U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow issued the following statement on the Build America Investment Initiative announced Thursday by President Obama:

"The president has repeatedly demonstrated that our infrastructure challenges have his full attention, and today we see again that his administration is devoting careful thought to how we tackle these problems.

"The sizable funding obstacles make transportation infrastructure an incredibly thorny political issue, and that means the solutions need to be innovative and forward-thinking. The Build America Investment Initiative is that in spades.

“Mobilizing the private sector to engage the infrastructure dilemma, as part of a balanced and comprehensive fiscal strategy, is exactly what the doctor ordered. The travel community fully supports the president's plan, we thank him for his initiative, and we're eager to work with him as this issue moves ahead.

"It used to be that we treated travel issues and transportation issues as separate and distinct, and travel businesses were content to leave surface funding questions to organizations like the truckers and road builders. We realized in recent years that we simply cannot afford to sit on the sidelines without the force of America’s travel community active in the debate.

“We have seen an abundance of alarming evidence that Americans are consciously choosing to move around less because of hassles related to infrastructure decay, and that is just unacceptable for the U.S. economy. Thankfully, this president has been a reliable ally in these challenges."

SOURCE: U.S. Travel Association press release