As a candidate, Barack Obama said he would double the money going to the federal Jobs Access and Reverse Commute program.
What does the program do? In general, buses and minivans give people from low-income neighborhoods rides to areas with jobs. It's called a reverse commute because it typically involves people from the inner city traveling out to the suburbs. This can mean starting new routes in neighborhoods without good access to public transportation or operating existing routes at odd hours, such as late at night or early in the morning.
"We asked for a doubling of the program and we didn't get that," said Mantill Williams, a spokesman for the American Public Transportation Association, a public transit lobbying group.
The program won't even exist soon. The Transportation Department is shifting the money to general urbanized and rural formula grant programs. The change comes as part of Obama signing the transportation bill in July, the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century.
About $165 million went to the Job Access and Reverse Commute program this year. Next year, no money is obligated to go that specific purpose. The two new large grant programs will get $372 million, and job access and reverse commute projects are eligible to receive some of that money.
We weren't sure what that really meant for the core purpose of the original program. Would federal money still pay for transporting low-income people to jobs elsewhere? We called around to transportation lobbying groups who follow the issue closely. They said it would be difficult to know, now that there isn't an explicit "set-aside" program for tracking money going to that purpose.
We also contacted Laraine Vance, the planning division manager for Cobb County Transportation Department near Atlanta, Ga. Cobb County received $600,000 in 2012 for a bus route through the Job Access and Reverse Commute program. Vance was just as in the dark about the long-term implications as everyone else we interviewed.
"We don't know at this point how it would flow down to the recipients," Vance said.
All we know for sure is that the program itself is gone and the projects it funded have become eligible recipients for an even larger pot of federal money, with no guarantee on how much they will actually get. That's a far cry from doubling an existing federal program. We rate this a Promise Broken.