The following blog is by Zoe Lipman, Senior Policy Advisor for the BlueGreen Alliance.
The opinion piece, “Let our Cities Move,” in Wednesday’s New York Times by Mayors Bill DeBlasio of New York City and Mick Cornett of Oklahoma City is bipartisan, inter-regional and compelling. They underscore the critical importance of reinvesting in America’s aging, overburdened transportation infrastructure of all kinds as a critical enabler of individual economic opportunity, and our global economic and business competitiveness. Modern transportation infrastructure can also greatly improve quality of life and environmental performance. The mayors also stressed the strong local support for investing in transportation in communities across the country, and the essential complementary role of long term, federal funding to make these major projects possible.
Getting serious about building the modern infrastructure our country needs has an additional benefit—the chance to drive forward national manufacturing recovery and growth. The BlueGreen Alliance, working with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, released a report report earlier this year in which we mapped the manufacturing supply chain for just one part of this infrastructure: transit and passenger rail (subways, commuter rail, Amtrak). We found more than 200 manufacturing companies in 39 states that manufacture rail cars or major rail components such as propulsion systems, electronics, seating and the like. When we looked in detail in just 10 states, we found another 500 subcomponent manufacturers serving this industry. Were we to look in detail at the remaining 40 states—or, for example, at manufacturers of buses or road construction equipment—we know that we would find hundreds of additional manufacturing companies and many thousands of manufacturing jobs that depend on our national commitment to transportation infrastructure.
These companies are found both local to and far from the transit systems themselves. Rail cars built for Denver’s transit system include major components from seven states including Georgia, Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. New Amtrak locomotives include parts built by 69 suppliers in 23 states, Workers build wheelsets for the Acela in central Pennsylvania and subway components in southwestern Missouri and upstate New York, even as they likely depend on our roads and bridges to get to work. Meanwhile investments in transit can also bring back good manufacturing jobs to city communities.
These manufacturing companies and jobs—and the thousands of jobs operating our transit and highway systems—are put at risk by uncertainty and underfunding, but stand to thrive and grow if we make the investment in transportation our economy demands. Every community stands to gain from a national commitment to the next generation of transportation infrastructure.