Barbara Boxer

Last year, while the House flailed in partisan misery, the Senate passed a transportation bill 74 to 22. When the bill was signed into law, it was considered one of the few real achievements of a deeply divided Congress. Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer got tremendous credit for enacting legislation three years in the making. And yet, it left a lot of good provisions on the cutting-room floor. While MAP-21 included some modest reforms, lawmakers missed an opportunity to prioritize transit, biking, and walking -- modes that are gaining popularity and help achieve national goals like congestion mitigation and air quality improvement.

The MAP-21 transportation bill was just signed two months ago, and its funding levels, agreed to by a difficult and fragile compromise between warring political parties, are already under attack.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) confirmed she is already working on the next transportation bill -- "two months to the day after President Obama signed MAP-21 into law and before the new policies even kick in on Oct. 1," according to Politico, which broke the story this morning.

With conference negotiations occurring in a black box, transportation advocates on all sides are anxiously awaiting word of the final deal. Rumors abound that Democrats have been willing to negotiate away local control over bike/ped funding as a bargaining chip to get other concessions from Republicans. We don't know if this is true or not, but bike advocates are stepping up their game, trying to hold Sen. Barbara Boxer to her promises to preserve funding support for small-scale street safety projects.

This post originally appeared on www.bikeleague.org. The author is the president of the League of American Bicyclists.

Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. John Mica just released this statement:

The transportation bill conference committee negotiations have been difficult and contentious, by all accounts -- all except Senator Barbara Boxer's account. The EPW chair has been optimistic when others have been bitter, consistently focusing on how much the two sides agree rather than the places where they're still far apart.

Sen. Barbara Boxer's noon press conference started out as a bit of a mess. The Senate press gallery announced it was canceled five minutes before it was due to start. Then three minutes later, the EPW committee sent out a notice that the event had changed locations and would start 20 minutes later. Needless to say, there was much confusion.

Sen. Barbara Boxer is due to speak to reporters in about an hour about the goings-on in the conference committee. The mood has turned dark in the past few days, but she’s kept a positive attitude, saying, “It’s been wonderful.”