President ratifies $286.5b roads bill
Sees boost for economy, safety
CHICAGO -- President Bush signed the $286.5 billion transportation bill yesterday, saying it would ease traffic congestion throughout the United States, create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and impose stricter vehicular safety standards that will save lives.
But critics said the legislation was stuffed with unnecessary and expensive projects that benefited only members of Congress seeking hometown support.
The six-year bill, the first major transportation spending measure since 1998, pays for projects from fiscal years 2004 through 2009. The previous highway bill expired Sept. 30, 2003, and Congress repeatedly passed funding extensions for current projects until it could agree on new legislation.
After years of delay over the amount of spending and the division of funds among states, the bill cleared the House and the Senate last month by large bipartisan votes. But some lawmakers and government watchdog groups expressed outrage over the number of individual projects -- more than 6,000 -- in the legislation.
The bill's price tag was $2.5 billion higher than Bush had requested.
The bill signing was the second ceremony this week that has taken Bush from his Texas ranch, where he is spending about five weeks on a summer break from the White House. On Monday, Bush went to New Mexico to sign a new energy policy into law.
The highway bill contains more than 6,371 projects, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The distribution of the money ''is based far more on political clout than on transportation need," said Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy for the group.
Bush, however, said: ''Our economy depends on us having the most efficient, reliable transportation system in the world." He spoke at a signing ceremony at a
But ''highways just don't happen," he said. ''People have got to show up and do the work to refit a highway or build a bridge, and they need new equipment to do so. So the bill I'm signing is going to help give hundreds of thousands of Americans good-paying jobs." He described the legislation as ''more than a highway bill; it's also a safety bill."
Joan Claybrook, a longtime auto-safety advocate, agreed. She said the bill's provisions ''could produce the most significant safety enhancement since air bags were required" in the 1991 bill, and will ''save thousands of lives."
The biggest effect, she said, will come from addressing the two deadliest types of accidents, rollover and side-impact crashes, which kill about 20,000 people each year.
The legislation requires the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to create a stability standard designed to prevent rollovers by April 2009 and to update its 34-year-old roof strength standards, Claybrook said.
A critic of the bill was Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, one of only four senators who voted against it. He said the estimated $24 billion directed to special projects was ''egregious."
Material from the Associated Press was included in this report. 
