Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd today will address the Regional Transportation Forum presented by the Connecticut Sierra Club and the National Corridors Initiative. Dodd will speak about the need for investing in our state and nation’s infrastructure in order to create jobs and spur economic growth.

"We have a golden opportunity in the coming months to not only rebuild existing transportation infrastructure and provide new capacity – and we need to – but to also start thinking differently about the role transportation plays in America – about how we get to work and school, how our businesses move and ship products. Not just how we live our lives today, but how we want to live our lives tomorrow."

Dodd, who is Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, will play a critical role in reauthorizing the nation’s surface transportation law, which expires later this year. Dodd is also the author of the National Infrastructure Bank Act, a bill that would create an independent national bank to identify, evaluate and help finance infrastructure projects of substantial regional and national significance.

Remarks as Prepared: It’s a pleasure to be with so many men and women who care deeply about addressing our region’s transportation challenges – citizens, legislators, architectural firms, and advocates who understand the connection between infrastructure and our quality of life, our communities’ competitiveness, our collective ability to grow and prosper, and the kind of future we leave for our children.

I want to thank the Sierra Club and the National Corridors Initiative for not only their work in recognizing the role rail and transit will play in shaping that future, but bringing the stakeholders together with this conference today.

I wholeheartedly endorse the resolution you are sending to President-elect Obama. And I know Joe Courtney would agree with me and wanted to be here.

You have it exactly right – this is about getting our country moving again!

We have truly entered a transformational moment – with an economy mired in a deep recession, and more than a half million jobs lost in just the last month.

At the same time, we have two ongoing wars abroad, a deepening dependence on fossil fuels much of which is imported from unstable parts of the world, an increasingly competitive global marketplace, and rising concerns about global warming – all of which impact our economy, our environment, our health and safety, and our ability to lead the world.

These are all enormous challenges. But combined they also present a once-in-a-generation opportunity for leadership and change.

And few issues give us the opportunity to tackle so many of these problems at once as transportation and transit.

Right now, we hear a lot about infrastructure in the context of economic growth. And it isn’t hard to figure out why.

It’s estimated that each billion dollars invested in transportation creates or sustains some 47,000 transportation construction jobs – jobs that on average pay nearly $1,000 per week.

Jobs that cannot be outsourced. At a time when we’ve lost more than a million jobs in two months, its importance cannot be overstated.

That’s why infrastructure investment will be at the heart of the economic recovery plan we hope to have on President-elect Obama’s desk soon.

It will likely include tens of billions of dollars for transportation infrastructure – highways, bridges, transit, passenger rail, and airports that will be critical to the success and continued vitality of states like Connecticut, which have some of the oldest and most congested roads, bridges and railroads in the country.

I am working hard to ensure that Connecticut gets its fair share.

But in a matter of days, we will have a president and a Congress that understand the benefits that investments in public transportation can bring not only on the macro level—to reducing congestion, increasing mobility, improving energy security, and addressing climate change—but the community level as well – helping connect workers to the jobs communities need, from the mechanics, nurses, and plumbers, to the young engineers and entrepreneurs, to those in our high tech and bio tech industries and others.

For too long, we’ve approached these issues discretely—as if they existed in some kind of vacuum—and with too little leadership at the national level.

I don’t pretend to believe that Congress always gets it right when it comes to deciding what issues come before what committee. How the House Energy and Commerce Committee can oversee biomedical research as well as travel and tourism remains a mystery to me.

But with the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs committee which oversees our nation’s transit policy, we did get it right.

As the chair of that committee and a member for some 28 years, I see it as my responsibility to connect these worlds so that we can invest in things like housing and public transportation strategically.

By coordinating housing and transit policy to encourage smart land-use, we can spur "transit-oriented development" that helps to increase ridership and create vibrant communities where people can live and work with a smaller carbon footprint.

I know I’m preaching to the choir.

Right here in New London, the Intermodal Transportation Center is an excellent example. This site is where Amtrak, the Cross Sound Ferry, the Southeast Area Transit public bus system, and taxis all converge.

When supported by safe and adequate pedestrian access, the Intermodal Center will truly be the economic engine for the New London community and a model for the region.

And so, what I want to talk about with you today is how we can leverage this moment to not only get our economy moving again in the short term but begin making the kinds of transportation investments we need to be competitive as communities, as a region and as a nation in the 21st century.

We have a golden opportunity in the coming months to not only rebuild existing transportation infrastructure and provide new capacity—and we need to—but to also start thinking differently about the role transportation plays in America – about how we get to work and school, how our businesses move and ship products.

Not just how we live our lives today, but how we want to live our lives tomorrow.

Thinking Regional

As we prepare to make what President-elect Obama has said will be a historic investment in our country’s infrastructure, we should consider how our needs have changed in the last century.

The truth is, since our nation’s current highway system was built in the 1950’s, our economy has wholly reinvented itself, and in the coming years it almost certainly will again.

The bulk of this growth has occurred in metropolitan regions – and along with it, the bulk of the congestion.

Already, there are more people on our roads and rails than we can handle, traveling to different places than they were a half century ago, at different times, and often for completely different reasons.

Approaching transportation differently starts with thinking about transit regionally.

Public transit plays an important role in Connecticut. Already, we have critical regional infrastructure in place in our two commuter rail lines, Shore Line East and the New Haven Line, on which passengers take some 36 million trips every year.

Each help create the kind of transportation corridors we need to accommodate businesses and families.

And we all know the importance of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor to our region.

With Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the White House, I’m confident we will finally make the investments we need for a first-class passenger rail system – investments that make it better, faster and more reliable.

But the need to expand is obvious. In the 21st century global economy, states like Connecticut can’t afford to be isolated from its neighbors or only connected to New York, even.

People today may live in Rhode Island and work in Hartford or New London.

Or maybe they live in Connecticut and commute to Massachusetts.

That tells us that the future of commuter rail in our region will be projects like the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield rail line.

The "Tri-City Connector" will take cars off the highways and link communities all the way from New Haven to Springfield.

It will improve access to Bradley International Airport, already one the region’s busiest airports.

And it is expected to result in an estimated 630,000 additional trips per year.

That not only means alleviating increasingly severe chronic vehicle congestion clogging the I-95 and I-91 corridors though Connecticut but also curbing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

The Tri-City Connector is but one idea whose time has come.

And if we start thinking about these challenges not simply community-by-community or state-by-state but region-to-region, I know there will be many more.

Opportunities

And we don’t have to wait. Congress is scheduled to reauthorize the surface transportation statute later this year, and the Banking Committee will play a critical role in that effort by writing the transit provisions of that law.

For sure, transit’s moment has already arrived.

The number of riders is growing and reaching levels we have not seen in decades. In 2007, Americans took over 10 billion trips on public transit, the highest number in half a century.

Public transit saves over 4 billion gallons of gasoline annually and reduces carbon emissions by some 37 million metric tons a year – that’s the equivalent to the electricity used by almost 5 million households.

While this increase has helped us to reduce both carbon emissions and congestion, challenges remain – not least of which is the fact that many transit systems are operating on aging infrastructures that are incapable of accommodating growing demand.

I hope you will reach out to me with your own ideas as we begin work on this important effort.

At this moment, with our challenges so great and so interconnected, our goal with the surface transportation reauthorization should be nothing less than reinventing transportation policy for the 21st century.

Big Ideas

But to fund these ideas now and into the future, we need to start thinking big as well.

One of my top priorities in this Congress as Banking Committee Chairman is creating a National Infrastructure Bank – an idea I developed over the course of several years with Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska, former Senator Warren Rudman and Felix Rohatyn.

With the Federal Transit Administration estimating that almost $22 billion is needed every year over the next two decades to maintain and improve the operational capacity of transit systems, we agreed that the time had come to think differently about how we finance the projects most important to our communities and regions.

The need was obvious.

In fact, only hours after Senator Hagel and I formally proposed this legislation, the bridge carrying Interstate 35 over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis buckled and broke, killing 13 people and injuring than 100.

And of course, for those who remember the Mianus River Bridge collapse in Greenwich 25 years ago, this type of tragedy is all too familiar.

A National Infrastructure Bank would create a new funding stream and a new competitive process that ensures that those projects with the greatest economic and environmental benefits receive funding.

That means projects that promote economic growth, smart growth and good urban land use policies – projects that provide tangible environmental benefits.

I know many of you are interested in how the bank works.

We are working to reintroduce this bill in the 111th Congress, but I have brought a summary with me that I hope you will look over.

President-elect Obama co-sponsored our infrastructure bank legislation as a Senator and endorsed the idea during his campaign as well.

So, I’m hopeful to see action on the bill this year – either as part of the recovery plan or the surface transportation bill.

However it happens, finding new ways to provide new funding for large, complicated infrastructure projects will be a priority for me, because at a time of great economic challenges, it’s priority for this region and for America.

And if we think big, we can make it a reality.

President James Garfield’s greatest contribution to the American presidency was probably that he was America’s first ambidextrous president.

But he once said something that struck a chord with me.

He said, "The American people have done much for the locomotive, and the locomotive has done much for them."

Those words reaffirm for me the impact transportation policy can have – on our people, on our economies and the kind of society we want to be.

They remind me that the moment has arrived to bring transportation policy into the 21st century.

For all the challenges to our economic and environmental security, we do not lack the resources or the ingenuity to face them – we never have.

And I need only look out at the people in this room to know that.

But moments don’t transform themselves. They require us to consider what is possible when we act in common purpose.

If we do—and when it comes to transportation policy, I believe we all want to—we can face our challenges with confidence and optimism for the future.

We can rebuild our region and our country to meet the challenges of this new century.

With this "perfect storm" of needs and opportunities before us, that’s what this conference is about – and it’s what I pledge to you I will be working toward in the coming months.

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