GVF Testimony to PA House Transportation Committee Hearing

Formed in 1990, GVF has been advocating for improved mobility and transportation infrastructure investment for the past 20 years. We are a membership organization representing over 100 partners in both the public and private sectors. Our service area covers both northern Chester County and southern Montgomery County.

As an advocate for all modes of transportation, we can authoritatively say that transportation systems are in a funding crisis that has never been experienced. Structurally deficient bridges, poor pavement quality, increasing traffic congestion, and minimal transit expansion are all symptoms of a poorly funded transportation infrastructure. We are a state in fiscal crisis, transportation being only one element of the greater problem, however thankfully we are here today to address the problem. You have heard, and will continue to hear many solutions to the problem of infrastructure funding. Ideas like raising the taxes on gasoline, charging drivers for miles driven, tolling roadways, even leasing roads to private investment firms are all very good ideas to raise the needed capital to improve our transportation network. These great ideas however address only the superficiality of the transportation funding problem, they are the answer to HOW we will fund the system, but do very little to address the reason WHY it needs to be funded.

During the past fifty years our nation has been in a highway building craze. Highways were built with such vigor and expedience into the rural countryside that little to no thought was put into the results of the building craze. The rapid expansion of highway building placed the emphasis on moving as many vehicles as possible with no consideration as to how many people were in those vehicles. The efficient movement of people was never considered. There is no doubt a fiscal crisis; the solution however must focus on the efficient movement of people and goods. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, we cannot use the same thinking to solve our problems that was used to create them.

GVF, along with the other eight transportation management associations in Pennsylvania focus our efforts on moving people more efficiently. In doing so we strive to put more people in fewer cars and where it is warranted, advocate for strategic expansion of both the highway and transit network. We recognize that the key to solving our transportation funding problems is to not only move people more efficiently but to rethink how we allocate the use of land and necessity of people to travel. We must move towards policies that incentivize living closer, not farther away from work. It should be easier for people to walk or bike to a destination close by than to drive. No longer can we afford to subsidize the continual expansion of housing into the rural countryside, but rather we should be encouraging more densely populated areas where it is less expensive to provide the required infrastructure. These suggestions are a dramatic shift from the policies and investments of the past fifty years; however are the solutions to today’s problems.

Solving the transportation funding crisis is not simply identifying a new way to fund transportation. Our problem is the result of poor decisions in the past that we must now pay for. This crisis provides an incredible opportunity to redirect how we think about the very way we go about our lives. If we simply find a new way to finance our current transportation system, we will find ourselves facing this very same problem in the not so distant future. Taking bold steps today to redirect future investments will find Pennsylvania on the path towards a more sustainable future.