[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9177-9178]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



   TCSP GRANTS AWARDED AS PART OF ADMINISTRATION'S LIVABILITY AGENDA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Reynolds). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Hoeffel) is recognized for 
5 minutes.
  Mr. HOEFFEL. Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to join a number of my 
colleagues this evening in reporting on the benefits to our 
congressional districts of the TCSP grants that were awarded last week 
by the Secretary of Transportation and by the Administrator of the 
Federal Transit Administration.
  The TCSP grants stand for Transportation, Community and System 
Preservation grants. These are a vital part of the transportation 
program as part of the administration's livability agenda.
  Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the 13th District of Pennsylvania, 
received a grant of $665,000 to promote a transit-oriented development 
along a proposed rail line.

[[Page 9178]]

  I would like to talk about that in some detail, but first it is clear 
to me in my travels around the district, in my town meetings and 
meetings at supermarkets, that the questions of suburban sprawl, of 
gridlocked traffic, of overdevelopment are the very highest issues 
facing the suburbs throughout this country and certainly the suburbs of 
Philadelphia. We need to do a better job in managing our growth, in 
fighting traffic gridlock, in fighting sprawl, in making sure we plan 
for the orderly growth and development in our suburban communities. 
These transportation grants are a very important way of doing that.
  We are trying to restore train service that was stopped 15 years ago 
from the City of Philadelphia through Montgomery County, my district, 
out to Reading, Pennsylvania. This train service, if restored, would 
allow for both commuting into the city and reverse commuting from the 
city every day.
  It would take shoppers to the largest mall on the East Coast. It 
would take shoppers to the Reading discount markets. It would allow 
access to cultural and historical benefits and assets, such as Valley 
Forge National Park. It would do a number of very beneficial things in 
my area.
  The question is, why did passenger service end on this train route 15 
years ago? Why was ridership so low? It is because we were not doing a 
very good job in promoting that service or making it attractive to 
people.
  The Transportation Department, through its transit-oriented 
development grant, is trying to promote the expansion of this commuter 
service along what will be called the Schuylkill Valley Metro by urging 
municipalities to plan for adequate parking at train stations to allow 
dense development so that there can be residential opportunities and 
retail and commercial opportunities surrounding the proposed train 
stations. We need to make commuting by rail not only attractive to 
those who would drive to a station and park their car but to create an 
area where people would be attracted to come and live, to rent an 
apartment or buy a condo around a train station with all of the 
commercial amenities and recreational amenities that a small town can 
offer, so that people would be attracted to live there and drive their 
cars there as well, to use the transit program.
  This is an exciting opportunity and one that we have to aggressively 
market if we are going to help reduce the traffic gridlock around 
Philadelphia and make people come back to trains and come back to a 
place of living and working, where they can walk to their train station 
from their apartment, they can walk to commercial and retail 
opportunities. If they are driving to the train station from a more 
remote area, they can do shopping, they can drop off their dry cleaning 
or get their hair cut when they come back from work, whatever it takes 
to make life more manageable and more livable and improve the quality 
of life while, at the same time, getting people off of highways.
  This is the goal. This sort of transit-oriented development 
encouraged by the Secretary of Transportation will help to fight sprawl 
in the suburbs. It will encourage smart growth strategies so that we 
can have a more livable community. It will ease traffic congestion and 
help to end some of the traffic gridlock that make our suburban areas 
so difficult.
  And it would also encourage what is called location-efficient 
mortgages. This is an exciting aspect of this program that will 
encourage lenders to lend more money to folks that live in these 
transit areas because they will not need to have the high expense of 
owning a car that many Americans have to face. So if they can live in 
an area where they can walk to a train station and take the train to 
work, a lender will be encouraged to give more money in terms of a loan 
to that prospective homebuyer or condominium buyer so that he or she 
can buy more house for the same income than they would if they had to 
factor into their expenses the cost of owning two or three cars and 
living in a remote suburban community.
  Fundamentally, this will reduce pressure on green space. It will 
allow us to save open space, preserve farmland and make all of the 
suburbs a more livable area for all of us.
  So the transit-oriented development to be encouraged by this 
transportation grant is exactly the right sort of thing that we should 
be promoting to improve livability throughout the suburbs and 
throughout this country.

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