Cascadia Prospectus

Photo Source: Amtrak Cascades

There has been a setback to the prospects of a permanent second daily Amtrak Cascades service to Vancouver, B.C. The Canadian federal government has made the decision not to waive permanently a border fee for the second train, requiring the Washington State Department of Transportation to pay almost $550,000 annually for border clearance services. Helping convince the Canadian federal government to waive the border fee -- not just temporarily first through the Vancouver Winter Olympics and then until this fall -- has been an important issue for Cascadia Center for several years. As a part of the coalition that has pushed for this expanded service, Cascadia is disappointed with the decision.

The long-term fate of the federal surface transportation program continues to elicit much speculation amid expectations that Congress (or at least the House) will change hands in November and make serious attempts to trim government spending, while at the same time resisting any large-scale tax increases. What would a federal transportation bill enacted by a Republican-led 112th Congress look like (assuming, that is, that the bill gets on the legislative agenda at all, i.e. in the first 8-10 months of the new Congress, before it gets caught in the 2012 presidential election cycle)?  Chances are it would be far less expansive than the bill proposed by Rep.James Oberstar and championed by the transportation community. A Republican majority, elected on a pledge to put an end to runaway spending and to shrink the size of government (see the House Republicans' "Pledge to America"), might well decide to strip the legislation of prescriptive programs of non-essential nature, focus on the highway "core program" and investments of high national priority and let states assume responsibility for discretionary programs that meet local political objectives or are primarily of local benefit (and there are a lot of those!). In sum, a Republican victory in November foreshadows major changes in the scope of the federal-aid program. As one of our colleagues put it, the program as we have known it over the years, will simply cease to exist.

In a guest commentary, Richard G. Little, Director of the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the University of Southern California, offers his own reflections on how the reality of constrained resources and greater spending discipline in the next Congress might affect our future transportation policy.