Secretary Anthony Foxx

Remarks at APTA’s Annual Conference and EXPO
Houston, TX
October 14, 2014

Thank you. Thank you, APTA. It’s great to be here this afternoon. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to receive an introduction from Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, someone who is a fierce fighter for American values, for transit, and for transportation.  And my goodness, she never lacks for enthusiasm.  Thank you very much, Congresswoman Jackson Lee.

And let’s also give a big hand to Peter Varga and to Michael Melaniphy and to Caroline Flowers for pulling this incredible expo together. Let’s give them a big round of applause.

Since I’m here at a great meeting of wonderful folks, I do want to say that our team at the Federal Transit Administration is an incredible collection of people who are working with you every day to ensure that American keeps moving and people get where they need to go. And I want to give a big shout out to Therese McMillan, the leader of that agency, and to all of our folks who are here today.  Please give them a big round of applause.

So, the first thing that I want to say today – and this is a bit of a mission for me – is that when we get together in our various associations and industries, we tend to get hyper-technical. There’s a lot of bricks and mortar and concrete and steel – 60-foot buses versus 48-foot buses – to talk about; those are important subjects. But what I really want us to spend the next few minutes thinking about is, “Why do we do this? Who are we working for? And what does it matter?”

I recall growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I lived most of my life with my grandparents. My grandmother, who had been a French teacher in middle school, never got a drivers’ license. So, on Saturday mornings she would wake me up and we would go down to the center city, but the only way we could get there was by way of bus.

And, as we would take the bus, she would show me various things: This is how you put the money in. This is how you do a transfer. This is how you find the bus on a map so you know where you’re going.

It didn’t occur to me until many years later, when I was pursuing my first job, how much I had learned from my grandmother about this way of getting around that didn’t require me to have a drivers’ license or even to be old enough to drive.

You see, behind everything you do, there are millions of stories of people who are trying to make a living, trying to live the American dream in a very real sense. And as I get around the country, what I realize, even more, is how hard folks are fighting.

I was in Detroit just a few weeks ago and met two young men who attend Cass Technical High School. These young men are doing everything you would want them to do. They’re soon to be Eagle Scouts. They’re athletes. They’re scholars. But, every now and again, the bus they need to take them home after school is late or sometimes doesn’t come at all.  So they get home around 8, leaving little time to do homework or prepare for the next day.

Or I think of a young woman out in Crenshaw, Los Angeles, who never thought she would find herself in a career in transportation.  But because we’re now involved in building the Crenshaw-Los Angeles light rail project out there, she now is not only working; she’s doing the job that she thought only men can do, and she now believes she can do it better.

In Alabama, a high school senior told me the story about how her mother gets her up at 5 in the morning. They board a bus to get to downtown Birmingham, where her mother goes off to work and where her daughter transfers to school.  Without that transit bus, she would not be able to go to that particular school, which is giving her a pathway to success.

You see, behind what you all are doing is the American dream.  And when we don’t work as well as we can or should, Americans can’t either.  What I continue to say, all across this country, is that I am working and fighting for a transportation system that is as good as the American people are.  And together we can do it.      

You have been holding this annual meeting for over 132 years. But all that history considered, I do believe that now is the most pivotal time over those 132 years – a time when the future is unclear.

Over the last 10 years, we have not had a six-year reauthorization bill, which has meant incredible challenges at the local level. And I can tell you, having been a mayor during this time, how tough it is. Not knowing how to plan. Not knowing how much you’re going to have next year. Trying to figure out service levels.

We have a responsibility, collectively, to remind this country that, when the wheels of transportation grind to a halt, so does America. So does its economy. So do its businesses. So do its people. And so, as we pursue our effort to get a reauthorization bill passed that will provide funding certainty and policy certainty for transportation in this country, APTA is a critical organization, and each of you are critical voices because you know what’s happening in your backyard. The more the folks in Washington hear from you and from your constituencies about those issues and challenges, the more ripe the opportunity will be to get something done.

You’re the ones, after all, who reported that last year transit ridership was higher than it’s been in six decades. In fact, our system could’ve moved the world’s population one-and-a-half times over in 2013 because10.7 billion trips were taken during that year.

And on the other hand, for all the demand for transit, we’re not seeing the supply.  

Across the country, there are still too many stops, as I mentioned, where the bus comes late, and too many places where the platforms are overcrowded, and the trains are delayed and slow and need to be replaced.

In fact, and you all know this, we have a backlog of $86 billion in backlogged transit repairs – more than the federal government spends on all forms of transportation every year.

But here is what I think is the most alarming thing.  With a lot of deferred maintenance and folks already overcrowded in a lot of systems, just imagine waking up in the year 2050 when we have 100 million more people, many of them needing or wanting to move by transit – and we haven’t even addressed the backlog of maintenance. Just imagine what kind of congestion we’re setting ourselves up for. Imagine what types of quality of life challenges we’re setting ourselves up for. This is an entirely avoidable problem.

This spring, USDOT put forward the most ambitious funding proposal for transit this country has ever seen. It’s called the GROW AMERICA Act. And it would increase funding for all surface transportation modes – but it would increase transit funding by 70 percent.

But instead of taking it down the hall and passing it right away, Congress patched our surface transportation system for another 10 months, setting up another potential funding crisis for next May – which is the beginning of the construction season.

And that brings me to the punch line.  Which is, given the great needs we have as a country when it comes to infrastructure, given the growth that we see coming down the pike, given the backlog of maintenance needs … Why are we not doing more?

If the American people are swiping their metro cards and passing through turnstiles in record numbers, why aren’t we investing more to meet their needs?

Well, I can tell you, there are some folks in Washington who stood squarely behind an increase in transit funding, and Congresswoman Jackson Lee is one of them.  But we don’t have enough critical mass yet to get over the line. The short-term patch passed by Congress this summer was just the latest in a pattern of the same kind of behavior. Congress has passed 28 short-term measures over the last six years.

Now, we can complain about Congress. Maybe in some sense we should.

But then again, we’ve always complained about Congress in this country. And complaining, as we’ve seen, doesn’t change much.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, the reality we face is that all of us who are engaged in this discussion as stakeholders bear a responsibility for making it abundantly clear to our policymakers how important this moment is, what the real costs of continuing to patch our way into the future will be, and what the real benefit of real long-term, sustainable investment in transportation will be.  And if we fail to make that case effectively, shame on us.

We have to remember that our democracy doesn’t just exist on Election Day. The American people are in charge. And when they have the facts, the American people are wise enough to press for what they want.

So our job is to give them the facts. And, I think folks are already voting with their feet, because they’re using transit in record numbers. So our job is just to help folks understand the connection between Washington acting and their everyday life.

Now, I admit that this is not easy. I suppose if it were easy, we would have a six-year bill, or something like it, already. But we have to make the argument that funding transit actually transcends some of the politics that have existed for a while.

There are some corners of this country where transit is seen as something of an urban issue. But I know there’s rural transit in America, and many of you know it, too.

In fact, I took a bus tour last spring and I ended up in Anniston, Alabama, a town of fewer than 5,000 people. And we went to a plant there where folks were making buses. So I went into the plan and asked them, for where are you making the buses?

They were making them for Dallas, making them for Washington, for Minneapolis. So if we don’t make substantial investments in transit, it doesn’t just hurt folks in urban communities; it hurts folks in rural America.

But in fact there is a substantial amount of transit service that reaches across rural, urban, rural and suburban communities – all over America. It’s not red or blue. It’s American. And when Americans have access to it, they use it.

So I think we’ve got some work to do in terms of making this issue one that cuts across those old lines.

Two weeks ago, I was in Sandy, Utah. One might say Sandy, Utah is a very red town in a very red state. But they’ve built a lot of light rail line there recently – and now they’re developing whole communities around transit, and people there are thrilled about it. I was there for the first transit-oriented development groundbreaking in Utah; it’s a big deal.

But what about Omaha, Nebraska, which just received a TIGER grant to build the first bus rapid-transit system in the state of Nebraska. That’s a pretty big deal.

You see, the old lines are falling down because the needs for transit cut across communities all over the country. So we have to tell Congress that we need not only to top off the Highway Trust Fund – we actually need more resources to address the needs of our growing country.

Now, let me say this, too: that we understand the importance of workforce development, and the connection between that and transit.

And in fact, our GROW AMERICA Act improves the way we build our transportation system by also improving and expanding the group of people who help build it. Over four years, the bill puts $80 million into workforce development programs for transit. That’s a big deal.

And by the way, we’re not just waiting for the GROW AMERICA Act to achieve swift passage in Congress. This is an issue we’re already working on at DOT. In fact, today I can announce: DOT will be granting $9 million in workforce development grants. This is money that’ll go towards helping folks that haven’t often benefited from transit projects being built in their own backyards. We’re talking about minority communities and veterans and folks with low incomes. It is exciting, and I know my team at FTA can’t wait to work with you to bring those opportunities to America.

I know that APTA has taken some pretty important steps, and announced your new advocacy efforts. And Phil Washington, I am so grateful to you for that. You have 68,000 transit advocates in your database – and I hope you relay the message to every single one of them.  

But as important as APTA is, we need the voice of more than just one organization to help us move the country forward.

One of the things that I found interesting as Secretary of Transportation is that when we go to meet with groups about various reauthorization issues, the highway community is very skilled at arguing for highways, the transit community is very adept at arguing for transit, the rail community is good at doing their thing.

But now is a time in this country to see these constellations of stakeholders come together to argue for transportation. Because the reality is if you are the end user of these systems, you need them all to work. We have great highways, but if we have low quality transit, our country is going to be stuck in traffic. If we have great transit but poor highways, some of our transit won’t work. I would add rail into the mix.

And I guess the question is, “Can we get all these stakeholders together and rally around a common group of solutions to help Congress get over the hump and move this country forward?” Can you all help me work with that? We need to do that.

I am asking you to advocate for not only getting the highway trust fund stabilized, but to help a growing country meet its needs. I am asking you to work with your partner agencies, be they State DOTs or chambers of commerce, be it the organizations that are in Washington, and work together on a surface transportation approach that this Congress can past.

And I am also urging you to take this GROW AMERICA Act as part of your advocacy, as part of your working together, because it reflects the most forward-leaning vision for transportation that I think our country has seen in quite some time. But it is only as good as our abilities to work together and push forward. And I think we can.

So folks, I just want to tell you how much I appreciate the work you that you all do every single day. And it hurts me when we, as a Department, can’t do more to relieve those crowded buses and to extend those crowded tracks, but that’s a function of the work we have ahead of us over the next several months.

That last thing I want to tell you is Congress – Republicans and Democrats – actually want to get this right. I believe that. But in order to do that, the urgency has to be there. So for us, collectively, I think our biggest job is to figure out how to raise the level of urgency and visibility on these issues.

America has spent a lot of time, energy, capital, and attention trying to push forward a transportation system that we’ve all inherited. And for another generation to walk into a country that is strong and robust and ready for the future, we’ve got to get this right.

So I just ask you to forget the wars of the past 10 years, the stops and starts. We have to go at this hard over several months, all the way through. I believe if we work together, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, we’re going to see Congress do something that maybe no one expects them to do.  I know it can be done, but only if we’re united and working together.

So thank you very much. Keep up the great work. Thank you, APTA.

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