Hiroko Kawai, principal with the transportation practice group at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, submitted the following response:

We are encouraged to see that transportation stakeholders and experts agree on the need for a national freight program. That is exactly what we heard from the trucking industry at a Charette held in Denver last April.

Convened by Rocky Mountain Institute, 40 trucking industry players — including truck OEMs, component suppliers, technology innovators and engineering design firms, and state and federal level policy makers — met to bust the “efficiency barrier.”

As Steve Van Beek, president and CEO of Eno Transportation Foundation stated, “We need to generate tactical steps to overcome the modally stove-piped, formula-based policy and allocation process to reach a new level of collaboration.”

Our initial approach was to characterize and understand how to curb barriers to create a “double efficiency” for trucks. We quickly realized the need to consolidate currently fragmented efforts and unify the industry voice to policy makers, work with them (i.e., generate “private and public” partnerships), and to ensure the delivery of trustworthy information to fleets.

There were four distinct yet integrated goals verbalized at the Charrette:

1. Accelerate the market adoption of efficiency-related technologies through trustworthy, evaluative information sources

2. Reduce the dependence on fossil fuel through efficiency improvements of trucks and trucking logistics

3. Make the trucking sector more profitable through system-wide efficiency improvements

4. Make the freight industry more environmentally sustainable

The participants concluded that, without a comprehensive approach to multi-modal, national level freight strategies, the trucking industry would not achieve competitiveness in all areas: economic, environmental, and national security.

Three follow-up projects emerged from the Charette. Attendees committed to their success, and RMI is partnering with the freight industry to materialize them. All three endeavors are interrelated under one goal: accelerate the adoption of efficient vehicles and operations and optimize freight mobility.

The first project is to generate a technology-standards organization. Launched in August, the U.S. Council for Freight Efficiency will drive the development and adoption of efficiency-enhancing, environmentally sound and cost-effective technologies, services and methodologies by establishing and communicating independent and performance-based standards. This effort will kick off in Chicago on Nov. 3 at USCFE’s inaugural meeting.

The second project will create a national freight agenda and strategy by unifying the industry’s voice to policy makers. Known as “Freight Without Borders,” this project will correlate the research and standards developed by the USCFE with public sector regulations and incentives to mutually aid the industry throughout the transition to energy independence.

The third project is to develop a market-ready, highly efficient freight vehicle to demonstrate, showcase and prove the findings of the first two projects, including intermodal exchange with rail and ships.

Through these projects and in conjunction with the Council for Freight Efficiency, our goal is to forge partnerships with key industry leaders and tackle many of the deficiencies and inefficiencies facing freight mobility today.

The following post was submitted by David Foster, executive director of RAIL Solution (www.railsolution.org ), a non-profit citizens' rail advocacy group.

Pivotal to the future of land transportation in America is implementation of a National Steel Interstate System (NSIS). Analogous to the vision, scope, courage, and function of its highway forerunner, it would do for the nation’s railroads what the Eisenhower Interstate System did for roads. A core national network would be created of high-volume rail corridors, the backbone for movement of both goods and people in the 21st Century. They would be multi-tracked, grade-separated, higher speed, employ state of the art signaling and safety, avoid congested terminals and densely populated urban areas, and move trains quickly and efficiently.

By concentrating heavy freight flows in such designated corridors, electrification of the steel interstate can be justified. By substituting domestically generated electricity for imported foreign oil as the main power for the nation’s transportation sector, we can lower cost, improve security, and keep billions of dollars here at home to fuel jobs, economic growth, and infrastructure.

The steel interstate is the only national infrastructure program that can help pay for itself. Though federal investment is required as a catalyst to begin the commitment, as the network expands and a greater and greater percent of the nation’s freight moves on the electrified steel interstate, the savings likewise grow. And they continue year after year. As detailed in our paper on NSIS, with less than a 1% increase in electric generation, we can displace 7% of total U.S. oil consumption.

The NSIS has important synergy with a number of other hot-button issues of the day, including international economic competitiveness, national defense, energy independence, greenhouse gas curtailment and climate change, health and safety, pollution reduction, energy conservation, and ensuring national mobility in a time of Peak Oil, when petroleum is no longer abundant and affordable.

As a member of the Freight Stakeholders Coalition, the railroad industry strongly believes that there needs to be greater emphasis placed on the efficient movement of freight by rail across our nation.

We agree with other contributors that the federal government should tie infrastructure investment to system performance measures like emissions and congestion reduction. America’s freight railroads would see increased federal investment under such a scenario, because of their ability to take freight off our highways and move it in the most environmentally friendly and cost effective way.

Railroads do support increased flexibility and tax incentives as a way for the government to partner with private companies to leverage private funds for infrastructure investment. The flexibility provided by the TIGER grants in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is an excellent example of a way to leverage infrastructure investment from private sources. Railroads have also promoted infrastructure tax incentives as another avenue to achieve increased investment in infrastructure.

The demand for cost-effective and environmentally friendly freight rail transportation will grow 88 percent by 2035 and increased investment will be critical. Any national freight policy should recognize the environmental and economic benefits of shipping freight by rail.

Even in the face of the current economic slow down, transportation experts continue to warn that our nation’s surface transportation system is at or near capacity across modes. If the supply chain is not expanded to meet growing freight demands, the result will be reduced mobility for passengers and freight and increasing logistics costs, jeopardizing U.S. global competitiveness and economic expansion.

To minimize the emerging crisis, policy makers should examine freight movement from a national, multimodal perspective and adapt policies that strengthen and grow the entire supply chain, particularly along key freight corridors. This includes adopting polices that encourage both public and private investment in environmentally - preferred rail. Many in Congress support this goal and legislation has been introduced in the Senate (S. 1036) and the House (H.R. 2724) that calls, respectively, for shifting 10 to 20% of truck traffic off of the highway network. Moving this freight to the rails is more efficient, reduces congestion and may help states better manage highway investments.

Cost efficient freight transport is essential to the United State's ability to compete in the world markets. Incentives for private investment and a reasonable regulatory environment can go far in ensuring that we use the most cost effective blend of transportation systems. While more funding is clearly needed for highways, more use of freight rail will help mitigate the impact of growing freight levels on highways and the staggering levels of public highway investment that accompanies it.

How heartening that transportation advocates from a variety of perspectives agree that we need (1) a vision and national policy for freight, (2) a dedicated source of revenue to help pay for regionally and nationally significant projects, and (3) eligibility criteria that include a wide range of benefits and costs to the economy and the larger society.

I agree with Mort Downey that one of the first things we need to do is obtain better data, commission more research, and create better institutional capacities at the national, state, and MPO levels.

Goods movement presents at least three policy challenges that must be addressed before we can design an effective policy and funding architecture.

First, freight projects involve public and private benefits and costs (other projects do as well but not normally to the same extent). This requires that policymakers and transportation advocates apportion appropriate roles and advocates agree on (a) a set of criteria that captures these benefits and costs, (b) achieve consensus on an appropriate method of putting together public, user, and private money that reflect these benefits and costs (including both trust fund revenues and in some cases general fund monies), and (c) figure out what mix of federal regulations and oversight accompany the receipt of user fees and taxpayer monies.

Second, goods move along thousand-mile long corridors that inevitably take in multiple modes and political jurisdictions. In the past this reality has disadvantaged freight projects within what has been a modally stove-piped, formula-based, and earmarked policy and allocation process. Our freight program needs to be a national discretionary program built with performance criteria and alternatives analyses that weigh one project’s benefits and costs against those of others. The last thing we need to do is simply overlay a new program on top of the old policy architecture. FHWA’s criteria for projects of national and regional significance are a good start for the development of a program; it should be joined by many of the ideas offered by my fellow bloggers. Geraldine Knatz and the National Transportation Policy Project are right that the program must be intermodal or modally agnostic.

Third, freight projects present a classic public goods problem. The economic and environmental costs of projects are often concentrated (e.g., Los Angeles and Long Beach) and many of the benefits are often dispersed (e.g., reduction in shipping costs and cheaper goods). This “concentrated costs, dispersed benefits” reality challenges our politics and can only be overcome by a clear mission, a strong business plan and, perhaps most of all, strong public and private leadership. While the Alameda Corridor is often rightly cited as a great freight project with regional and national benefits, less appreciated were the critical roles played by the U.S. DOT, the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority, the Ports, and the user community in cobbling together a series of program authorities and funding sources essentially out of whole cloth.

Creating a strong freight policy is vital for transportation, the economy, and the environment. We should spend the time we have on incorporating many of the good ideas and doing it right.

A National Goods-Movement Policy?

Goods-movement infrastructure has not gotten enough attention in recent decades, either at the federal level or in the transportation plans of urban area MPOs. So it would be useful for the forthcoming federal reauthorization to require MPOs to put more serious emphasis on goods movement as they revise their long range transportation plans.

The larger question before us is what the federal government’s direct role should be. Despite my general decentralist leanings, I agree that facilitating the free flow of commerce—with the world and among the states—is one of the tasks the Constitution gives to the federal government. So I’m favorable to the idea of the federal government making strategic investments in critical corridors and key nodes in the goods-movement system. And obviously, this needs to involve all the modes that make economic sense for shippers to use in moving cargo.

But the difficult part is figuring out a mechanism that will actually do this. Our general experience with federal user taxes, centralized trust funds, and politically driven allocation of the monies is that this model creates all kinds of incentives to spend Party A’s money on something that benefits Party B, and to substitute political criteria for economic/investment criteria in determining what is “strategic.” Just within the Highway Trust Fund, we have not only out-of-control earmarking but a plethora of specialized programs that are anything but strategic (“Recreational Trails”? “Scenic Byways”?) as national priorities. Similar problems exist within the Airport Improvement Program and the harbor dredging program.

Some are now calling for a new federal multimodal freight program, funded by some combination of new user taxes and fees—but with the funds still sent to Washington, deposited in the Treasury, and then authorized and appropriated by Congress. Even though it would be separate from the Highway Trust Fund, and begun with the best of intentions, I fear it would fairly rapidly come to resemble the existing centralized approaches, taxing high-volume, high-growth sectors of goods-movement to fund projects serving a large variety of politically blessed ends.

So what kinds of safeguards could we impose, to resist those tendencies? The first is to avoid creating a single multimodal fund, where the tendency to cross-subsidize one mode with funds derived from another mode will be too great to resist. That’s not to deny that multimodal projects are sometimes appropriate. But if there is a strategic freight highway fund and a strategic freight railway fund—each paid for by user fees on its mode—then funding for specific multimodal projects that meet the needs of both modes can be made available, with the consent of both.

That model also suggests two other safeguards. First, the revenue source for each fund be some form of user fee, paid by the users of that mode. Second, those users should have a significant say in which projects get selected—“user pay means user say.” Thus, even if the user fee is legally a federal user tax that gets deposited in the Treasury and must be authorized and appropriated by Congress, each modal fund would have a user board to determine both the general principles for selecting strategic projects and the allocation to specific projects (whether single-mode or multi-mode) of the funds made available by Congress each year.

To be sure, that would be a dramatic change from the way we’ve operated federal infrastructure funds historically. It would mean Congress delegating the details to the goods-movement community, rather than micro-managing them itself. I realize that’s a tall order. But if we simply replicate, for goods-movement investment, a model that we know from experience is seriously flawed, we shouldn’t be surprised when the results turn out to be far less beneficial than hoped for.

In his thoughtful post below, Mort Downey notes that we are overdue for a serious policy discussion around freight. He suggests that the public sector should ensure that there is a robust and fair framework for competition among an array of private carriers, and should also work to “minimize impacts of various kinds on communities and the environment.”

While T4America heartily agrees with both impulses, I especially want to focus to on the second point, because it too often has been missing from such discussions. We must ensure that port and freight investments reduce localized pollutants and increased concentrations of heavy truck traffic, in particular. The crux of any freight program should be to increase efficiency and reliability while decreasing environmental impacts. The linkage between these two goals is inextricable and one should not be sacrificed for the other.

As an example, consider the Port of Long Beach and its Clean Trucks Program, which has proved to be a boon both for local air quality and for truckers. The port helps truckers buy new trucks or retrofit diesel engines, establishing a fleet of clean vehicles that helps the environment while keeping the costs of fuel and maintenance down.

In many major hubs constant gridlock and congestion adversely affects not only goods movement, but also the people in communities through which the goods flow. Thus, unclogging chokepoints that often develop in dense urban areas provides benefits everyone. Chicago’s CREATE program is an example that can be implemented in other places to help ease this burden.

Transportation for America examined these and other success stories in crafting our proposed “green freight and ports program” for the upcoming transportation authorization. Among other things, the program would offer competitive grants administered by US DOT to fund investments to expand, better manage and “green” our freight system and nation’s ports.

This program would help to achieve three key goals:

1. Support a transition to cleaner trucks through increased diesel engine retrofits, repowering, and fuel efficiency standards. as well as expansion of rail-based goods movement, coordinated with increased use of hybrid and non-carbon-based fuel systems for both trucks and trains.

2. Support increased efficiencies at port-rail-truck transfer connections.

3. Support programs to reduce and mitigate effects in nearby neighborhoods, which tend overwhelmingly to be poor and minority communities.

The discretionary program would provide funding for railroad, highway, marine highway, port, and intermodal transfer projects, including technology applications, as part of the National Freight Transportation System.

The final piece of the puzzle is supporting local and regional efforts to preserve industrial land and warehousing facilities that can improve freight transportation efficiencies. For instance, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the loss of industrial land for warehousing means trucking goods from the Port of Oakland to distribution centers in the central valley of California, only to truck them back in again to have them reach stores and consumers. Think of it as affordable housing for what’s inside the containers – another example of why a more efficient transportation system needs a much smarter approach to land use.

Freight today rarely travels by truck alone, and the transfer from one mode to the next often adds to costly delays and pollution from idling vehicles. The needs of our global economy demand that we start enhancing and improving connectivity and service to the major intermodal terminals including seaports, airports, rail terminals, ports of entry and inland intermodal terminals. To do this, programs at every level of government need to use a wide range of multimodal options and new technologies when developing their transportation plans. Of course, the key question in all of this is: How do we pay for it?

A national freight mobility program, the creation of which ASCE strongly supports, has the potential to target bottlenecks and delays, and help meet broad economic and environmental goals. Funded with dedicated revenue, such a program would provide the kinds of capacity increases and operational improvements that will ensure a safer and more efficient movement of freight. We also have to consider developing a federal rail trust fund, similar to the successful highway trust fund, which uses an 80/20 match formula to encourage state participation. Revenues would come from tonnage and mileage fees, a ticket tax and/or general treasury funds, among other sources.

And, as with all sectors of infrastructure renewal, we have to seriously investigate and strongly encourage the use of innovative financing methods like revenue bonds and tax exempt financing at the state and local levels, public-private partnerships and state infrastructure banks.

The success of our national transportation system—the underpinning of our ability to compete in the global marketplace—hinges on a shift in focus from simply moving vehicles to the movement of people, goods, and services. With a refreshed perspective and new goals, a national freight program can, and should, play a significant role in that success.

ARTBA's Rail Policy statement recommends creation of a Critical Commerce Corridors Program to develop additional capacity required for U.S. freight shipments that would be funded outside the Highway Trust Fund with freight-based user fees or other appropriate revenue sources.ARTBA calls for creation of a national rail infrastructure investment policy and calls on USDOT to regularly assesss freight and intercity passenger rail infrastructure needs.ARTBA supports targeted federal tax incentives to help attract investment in rail infrastructure improvements.Credit assistance programs as TIFIA and RRIF should be expanded.Public- private ventures are encouraged with each party contributing amounts commensurate with benefits each would receive.A dedicated funding mechanism such as user fees paid by railroads and shippers and tax credit or tax exempt bond financing will be required to help finance freight rail infrastructure imporovements.

With energy at near record prices and the opportunity never greater for rail technology to improve air quality and transportation efficiency, the U.S. Congress, the rail industry, and its related stakeholders are more at odds than in partnership. This will not do for such an important infrastructure and economic linchpin as railroads.

Fortunately, railroads do not need a government bailout; they are currently outperforming other industries. That stability, along with rail technology’s inherent energy and capital efficiency, can deliver a high return on investment if we focus our national economic revitalization plans on a comprehensive build-out of our entire rail transportation system. Truck and rail transportation both have their places within an efficient freight system. But we have abdicated the design of that interaction to the economic drivers of the marketplace. And the marketplace does not act holistically or sustainably.

We have launched OnTrackAmerica to raise the cause of optimal freight transportation to the level of a national mission in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. We intend to forward what I believe the world needs in these very troubled times: a better way to coordinate commercial activity and related public policy that best serves not only private commercial interests, but our longer-term, communal interests as well. This may be one of the world’s most urgent challenges. Ultimately, this is how business will thrive in the future.

It is time for long-term thinking and action. Our attention to higher-volume shipping lanes and overall capacity does not have to mean less rural, urban, and direct rail service with its consequent increase in local truck traffic. Projects of “national significance” are important but so are the many smaller projects that contribute to a networked freight transportation system. To successfully integrate population growth over the next century, we need to end the demarketing of branch line rail service and the suffocating impact of public policies, regulations, and financial assistance that favors the largest projects and transactions. My September '08 Railway Age magazine article, Leveraging Capital for the Entire Industry, speaks further to this issue. It is counterproductive to add one more hurdle—lost rail service—to the revitalization of economically challenged towns and regions across North America.

We have the most productive rail system in the world. But our society’s tendency to pit groups against each other has led to a North American transportation system that underutilizes railroads in spite of this success. We need railroads more than ever. Working collaboratively, we can move beyond incremental progress to place rail transportation at the dynamic center of a revitalized North American economy.

The question posed asks about a national freight policy, and then jumps to a means of financing. Let me introduce an intermediate step of a national freight program, and then provide comments on all three points

As to policy, we should have a serious discussion and frame a policy statement before jumping into program design, so that the latter effort best reflects what we want to accomplish. Some key elements in such a policy statement would include the retention of a competitive and profitable array of private sector carriers offering freight service, balanced with a public sector commitment to assure that the fundamental infrastructure of our national transportation system allows for freight carriers to be efficient, maximize their service according to their competitive advantages and minimize impacts of various kinds on communities and the environment. The public commitment should also provide for public funding when the need to achieve public benefits outweighs what the freight carriers need for their business purposes. And I’m sure there are other factors that full debate would bring forward.

As to a freight program to achieve the policy goals, I would see a mixture with at least three parts

• Development of the intellectual and human capital to support sound decision making. This would include federal sponsorship of mode-neutral research and training initiatives as well as continuing performance assessment as the basis for future investments.
• Recognition of freight in the mainstream of transportation development, likely through a defined freight planning and investment program executed at the state and metropolitan level, with measures to assure that stakeholders are involved in the decision process
• A highly flexible program at the national level to fill gaps and make freight investments that are of national importance and deserve to be funded at a national level to reflect the nature of the benefits achieved. As a flexible program, the appropriate federal officials (likely the USDOT but perhaps also a National Infrastructure Bank, should be empowered to craft project-specific investment packages with a mix of grants, loans, guarantees backed up by hands-on efforts to resolve implementation problems. . The recently issued Transportation Research Board Special Report 297 “Funding Options for Freight Transportation Projects” http://gulliver.trb.org/FreightTransportation/Public/Blurbs/Funding_Options_for_Freight_Transportation_Project_162174.aspx is a useful guide to why such a program is needed and how it could operate. The Recovery Act “TIGER” discretionary program may give us some insight on how it could work effectively as a competitive investment program.

Finally, how should this national freight program be funded, especially in the context of all our other transportation needs and our seeming unwillingness to put prices on the menu? I think the case for national benefit has been made pretty clearly. We need to get the economy performing again, and we have yet to retool our transportation system to support economic realities—both the movement of imports and the important efforts to enhance our capabilities as an exporter of high quality manufactures. If this is a worthwhile effort, it is by definition worth paying for, and the freight community is the likely suspect. This may not come as the most welcome news in a highly competitive sector, but the improvement of system efficiency and capacity should actually enhance industry performance and recover costs from the beneficiaries. This recovery could come from directly user-funded investments as well as broader based freight taxes and fees. The nature of these deserves some additional discussion and informed debate, much of the homework has been done by the recent Commission reports. It will soon be time to make decisions among these alternatives. Whatever decision is reached, I believe there will be significant benefit from a “user pays” scenario that allows users a voice in defining improvements that truly reflect their needs as well as assuring those users that funds collected will indeed be put to work towards meeting those needs. A Freight Trust Fund of some nature will be an important element in the final package.

Updated at 5:31 p.m. on Sept. 8

Most large agencies that are responsible for land areas have capital plans where they have identified and prioritized investments. The federal government should have a capital plan for freight and it should be updated frequently. A National freight program needs at a minimum two things: 1. A program with a big picture vision...and someone at the Undersecretary level or higher within DOT to implement the inter/multi-modal national vision; 2 a dedicated funding source for freight related projects, including environmental improvements. Some of the money needs to be retained at the federal level for funding large multijurisdictional projects. The ARRA/TIGER program is a good start. We can and should build on it, adding a stronger "green" emphasis that considers the carbon footprint and environmental impact (e.g. emissions, etc.) of potential projects. Ports (and other local agencies and freight stakeholders) need to be able to apply directly for these new funds. This will ensure that we are competing on an equal level with comparable nationally important projects, rather than competing with local street resurfacing. Important freight projects rarely get the attention America needs them to get when we have to compete through our local transportation agencies. Funding for the program must be from a source that all of the major stakeholders are bought into, whether a national cargo fee of some sort (that has return to source provisions and applies to all ports of entry and all types of cargo) or some other freight-related revenue (e.g. customs revenue, diesel charges, etc.), and must not favor or hinder one region or mode over another, while taking into consideration the challenging economy facing all of us in the goods movement industry. We can do this!

American companies trying to ensure the on-time delivery of products to the marketplace must have a transportation network that can meet their needs. How fast, how reliably, and how economically they can send products by truck, rail, ship, barge, air, or all of the above – may make the difference between profit and bankruptcy. When the system works well, people get what they want, when they want it, at the best possible price and the nation can compete in the global economy.

A nation of seamless supply chains might sound great in concept, but to achieve this vision, it must work within the real world of aging infrastructure, budget shortfalls, and competing priorities. An important element of the national consensus on the future of the federal transportation program should be the need to support interstate commerce.

This is why AASHTO, in its recommendations for the next authorization of the surface transportation program, proposes that Congress call for the Secretary of Transportation in cooperation with the states and industry develop a National Strategic Freight Transportation Plan that achieves maximum efficiency and is based on future transportation network needs. By committing $60 billion over the next 6 years to such a network, as a basis for making productive investments.

AASHTO's proposal includes the establishment of a state freight transportation program to guarantee total access to the nationwide system, and a national freight corridors investment fund for projects that meet the standard of national importance. The latter would be funded from new sources of revenue outside the Highway Trust Fund drawing on the value created by transportation investment.

AASHTO also proposes the establishment of multi-state freight planning organizations to make it possible to plan and invest in a coordinated way in projects that benefit more than one state.

Congress has the opportunity to enact a new surface transportation authorization bill that creates a dynamic and responsive transportation system that is accountable to the public and focused on the future.

One definition of "national policy" is a wide-ranging course of action used to guide the federal government in pursuing its goals. With respect to freight, this requires us to first establish our national goals, as distinct from local or regional goals.

Obvious among these are providing for the efficient conduct of commerce across state lines and access to foreign markets for American exported products and, similarly, for products imported to meet in-country consumer demand. Then, there is the need to anticipate future demand and provide the necessary infrastructure to facilitate tomorrow's commerce and compete in the global marketplace. Third, given that the marketplace will dictate that goods flow through specific corridors and nodes, concentrating both efficiencies and impacts on particular geographic areas, there is a federal obligation to provide collective resources to sustain those efficiencies for the greater good and to fairly share the costs of mitigating local impacts. Finally, our goals for the freight system must be achievable within our broader environmental objectives and be integrated into a global pathway for a sustainable future.

A course of action to meet these goals involves wide coordination among the lead federal agency USDOT, the states, local governments and the private sector users and carriers. Effective coordination requires a certain amount of interdependence as the federal government must rely on the other partners to identify demonstrable needs and provide sound projections for the future. At the same time, those partners are entitled to federal responses and prioritization of needs based on objective information.

But coordination alone is not sufficient and the stated goals demand federal assistance in fairly raising and allocating funds for infrastructure development and improvement. Furthermore, the urgency of our environmental issues - greenhouse gas emissions, energy supply, air and water quality, to name a few - must be weighed in the context of both national and international interests and laws, which requires more coordination among more federal agencies.

To balance and satisfy these imperatives, the Coalition for America's Gateways and Trade Corridors supports the establishment of a new federal multimodal freight program with a dedicated trust fund based, at least in part, on new user fees, such as the waybill fee Congressman Smith has proposed in HR 2707. A short description of the Coalition's approach can be found here.

Freight-focused transportation projects, while critical to American consumers, our nation’s ability to be competitive in global markets, and our overall economic prosperity, have too often received low priority in state and local transportation plans. The federal government should play the appropriate role in helping enhance the movement of goods by developing a national freight policy to ensure that freight mobility projects are recognized in the transportation planning process. The creation of a national freight program must be a high priority in the next surface transportation authorization.

Among the things a national freight program should include are funding for projects and corridors of national and regional economic significance; funding for intermodal freight connectors; appropriate investments in freight rail; and, the development of marine highways. The program should be performance-based and improve project delivery by addressing inefficiencies and redundancies. Funding, particularly in the current political climate, likely will need to come from a combination of mechanisms. Specifics on AAPA’s perspectives regarding a national freight policy and funding options are contained in our surface transportation policy document.

It’s imperative in today’s global economy that when we think about freight transportation infrastructure, we include America’s ports and the connections on both sides of the pier. Local public port authorities are investing over $2 billion/year in port infrastructure projects, but there is much to do with regard to enhancing the connecting infrastructure to ports, most of which is beyond ports’ jurisdiction. Moving freight in and out of ports requires efficient road and rail connections as well as modern, navigable channels – deep and wide enough to handle today’s (and tomorrow’s) larger ocean-going vessels.

The Panama Canal expansion is underway and on schedule for completion in 2014. Many of our trading partners, and our competitors, are investing heavily in freight transportation infrastructure to compete in the world marketplace.

August is over, Congress is back, the football season is ready to start, and to quote a former Washington football coach, in terms of America’s freight transportation system’s needs, “The Future is Now.”

As a member of The Freight Stakeholders Coalition, ATA believes that the next surface transportation authorization bill must maintain a strong federal role and provide for the creation of a national freight program.

The success of our nation’s economy relies largely on the transportation of freight, and ATA predicts that in the next 12 years total U.S. freight tonnage will increase almost 28 percent. While freight rail does play an important part in our nation’s movement of heavy bulk commodities over great distances, truck is the more financially sensible, preferred option for shipping time-sensitive goods over distances of less than 750 miles. As our nation moves forward with short and long-term transportation strategies we need to keep in mind the essentiality of the trucking industry. Even railroads and marine transportation depend on trucks for intermodal delivery of their freight from its origin and to its final destination. Trucks deliver nearly 100 percent of consumer goods and about 70 percent of overall freight tonnage in the United States. Economists predict this trend will continue, so we must expand and repair the aging National Highway System (NHS) to meet these demands. ATA supports funding this expansion by increasing the federal fuel tax, but only if all proceeds go into the Highway Trust Fund.

Implementing a national approach that addresses the nation’s worst traffic bottlenecks and improves the flow of freight will have the greatest benefit for taxpayers. As proposed in the House Surface Transportation Authorization Act, a national strategic plan that defines the federal role in meeting transportation needs will improve delivery of infrastructure projects by primarily investing in those of national importance. The federal government should start with NHS’s worst traffic bottlenecks, as listed by the Federal Highway Administration.

Also, federal government should tie infrastructure investment to system performance by requiring recipients of federal funds to meet performance standards related to safety, infrastructure condition, congestion reduction and emissions. Moreover, infrastructure projects must recognize the critical role of freight transportation in meeting the nation's economic needs. Specific proposals that establish a new core Freight Improvement Program will dedicate money to the NHS -- which carries 75 percent of truck traffic -- and other highways designated by states as important to meeting freight mobility needs.

Meeting the transportation challenges of the 21st Century is critical to the long-term prosperity of the United States. As our population and economy grows, a national transportation policy that focuses on efficiency, safety, congestion reduction, and the improvement of freight movement around our nation’s worst bottlenecks will facilitate economic growth and help our industries compete in the global economy.