Transportation & Infrastructure
Improving our transportation infrastructure must be a national priority deserving urgent attention – sooner rather than later. Capacity constraints, structurally deficient bridges, deteriorating roads, and locks and dams long past their expected useful life require our full attention as a nation.
Transportation & Infrastructure
Improving our transportation network must be a national priority deserving urgent attention – sooner rather than later. Most of the U.S. transportation system is rural: 74 percent of bridges and 73 percent of roads. Capacity constraints, structurally deficient bridges, deteriorating roads, and locks and dams long past their expected useful life require our full attention as a nation.
Infrastructure investment goes beyond transportation. For example, broadband infrastructure is essential to keeping rural America connected to the world. Broadband represents the critical link that enables agricultural business, teleworking, distance learning, telemedicine and even relocation of businesses to rural areas. Yet millions of rural Americans lack access to even basic broadband speeds that are taken for granted in urban America today. Access to affordable high-speed internet is vital to ensure the future of rural communities and their economies.
Policy Resolutions
- Support modernization of U.S. transportation infrastructure to maintain and enhance U.S. agriculture’s global competitiveness.
- Support legislation to fully fund construction of new locks on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois River System.
- Support efforts and resources necessary to always maintain a nine-foot river channel for river commerce.
- Support improvements in rail capacity, competition, service, and accessibility in rural America.
- Support expansion of key trucking routes on the interstate system.
- Maintain and expand agricultural hours of service exemption.
- Pass long-overdue trucking productivity improvements, including increased allowable weights for hauling agricultural commodities.
- Support policies that promote the construction of pipelines in the United States to accommodate increased domestic energy production, improve the reliability and flexibility of our country’s energy delivery networks and to complement rail lines, highways, and waterways.
- Support measures that facilitate increased U.S. port efficiencies and policies that prevent port disruptions that cause economic harm to agricultural shippers and producers.
- Support streamlining the review and permitting processes through regulatory reforms of such laws as the Endangered Species Act to expedite improvements to infrastructure, avoiding unnecessary delays for long-awaited maintenance, repairs, and new projects.
