Phineas Baxandall and Lizzi Weyant

Last week, the U.S. House introduced bills to fund our nation’s transportation system for the next five years. The new rules for spending $260 billion would be significantly tilted toward highways with less going to buses rail, biking and pedestrian trails. Given the nation’s urgent need to reduce our addiction to oil, that in itself would have been a tragedy.

But later in the week, tragedy turned into a dangerous farce. The House introduced additional legislation proposing that new revenue for the Transportation Fund would come through increased volumes of oil drilling and that public transit would be entirely kicked out of the transportation fund. Not only does this break with three decades of public transit support from the federal gas tax, it also comes at a time when our own state is facing a $161M budget shortfall at the T. The House measure would funnel all federal gas tax funds to highways, highways that we don’t need here in Massachusetts, while mass transit is forced to beg for scraps from a Congress that’s already making massive cuts to the general budget.

If you were trying to make America as addicted to oil as possible, you might design legislation like this.

The agenda advanced in the House flies directly in the face of clear trends in how Americans are choosing to travel. Right now, the number of vehicle miles driven is lower than any point since 2004, and transit ridership here in the Bay State is at an all time high, even in the wake of proposed fare hikes and service cuts.

While the House is characterizing its legislation as a “jobs bill,” past studies consistently show that spending on highways creates fewer jobs than the same dollars would invested in public transit.

Paying for highways through commitments to drill for more oil is both preposterous and perverse. The potential drilling revenue just doesn’t add up and would be delayed for several years before the new wells and exploration could even move forward. More broadly, America needs a transportation system that uses less oil. You don’t accomplish that by committing to drill more. It’s akin to funding a program to reduce smoking by lowering the tobacco age limit to generate more cigarette taxes.

While the drilling proposal met knowing disapproval, the move to defund transit has ignited a firestorm of protest. Over 600 groups including the Chamber of Commerce and AARP mobilized over the course of twelve hours to denounce the move in a joint letter. The U.S. Secretary of Transportation, a former Republican legislator, declared the House legislation to be the worst transportation bill in history.

The House has dangerously breached the past precedent which has long supported public transportation; but it may also have created a Paul Revere type rally to arms for transportation advocates roused across American. Let’s hope so.

Phineas Baxandall is a senior analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and Lizzi Weyant is a staff attorney at the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group.