Highway background, but at least she mention railways in the press release…
dd
From an AP story:
WASHINGTON — President Bush on Tuesday chose Mary Peters, a former federal highway administrator, to succeed Norman Mineta as secretary of transportation.
The president announced the nomination at a White House ceremony as Peters stood alongside him.
“She’s going to make an outstanding secretary of transporation,” Bush said, urging the Senate to rapidly approve her nomination.
“It is a job that requires vision and strong leadership,” the president said. “Mary Peters is the right person for this job. She brings a lifetime of experience on transportation issues from both the private and the public sectors.”
Peters said that if confirmed, she would try to improve a transportation infrastructure that is showing signs of aging.
“We are experiencing increasing congestion on our nation’s highways, railways, airports and seaports and we’re robbing our nation of productivity and our citizens of quality time with their families,” Peters said. “In some cases this is the result of systems and structures that are more suited to a bygone era than to the 21st century.”
Well, hopefully she will realize that a good way to save the roads and freeways in this nation would be to encourage rail transport. Hopefully. She better hurry, she only has two years left.
You are both asking an awful lot of a career ploitician[civil servant], and expecting too much, too fast ,from our Washington governmental structure. Possibly the best we can hope for is that they do not upset the status quo.
I’m not expecting miracles. DOT is three very tall silos, each separately containing Air, Highway and Railroads. The Waterways silo is over on a separate farm. It has been that way from DOT day One and NO administration in its history has done anything to make DOT view our transportation resources as an integrated system.
While I agree that two years is way too short to get anything of substance accomplished, I think a highway person at the top with some recognition of the interrelationship among modes may actually get a little more done than a railroad person. A railroad person might be viewed by many in Congress as somebody just trying to take money away from highways to dump in a favorite and “obselete” mode of transport.