US government Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and 11 of his predecessors have signed an open letter to the US Congress calling for larger, longer-term investment beyond the extension of the Highway Trust Fund until May 2015.
In the letter, Foxx said: “This bill will not “fix” America’s transportation system. For that, we need a much larger and longer-term investment. On this, all twelve of us agree. Taken together, we have led the U.S. Department of Transportation for over 35 years.
“So it is with some knowledge and experience that we can write: Never in our nation’s history has America’s transportation system been on a more unsustainable course.
In recent years, Congress has largely funded transportation in fits and starts. Federal funding bills once sustained our transportation system for up to six years, but over the past five years, Congress has passed 27 short-term measures. Today, we are more than a decade past the last six-year funding measure.
“The result has been an enormous infrastructure deficit – a nationwide backlog of repairing and rebuilding. Right now, there are so many structurally deficient bridges in America that, if you lined them up end-to-end, they’d stretch from Boston to Miami. What’s worse, the American people are paying for this inaction in a number of ways.
“Simply put, the United States of America is in a united state of disrepair, a crisis made worse by the fact that, over the next generation, more will be demanded of our transportation system than ever before. By 2050, this country will be home to up to 100 million new people. And we’ll have to move 14 billion additional tons of freight, almost twice what we move now.
Without increasing investment in transportation, we won’t be able to meet these challenges. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to invest $1.8 trillion by 2020 just to bring our surface transportation infrastructure to an adequate level.”