Secretary Anthony Foxx

Conference of Mayors’ Transportation Committee Meeting

Washington, DC • January 21, 2016

Good morning. I’d like to thank my friend Mayor Hales for that introduction, and acknowledge all of the great work he’s done for the city of Portland.

It is great to be here with some of the most committed and hard-working leaders in advancing this nation’s transportation systems.

Let me begin by thanking the many mayors in this room that supported the Administration’s efforts to secure the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement last fall.

Once it is implemented, TPP will have a tremendously positive impact on U.S. transportation by promoting strong trade relationships, increasing the amount of business being done in our nation’s ports, and spurring job growth in the transportation and distribution sectors.

So, thank you again and we appreciate your continuing support as this historic agreement enters the final stages of ratification.

Now, let me also say that after 10 years of uncertainty and 36 short-term extensions, it is wonderful to start this year with a five-year surface transportation bill.

Our Department worked hard to secure this long-term bill from Congress.

Over the last couple of years, we held hundreds of Congressional meetings, organized two bus tours, and visited leaders in 43 states, including many of you in this room, to galvanize support. And I want to thank you for helping us reach this bipartisan agreement.

The FAST Act is not perfect. Although it achieved some increases in funding levels and several important policy reforms, we still have work to do.

Frankly, even if it did include more funding, we would still be limited in terms of our ability to build a forward-looking transportation system that can accommodate the 70 million more people that will be moving around this country in the next three decades because we are still constrained by 20th century thinking about technology.

At U.S. DOT, we know it’s going to take some creative thinking to make our transportation systems the safest, cleanest, and most efficient in the world while also ensuring that our infrastructure is ready to accommodate the tsunami of growth that is coming.

That’s why we are transforming government for the 21st century, harnessing innovation and technology that will improve people’s lives, while still focusing on further connecting folks to opportunities both inside and outside of the communities in which they live.

Last month, our Department launched the Smart City Challenge, a competition to create a fully integrated, first-of-its-kind city that uses data, technology, and creativity to shape how people and goods will move in the future.

This Challenge is a response to our Department’s Beyond Traffic framework, which recognizes that many cities, particularly mid-sized cities, will experience rapid population increases and a corresponding increase in demands on transportation systems in the next three decades.

So we launched the Smart City Challenge to encourage these cities to develop their own unique vision of what a fully integrated, forward-looking transportation network looks like.

We will be awarding the winning city up to $40 million. But we’re also teaming up with some of the most innovative folks in the private sector. Paul Allen’s Vulcan Philanthropy will be awarding an additional $10 million.

And Mobileye will be outfitting the winning city's entire public bus fleet with their Shield +TM technology, empowering bus drivers to avoid imminent collisions while generating real-time data that cities can use to make intelligent improvements.

We believe that this Challenge is going to do more than just help one city adopt innovative and forward-looking ideas – it will serve as the catalyst for more widespread change in countless U.S. cities.

You can find more information about the Challenge at www.transportation.gov/smartcity. Applications are due by February 4 and we anticipate selecting the finalist by June. I look forward to seeing applications from many of the mid-sized cities represented here today.

So, we are taking a new approach at the federal level to prepare for the future. But, as a former Mayor I know that local leaders can move faster than the federal government when it comes to tackling population growth, climate change, and other transportation related challenges.

That’s why I’m committed to ensuring that you have the support you need from our Department as you continue to improve and advance your transportation systems.

Our Department continues to support your efforts to promote bicycle and pedestrian safety. Many of you are already doing great work on your own when it comes to advancing these efforts.

Take Atlanta, where Mayor Reed and his team are part of the Atlanta Regional Commission’s effort to produce Bike-Walk-Thrive, a plan to expand safe walking and bicycling options for local residents and communities.

And in Boston, city officials and the Neighborhood Greenway Group are expanding outreach and establishing greenway corridors with enhanced bicycle infrastructure.

Those programs are outstanding, but I want you all to know that our Department stands ready to support you in those safety efforts.

Last year, we conducted Ped-Bike Safety Assessments in every state, often working alongside your teams to improve safety and effectiveness.

And we launched the Mayors’ Challenge for Safer People, Safer Streets. Through this initiative, our team has been working directly with city officials to improve the resources available to transportation engineers, law enforcement personnel, and others to tackle safety in non-motorized transportation.

We’ve also given cities a clear roadmap for using those resources.

This Challenge has proven to be popular. We currently have 241 local jurisdictions signed up, representing 46 states and seven of the 10 largest cities in the country.

And because of its success, we have extended the Challenge and will be presenting awards this fall to places that have made the most progress in the seven Challenge areas. We want to highlight their success and give them a chance to share their success with other cities.

But, let me be frank: while we continue to do great work together on bike-ped safety and other safety issues, the transportation structure in this country is far from perfect.

Most significantly, our transportation funding model is broken – you know it, I know it. And for two and a half years, I’ve argued that the solution is not just more funding, but also improving how the money flows.

This conference and country need to rework the system.

The status quo served us well in building the transportation infrastructure we have today.

But unfortunately the current distribution of transportation funds, as well as political barriers in many areas, are preventing local governments from being able to effectively address important issues facing their communities.

So, during this final year of the Administration, my team and I are going to be working with you to take a serious look at the current system and will consider steps to make it more effective at accommodating transformational investments that we have to make as we move our transportation infrastructure into the 21st century.

I’d like to talk about one more thing we will focus on a lot in the coming weeks and months – and that is how we can use transportation to promote opportunity.

Everyone in this room knows that the gap between the wealthy and the poor and middle class is widening in this country.

This opportunity gap knows no boundary.  It’s not confined to race. 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.

Now, it’s easy to blame this inequality on human behavior. But the truth is that transportation infrastructure has played a very significant role.

A few generations ago, 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. 

These walls 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.

I say this to a room full of mayors because you have the ability to affect great change in your cities.

You have the power not only to build the ladders of opportunity that folks need to climb out of historically underserved neighborhoods, but also to introduce placemaking initiatives that will breathe new life into these communities.

And I’m heartened to see so many city officials are taking action to tackle this inequality.

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.

I see it in Columbus, Ohio, where they're restoring a connection by capping I-71, which bifurcated a community.

And I see it in Detroit where the buses were so unreliable that one man made a daily 21-mile walk to get to work and a hard-working mother may hail a cab to keep her job, neutralizing her own pay. We just invested $25 million into the city of Detroit to help restore its fleet and its reliability. 

As I said before, our Department is committed to helping mayors across the nation develop transportation strategies designed to help close the opportunity gap.

Last year we launched the LadderSTEP pilot program in seven cities. This program is helping mayors complete transportation projects that’ll help remove barriers to opportunities and promote good economic development.

We’re supporting workforce programs that are training the next generation of transit workers. These are providing folks with opportunities to learn on the job and get connected with career development and skills training.

And we’re working to implement the FAST Act and its many tools to expand opportunity, including new workforce programs, eligibility to support Transit Oriented Development with our core credit programs, and additional tools and funding for local planners.

So, let me just finish by challenging all of you to reconnect the tissue of your cities and communities with infrastructure.

You can show us what is possible. When it comes to regional planning, you know it’s not just stapling together a project wish-list.

It’s responding very directly to the needs of a community. It’s aligning that plan with development proposals and revitalization and efforts to increase access to jobs, education and healthcare.

It’s not that this isn’t happening. As I said, I’m seeing it.

But this is about us saying collectively as we go forward that we have a higher purpose than creating throughput. We have the ability to put projects and concepts on the table that will help us solve this opportunity gap.  

As a nation, we can’t afford for transportation to simply be functional anymore.

Our infrastructure defines how we live together by creating spatial connections and, at its worst, spatial disconnections. We need to bring people together by design. 

So, thank you all so much for being here today. I look forward to engaging in some conversation with you.

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