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It’s so much worse than we thought.

Yesterday, the House released its transportation bill, the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act. We expected the bill to be bad news for biking and walking, but we didn’t think it would go so far as to reverse all progress we’ve made over the past 20 years. (Check out the Top 10 Reasons the House Bill is Bad for Bicycling and Walking from Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists, on the right.)

If your member of Congress is on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, please take action TODAY. With a vote coming in the T&I committee TOMORROW, tell your Representative to preserve biking and walking. Click here to contact your Representative through the League’s Action Center.

House leadership is exerting pressure to completely cut bicycling and walking out of transportation. Lawmakers seem to have gone through the bill, line-by-line, to gut programs that make streets safer. The American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act:

• Destroys Transportation Enhancements by making the program optional
• Repeals the Safe Routes to School program, reversing years of progress in creating safe ways for kids to walk and ride bicycles to school
• Removes requirements for states to build bridges with safe access for pedestrians and bicycles
• Eliminates bicycle and pedestrian coordinators in state DOTs

There’s still a chance to save biking and walking. Tomorrow, in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Representatives Tom Petri (R-WI) and Timothy Johnson (R-IL) plan to stand up to leadership by offering an amendment that restores dedicated funding for Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to School. Petri and Johnson can only be successful if everyone with a stake in safe sidewalks, crosswalks, and bikeways contacts his or her Representative today.

This is as urgent as it gets. Even if we win this amendment, there will be a long road ahead. But if we lose here, we risk losing decades of progress.

If members of the Transportation Committee are going to stand up to House leadership by supporting biking and walking, they need to know their constituents are behind them. Please contact Congress TODAY and ask your Representative to preserve dedicated funding for biking and walking.

Take action NOW!

If you have a Representative on the T&I committee, please forward this action alert to your members and supporters. Pass it along to all your local partners — particularly high-level contacts like mayors, school board members, and business leaders — and ask them to weigh in, too. And thank you for all you do to advance biking and walking!

Please Contact your Senators Again Today to Save Bicycle and Pedestrian Funding

It’s happening again. Just one month ago, Sen. Coburn (R-OK) failed in his efforts to strip funding for Transportation Enhancements from the six-month transportation extension. Now, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is taking the lead in trying to destroy Transportation Enhancements. On November 1, the Senate will finalize the transportation appropriations bill, which sets funding levels for FY2012. Sen. Paul has offered an amendment to redirect all funding for Transportation Enhancements to bridge repair.

We agree on the need to keep our bridges safe, but the lives of pedestrians and cyclists are important, too. Thirteen people died when the Minneapolis bridge collapsed in 2007. Since then, close to 20,000 pedestrians and 2,800 cyclists have died on our nation’s highways, largely as a result of poor highway design and a lack of safe non-motorized infrastructure – exactly what the enhancement program was created to fix.

If Sen. Paul’s amendment is successful, it would eliminate approximately $700 million in federal funding for FY2012 that is used to construct sidewalks, bike lanes, bike paths, trails and other infrastructure that makes it safe for bicyclists and pedestrians to get around. Even if every penny of these funds is diverted to bridge repairs, Senator Paul’s plan will still take 80 years to fix the backlog of bridge repairs we have today — by which time all those repaired bridges would be falling down again.

Remember that the TE program represents less than two percent of the federal transportation program and these projects help alleviate traffic congestion, improve safety, get people active, and create more jobs per dollar than highway-only projects.

Remember also that last year, states sent back to Washington $530 million of unspent bridge funds in rescissions. The states are leaving bridge repair funds on the table, unspent, year after year. They should at least spend these funds first.

If the Paul amendment succeeds, it will make it much more challenging to sustain funding for Transportation Enhancements, Safe Routes to School, and Recreational Trails in the long-term transportation bill that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee starts debating on November 9.

We must turn back any amendment to strip Transportation Enhancements.

Last month, more than 75,000 messages were sent to Senators to ask them to stand strong for Transportation Enhancements. Thank you, that was an amazing turnout – but we must do better this time. Every time someone in Congress attacks bicycling and walking, we must push back even stronger than we did the time before. And, we will keep doing it until bicycle and pedestrian funding is protected.

This is the third time in a month that a small group of Senators has targeted Transportation Enhancements, using a different angle each time. It is a waste of the Senate’s time and taxpayers’ dollars to focus on this small and valuable program when we are in dire need of real and viable solutions to fix our failing transportation system.

Please contact your Senators today to ask them to vote against the Paul amendment (SA-821) to eliminate Transportation Enhancements. And then please forward this message to all your members and supporters, with the link to the League of American Bicyclists’ Action Center.

Thank you for your help today, and for passing along the call to action.