The simple answer is an emphatic yes. The Department of Transportation’s new criteria will unleash funding for vital transportation projects across the nation that will not only spur economic growth, but reduce congestion time as well as our reliance on dirty, expensive fuels.

Yet it seems misleading to label the criteria announced by Secretary LaHood as new. When I authored Small Starts, which was signed into law in 2003, the original intent was to provide federal funding for smaller scale and less expensive transit projects. Which projects would be funded was to be determined by a variety of benefits, from economic development potential to environmental gains.

By dropping the Bush-era practice of focusing exclusively on travel-time savings for suburban commuters, Secretary LaHood has restored the integrity of this program. Consistent with President Obama and his administration’s commitment to livability, and in the spirit of the law as written, DOT is doing the right thing by looking at a wide spectrum of economic and pollution reduction benefits.

The Obama administration is walking the walk when it comes to improving the capacity of all our communities, both urban and rural. Fundamental to making communities livable is to ensure people have more transportation options, from streetcars and bus-rapid transit to bike lanes. From New Orleans to Tucson, there are more than eighty cities exploring the streetcar, with a dozen projects in various states of development, even before this decision.

Portland has reaped enormous economic and environmental gains from our streetcar. In October, Portland received the first ever Small Starts grant. With this funding, we will more than double our streetcar system and in the process createnearly 1,300 high-wage construction and manufacturing jobs in Oregon, attract 2.4 million square feet of new development into the project area, and reduce regional vehicle miles traveled by an additional 28 million miles.

Since its inception, Small Starts has languished, but I am confident it will thrive under this administration and Secretary LaHood. The announcement of these new guidelines will make it possible for cities across the nation to reap the same benefits as Portland.

I applaud USDOT for highlighting the importance of safety in public transportation – specifically transit. At NJ TRANSIT, safety has always been and continues to be our top priority. Our capital investment strategy focuses on state-of-good-repair first, followed by core capacity enhancement and strategic expansion. Concentrating our efforts on state-of-good-repair helps to minimize equipment and system failures, further improving the safe travel of our customers.

NJ TRANSIT, like many of the larger transit agencies, operates a multi-modal system, with light rail, bus and commuter rail. Our commuter rail operation is regulated by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), which sets minimum standards for the industry.

With the FRA, we operators are not subject to onerous processes that unnecessarily increase staff time and costs. This type of structure should be mirrored by FTA, to the extent possible. I agree with William Millar of APTA that minimum standards (such as parameters for track inspection) are important but standards should be performance-based to allow for local conditions and diverse operations. Furthermore, FTA should consider best practices when developing minimum standards. Lastly, as we are all facing daunting budget challenges, federal funding of safety oversight programs is a necessity.

With a successful strategy for implementation, USDOT’s proposal to promote safety throughout the nation’s transit systems will serve to further improve the safety record of public transportation – the safest way to travel.

The legislation proposed by Secretary LaHood is timely and appropriate for several reasons.

First of all, it is a very modest proposal, which is a good thing. Rather than a complete federal take over, it simply sets minimum safety standards and provides funding for training, implementation and enforcement.

Transit ridership is soaring and will continue to increase dramatically as a result of rising gasoline prices, environmental requirements and concern about automobile emissions and global climate change. Lines will likely become crowded as during construction as proposed lines gradually become available. Interstate transit systems, such as those in Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey, and our own three-state system in the Washington, D.C. Metro area (Maryland, Virginia and D.C.) can be difficult to regulate in terms of safety requirements on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis.

Lastly, the federal government should — and probably will — eventually link many individual lines to create true regional interstate transit systems. At that point, federal safety standards will be absolutely essential.

I commend the Department of Transportation for focusing its first legislative proposal on improving transit safety. I would like to thank Secretary LaHood, Administrator Rogoff, and the entire Department for making safety its top priority. Improving transportation safety has always been a priority for this Committee, and it will continue to be so as we move forward with the long-term Surface Transportation Authorization Act (STAA) early next year.

The safety of our transit systems is especially important in light of the public transportation renaissance taking place in cities large and small across America. In 2008, Americans took 10.7 billion unlinked passenger trips on public transportation systems, representing the highest transit ridership levels in 52 years. This increase is almost triple the growth rate of the general population, and substantially more than the growth rate for vehicle miles traveled on our nation’s highways.

Unfortunately, the condition of many transit systems has been declining to a point where older, less safe rail cars, tracks, electrical equipment, and other assets are left in service long past their useful life spans. According to the Federal Transit Administration, more than one-third of the total assets of the largest rail systems in the country are in either marginal or poor condition, and the estimated maintenance backlog for the nation’s rail transit systems exceeds $80 billion. Therefore, addressing the issue of transit safety will mean increasing investments in transit systems across the country, and I am committed to achieving a state of good repair through provisions in the authorization bill.

We need to ensure that passengers feel completely safe as they board rail transit systems in their daily lives. This is a key component of creating livable communities. Currently, there are no national mandatory minimum standards for rail transit safety. Unlike the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Transit Administration does not have the authority to directly regulate public transit systems.

Instead, FTA’s State Safety Oversight program, created in 1991, requires that States enforce safety requirements for rail transit systems. However, the legal authorities of the various State oversight agencies are limited and vary widely from State to State. According to a Government Accountability Office report in 2006, some States employ as few as 0.1 or 0.2 full-time equivalent positions dedicated to the safety of rail transit systems they are required to oversee. GAO also found that many state safety offices lack sufficient financial resources and independence from the transit systems under their purview. The relationship between the Federal government and the states is a partnership, and a culture of safety must permeate this relationship. And as in all partnerships, when one partner doesn’t do its job well, the other must step in to help achieve their shared goals.

I commend the Administration for acknowledging the shortfalls of the current system and I believe that DOT’s proposal presents much needed improvements. It will assure that each State has an adequate number of fully trained staff, that they have sufficient authority granted by the State legislature and the governor, that they can compel compliance by the transit agencies and that those various entities have financial independence like our NTSB. Those are reasonable propositions.

Public transportation is one of the safest ways to travel. In fact, it is much safer to ride in a rail transit vehicle than to ride in an automobile. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, over the past six years (2003-2008), there was an annual average of nearly 42,000 highway fatalities, of which nearly 32,000 were motor vehicle occupants. In contrast, there was an annual average of one passenger fatality on heavy rail (subway). And there was no passenger fatality on light rail transit (streetcars, trolleys) in this six year period.

Safety has been and still is the number one priority of the public transportation industry. APTA and the public transit industry have worked to raise public transit safety to the highest level through many activities including: developing and implementing wide ranging safety standards; putting system safety plans in place; training employees in safe work methods; and conducting safety audits.

While it will take many steps to improve transit’s enviable safety record, it will also take significant financial investment to bring public transportation systems up to a state of good repair; to increase the training of transit employees; and to correct safety deficiencies that might be identified.  It is simply not enough to pass laws and issue regulations, if safety is to be taken to the next level, investments must be made. 

If it is the will of Congress and the Administration to implement federal rail transit safety oversight, APTA encourages the following common sense principles to be included in federal legislation:

• In order for the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to assume a larger responsibility for safety, it will need adequate staffing and training.

• The FTA should use the APTA consensus-based standards that FTA helped fund, as the foundation for any federal regulation for rail transit safety. Where feasible, standards should be performance-based rather than prescriptive to accommodate local conditions and diverse operations, as well as to foster innovation in technologies and problem solving.

• Any federal program to establish rail transit standards by regulation should incorporate federal preemption to ensure that efforts at the state level remain concentrated on identified national safety priorities.

• If new regulations add significant new costs, the federal government should pay for these additional costs. Public transportation systems do not have extra money in their budgets to accommodate unfunded federal mandates.

• To improve safety, specific new federal funding should be established for projects that bring systems up to a state of good repair; correct safety deficiencies; and train employees in safe work methods and procedures.

• Although the existing State Safety Oversight (SSO) program is uneven in its effectiveness, starting with the SSO program is the most expeditious and cost effective way for FTA to strengthen rail transit safety oversight, provided that states are able to hire and train appropriate personnel.

• APTA supports FTA’s proposal to consider other federal models, where states can become certified to administer a federally mandated oversight program, and receive compensation to do so. If a state chose to opt out, FTA would need to provide direct safety oversight of transit operations in that state.

Despite some recent high profile accidents in the United States, transit remains the safest mode of transportation in this country - safer than aviation, highways, and other forms of rail transportation.

The federal government has a responsibility to make sure transit remains a safe mode of transportation, and improve safety where possible.

That is why I believe the federal government should assume a stronger role in overseeing safety, but it should not take over the role of transit safety regulator by creating a new federal agency to inspect and enforce the safety standards of local public transit systems.

Setting federal standards, and providing the appropriate State safety organizations the resources to oversee and enforce those standards are reasonable measures that we should consider, but we should be very careful before we establish a new federal transit safety bureaucracy.

A federal bureaucracy - the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) - currently regulates commuter and intercity passenger rail, and the comparison of safety records clearly shows that federal regulation does not necessarily translate into safer transportation.

In 2008, transit systems under State safety oversight experienced one death for every 66 million passengers, whereas commuter rail experienced one death for every five million passengers and Amtrak had one death for every 241,000 passengers.

Most rail operations overseen by FRA cross State and local boundaries and operate on the general railway system, and are therefore subject to federal regulation and oversight. But since the Federal transit program was first created in 1964, the Federal Transit Administration has been prohibited from regulating transit operations because transit is an inherently local activity.

There are 45 very different rail transit systems across the United States, each with its own unique technology, signal system, and rail cars. Instead of creating a new bureaucracy and adding a large inspector force to walk the lines of these may different systems, we should free up federal transit funding to allow the State safety oversight agencies to beef up their ability to oversee the safety of local transit systems. This is a course of action I recommended earlier this year.

We should also assist transit agencies with upgrading their rail systems and technologies to help prevent accidents and crashes.

The SSO system has been demonstrated to be safer than a federally regulated system, and we should strengthen that system.

By expanding the federal government's authority into transit safety regulation, we risk diluting the soup and winding up with transit systems that are less safe.