Obama's Transportation Secretary Must Be a Visionary

In the hierarchy of presidential Cabinet officials, the secretary of transportation is sort of like the brunette on Three's Company — you might recognize the name, but you can never quite place it.

That will almost certainly change under the Obama administration, which must repair the infrastructure crumbling beneath our feet. The president-elect has promised the nation's governors that he will invest heavily in roads, bridges, schools and other public projects. It's a wise move, because such spending is just the thing to reinvigorate our tanking economy.

The president-elect and his transportation secretary face a daunting list of issues. One of every four bridges nationwide is either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Bringing our drinking water infrastructure up to snuff will cost billions. Highway congestion eats up $78 billion annually through the 4.2 billion hours and 2.9 billion gallons of gasoline we waste sitting in traffic. "We have severe, serious infrastructure problems," David Mongan, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, tells us. Fixing them will require $1.6 trillion over five years.

It will also take transportation secretary with vision. Obama hasn't said much about who might get the job, but the list of names being bandied about includes some top-notch candidates.

As you'd expect, several congressional lawmakers who serve on various transportation committees make the list, and they're well qualified for the job. They include Oregon Reps. Peter DeFazio, chair of the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee, and Earl Blumenauer. He's a former Portland public works commissioner and member of the House Transportation Committee who founded the Congressional Bike Caucus. Illinois Rep. Jerry Costello chairs the House Aviation Subcommittee and would be in a position to tackle our woeful air traffic control system. And we especially like Minnesota Rep. Jim Oberstar, who chairs the House Transportation Committee and moved quickly to secure funding to begin repairing the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis last year.

Of course, appropriating money is different than spending it wisely, and it's not clear any members of Congress have the vision needed to address the challenges ahead. For that, President-Elect Obama might do better to look to state transportation officials. People like New York Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn, New York City Councilman John Liu or Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell would bring the government experience, ground-level perspective and progressive thinking the Department of Transportation needs to move forward. Any of them would do a fine job.

That said, the best guy for the job may well be R.T. Rybak, the forward-thinking mayor of Minneapolis. He's made sensible and sustainable transportation policy a hallmark of his tenure. His Access Minneapolis transportation plan calls for bringing streetcars back to the city, building a robust pedestrian network, increasing transit access and capacity and making city streets more bike-friendly. When the Minneapolis bridge collapsed, he insisted that its replacement have the capacity to support light rail. His progressive transportation policies have nearly doubled the number of cyclists and, more impressive, made downtown Minneapolis one of the few urban areas to return to the population levels it saw before the flight to the suburbs that followed World War II.

His is exactly the kind of proactive, big-picture thinking we need if we are to address our nation's infrastructure problems and begin moving us toward smarter growth. It doesn't hurt that he's also the only big city U.S. mayor who's ever been seen crowd surfing.

Rybak, Liu and Sadik-Kahn certainly aren't safe, conventional choices. But safe and conventional won't solve America's transportation challenges.

Photo by Flickr user kmf221.