U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Washington, DC

Good morning. Thank you, Neil, for that introduction.

It is great to be at TRB with so many of the most committed, smartest folks in transportation.

And after 10 years of uncertainty and 36 short-term extensions, it is wonderful to start the year with a five-year surface transportation bill.

We did not get everything we asked for in the FAST Act. But we did at least get some increase in funding levels. And we got some important policy reforms that we put forward in our GROW AMERICA proposals.

For instance the bill includes two new dedicated freight programs, the ability to deliver projects more quickly while safeguarding the environment, and the authority to promote public private partnerships with a new innovative finance bureau.

But here is what I will say. Even if we HAD gotten everything we had asked for, we would still be limited in terms of our ability to build a forward-looking transportation system that can move the 70 million more people that will be living and moving in this country in the next three decades.

At U.S. DOT, we know it’s going to take some creative thinking to ensure that our infrastructure is ready to address the challenges of the future, such as the effects of climate change and the tsunami of growth that is going to hit our transportation systems

And the President knows this too.

That’s why last night during his State of the Union address, he talked about the need to change the way we manage our oil resources and make investments in infrastructure, technology, and innovation that can transition the country to a cleaner, safer, and faster transportation system while putting tens of thousands of Americans to work.

We will have more details on the President’s proposals in the weeks ahead. But, it is safe to say that during his final year in office, the President will be presenting many smart proposals that will prepare the nation for a bright future.

At DOT, we plan to do the same. And to accomplish that, we are transforming government for the 21st Century, harnessing innovation and technology that will improve people’s lives, while still focusing on furthering connecting folks to opportunities in and outside of the communities in which the 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 move in the future.

This Challenge is a response to our Department’s Beyond Traffic framework, which examines the trends and choices facing America’s transportation infrastructure over the next three decades.

The report recognizes that many cities, particularly mid-sized cities, will experience rapid population increases and a corresponding increase in demands on transportation systems.

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

We will be awarding the winning city up to $40 million. But we’re inviting some of the most innovative folks in the private sector to pitch in as well.

Paul Allen’s Vulcan Philanthropy answered the call by offering an additional $10 million to demonstrate what’s possible by transforming a city’s transportation system into one that is electrified and low-carbon.

And last week, we announced that the winning city's entire public bus fleet will be outfitted with Mobileye's Shield +TM technology.

This award-winning driver assistance technology will empower bus drivers to avoid imminent collisions, while generating real-time data that will allow the city to make intelligent improvements to the safety and efficiency of its public bus system.

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

You can find more information about the Challenge at www.transportation.gov/smartcity. Applications are due on February 4 and we anticipate selecting the finalist by June. 

So we are excited about this Challenge. And we are excited about the many other things we are doing to transform transportation like expediting rulemaking to require all new vehicles be equipped with v2v technology, deploying NextGen technology to upgrade the world’s largest and most complex air traffic control system, and hiring our first Chief Data Officer to lead our team in embracing new data-driven ideas.

But, as we continue to push forward bold ideas for the future, we must not forget that our work is not solely about advancing our transportation systems – it is imperative that we work to improve them as well, especially for underserved communities who lack access to opportunity.

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 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 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 70 straight months of job growth, 14.1 million jobs. This Administration has reduced the nation's deficit by two-thirds.

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.

Education is a pillar. I’m proud to be part of an Administration that 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.

And housing and job skills are both pillars of opportunity. 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. 

Transportation 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 a ranch in rural Montana to a doctor in Bozeman, or from West Charlotte to a school, or South Side Chicago to an apartment.

Transportation can do more than that. At its best, transportation can have an even greater impact than delivering people to opportunity. It should also bring opportunity to them. 

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.

But, to do that, all of us 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, or the Highway to Nowhere in Baltimore, 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 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. 

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're working to update our guidance on Title VI, something which has not been done since the 1970s.  And we’re also stepping up our enforcement to make sure it is understood that Title VI it is not optional.

As an example of this, I was deeply concerned when Alabama, a state with a voter identification law, closed down federally supported DMV offices and reduced services across the state last year.

It is critical that these services be free of discrimination. And so we launched an investigation to see if these actions in fact violated Title VI.

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.

We’re working to implement the FAST Act and its myriad 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.

And last year I created a new position at USDOT: a Chief Opportunities Officer. I named Stephanie Jones to serve in this position. And since then Stephanie has been working with every agency in USDOT to ensure that opportunity and inclusion is part of everything we do.

Folks, 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.

Now, this room is full of people with the power to affect real, transformative change in communities across the country.

So today I want to issue you all a challenge.

We’re asking folks in the project planning and development arena to identify innovative solutions for reconnecting these communities that have seen infrastructure decisions and projects of the past disrupt and disconnect residents.

We’re encouraging industry professionals, elected officials, educators, students, and other transportation stakeholders to consider the link between transportation and revitalization when working on projects.

And we’re challenging you to ask what you can do to help communities measure and visualize how well a project increases connectivity for all residents and be a thought leader for solutions that connect Point A to Point B, without forgetting the points and people in between.

You can show us what is possible. When it comes to regional planning, 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.  

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.

Thank you very much. It’s great to be with you. And I’m happy to take a few questions.