Transportation industry groups asked the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) on Thursday to delay new asset management reporting requirements for state transportation departments, transit operators, and metropolitan planning organizations that are slated to take effect on Jan. 1.
Leaders of the American Public Transportation Association, the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations and the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations requested a one-year delay of reporting requirements in a letter to USDOT Secretary Elaine Chow.
The delay, the groups wrote, would enable them to absorb various requirements issued by federal agencies in recent years and would enable agencies to add clarity to regulations.
“To this day, not all of the new regulations have been finalized by both the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHA),” the letter stated.
USDOT was required to draft new rules for state DoTs, transit operators and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to report on performance management of transportation assets under the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21) Act of 2012. Although MAP-21 established a single statutory deadline for the reporting requirements, however, various federal transportation agencies have handed down regulations with numerous timetables and deadlines for implementation.
“USDOT originally proposed a single calendar date whereby all 10 of the original interrelated regulations would have been made effective, including those rules addressing planning, highway safety, highway conditions, congestion/system performance and transit performance,” the letter stated. “Clearly, the challenges in developing the rules went well beyond the statutory deadlines in MAP-21 and resulted in many different effective dates that went years beyond the original mandates set by Congress and initial dates established by USDOT.”
State transportation departments, transit authorities and MPOs are currently “hard at work” implementing performance management provisions, the letter continues. But the groups identified three key benefits of extending the compliance deadline: better alignment with critical reporting dates, additional time for oversight agencies to finalize guidance and reporting infrastructure, and more time for transportation groups to comply with guidance and to coordinate efforts with partner agencies.
“Under the current timeframe, the earliest that USDOT will be able to prepare an assessment of the impacts of the performance management provisions for first reporting period is summer 2023, well beyond the timeline of reauthorizing the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act where potential changes to the performance management statutes would be informed by such a report,” the letter stated. “Thus, shifting the reporting period by one year would not adversely affect informing the surface transportation reauthorization process.”
The transportation groups reaffirmed their commitment to establishing performance measures. Group leaders noted have worked with Congress to ensure that the performance target measures result in investments and outcomes that advance national goals, the letter noted.
“We believe that a single update, tied to a common effective date of performance targets resulting from the shift in the performance reporting period for all of the performance measure targets required by FHWA — safety performance, pavement and bridge performance, system performance — and FTA — asset management targets — will significantly improve the efficiency and ability of MPOs to meet the performance management requirements,” the letter concluded.