Steve Heminger, Executive Director, Metropolitan Transportation Commission
Biography provided by participant
Steve Heminger is Executive Director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). MTC is the regional transportation planning and finance agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. It allocates more than $1 billion per year in funding for the operation, maintenance and expansion of the Bay Area’s surface transportation network.
Since 1998, MTC has served as the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) responsible for administering all toll revenue from the seven state-owned bridges. BATA has a "AA" credit rating and plans to issue over $6 billion in toll revenue bonds to finance bridge, highway, and transit construction projects over the next several years.
Heminger was appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, which will help chart the future course for the federal transportation program. In addition, he is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Mineta Transportation Institute and the Board of Directors for the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations and International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnkpike Association. Prior to joining MTC in 1993, Heminger was Vice President of Transportation for the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored public policy group. He also has served as a staff assistant in the California State Legislature and the U.S. Congress.
Heminger received his Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown University.
This is the toughest question in the whole debate about the future direction of the federal surface transportation program: what are the "core national priorities" that the program ought to pursue? During the Interstate era, the purpose of the federal program was quite clear: connect the population and manufacturing centers of the nation with a network of grade-separated highways. In the post-Interstate era (which we entered some 20 years ago), the mission of the federal program is muddled at best. The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission on which I served struggled with this question throughout our early… Read more
Let me give my shortest answer yet to this week's question about how better to link transportation investment and land use location decisions: put more federal transportation funds directly in the hands of the local elected officials who decide how their communities grow. That will put the authority -- and accountability -- for more "livable" outcomes right where it belongs. Chairman Oberstar's bill takes a strong step in this direction with a new program called Metro Mobility. Here's hoping the Senate heads in the same direction.… Read more
Yes, the stimulus is working for transportation, but it would be working much better (and faster) if we had a less cumbersome project delivery process. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we have obligated over 70% of the highway and transit funds at our disposal from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). But "obligating" the funds doesn't stimulate the economy. Jobs are created when the funds are put under contract with a private sector firm to pave the road, fix the bridge, or manufacture the bus. And the Bay Area has less than 10% of our ARRA funds under… Read more
For most of the last century, the U.S. transportation equation was pretty simple: VMT = Mobility. I suspect that some of my fellow bloggers who believe federal policy should not attempt to reduce vehicle miles traveled per capita continue to equate VMT with mobility. The federal government certainly has no business promoting less mobility. But in the nation's major metropolitan areas, there are a growing number of ways to get around besides driving a car, especially for the journey to work. And in the interest of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our dangerous reliance on foreign sources of oil, I… Read more
The United States has neither a national goods movement strategy nor a federal freight program in our surface transportation law. This omission is quite startling, given the constitutional mandate for the Congress "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states . . ." Like Mort Downey and several other bloggers, I hope this omission can be rectified in the new authorization following the expiration of SAFETEA. As a member of the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, I participated in the hearings we held around the country. I think the best answer we heard to the question… Read more
After literally days of testimony on PPP's before the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission, I am just about worn out on this subject. The debate about the wisdom of greater private investment in our surface transportation system is almost always contested on theoretical or ideological grounds, and that may be enjoyable for the debaters but it is completely unenlightening for the rest of us. I suggest instead that we try to answer the following practical question: what part of our investment shortfall are PPP's most likely to address? It is probably not deferred maintenance (about 50% of… Read more
One sure-fire way of assessing how serious someone is about a new transportation project idea is whether they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. By that measure, the Obama Administration is serious about high speed rail. The question now is: how serious is everybody else? For the $13 billion down-payment contained in the economic recovery package and FY 10 budget outline will only be meaningful if it leverages much greater funding commitments from state, local, and private sources. In California, our voters passed a $10 billion bond measure in the November presidential election to construct a statewide… Read more
Thanks to Ken and Emil for suggesting this topic. I think transportation's human capital problem is related to its message problem. Those of us in the transportation community often bemoan the fact that the presidential candidates (and those eventually elected president) rarely mention the word "transportation" in their speeches. This constant complaint is another example of confusing means and ends. Transportation is a means to maximizing other values, not an end in itself. While the recent presidential campaign again ignored the word "transportation", the subject area was continually discussed. The candidates just used different words and phrases like energy security… Read more
Our guiding principle for financing the 21st Century transportation system ought to be "user pays". A user-based financing system has several advantages, including (1) connecting the burden of paying the tax or fee with those who benefit from its expenditure; (2) allowing variation of the fee charged by time or place of use to manage system performance; and (3) reducing demands on the general funds of all levels of government. In my opinion, we spend too much time debating whether tolls or gas taxes should play a more prominent role in future surface transportation finance. The fact is that we… Read more
I am happy to agree with my former commission colleague, Matt Rose, and my friend, Rob Puentes, that the biggest lesson we can learn from outside our borders is this: we need to tear down the walls between the various transportation modes. The federal program is modally organized, and so is U.S. DOT. Consequently, the advocacy groups tend to splinter by mode, often spending just as much time fighting with each other as linking arms to argue for greater levels of infrastructure funding across the board. The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission (on which I served) called for… Read more
I hope we don't make a fetish of the phrase "shovel ready within X days" in forthcoming congressional action on the economic recovery program. While we certainly want to move promptly in spending any new infrastructure funding, our economic troubles won't be over in 90 or 180 days. Residents of the San Francisco Bay Area (where I live) continue to rely every day on major infrastructure projects built during the Great Depression, such as the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges. Neither of these massive structures was "shovel ready" when the stock market crashed. Yet these 1930's investments helped make possible… Read more
While high gas prices make politicians extremely uncomfortable, $4 per gallon gasoline last summer led to less driving, fewer traffic fatalities, more transit use, and serious consideration of the business case for alternative fuels. What's wrong with those outcomes? Fuel prices and consumer demand are indeed variable, but there is no question that demand will grow as the worldwide economy recovers and that fossil fuels are a finite resource. So, over the long term, fuel prices will rise and produce some of the positive changes in driver behavior we saw last summer. We can either wait for that future to… Read more
Biography provided by participant
