REMARKS FOR
THE HONORABLE MARY PETERS
SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION

METROPOLITAN MOBILITY TOUR
HOUSTON, TX

AUGUST 19, 2008
10 AM

Thank you, Mayor White. And thank you, Frank [Wilson, METRO President and CEO], for hosting us here today.

Good morning, everyone. It’s great to be in Houston 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 Houston, 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.

Houstonians are beginning to understand that they can’t fight tomorrow’s traffic with yesterday’s broken transportation solutions.

This is the city that installed America’s first cashless toll road and showed that transponder technology had made tollbooths, and the backups that come with them, obsolete.

Now, this city is considering a far-reaching congestion-pricing plan to create high-occupancy toll lanes where charges vary based on demand along the city’s major freeways.

And with its ambitious plans for METRO expansion , Houston is looking to demonstrate that public-private partnerships can play a clear and successful role in financing and managing mass transit systems…just as they can with highways, airports, and seaports.

But the bottom line is that our current approach to transportation discourages, instead of encourages, the kind of innovate approaches to financing and building systems like the North Transit Corridor that Houston needs to keep its residents moving and its businesses thriving.

After all, when it takes longer to review, approve, and fund a transit program than it does to put a man on the moon, more than Houston has a problem.

Getting increasingly stalled traffic moving in our largest cities must be a federal priority. 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 an unprecedented federal funding allocation directly to communities like Houston to cut traffic, expand highways and transit systems, and improve commutes.

Under our approach, Houston 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 criterion: 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 the Medical Center, to visit the zoo, or to see the Texans play football... and win!

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

And it will make it easier to tap the over $400 billion in private capital available worldwide for infrastructure investments.

The bottom line is this: If the North Corridor project is as good as local sponsors say it is, it will be easier to fund under our proposal than under the current, broken federal system.

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 projects that it does today.

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

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 Houston to that discussion.

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