FREIGHT Act of 2010

The topic for this week’s National Journal blog was whether the Focusing Resources, Economic Investment, and Guidance to Help Transportation (FREIGHT) Act of 2010 will enhance the nation’s freight system.

Emil Frankel, Director of Policy for the NTPP, argues in his latest entry that the problems facing freight transportation are dealt with most efficiently when a broad, programmatic approach to transportation investment is employed. Through this lens, the NTPP views the issues plaguing freight transportation (i.e. increasing congestion, unreliable delivery times) as problems that reach beyond the freight mode and need to instead be dealt with across modal and agency lines.

Mr. Frankel argues that the FREIGHT Act could be strengthened by including, along with goals for economic growth, NTPP’s goals of accountability toward increasing national connectivity and metropolitan accessibility of investments. These goals would make any freight investment benefit the national transportation system as a whole rather than a particular region or state. Furthermore, the FREIGHT Act should include a mode-neutral freight fee in order to further tie funding to investments, enabling performance benchmarks to be met.

Read Emil’s blog post here.

Emil Frankel in the Financial Times

Emil Frankel, Director of Transportation Policy for the National Transportation Policy Project, was recently quoted in a Financial Times article “US deals with the politics of recovery”. In the article, Mr. Frankel argues that a greater emphasis should be placed on how federal funds “perform” as evidenced by how well the funds generate economic activity.

This emphasis on performance is at the core of NTPP’s vision for federal transportation policy reform. Implementing federal transportation policy that aims to foster economic growth, among other national goals, will ensure wasteful or unnecessary projects are replaced with investments that encourage long-term, sustainable economic growth across the nation.