When U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters came to Atlanta Tuesday to unveil the Bush administration's plan to pay for transportation, she touched on federal funding reform, private investments in roads and replacing the outmoded gas tax.

"Without a doubt our federal approach to transportation is absolutely broken, and no amount of tweaking, adjusting, or adding new layers on top will make things better," Peters said.

At a press conference and in a meeting with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution afterward, she laid out a proposal to streamline the U.S. Department of Transportation's funding programs.

Among other things, reform means Congress must stop earmarking funds for pet projects, she said. The agency's 102 funding programs would be replaced by eight core groups.

Mass transit and environmental groups got busy Tuesday trying to figure out if that means shifting more dollars into roads. U.S. DOT officials said mass transit could benefit from the reorganization.

Federal grant programs, which helped fund Georgia Regional Transit Authority express buses, would disappear. Instead, Peters and her aides said, such projects would vie with road projects and others for a larger pot of money available to metropolitan areas.

William Mecke, a spokesman for GRTA, said officials there hadn't had time to digest the proposal. But, he said, grant money "definitely has been a big part of what we do and we're obviously going to have to look carefully at what comes out of this in the end."

Tyler Duvall, an aide to Peters, said that good mass transit programs, like good road programs, will still get funded, and the program would start requiring highways to undergo cost-benefit analyses.

Congress is due next year to renew the multi-year transportation funding bill. Peters acknowledged that the current proposal will fall to the mercies of the next president and Congress.

Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minnesota), chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said in a statement that the ideas were "uninspired and uninspiring."

Oberstar said the plan, presented during the administration's "waning months," reminded him of "the dead hand, reaching out from the past to affect the future."

Peters proposal emphasizes increasing private investment in public roads. It also includes a greatly expanded version of the Urban Partnership Agreements. Under that program, cities competed for a pot of federal funds for projects where tolls rise with congestion. Atlanta's proposal for HOV toll lanes on I-85 in Gwinnett County lost that competition, but the state is re-working the proposal, and Peters said she discussed it with state officials Tuesday.

The federal gasoline tax is a hot topic in transportation circles and Peterson weighed in while she was here.

The tax is no longer adequate to fund transportation, but political lines break down around what to do about it. It is charged as cents per gallon, not cents per dollar and so doesn't rise with inflation.

Some experts say Congress needs to raise the tax to keep up with inflation; Peters disagrees.

She said a new source of funding is a better answer.

In a shift from previous remarks to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Peters said that if the gas tax were replaced with something more modern like a cents-per-mile odometer charge, she might support making that rise with inflation.

Researchers have tested technology that downloads a driver's driving history at the pump, so they pay tax on the miles they drive rather than the gas they buy.