REMARKS FOR
THE HONORABLE MARY PETERS
SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION

REFORM PROPOSAL MEDIA EVENT
CHARLOTTE, NC

AUGUST 20, 2008
9:30 AM

Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining me. And thank you, John [JOHN SULLIVAN, FHWA], for explaining Charlotte’s traffic challenges.

It’s great to be in Charlotte 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 cities like Charlotte, this plan will deliver fewer traffic tie-ups, better transit services, a stronger economy, and a cleaner environment. It is a clean break with the past when it comes to transportation in this country.

Charlotte’s citizens are beginning to understand that they can’t fight tomorrow’s traffic with yesterday’s broken transportation solutions. Charlotte is undertaking a two-phase study of the feasibility of a network of high occupancy toll lanes, the price of which would vary according to time of day and the number of users.

There’s no telling what might come of this study, but the message it sends is clear: Charlotte is ready for a fresh approach to solving its transportation challenges.

This city and others like it across the country should be able to pursue new ways of building roads and transit systems that will make a real difference for their citizens. But the bottom line is that our current approach to transportation discourages, instead of encourages, the kind of innovative financing and building methods that Charlotte needs to keep its residents moving and businesses thriving.

Getting increasingly stalled traffic moving in the Queen City should be a federal priority, instead of a royal pain. After all, America’s 100 largest metropolitan areas are its key drivers of prosperity, generating three-quarters of U.S. gross domestic product. We can’t afford to have that economic engine stalled by gridlocked traffic as it is today.

So, our plan shifts a huge percentage of resources to our urban areas by proposing a new dedicated Metropolitan Mobility Program. This program will provide unprecedented federal funding directly to communities like Charlotte to cut traffic, expand highways and transit systems and improve commutes.

Under our approach, Charlotte and other 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 it generate a good rate of return. Under our plan, local officials will be free to make investments based on their most pressing transportation needs, whether it is new highways or expanded transit systems.

Projects will receive funding based on economic merit, instead of political influence. In other words, good projects won’t have to seek earmarks to get built, while good money won’t get squandered on projects that do little to improve traffic.

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 from Lake Norman or South Charlotte to jobs Uptown.

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

And the plan will make it easier for cities like Charlotte to tap into the over 400 billion private sector dollars currently available worldwide for investments in infrastructure.

The bottom line is this: expanding local highways and easing traffic on roads like I-77 and I-85 will be a lot easier under our proposal than under the current, broken federal system. And it will take a lot less time, 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 projects it does today.

And because our plan gives cities like Charlotte greater flexibility to use variable tolls to manage traffic while raising needed revenue, there also will be more funds available to invest in transit and other vital projects.

Trying something new is never easy, but the time has come to stop tolerating failure. Instead, it is time to embrace and support fundamental and essential reforms to the way U.S. transportation decisions and investments are made.

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 anyone who cares about improving traffic in Charlotte to that discussion.

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

# # #