DOT Chief Foxx discusses plan to battle ‘infrastructure deficit’

Anthony FoxxAnthony Foxx

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx on Wednesday shared the DOT’s plan for battling the “infrastructure deficit” at the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., our sister site Commercial Carrier Journal reports.

At the meeting, Foxx noted that recent transportation funding solutions have been “short-term.”

“It’s been ten years since we had a six-year surface reauthorization bill. To the extent that we’ve been able to address funding, it has been short-term and, from the perspective of state and local governments, too unpredictable to make long-range plans or long-term investments,” Foxx said.

Among the plans Foxx highlighted in his speech were to:

  • Post a monthly update “ticker” on the DOT’s website that shows the balance remaining on the Highway Trust Fund (HTF)

  • Provide transportation funding with proceeds from corporate tax reform

  • Possibly increase the federal gas tax and rework the user-pay system

In addition to announcing DOT plans, Foxx also reiterated the need for a multimodal transportation system.

“Highway people like highways. Transit people like transit. Rail people like rail. But our transportation system should be greater than the sum of its parts,” Foxx said. “We need a plan that takes our roads and rails and ports – and links them – and remakes the finest system of transportation the world has ever known into its 21st-century incarnation.”