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Community Transportation Association of America

Connecting America Through CommunityTransportation: Building a Mobility Policy for the 21st Century

The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) generally supports the transportation priorities and mechanisms established by the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, or "ISTEA." CTAA embraces a reauthorization of this law that will carry its many strengths forward into the 21st century. In particular, CTAA calls for the following features in the reauthorization of ISTEA....

• Continue the successful features currently found in ISTEA, such as: formula funding mechanisms that strive to allocate federal transit dollars to all communities, large and small; the flexibility to transfer funds between highway and transit programs; a recognition that public transit services must be delivered in a cost-effective, coordinated fashion; and planning processes that promote a community-based approach to transportation decision making.
• Recognize that operating assistance is a vital component of federal support for public transportation.
• Establish a Mobility Enhancement Account, supported by one penny of existing federal motor fuel taxes, which would be used to help state, local and tribal governments address the unmet transportation needs of persons trying to exit the welfare system and enter the workforce, of persons with disabilities, of families unable to own or use an automobile, and of others whose age, income or other circumstances cause them to depend on the availability of a public transportation infrastructure.
• Create a unified program of transit assistance for smaller communities, which would receive 20 percent of all formula transit grant funds. This program would combine the best features of the existing rural and small-urban formula grant programs, including the absence of a federally mandated limitation on the use of funds for transit operating assistance.
• Require at least 20 percent of each year's discretionary capital spending for transit to be made in areas of under 200,000 population. Broaden the scope and funding of the existing Rural Transit Assistance Program to better serve the technical assistance and training needs of transit operators in areas of up to 200,000 population. Funding for this program should be an amount equivalent to 5 percent of the formula transit funding for areas under 200,000.
• Assure every state that its residents will receive an equitable percentage of what they pay into the federal transportation program. Improve formula funding mechanisms to ensure greater equity in transit funding between rural and urban areas of the country, particularly for those states whose residents historically have paid more into the Mass Transit Account than they have received in transit spending.
• Provide transit/highway funding flexibility in the Indian Reservation Roads and other public lands highway programs. Uniformly exempt all federal transit grantees and subgrantees from federal motor carrier registration and related requirements, as well as from paying federal motor fuel taxes.

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