Virtual Lobby Day This Thursday

From MassBike

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Join us on Thursday for a Virtual Lobby Day: While we are visiting Congress in person, we need you to call and email your support for bicycling! Our first two Virtual Lobby Days in 2010 and 2011 were great successes, flooding our Congressional offices with calls and emails.  Stay tuned for more details….

If you’ve been following activity in DC, then you probably already know that there has been a lot of activity around the transportation legislation that only a few weeks ago was an all-out crisis. Thanks to the tens of thousands of emails, telephone calls and letters bombarding Congress, we have some great news out of the Senate.

The Cardin-Cochran amendment, which we asked you to contact our Senators to support, was adopted by the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works at the beginning of March. Our own Senators Scott Brown and John Kerry led the way by co-sponsoring the amendment. The amendment works like this:

• Transportation Enhancements, Safe Routes to School, and Recreational Trails are consolidated into a new program called Additional Activities.
• State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) will make their Additional Activities funding available to metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and local governments. Here’s how they’ll allocate the funds:

• The state DOT will allocate 50% of the Additional Activities, based on population, to MPOs and rural areas. MPOs will then distribute the funds through a competitive grant program for projects in their communities.
• For the remaining 50% of Additional Activities, the state DOT would host its own competitive grant process for projects. Local governments, school districts, and others would be eligible to compete for this funding.

Even more exciting is that last week the Senate passed the two-year transportation bill, complete with Cardin-Cochran, by a vote of 74 – 22. Bipartisanship is especially important given the fact that the Senate is almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Because of the hard work of our national and Massachusetts partner organizations, and, of course, our members and supporters, bike funding and strengthened local control are a part of this legislation.

On the House Side

In other news, the transportation legislation produced by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (H.R. 7) has ground to a halt. Their bill, as you may recall, was generally reviled by anyone concerned with biking, walking, transit, air quality, or economic development. The failure of this bill is especially striking given the strong majority held by Republicans in the House. As Transportation for America puts it, “All of these numbers make the inability for the House’s proposal to even come close to 50 percent approval ever more glaring. According to sources on the Hill, H.R. 7 was getting 180 votes or fewer in the “whip counts” by leadership to gauge support — far below even the minimum 218 that would represent a simple majority at just over 50 percent.”

The collapse of H.R. 7 has revealed discord among House leadership. As a result, Chairman Mica was removed as the driving force behind this legislation (you can read more about this big change here). Instead, Representative Bill Shuster (R-PA), a junior member of the committee,  has been tapped by Speaker of the House John Boehner to lead the process.

Only two weeks remain before the expiration of the current extension of the previous transportation bill, so the House must move quickly to do something to avoid a complete freeze on federal transportation funding. This may take the form of a revised H.R. 7, or something closer to the Senate bill, or simply another extension of current funding levels. With little time to build support in the House for a new bill, an extension is the most likely outcome, but then the question is “for how long?” A short extension would mean the House believes it can work out a new bill soon, while a longer extension would indicate deeper divisions without a resolution in sight.

Executive Director David Watson and I are taking the fight to DC this week, leading our delegation to the National Bike Summit to press Congress to solve this problem in a way that strongly supports biking. We’ll be thanking all of our Senators and Representatives for their unfailing support for biking, and asking them to do all they can to persuade their colleagues to “ride” with us!

Even though we have been successful so far, we aren’t out of the woods yet. As Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff warned, “And since the House has yet to bring forward any concrete alternatives, it presents ‘an incredibly fluid and dangerous situation, especially since our highway trust fund programs are scheduled to expire in three weeks.’” We depend on your support to advocate on Capitol Hill, Beacon Hill, and in communities around the state. Please consider supporting MassBike today so that we can keep on giving a voice to support better biking in Massachusetts!

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Help MassBike With Their Virtual Lobby Day

Taken from MassBike here.

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Read on for information on how you can be part of our virtual lobby day!

This week is the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC. MassBike is leading the largest-ever group of Massachusetts advocates on a mission to protect funding for bicycling in MA from the federal budget-cutting frenzy. Federal dollars pay for a wide range of things you care about: roads with bike lanes, rail trails, Safe Routes to School, and more!

This year, we’re encouraging everyone in our group to tweet updates from Tuesday to Thursday throughout the Summit, using the hash tag #nbsma.

On Thursday, March 10th, while we are visiting Congress in person, we need you to call your own U.S. Representative and both Senators and ask them continue to support federal funding for bicycling. When you call, you can use these talking points:

• Funding For Bicycling And Walking Is At Risk We are concerned there will be efforts to strip federal funding for biking and walking in Congress either by eliminating the funding for programs such as Transportation Enhancements or Safe Routes to School, or by making funding these programs optional for states.
• We Already Underinvest In Biking And Walking Just 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars currently support bicycling and walking, although these two modes represent 12 percent of all trips in the United States. Bicycling and walking are growing in significance to our transportation system and yet only a tiny fraction of transportation funding is allocated to these essential and affordable modes.
• Bicyclists And Pedestrians Make Up A Disproportionate Number Of Roadway Fatalities 14 percent of roadway fatalities are bicyclists or pedestrians. Small investments in improving roadway safety not only make our roads safer for bicyclists and pedestrians but also make drivers feel more comfortable and reduce conflicts among all road users.
• Biking And Walking Are Great Investments Bicycling and walking improvements are relatively inexpensive, highly cost-effective investments that create significantly more jobs per dollar than road repair and upgrades; they also boost local small businesses and increase real estate values.
• Biking And Walking Help Solve Many Problems In these tough economic times, we must invest in solutions that solve multiple problems: biking and walking are low-cost transportation options that improve safety, health and air quality; they reduce dependence on foreign oil.

Here are the phone numbers for all the U.S. Representatives for Massachusetts:

Don’t know who your U.S. Representative is? Click here and enter your address to find out.

And our two U.S. Senators:

Please don’t forget to call on Thursday, March 10th, to be part of MassBike’s National Bike Summit Virtual Lobby Day. And then leave a comment here to let us know you called!

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