It’s just the shot in the arm Minnesota and 49 other states needed.
Long overdue, this welcome boost is known as the FAST Act, which stands for “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act.”
Up until now, the U.S. Congress would approve funding for transportation infrastructure projects and improvements in a stop-and-start herky-jerky fashion, bits of bills here and there, a series of short extensions to what was a previous comprehensive long-term transportation bill. That iffy, piecemeal approach, because of its ongoing uncertainty, was during the past decade an impediment to long-term planning in every state in the nation.
Thanks to the FAST Act, Minnesota will receive a whopping $4 billion in federal transportation funding during a five-year period, from 2016 to 2020. What that means is that, in addition to funds already earmarked, there will be an additional $36 million to Minnesota this year, and increasingly higher amounts each year, with an extra $107 million in 2020. The money will be used for a wide variety of projects, including bridge-and-road repairs and improvements to make roads safer, with higher capacity, and also in some cases public-transit lines. Most of the projects will be local ones with local needs tying into the larger transportation process.
The money, in addition, will provide for many other things, including improving railroad safety at highway-rail crossings and safety programs for drivers such as enhancing teen-driving skills and helping to combat distracted driving. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar was instrumental in getting those safety provisions into the FAST bill, as well as being a force in getting FAST itself passed.
FAST could not have been more timely. Anybody who travels roads in Minnesota and elsewhere these days has noticed cases of sad deterioration all along our transportation systems. Some of the deterioration is not visible to the eye. That is why, without any warning, the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed Aug. 1, 2007, killing 13 and injuring many more. That should have been an immediate nationwide wake-up call, and in some ways it was in that many long-neglected bridges were inspected. There are about 600,000 bridges in this nation, and 24 percent of those are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
For so many decades, the United States led the world in superb state-of-the-art transportation systems. Sadly, we have fallen behind, and the slow but sure decay has affected our economy negatively. Thanks to FAST, transportation renewal will not only create hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, it will also in the long run increase safety, efficiency and facilitate the flow of goods and services.
The FAST Act is only a beginning. Some have called it a “down payment” on a 21st Century state-of-the-art transportation system. First step or not, FAST is a welcome boost in more ways than one. Those who worked so hard to pass the bill, Democrats and Republicans alike, deserve our thanks.
