December 18, 1996, marked the fifth anniversary of the day President Bush signed ground-breaking legislation known as ISTEA (the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, pronounced "ice tea").
Americans of all ages, in hundreds of communities across the country, now have better mass transit links, cleaner air, historic trails, new bike and pedestrian paths, restored train stations, and improved roads as a result of this innovative law passed by Congress in 1991.
Whereas previous federal transportation laws had restricted transportation solutions to a highways-only approach, ISTEA opened the door for a new era in transportation policy. ISTEA recognized transportation as an integral part of local economies, community development, the environment, historic preservation and mobility for children, the elderly and the disabled.
Through the Federal Transit Administration's Livable Community Initiative, the City of Baltimore will construct a 100-child day care facility and police substation at the Reisterstown Road Plaza Metro subway station, one of Baltimore's busiest subway stations. This project will provide mixed-use development to support and encourage transit ridership, while providing community services to the surrounding neighborhood.
To integrate these new facilities with the transit station, the project will include security lighting, site landscape renovations, kiss-and-ride modifications, customer information and covered walkways. According to Governor Parris Glendening, the "grant is an important part of our efforts to revitalize Baltimore communities....The construction of this day care facility will encourage the use of mass transit by offering additional services to potential riders-we also create safer communities with the addition of the police substation."
This project is indicative of a dramatic change in the way communities are approaching local transportation problems, a change that would have been unthinkable before the passage ISTEA.
In communities throughout Maryland, ISTEA Transportation Enhancement projects have become the catalysts for urban economic and community development. As part of the trend, in Cumberland efforts are underway to halt the exodus of major industrial employers and to help the city and surrounding region reverse its economic decline.
Centered on the western terminus of the historic C&O Canal, a multi-phased project focuses on the newly created Canal Place Enhancement Project, which includes the canal, downtown and the historic neighborhoods of the City of Cumberland. In the first stage of the Canal Place Enhancement Project, a new plaza called Station Square was completed in May of 1994. Other ISTEA-funded projects, including the Western Maryland Railway Station, to be completed in December of 1996, and the Crescent Lawn Improvements, are underway.
The ISTEA Enhancements program has to date funded 66 projects in all parts of the state. Projects range from land acquisitions for the Antietam Battlefield to acquiring historic railroad buildings for the Baltimore City B&O Railroad museum. Twenty-seven pedestrian and bicycle facilities have been or are being built statewide. These include bicycle and pedestrian promenades in several eastern shore towns, bike paths along the Anacostia in Prince George's County, C&O Canal rehabilitation projects, bike paths in Central Maryland, and the retrofitting of sidewalks in many of the state's older urban areas.
In many cases, ISTEA money was used as a match to stretch local and state funds further.
ISTEA has provided the funds to expand and improve bus service through the state, not only in the metropolitan areas but in many of the state's smaller jurisdictions served by local bus systems. New buses, some with alternative fuel sources, have been purchased to provide cleaner fueled vehicles, thus helping to improve the states air quality and provide alternative to those with and without cars.
And amidst current debates about how much EPA's recently proposed guidelines for reducing air pollution would cost, ISTEA has already targeted transportation funds into areas that desperately need to clean up their dirty air. Both the Washington and Baltimore regions have used ISTEA to replace and expand their bus fleets.
ISTEA's innovations have thankfully left their mark here in Maryland. ISTEA has provided greater public participation, better funding for alternatives, and new programs to reduce air pollution.
Yet as we celebrate ISTEA's fifth birthday and Americans stand poised at the crossroads, ready to enter a new era of creative solutions to our nation's transportation problems, all is not well.
The law is due to expire in 1997 and must be reauthorized by the 105th Congress. Powerful interests, most notably the highway lobby as well as state bureaucrats, have been forced to share their power under ISTEA-something they haven't been too happy about. It would have been much easier to just keep doing what they were doing-building new highways-without getting local governments and the general public involved.
Several proposals soon to be considered by Congress would undo nearly all the beneficial provisions in ISTEA, turning back the clock by once again restricting state and local governments solely to investment in highways, thereby denying Americans the ability to choose among affordable alternatives .
Meeting the increasingly complex transportation demands of the 21st century will require vision, creativity and collaboration. ISTEA has started by providing affordable choices and greater local community control: an essential foundation from which to begin.
So from all of us whose benefited, and from the thousands who may not even know that you're the reason: happy birthday ISTEA. Here's hoping it's not your last.

Mr. Clarke is transportation chair of the Sierra Club Maryland Chapter.