Opening Statement of  Rep. Thomas Petri
Chairman, Subcommittee on Highways, Transit, and Pipelines
Joint Oversight Hearing on
Coordinating Human Services Transportation

May 1, 2003

The hearing will come to order.  The subject of today’s joint hearing of the Committees on Transportation and Infrastructure and Education and the Workforce is "Coordinating Human Services Transportation."  I want to extend my sincere gratitude to the governmental witnesses from the Departments of Labor, Education, Health and Human Services, and Transportation who have made time in their extremely busy schedules to appear before the Committees this morning.  I am also very grateful to our witnesses who have traveled from Florida, Pennsylvania, and Alaska to participate in this hearing.

The General Accounting Office has identified 62 different federal programs that provide funds for specialized transportation services for special needs populations.  In most cases, transportation services are not an end in itself, but provide access to other services – health and medical services, education, job training, elderly nutrition and employment opportunities.  These multiple federal programs each have unique requirements and criteria, but share a common goal of transportation for their eligible clients.

Coordinating these transportation services would encourage efficiency and reduce costs through the shared use of personnel, equipment, and facilities, thereby improving the level of service for current clients and making an expansion of services possible.

We spend a lot of money on providing transportation services at the federal, state, and local levels.  It is not possible to put an exact dollar amount on the federal investment in human services transportation expenditures because 34 of the 62 programs that provide transportation services do not require that data be kept on transportation expenses.

But just the 28 federal programs that do track transportation expenses spend a total of $2.4 billion a year.  Most of these programs require a state or local match for the federal funds, many of them at 50 percent.  So the best we can estimate is that the combined federal, state, and local annual investment in human services transportation is at least $4 billion a year – and probably much more.

The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has been concerned for some time about the need for coordination of transportation services for special needs populations.  In fact, the House Public Works and Transportation Committee (the T&I predecessor committee) held hearings in March 1977 on improving transportation services for the elderly and disabled.

At that hearing, then-Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams testified that: "Any program addressing these needs [transportation needs of the elderly and disabled] should include some mechanism for coordinating the wide variety of federally assisted transportation services currently provided under a number of social service programs."

Part of the reason we are still talking about the need for greater coordination 26 years later is that coordination can’t be done alone.  In the 1998 Transportation Equity Act for the 21^st Century, Congress directed the Department of Transportation to coordinate with other human service transportation providers. However, if that same message is not sent to other federal agencies that provide transportation services, who will DOT coordinate with?

A single Department trying to coordinate alone is like playing a game of catch with yourself.  Many states have agreed that coordination is a desirable goal.  Approximately one-half of all U.S. states have a coordinating body of some kind, though the level of support for such coordination, and the degree to which coordination is required, varies widely.

Some of the potential benefits of coordination are:

• Eliminating inefficiencies.
• Achieving economies of scale.
• Stretching limited funds and personnel resources.
• Reducing the operating costs for transportation providers.
• Expanding services to people not currently being served.
• Improving customer service and simplifying the process of getting transportation services.

I hope that when we complete this hearing, we all have a clearer picture of what is meant by coordination of human services transportation, why it is a desirable goal, what some of the obstacles are that impede a more coordinated transportation system, and what some potential options might be to improve coordination.  As the second-ranking Republican member on both of these Committees, I look forward to working with the Departments of Transportation, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education, and with my colleagues, to make this a higher-level issue for everyone involved.