[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 20 (Thursday, February 16, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1431-S1432]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Ms. COLLINS:
  S. 2311. A bill to establish a demonstration project to develop a 
national network of economically sustainable transportation providers 
and qualified transportation providers, to provide transportation 
services to older individuals, and individuals who are blind, and for 
other purposes; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and 
Pensions.
  Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, in recent years, we have become 
increasingly aware of the great challenges facing our Nation as our 
population ages. While much discussion revolves around health care, 
social security, and pension systems, there is another daunting 
challenge that is rarely addressed in a comprehensive way.
  I am referring to the challenge of senior transportation.
  We Americans love our automobiles. From the time most of us were old 
enough to drive, we have been behind the wheel. Cars mean freedom--not 
in some grand philosophical sense--but in the real and practical sense 
that matters to us in our everyday lives. Having a car, and being able 
to drive it, means the freedom to go where we want, when we want.
  But as we age, we will find it harder and harder to use the freedom 
given to us by automobiles. Because as we age, our abilities decline, 
and driving becomes less and less simple. And then the day comes when 
we wonder whether we should keep driving at all, and if we don't, how 
we will get about our daily lives.
  That day has already come for millions of our senior citizens.
  All around the Nation, older Americans are struggling to stay active 
and independent while their ability to drive themselves declines. A few 
live in communities with well-developed public transportation services 
geared to our senior citizens, but most do not. Many seniors drive as 
long as they can, perhaps longer than they think they should, simply 
because they feel they have no alternative.
  That is why I am today introducing the Older Americans Sustainable 
Mobility Act of 2006. Despite its rather

[[Page S1432]]

awkward name, this legislation has a great purpose. It would create a 
5-year demonstration project, overseen by the Administration on Aging, 
to establish a national, nonprofit senior transportation network to 
help provide some transportation alternatives to our aging population. 
The goal of this network is to build upon creative, successful models 
that are already showing how the transportation needs of older 
Americans can be met in a manner that is economically sustainable.
  This last point is important. Senior transportation is a complex and 
expensive logistical problem. We cannot expect to address this problem 
by creating a brand new, expansive, Federal Government program that 
requires the commitment of vast sums year after year in order to 
succeed. We can't afford that, and that really isn't what older 
Americans want.
  What older Americans want is what most of us have and take for 
granted--the freedom and mobility that our automobiles provide.
  My legislation would build upon models that have demonstrated how 
senior citizens can stay active and mobile even after they stop 
driving. One such model is ITNAmerica, which has been operating in my 
home State of Maine since the mid-1990s and has since branched out to 
communities across the Nation. ITNAmerica uses private automobiles to 
provide rides to senior citizens whenever they want, almost like a taxi 
service. Riders open an account which is automatically charged when the 
service is used. Riders can get credits for rides through volunteer 
services, through donations--and this is what I think is most 
intriguing--by donating their private car to the program after they 
have decided that they should no longer drive.
  Kathy Freund, the founder of ITNAmerica, sees this as a way of taking 
something people see as a liability, and turning it into an asset. 
Through Kathy's extraordinary vision and hard work, ITNAmerica has 
developed a model that works because it allows older Americans to make 
the transition away from driving themselves without asking them to 
sacrifice their independence, or to learn at an older age how to 
navigate public transportation systems that may simply be inappropriate 
for their needs, or widely unavailable in many parts of the country. 
They can still be mobile, they can still go where they want and when 
they want, and they can go by car.
  Senior citizens will often keep their vehicles long after they have 
stopped driving. I am sure you have seen these vehicles in your State 
as I have in mine. You will see them sitting in driveways--unattended 
and poorly maintained, sometimes not driven for many months at a time. 
In this form, these cars are ``wasting'' assets. But ITNAmerica has 
found that the value of these cars can be unlocked by allowing seniors 
to exchange them for rides. That is why my bill calls for the creation 
of a once-in-a-lifetime tax benefit for seniors who exchange their cars 
for rides, valued at the amount of the ride-credit they are provided.
  One of my senior citizen constituents, June Snow from Falmouth, ME, 
has been using the system that I described--the ITNAmerica system--
since 1995, when her eyesight began to fail. At first, she used the 
program only to get into the city, Portland, and only after dark, when 
she found it more difficult to drive. But more recently she has traded 
her car for rides, and now she depends on the system to go everywhere 
she needs to go. She finds that the program allows her to get around 
town, to run errands, and do the things she has to do and wants to do 
without worrying about whether she will be able to get safely from one 
place to another. She told me: It's not like riding a bus, where you 
have to work with their schedules, and they won't stop and help you 
with your groceries. They won't make you get your feet wet walking 
through the snow to the bus stop.
  But what she loves most is the personal attention she gets from the 
drivers, most of whom are volunteers. ``They help you to the door, and 
they even carry your bundles and put them in the trunk,'' she says.
  My bill also creates a limited-time matching grant program to help 
communities establish sustainable transportation alternatives for 
seniors as part of a national network. Programs that wish to compete 
for these matching grants must be able to show that they can become 
self-sustaining after 5 years, and that they can operate after that 
period without reliance on public funds. So what I am proposing, is 
that we just provide some seed money as a catalyst, to get these 
programs going, with the full expectation--indeed the requirement--that 
they become self-sustaining without any public funds after the initial 
period. My bill also provides smaller grants to help transportation 
providers acquire the technology they need to connect to this network, 
and grants to encourage efforts to get the baby boomers more involved 
in supporting transportation alternatives in their communities. The 
total cost of these grant programs would be only $25 million over the 
full 5 year period. Then the program sunsets, and these wonderful 
transportation programs that would be created all over the country 
would be sustainable on their own without public funding.
  The challenge of providing transportation alternatives to our 
Nation's senior citizens is literally growing by the day. The bill I am 
offering is one step toward a reasonable, practical, solution to this 
important challenge. I think all of us know of neighbors and family 
members who reach their senior years and really shouldn't be driving 
anymore but are very reluctant to give up those car keys because there 
are simply no workable alternatives for them. This bill would provide 
those alternatives, and I urge my colleagues to support the 
legislation.
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