Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Constrained by Paul Ryan’s budget and the sequester, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation and HUD passed a $44 billion spending bill for 2014 – 15 percent lower than 2013 enacted levels. The bill contains $15.3 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department of Transportation, also 15 percent below enacted 2013 levels and amounting to about two-thirds of the president’s request. It passed the subcommitee this morning on a voice vote.

Rep. David Price (D-NC): "Are we totally helpless here?"

The budget would eliminate both TIGER and high-speed rail funding (as have all House-passed budgets in recent memory), cut Amtrak’s subsidy by a third, and bring HUD’s Community Development Block Grants back to Ford administration levels. While the cuts are steep, as in past years they are unlikely to be enacted, given Democratic control of the Senate.

At today’s markup, even subcommittee chair Tom Latham (R-IA) admitted that cutting $7.7 billion was “extremely challenging” and “not an easy task.” No other Republican spoke at all. While Latham’s official statement upon the introduction of the bill said that it was crafted “in a bipartisan fashion,” he admitted during the markup that he could thank Ranking Member Ed Pastor only for good “communication” rather than “cooperation” on the bill, since the top committee Democrat wasn’t “a huge fan of the product.”

Across the board, Democrats disavowed the bill and the process that begat it. While many acknowledged that Latham had received “an impossible allocation” from Rep. Paul Ryan’s Budget Committee, Democrats made it clear that the 15 percent cut was “unacceptable.” The appropriation is $4.4 billion lower than the amount allowed by the sequester.

Nita Lowey, ranking member of the full Appropriations Committee, said this budget “impairs the economic recovery,” and Illinois Democrat Mike Quigley said the bill “defies financial common sense,” not to mention the committee’s “moral obligations” to preserve the social safety net. David Price of North Carolina said it was “a grossly inadequate bill” that goes “way beyond the normal range of disagreements and difficulties with appropriations.” He mused that it could be “the twilight of the appropriations process.”

“I’ve never known us to be in this kind of institutional crisis,” Price said. “Are we totally helpless here? I know that’s what we hear, that we’re boxed in by sequestration, that we’re boxed in by the absence of a budget agreement.”

Price suggested the need for leadership “perhaps outside the conventional channels,” implying that they, the appropriators — who understand better than anyone the damaging cuts that are necessitated by such an austere budget — need to take the reins back from the deficit hawks in the Budget Committee.

Highway and transit programs maintain their MAP-21-authorized levels of $41 billion and $8.6 billion, respectively, in the appropriations bill. That represents a $557 million increase for highways over this year. These programs come out of the Highway Trust Fund and so aren’t included in the appropriations bill’s top-line numbers.

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It’s been six months since Lisa Jackson announced she was stepping down as chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, but there’s still no replacement. President Obama nominated Gina McCarthy to be Jackson’s successor in early March, and the Senate EPW Committee confirmed the nomination almost a month ago – albeit by a party-line vote of 10-8.

Gina McCarthy will infuse the EPA with a smart growth ethic -- if Republicans ever let her nomination proceed to a vote.

Committee Republicans boycotted her confirmation hearing but submitted an astounding quantity of questions for her to answer – more than a thousand of them, almost two-thirds from Ranking Member David Vitter. She responded to every single one, but Vitter still claims that the EPA is withholding information. He said this week he’ll delay the vote until the EPA can provide justification for some of its regulations.

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt is joining Vitter in holding up the nomination for his own reasons, something to do with a dispute over a quarter-mile gap in a levee in his state.

The pity of it is that McCarthy has the chops to be an excellent EPA administrator. She comes from the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, which oversees air quality issues. But before that, she left an impressive smart growth legacy in New England – including a significant stint during the progressive and forward-thinking part of Mitt Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts.

Romney was the fifth Massachusetts governor McCarthy worked for, and he promoted her to undersecretary for policy at the Executive Office for Environmental Affairs. That office was merged with the state departments of housing, transportation, and energy to form the Office for Commonwealth Development – a precursor to President Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities – and Romney picked McCarthy to be its deputy secretary of operations.

According to a Mother Jones article from last year, environmentalists in the state enthusiastically praised McCarthy’s performance in the role, calling her “terrific — plainspoken, smart, and very aggressive.” The office used state funds to support compact and transit-oriented development, implemented a far-reaching Climate Protection Plan that sought to reduce emissions enough to “eliminate any dangerous threat to the climate,” and crafted a 20-year Strategic Transportation Plan that focused on transit.

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A new transportation plan put forward by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory will make it “almost impossible to find money for passenger trains, sidewalks, bicycles and regional transit,” according to the Raleigh News Observer.

Why is North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory trying to torpedo plans for transit in the "Golden Triangle?" Image: Wikipedia

McCrory’s Strategic Mobility Formula will clear the way for more spending on the state’s highway system, designating about 40 percent of the state’s transportation money for projects of statewide importance (big highways, airports and freight rail only). Another 30 percent will be divided between seven regions of the state. Projects eligible for this smaller pot of money would include “second-tier” highways and ferries, but no transit and no Amtrak, reports the News Observer’s “Road Worrier” Bruce Siceloff.

Siceloff adds that the governor’s plan might torpedo a rail “triangle” between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill:

It creates new barriers that appear likely to kill prospects for money to build greenways or upgrade Amtrak service.

Also in jeopardy are Triangle plans – endorsed by Durham and Orange residents who have voted to increase their local sales taxes – for light-rail lines and rush-hour commuter trains that could eventually reach beyond the region as far as Greensboro and Goldsboro.

McCrory — who helped secure funds for Charlotte’s Lynx light rail system when he served as mayor — has also obstructed the city’s streetcar plans.

It’s something of a mystery why McCrory has become such a dogged transit opponent. Jeff Wood at the Overhead Wire speculates that there are greater political rewards for McCrory in supporting sprawl, since certain individuals stand to profit from some $3 billion in road projects for the Charlotte region, and big-ticket transit projects are seen as competition.

According to the News Observer, state legislators will vote on McCrory’s plan “in the next week or so.”

The FHWA applies the same design standards to city streets as to suburban arterial roads.

The Federal Highway Administration classifies roads as either “rural” or “urbanized.” But the “urbanized” label is deceptive, because it applies suburban street design standards to any street that isn’t rural. So if you live in, say, downtown St. Louis, the FHWA applies the same standards to your streets as to the streets in Orlando’s most distant suburbs. This contributes to a horrendous mismatch: Many city streets where walking should take precedence are in fact designed for moving massive amounts of traffic.

Now there’s a petition drive underway to change that. John Massengale, Victor Dover, and Richard Hall — a team of planners and architects that are involved with the Congress for New Urbanism — are circulating asking U.S. DOT to develop more city-friendly standards.

The trio recommends establishing separate standards for urban and suburban streets, introducing new priorities that place pedestrians first on city streets. From their letter to U.S. DOT:

The new standards for Urban Areas would be fundamentally different than the current Urbanized standards. Two-way streets, narrow traffic lanes, bicycle sharrows, and a prohibition on slip lanes and turn lanes would be the norm. In large cities, faster urban routes might be limited to broad boulevards and parkways. Small-town residential streets and Main Streets would be similarly transformed, according to their context.

The team calls their proposal a “simple but powerful idea could transform America’s streets and make our neighborhoods, cities and towns more walkable.” As of this afternoon, the petition needs only about 60 signatures to reach the goal of 500 supporters.

Cleveland’s business leaders want you to know that “The Opportunity Corridor” — a new road they want to jam through the city’s southeast side — definitely isn’t a highway. From the beginning, project proponents have been careful to refer to this $350 million, three-mile traffic-mover as a “boulevard.” And they also want you to faithfully accept that this is really all about “opportunity” for the neighborhoods the road will bisect — some of the poorest in the region — not the benefit of suburban car commuters.

This roughly three-mile road would cost $350 million and displace nearly 100 families in Cleveland. Image: ODOT Click to enlarge.

For more than 10 years, business leaders in greater Cleveland have been pursuing this grand plan for a road to connect the suburban freeway system with the University Circle neighborhood, a major regional center of employment and home of the Cleveland Clinic. Their proposal — led by the Greater Cleveland Partnership, Cleveland’s chamber of commerce — is an at-grade, 35 mile-per-hour, three-mile road with a series of stoplights. The cost is more than $100 million per mile.

When it comes to marketing this road, proponents are laying it on thick. They’re currently preparing a video that hails the new wave of prosperity it will usher into some of Cleveland’s most troubled neighborhoods. The co-chair of the project, Terry Eggars, is publisher of the local newspaper, the Plain Dealer, and the paper’s editorial board is one of the project’s most consistent cheerleaders.

Underlying the euphemisms and optimistic assessments, however, is the reality that this project is basically a high-speed traffic conveyor that will gouge a path through poor, African American neighborhoods by use of eminent domain — something that modern planners and city leaders generally frown upon, with good reason. Some 90 homes are slated for demolition, and more than half a dozen businesses — this is in a city that’s having enough trouble hanging on to its residents.

While project proponents downplay the displacement issue, the equity concerns go much deeper. Environmental Health Watch reports that 22 percent of African American children living on Cleveland’s east side suffer from asthma, and about 8 percent require hospitalization for the illness. In most of the neighborhoods the road will cut through, a majority of households don’t own cars. The project contains no money for transit, though it does include an off-street path for walking and biking.

Some of the most affected communities along the route sense that this is another grand development scheme at their expense. Before it was called the “Opportunity Corridor,” the project was known as the “Access to University Circle” project. Local writer Mansfield Frazier reported overhearing one resident say at a community meeting, “Yeah, this is an opportunity all right … an opportunity for white folks to get to work and not have to see any black folks.”

Akshai Singh, an organizer with the local chapter of the Sierra Club, points out that there are already six routes to the Cleveland Clinic from the beginning of the proposed “Opportunity Corridor” at East 55th. And many of them are in a state of disrepair, he says. Singh acknowledges there’s a “bottleneck” where the freeway currently ends at East 55th, but he says there are lower cost ways to remedy that. He’s not sure why Cleveland’s business and political leaders are so committed to this one approach.

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On Thursday, U.S. DOT announced the 47 people who will make up the new Freight Advisory Committee, tasked with coming up with a cohesive, strategic vision around freight movement in the United States. Freight crosses state lines and travels on every mode imaginable, but there is no national agency to coordinate all this movement of goods, resulting in a chaotic and fragmented approach divided among several decision-making bodies. With any luck, the new advisory committee will attach some smart national priorities to freight movement and set policy accordingly.

California Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal is just one of the 47 members of the U.S. DOT Freight Advisory Committee that gets high marks from transportation reformers. Photo: Everything Long Beach

If controlled by the existing modal agencies within U.S. DOT, the conversation about freight can too easily work backwards: deciding first that the solution is highways, for example, and then figuring out how to match that with the problem. Shipping freight by rail and inland waterways can often be a far more efficient and less polluting way to move goods, while taking trucks off congested roadways.

The committee will also have to avoid the pitfalls that come with the expansion of the Panama Canal and the supposed freight “tsunami” that is going to come crashing down on U.S. shores. While all of the country’s west coast ports can already handle bigger ships, many east coast ports are in panic mode, worried that they either need to spend millions on dredging or get left behind. If these decisions are left to the states, there will be a lot of unnecessary spending. But if decisions can be made with national priorities in mind, the country can decide which – if any – east coast ports need to be deepened and save the money on the rest. With any luck, the people named to the U.S. DOT freight advisory committee will be dispassionate enough to make those calls.

And there’s good reason to think they’ll make smart calls. The committee includes many advocates for multimodalism and livability. “[It’s] nice to see some solid academics and advocates in here, that states are represented by more than just DOTs, and that cities are so strongly represented,” said Deron Lovaas of NRDC. “This stacks the group strongly in favor of robust debate and balanced recommendations. I hope their deliberations capitalize on this good setup.”

Joshua Schank of the Eno Center for Transportation agreed that it is a “very impressive group,” while adding that it is “a bit heavy on existing stakeholders” — shipping companies and trade groups who represent the freight industry. He said that while “real change demands an outside, more objective presence from groups that do not stand to benefit from DOT decisions,” stakeholder buy-in is necessary to “move the ball.”

To pull out a few of the brightest stars:

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard was an unexpected favorite at this year’s National Bike Summit. A Republican, Ballard created the city’s first Office of Sustainability ever and is working to bring bike-share to the city. He’s not the only person representing cities on this panel: Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton, and Stacey Hodge from NYCDOT all bring an urban perspective. Anyone else putting together a big panel on freight might load it full of state DOT heads, but U.S. DOT only named two: Ann Schneider of Illinois DOT and Mike Tooley from Montana.

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The answer to that question is: Probably not. Reps. Daniel Lipinski, a Democrat from Chicago, and Michael Grimm, a Republican representing Staten Island and a little slice of Brooklyn, announced their new transit-focused Congressional caucus just last week, and this week the House has been in recess.

Rep. Lipinski, pictured here between Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Illinois DOT Secretary Gary Hannig on a Metra train, has formed a Public Transportation Caucus in the House. Photo: CREATE

But according to Lipinski spokesperson Guy Tridgell, there has been interest from other lawmakers, and Lipinski and Grimm will be reaching out to colleagues in the coming weeks to recruit more membership.

Rep. Lipinski is well-known for his support for transit and complete streets. He fought hard against the GOP effort to strip transit out of the Highway Trust Fund in 2012 and has been pushing hard to get more frequent service on the Metra commuter line that runs through his district. Lipinski is also a big believer in federal support for bike and pedestrian projects like Safe Routes to School.

Lipinski is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee but doesn’t serve on the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, serving instead on both Railroads and Aviation.

Congressional caucuses don’t have any formal duties, but Tridgell said the Public Transportation Caucus will be an active one. Aside from engaging on any issue that arises in the House, Tridgell said it will focus on state of good repair for transit systems. Though caucuses don’t hold hearings like committees do, Tridgell said the Public Transportation Caucus would gather input from stakeholders, including riders, employers, transit operators, business community.

Rep. Grimm is one of a small handful of Republicans to publicly support transit. He represents the only borough of New York not connected to the city’s subway system. By New York standards, Staten Island is fairly car-dependent, but by the standards of most of the country’s Republican districts, it’s a transit paradise.

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In the 1990s, Wisconsin proposed a bypass for the town of Burlington (population 10,000). The $118 million project was sold as a way to reduce traffic in the center of the city, which includes the junction of four state highways.

Driving is declining in Wisconsin, but the state's highway budget is growing. Image: WisPIRG Road Overkill

The 11-mile highway opened in 2010. But traffic never lived up to the projections WisDOT offered to justify it. Today, traffic volumes are 33 to 36 percent below forecasts, reports the Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group [PDF]. WisPIRG says that by 2010, WisDOT officials projected about 11,000 cars would travel the road daily, but actual counts in 2011 were between 7,000 and 7,400.

WisPIRG examined seven major highway projects undertaken by the state of Wisconsin over the last two decades at a public cost of more than $1 billion. The group found that WisDOT consistently overstated the case for expanding highways.

On U.S. Highway 41 in Marinette and Oconto counties — which underwent a $180 million expansion, converting a two-lane country road into a four-lane highway with three bypasses — traffic volumes were projected to increase 35 to 71 percent by 2025. But by 2012, actual traffic counts were still below what they were expected to be five years prior, in 2007.

The state completed the $109 million expansion of State Highway 64 in St. Croix in 2006, anticipating traffic volumes would increase 75 to 101 percent on sections of the road by 2016. So far traffic counts have been far below expectations, edging up only 21 and 56 percent, respectively.

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Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx’s Senate hearing was, by all accounts, the one “oasis of calm” on an otherwise stormy Capitol Hill yesterday. There were no sharp exchanges, no tense moments, not even any particularly tough questions. Two weeks from today, we’ll probably be calling him “Mister Secretary.”

Foxx enjoyed smooth sailing through his confirmation hearing yesterday in the Senate and is expected to be confirmed at the beginning of June.

Cabinet nominees often spend all their time on the witness stand at these hearings dodging questions, saying they’ll “look into that and get back to you.” But Foxx gave some real answers. He was well-informed and confident, and when senators asked him how he would handle thorny issues like funding constraints and modal silos, Foxx reassured them that he had ably handled the same issues as mayor.

TIGER. Foxx spoke with authority about TIGER, having managed TIGER grants in Charlotte that he felt did a lot of good. The city got $18 million in 2011 for additional power substations and extended platforms at three stations on its expanded light rail Blue Line. Foxx said that constraints of formula funding had hindered them from building the platforms right the first time, and it was a testament to TIGER’s flexibility and multimodalism that it was able to step in and fill that gap.

Funding. Senators seemed determined to try to scare Foxx by reminding him of the funding emergency confronting the department, but he remained sanguine. He didn’t show his hand about what solutions he had in mind — and it’s Congress’s decision anyway — but he indicated that they’ll have to “think outside the box,” as his predecessor, Ray LaHood, liked to say. To his credit, Foxx did not follow Obama’s line and promise to pay for transportation with war savings.

He also had a very reasonable response to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) who asked him to make sure that the sequester and any future spending cuts be implemented with a minimal amount of pain to consumers, targeting only “waste, fraud and abuse.” Foxx refused to take the bait. He said that, certainly, they would seek to minimize pain, but there would be some. If lawmakers are going to continue to cut programs, they can’t fool themselves into thinking that there won’t be consequences.

Tolling. Foxx indicated he would continue the current policy of allowing tolling only on new federally-funded roads to pay for their construction — not on existing roads to pay for their maintenance. He said tolling “has a place” but “we’re not going to toll our way to prosperity.” Maybe not, but it sure could help. Allowing state DOT’s to toll existing interstates — something many agencies want to do — could result in wringing more efficiency out of the transportation network without building expensive new infrastructure.

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4:29: Hearing adjourned. Rockefeller: “I adjourn this hearing on the supposition that you will ride the fast rail right into the secretaryship.”

4:27: Thune: We also can’t continue to borrow from general fund to fund highways. Either we need to find a way to pay for it or we need to cut our appetites. Can’t just keep borrowing from our children and grandchildren.  I hope you and the president will lead and put specific ideas on the table. Infrastructure is important. Best way to avoid deficits and debt is to grow the economy.

4:23: Rockefeller: We’re going to have to spend money and no one wants to talk about it. Because as soon as you talk about it, your opponents will find someone to run against you. You have to goad us. If you can’t do something because you don’t have the money to do it, tell us. Express your frustration. Safety inspections, next-gen shouldn’t be sacrificed because we don’t have the money.

4:22: Rockefeller is on a roll, but I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Now talking about hospital bathrooms and the international space station (re: MRSA). He’s already ordered Foxx not to respond to what he’s saying. He’s very poetic but sort of rambly.

4:20 Rockefeller: “I want you to be a good secretary of transportation. And you can’t do that without revenue.” Your predecessor just went around saying whatever he wanted. Great to talk about infrastructure bank, but private sector will invest if federal government does.

4:16: Rockefeller: Fear of next primary is destroying the country. You’re being told to eliminate all rules and regulations, don’t do any tolls, raise no revenues — by simply avoiding waste, fraud and abuse. Hypocrisy. “You can’t minimize yourself into greatness.”

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