Secretary Anthony Foxx
APTA Annual Meeting
San Francisco, California
October 5, 2015
I wish to speak today from the subject: "The Next Frontier."
If you read the newspapers or watch the news these days, you know that the gap between the wealthy and the poor and middle class is widening. This opportunity gap knows no boundary. It’s not confined to race. It’s not confined to urban areas – there are too many rural poor in America. It is not confined to geography. This gap exists all over America.
This widening gap threatens the core of the American Dream – the idea that, no matter where you come from, you can make it in America if you work hard and play by the rules. Under President Barack Obama, we have been working and we will continue working to make America great again for every single American right now.
Now there are some obvious pillars of opportunity. A strong economy is a pillar. Over the last six years, this Administration has taken our nation from the depths of the Great Recession to 67 straight months of job growth, 13.2 million jobs. This Administration has reduced the nation's deficit by two-thirds. A strong economy is a pillar.
Health is a pillar. This Administration has addressed one of the most bedeviling policy issues of the last 50 years by shepherding the Affordable Care Act and finally extending healthcare to more than 17 million previously uninsured people and, in the process, steadying the rate of increase in medical costs and bending the curve on related federal spending. Health is a pillar.
Education is a pillar of opportunity. This Administration has moved the dial on education, spurring the nation's best high school graduation rates in decades and putting a focus back on kids and not on adults. Let me say publically, I will miss my colleague, Arne Duncan, who has, as the President said, been perhaps the most consequential Education Secretary our nation has ever had. Education is a pillar of opportunity.
And so are housing and job skills. Our housing markets are strengthening again and never before has the connection between the federal government, community colleges and vocational schools been stronger. All of these are pillars of opportunity, but they are not the only pillars. There is another pillar of opportunity that too frequently gets left out of the conversation, and that pillar is transportation.
When I speak about the transportation as the next frontier, I’m talking about the role transportation has to play in closing these opportunity gaps in our nation. Far be it for me to give this group a survey of how important transportation is to connecting people to jobs, to medical appointments and better health, to education, to housing and job training. In fact, I thought, since I was out here on the West Coast, if opportunity were an iPad, transportation would be the operating system.
It doesn’t hire you. But it makes getting work possible.
It doesn’t treat illness, but it makes getting healthcare possible.
It doesn’t teach, but it makes learning possible.
It’s not a house, but try getting to yours without it.
But I see transportation having an even greater impact than taking people from the Ninth Ward in New Orleans to a job, or from the Far Rockaways in New York to a doctor, or from West Charlotte to a school, or South Side Chicago to an apartment, or even here in San Francisco's Mission District to a job training program. Transportation can do more than that. At its best, transportation should not just get someone from the Barrio to opportunity; transportation can also bring opportunity to the Barrio.
If we do our jobs right, the economy will get better, the schools will be better, neighborhood health will be better, the housing stock will be better and job training will translate to jobs in neighborhoods where people live. We should talk beyond taking people from their doorstep of opportunity. We should begin to talk about bringing opportunity to folks’ doorstep.
Two weeks ago I had the privilege of sitting in the well of the House of Representatives to hear Pope Francis deliver timely and important remarks to our nation's leaders. Let me preface what I’m saying by me saying, I am not Catholic. And he said many things but one of the messages that struck me the most was his simple reminder that the poor are our neighbors and, whether we like it or not, our futures are inextricably linked to theirs. They are, in his words, “Men and women who strive each day to do an honest day’s work … and build a better life” and “Men and women who are not concerned simply with paying their taxes, but in their own quiet way sustain the life of society.” When we help them, we help ourselves. When we extend opportunity to them, we nourish the spirit of work and determination that defines this nation.
But, to do that, we, as the community of transportation planners, engineers, contractors and decision-makers must embrace our role in closing the opportunity gap. I say this because a few generations ago, our community didn't do that. We built highways and railways and airports by carving up neighborhoods, leaving bulldozed homes and broken dreams and sapping needy families of the one connection to wealth they had, which was their homes. Every community in America has a thoroughfare that resulted in what folks are now calling structural discrimination. Instead of a lifeline, transportation facilities in some areas became walls. This wall conveyed to those affected that the checks they wished to cash at the Bank of Opportunity would be returned due to "insufficient funds." Their children could not run as far as the horizon because they could not see the sun behind the overpass. New housing, good grocery stores, pharmacies and other neighborhood services could not find them because these communities were trapped. They even gave these walls names – the Mason-Dixon line for the Staten Island Expressway, or the Berlin Wall in Syracuse, just to name a couple.
The vestiges of this system are still there. The walls are still up. And, yet, as the bill for deferred maintenance comes due, this generation of American transportation planning can be the most restorative in our history. Imagine bridges and overpasses that are more than just north/south throughputs; imagine unleashing the ingenuity of our nation's land use planners and engineers and decision-makers to make those facilities more inviting and approachable and maybe even complimentary of the surroundings on the east and west sides of them. Imagine meaningful public input processes that use technology and capture the views of the public at a stage of planning where that input can actually be incorporated into a project. Imagine some of the most challenged communities in America: instead of being limited by their environs, they’re opened up. Jobs are coming in again. People are working. The American Dream has come alive in a new and even better incarnation, one in which everyone really does have a shot and no zip code is confined to being the hardest to get out of.
I make this point to you folks not because I have read about it some great periodical – I’ve lived this. I was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1971. And I promise you that as my 19-year-old mother looked at me no one would have guessed that I would be the 17th Secretary of Transportation. We lived with my grandparents through my formative years in a home that was two blocks away from I-85 and two blocks away from I-77. Those walls were walls I saw every day. There was one way in and one way out of my neighborhood. And somehow I ingested this idea that my physical surroundings were all there was to the world.
I was fortunate to have access to a great education. I was fortunate the streets were relatively safe. I was fortunate to have come out of a place that folks might have called nowhere. But when you have seen how hardworking people trying to do everything they can to find a little crack of daylight just to provide for their kids and maybe add a little into retirement and hopefully have a future for generations to come … when you see people working that hard … you want to make sure they have a real shot.
Now I want you to stop imagining. Because I have stopped imagining this future we could have as a country. And the reason I have stopped imagining it is because I now am seeing it. I see it in Crenshaw where LeDaya Epps, a working mom, is helping to build a new light rail connector in her neighborhood. This connector is bringing Crenshaw to life, spurring new housing and jobs.
I see it in Rochester, NY, where instead of homes being razed for a highway, a highway is being razed to make Rochester feel more like the home it used to be – thanks to a recent TIGER grant.
Or in Columbus, Ohio, where they're capping I-71, which bifurcated a community to restore the connection. Or in Detroit where the buses were so unreliable that a man made a daily 21-mile walk to get to work, in the same city where a hard-working mother may hail a cab to keep her job, neutralizing her own pay. We just put $25 million into the city of Detroit to help restore its fleet and its reliability.
These things are not just happening by happenstance. Together you and I are making these things happen.
Ladies and Gentlemen, all my friends in this room, for far too long the transportation system has been the operating system devoid of an app to help fix this. But you are doing it. And you are doing it every day. We are both the operating system and the app.
We have accepted unacceptable limitations about what transportation can do not only to lift people up but also to lift up where they live. And we know how integrally connected transportation and land use are.
I would posit there is more power in this room to transform communities than any other room in America.
That's why our Department has been developing new strategies to focus national, state and local attention on using transportation to help close the opportunity gap. Last year we launched the LadderSTEP pilot program in seven cities, where we’re helping mayors complete transportation projects that’ll help remove barriers to opportunities and promote good economic development.
We’ve also placed increased emphasis on last-mile connections. We’re doing this by supporting the evolution of flexible street designs that are safer and more accessible for everyone who uses them.
We've launched a disparity study in the railroad arena, one of the few areas in government without a DBE program.
We're stepping up our Title VI enforcement. And we're even working to update our guidance on Title VI, something which has not been done since the 1970s. Parenthetically let me say I am deeply concerned about opportunity when, in Alabama, a state with a little history and a voter identification law, starts to close down federally supported DMV offices. We are reviewing this matter now.
We’re supporting workforce programs that are training the next generation of transit workers. These are providing opportunities to learn on the job and get connected with career development and skills training.
And recently I created a new position at USDOT: a Chief Opportunities Officer. I’ve named Stephanie Jones to serve in this position. And Stephanie’s job will be to work with every agency in USDOT to ensure that opportunity and inclusion is part of everything we do.
Today we're taking yet another step. Today, DOT is launching a transit-oriented development initiative focused on revitalizing economically distressed communities. We’ve seen how investment in transit can lead to new housing stock, new jobs and new economic opportunities in areas that badly need them. But this also requires communities to enter into the process with sound, community-sensitive development plans. Over the next few months Therese McMillan, our acting Federal Transit Administrator – and believe me I am look forward to taking the acting off of her name – are going to work with Smart Growth America to provide technical and planning assistance to communities across our country.
For instance, they’ll look at how to incorporate transit investment with affordable housing. One of the cities that will receive technical assistance is Richmond, Virginia. We provided Richmond with a TIGER grant to build a bus-rapid transit route. This will connect residents in low-income neighborhoods to education and job centers. But as I said before, this effort will help us take a project that would otherwise help people go from where they live to where the opportunities are and work with local officials to help attract those types of investments and that type of job growth and that type of revitalization right where the folks live.
So it’s pretty simple. If it can happen in Crenshaw, it can happen in Richmond. If it can happen in Richmond, it can happen in Appalachia. In fact it can happen all throughout the country as long as you and I are focused on creating these vital connections.
So I know that our efforts to strengthen opportunity and build a stronger foundation that undergirds the America dream would be enhanced with a long-term surface transportation bill. In fact the GROW AMERICA is still available. We like it.
I want to thank you APTA. I want to thank you for raising your voices collectively to push and urge for a long-term surface transportation bill. I want to urge to keep raising your voices individually to your federal delegations. Tell them what your agencies mean to those you serve.
Remind them that transit is not just an urban phenomenon; there are plenty of people in rural America depend on transit, too.
Tell them. But don't stop there. Help us put projects on the table that will help solve this opportunity gap.
Transportation is not just functional. We can’t afford for it just to be functional anymore as a nation. It defines how we live together by creating spatial connections and, at its worst, spatial disconnections. We need to bring people together by design.
So I want you to embrace your roles as pioneers on this New Frontier to an America in which every person has a real shot to fulfill his or her dreams. That’s ultimately what we do.
Thank you very much. It’s great to be with you.
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