I’ve been begging for a bill like this and Congressman Randy Forbes has done it.
Forbes calls it the “414 Plan,” referencing the 414 days it took to replace the fallen bridge in Minnesota.
“If we can rebuild a collapsed interstate bridge in 414 days, we can certainly build a road in less than 13 years,” says Forbes.
He’s SO right. One of the big problems in funding transportation solutions is the decades-plus it takes to build one of them. The Transcontinental Railroad was built in six years, but we can’t build a bridge tunnel of a few miles in less than 16 or 18 years.
This plan “suspends for five years all federal regulations that do not pertain to the safety or durability of highway facilities, or of public and workplace safety” and “dispenses with costly, outdated federal requirements while continuing to afford states and localities flexibility in utilizing federal funding for road and bridge projects.”
You can read HR2924 here.
Time equals money, and while Democrats cry about wanting to raise taxes to fund these obscenely expensive and multi-decade projects, Rep. Forbes attacks the real problem – federal regulations that make these transportation solutions excessively pricey in the first place.
I hope this bill gets a tremendous number of cosponsors from both sides of the aisle. This bill is a job creator and key to our transportation future.
