-ups, better transit services, a stronger economy, and a cleaner environment.

This is where the Interstate was born when, in 1956, the very first contract was awarded and ground was broken for I-70.

But residents of the Gateway City understand that they can’t fight tomorrow’s traffic with yesterday’s transportation solutions.

So St. Louis is again embracing a new way of thinking as it contemplates an ambitious plan to expand local interstates like I-70 and I-64 to get traffic moving again into and through this region. Indeed, plans to add new truck-only lanes along interstate 70 will go far to make daily commutes easier and freight shipments cheaper and more reliable.

When you add the fact that this region is embracing innovative new contracting approaches to expand I-64, you can see a future where local businesses enjoy lower shipping costs and local commuters enjoy faster trips to work and home again.

That’s something I know would make County Executive Dooley’s life much easier.

But the bottom line is that as ambitious as these local transportation plans are, without real reform to the nation’s transportation program, good projects like this will languish too long without the funds or the clearance needed to move forward.

Our plan fixes that by re-focusing transportation dollars on getting people and goods moving again in the nation’s busy cities and crowded highways.

Under our approach, cities will no longer have to slice and dice every federal dollar to qualify for niche programs that do little to improve their communities or commutes.

Instead, there will be a level playing field, with one overarching criteria: does the project justify the investment of taxpayer dollars. Or in business terms, does the project generate a good rate of return?

Projects qualify for funding if they stand up to benefit-cost analysis. In other words, projects that make sense for commuters get funded, while projects designed only to help local politicians don’t.

In addition, our plan calls for a renewed focus on the nation’s Interstate highways, especially along busy freight corridors like I-70. This means that instead of being forced to fund light house projects and new museums, states will finally have the resources they need to maintain and expand the highways on which roughly one-quarter of all highway miles traveled in the U.S. takes place.

The idea is simple, good highway projects shouldn’t have to rely on earmarks while bad projects shouldn’t get good money earmarked to them.

That’s bad news for those looking to build bridges to nowhere or highways for no one, but it’s great news for people who want to find a faster and more reliable way to get downtown, visit the zoo or see the Cardinals win a game.

In fact, our proposal will not only put an end to earmarks, it will give states like Missouri greater flexibility to invest the over 10 billion dollars worth of stale earmarks from previous years that are simply lying around unspent today.

We also give cities like St. Louis greater flexibility to embrace variable pricing on the region’s roads, while improving the flow of traffic on local roads.

That means it will be easier for communities like this to generate new revenue for other, equally ambitious transit and highway projects.

So the bottom line is this, our proposal will make it significantly easier to widen I-70, improve I-64, finance local transit projects and cut commuting times region-wide.

It will be faster to build, too, because our plan pilots changes to the federal review process so it will not take the 13 years on average to design and build new highway and transit projects it does today.

Trying something new is never easy, but the time has come to fundamentally reform the way U.S. transportation decisions and investments are made, to renew our commitment to metropolitan mobility and to re-focus on delivering more efficient roads and new transit systems for St. Louis’s businesses and families.

We’ve laid out a plan intended to spur local, state and federal debate about how best to incorporate new reforms into the surface transportation legislation that Congress will begin work on this fall. Today, I welcome County Executive Dooley and anyone who wants to see a less-congested I-70 to join that discussion.

Thank you. And I will be pleased to answer any questions.