Foxx takes a futurist turn at DOT

Politicians are often accused of failing to look past the next election. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx wants to look past the next fifteen.

Foxx is leading a DOT effort to create a 30-year outlook for the state of transportation in the U.S., an ambitious effort he hopes will shift the country out of its stubborn, single-track focus on the short-term needs of keeping solvent the Highway Trust Fund. Instead, he wants to take a broader look at how the country plans on moving an additional 100 million people by 2050 and all the goods those Americans will buy.

In a sit-down interview with POLITICO on Friday, Foxx was blunt.

Were having the wrong conversation about transportation in this country, he said. There are a host of factors that are colliding, that are changing the ground underneath us. But yet our policies, not to mention our funding, arent keeping up. I think its very important for us to have a new reset.

Foxx ticked off those factors: technological innovation, a population moving into denser metro areas and demographic shifts.

Lots of forces are converging to create a very disruptive set of conditions, he said. We need to lay out what we think policymakers are going to be facing over the next 30 years. Because right now were having conversations about transportation funding that are really disconnected from the conversations about policy we need to be having.

Foxx is frustrated with the narrow focus on finding money for the trust fund which Congress patched yet again before leaving for the August recess and he expressed the need to focus more on how federal transportation dollars are spent.

My hope is that people will take a look at this, and some of the unexamined assumptions weve had about transportation in the last couple of decades will start to be examined, and policymakers hopefully will understand we cant just concern ourselves with the funding side of the equation, that how that funding is actually deployed is a key piece of how we move forward, he said.

If Congress had succeeded in getting the Highway Trust Fund stabilized, many people in Washington would have considered that as accomplishing the mission, he said. And thats just not the case.

Foxx wants to reveal a report by the end of the year and promises a robust outreach effort before then. He will host five webinars to gather feedback from transportation groups and government bodies, and DOT staff will also regularly solicit feedback. While he emphasized the plan wouldnt promote specific policy ideas, he did drop a few hints about the areas DOT could focus on.

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Foxx takes a futurist turn at DOT