Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Tomorrow, a Senate panel will vote on two budget bills for FY2012, one of which is for transportation and housing programs. The draft of the bill isn’t available until after the subcommittee markup tomorrow, but Smart Growth America is calling attention to the fact that it’s important to make sure the bill includes funding for the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the partnership between USDOT, the EPA, and HUD.

Normal, Illinois' multimodal transportation center, funded with a TIGER grant from the Partnership. Image: Normal, Illinois

Through the partnership, the three agencies have coordinated transportation and land use policy to a greater extent than they did before, helping to curb sprawl and promote smart growth. This partnership has taken the federal agencies out of their “stovepipe” mentality and encouraged efficiency and collaboration at an unprecedented level. Why would lawmakers who want to reduce inefficiencies and waste in the federal government want to cut a program that has been so effective at doing just that?

Last fall, Mariia Zimmerman from HUD told Streetsblog that the Partnership has standardized guidelines to make it easier to apply for grants and eliminated some areas of inefficiency, overlap, and even direct contradiction among the agencies. But perhaps more importantly, she said the Partnership has transformed all of HUD, incorporating a focus on sustainability in all of the agency’s work.

A vote of support from the Senate would mean a lot to the Partnership, which saw its funding stripped in the House proposal for next year’s budget. But the Partnership isn’t the only potential casualty of the House plan: Highway and transit funding each get slashed by 34 percent, TIGER and TIGGER grants are cut entirely, high-speed rail gets nothing, the New Starts transit program gets slashed, and Amtrak is left gasping for air. If the Senate subcommittee doesn’t vote to save funding for these programs tomorrow, they have no chance.

See the Smart Growth America action alert for more information.

In about an hour, Congressional appropriators will vote on how much money to allocate for transportation in the next fiscal year. It won’t be pretty.

This smiling man (THUD Chair Tom Latham) is getting ready to take the axe to prized livability programs. Photo: Iowa Independent

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) is planning deep cuts to many programs, some reminiscent of House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s notorious budget proposal, which wanted to slash transportation spending by about a third.

The subcommittee is led by Iowa Republican Tom Latham, whom we profiled when he took the gavel. At the time, we were worried he would end up cutting important livability programs, and here he is, doing exactly that.

At least transit and highway spending share the pain, both getting cut the same 34 percent. Highway funding goes from about $41 billion to $27 billion; transit funding (excluding New Starts) goes from $8.3 billion to $5.3 billion.

Bizarrely, the bill regresses to a pre-cooperation era and returns to the age of agency silos. One great accomplishment of the Obama administration has been the Sustainable Communities Partnership which joined USDOT, HUD and the EPA to work together on common development programs, planning inexorably linked programs of housing and transportation in conjunction with each other, and in consultation with the environmental regulator. But the appropriations bill prohibits HUD from using any funding for anything related to the Partnership.

In his excellent analysis of the dismal news, Transportation for America’s Stephen Lee Davis also delivers this blow: the innovative TIGER grants, TIGGER grants and high-speed rail programs are cut entirely. And more, Davis writes:
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This morning, President Obama announced that he would direct the EPA to back off of new ozone standards that would have saved an estimated 12,000 lives [PDF]. They’ll revisit it in 2013.

Get used to it.

Obama said the action was taken in the interest of “reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover,” but environmental groups slammed the decision as “a huge win for corporate polluters,” in the words of League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski.

NRDC President Frances Beinecke said, “The Clean Air Act clearly requires the Environmental Protection Agency to set protective standards against smog — based on science and the law. The White House now has polluted that process with politics.” Sen. Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said she was “disappointed” with the decision.

The decision has a major impact on efforts to reform transportation, NRDC’s Deron Lovaas told Streetsblog.

“It frankly makes our job harder, in terms of reducing pollution from mobile sources,” Lovaas said. “If they had set the standard closer to 60 parts per billion, as opposed to 80, regions and states would have to get really serious about transit, and really serious about smart growth, and really serious about reducing vehicle miles traveled, because the gains couldn’t all be made through better technology.”

Business interests had long lobbied against the tighter standards, and they expressed their pleasure at the president’s announcement. The Chamber of Commerce cheered the move, rationalizing that by waiting for the statutorily-required rule-making in 2013, the EPA “can base its decision on the most recent science, not 2006 science.”

According to the National Review, some Republicans had called the ozone requirements “the single most harmful regulation proposed by the administration” and estimated that the total cost of implementation would have been “at least $1 trillion over a decade and millions of jobs.” House Speaker John Boehner called Obama’s concession to polluters “a good first step” and said he was glad the White House “recognized the job-killing impact of this particular regulation.”

Did we mention it would have saved 12,000 lives?

The results of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission's performance monitoring program. Source: EPA

In the vein of several other recent reports that have highlighted significant transportation reforms that can be made now, with or without a reauthorization bill, the EPA has published guidelines for states and MPOs to make livability plans a reality [PDF]. They illustrate how using performance metrics can lead to better-designed transportation networks, especially when it comes to livability.

The EPA focuses on 12 important indicators that transportation agencies should be measuring:

• Transit accessibility
• Bicycle and pedestrian mode share
• Vehicle miles traveled per capita
• Carbon intensity
• Mixed land uses
• Transportation affordability
• Distribution of benefits by income group
• Land consumption
• Bicycle and pedestrian activity and safety
• Bicycle and pedestrian level of service
• Average vehicle occupancy
• Transit productivity

The EPA recommends a range of tools familiar to urban planners and reformers, like scenario planning and performance monitoring.

It acknowledges in the fine print that in some places, lack of data is still an obstacle to adequate performance measurement – especially on issues that DOTs are less likely to invest in, like bicycle mode share. Meanwhile, everyone collects data on VMT, for example. And when San Francisco established their performance measures through a planning process like the ones recommended by the EPA, they discovered just how far they were from their objective — even if they put ideal conditions in place:

San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Commission measures VMT per Capita under Investment and Policy Scenarios. Source: EPA

You don’t decide to start measuring transit access through long-range planning and corridor studies without having a goal in mind, though, and the EPA has several. It seeks to “protect natural  resources, improve public health, strengthen energy security, expand the economy, and provide  mobility to disadvantaged people”  by improving states’ accountability for making sure these livability measures are implemented.

Speaking of transit access: the guidelines get specific about how to measure access, explaining that access is determined by establishing how many jobs, residents, trip  origins, or trip destinations are within a ¼- to ½-mile radius of a transit  stop. And getting even more detailed, the EPA spells out exactly what those measurements should be:

• Share of population with good transit-­job accessibility (100,000+ jobs within 45 minutes).
• Number of households within a 30-minute transit ride of major employment centers.
• Percentage of work and education trips accessible in less than 30 minutes transit travel time.
• Percentage of workforce that can reach their workplace by transit within one hour with no more than one transfer.

Determining success in mixing land uses is a little more complex. It goes a little something like this:

Source: EPA

Follow all that? Yeah, me neither.

Performance measures, as a tool for getting the most value out of what we spend, are working their way into the mainstream discourse on transportation, embraced (at least rhetorically) by both sides. Planning, on the other hand, is still seen by many conservatives as the occupation of coneheaded urbanists, always trying to rein in man’s wild nature (which, I suppose, is to drive SUVs in exurbia).

Getting specific about how planning can be used to hold government accountable for its spending – and how those tools can help improve out health, economy, and environment, as well as our traffic throughput – could be a big step forward for transportation reform, even if Congress never passes a reauthorization bill. And by the looks of it, “never” sounds about as reasonable a timeline as anything else.

For much of this week, the House has been debating next year’s appropriations bill for Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. The bill includes harsh cuts to many key safety and environmental programs, including the EPA’s Smart Growth Office. According to the Obama administration’s statement of policy on the bill, “The bill terminates funding for EPA’s Smart Growth program, which contributes to efforts to assist communities in coordinating infrastructure investments and minimizing environmental impact of development.”

San Francisco's Mint Plaza won an EPA Smart Growth award last year. Photo: SF Weekly

Smart Growth America opposes the cut, calling it “shortsighted” and saying it would be “detrimental to economic growth.” According to SGA:

The EPA’s smart growth programs assist communities on a diversity of projects, like creating a range of housing and transportation choices for residents and workers, growing local economies, protecting the environment and public health, and improving local infrastructure. For example, the rural communities of Driggs and Victor in Idaho received a Smart Growth Implementation Assistance award to help identify steps to redevelop their downtown economies. Hundreds of other communities across the country have received similar assistance under the smart growth program, but these economically vital efforts would come to an end under the House legislation.

Four Democrats sent a letter to their House colleagues yesterday asking them to oppose the cuts.

“The program, with its voluntary, market-driven approach, has directly assisted communities across the country, helping them increase economic development, protect the environment and public health, improve their infrastructure, and ensure efficient use of government services,” the letter stated. “The Smart Growth programs face such high demand that they are only able to help 9 percent of current applicants.”

The House has been voting on amendments for the past few days, essentially approving further cuts and rejecting anything that would restore funding.

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With multiple versions of two years’ worth of federal budgets flying around, some details are still emerging about what’s in and what’s out. At the end of last week we heard that the FY2011 budget, which has been sent to the president for his signature, includes $100 million for the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. According to HUD Sustainable Communities Director Shelley Poticha, the partnership was allocated $70 million for regional planning grants ($17.5 million is slated for regions with populations of less than 500,000) and $30 million for Community Challenge planning grants.

Chicago's GO TO 2040 plan to link transportation, land use, and economic development was awarded a $4.25 million Regional Planning grant from HUD last October. Image: CMAP

That’s still a significant reduction from the $150 million the partnership had last year, but in this time of shrinking budgets, it’s a lot more than some livability advocates feared. If the Sustainable Communities program had been killed in this budget, it would have been all the more difficult to revive it for inclusion in the upcoming reauthorization of the transportation bill.

The president wants to keep the partnership going, and indeed, within the administration and among reformers, the funding for the partnership is seen as a money-saver, consolidating duplicative agency programs, cutting through red tape, and using outcome-based metrics to identify and fund effective projects. Still, it’s an administration program labeled “livability” and was, therefore, extremely vulnerable to the GOP ax.

The Partnership for Sustainable Communities is the name for the coordination among DOT, EPA, and HUD to promote planning and infrastructure investment according to their six tenets of livability: transportation choices, affordable housing, economic competitiveness, support for existing communities, coordination of federal policies and investing in healthy communities. The two planning grant programs, which are funded and managed out of HUD, are a centerpiece of the entire partnership. The other main part of it, TIGER, is run through the DOT and also saw the bulk of its funding — the lion’s share of TIGER, if you will – preserved (perhaps somewhat surprisingly, in the current budget bill), suffering only a 12 percent cut.

Meanwhile, transit capital funding (the FTA’s New Starts program) was reduced by about a quarter, high-speed rail was zeroed out completely, Amtrak took about a 10 percent hit, and TIGGER (a greenhouse gas reduction program for transit) got cut from $75 million to $50 million.

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Where we live has an enormous impact on energy use, according to new research commissioned by the EPA. The report, “Location Efficiency and Housing Type — Boiling It Down to BTUs” finds that Americans use far less energy if they live in an apartment building in a transit-oriented neighborhood than if they live in a detached suburban house, even if that house has green building features and sports fuel-efficient cars in the driveway.

When it comes to this report, a picture’s worth a thousand words. As the graph above shows, the biggest energy efficiency gains come from living in transit-oriented neighborhoods.

A household living in a single family detached house located in a typical sprawl development uses an average of 240 million BTU (British Thermal Units, a unit of energy output) of energy a year, while the same household would only use 147 million BTU if the exact same house were located in a compact neighborhood. Make that single family house an apartment and energy use is down to 93 million BTU.

“While energy efficiency measures in homes and vehicles can make a notable improvement in consumption, the impact is considerably less dramatic than the gains possible offered by housing type and location efficiency,” the authors write. The ideal solution, of course, is to combine smart growth with green technology.

The report serves as a high-level rebuke to those who dismiss the importance of smart growth for curbing energy use, a point of view that was reinforced by a recent report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. While putting a stop to the country’s many sprawl-inducing policies may not be easy, the EPA’s numbers show it’s necessary.

The House Appropriations Committee voted last night to move ahead with deep spending cuts, totaling $32 billion, to the remainder of the FY2011 budget. It’s still not the $100 billion the GOP wanted to cut, and some committee Republicans voted no, saying the cuts were still too small.

Appropriation Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) proposes to cut $224 million from Amtrak -- still less than some Republicans wanted to cut. Photo: Politico

Tell that to Americorps volunteers, who will see their entire program eliminated, along with the entire federal allocation for public broadcasting and family planning and about 60 other government programs, according to the Associated Press. The plan takes an enormous bite out of transportation programs, eliminating $1 billion for high-speed rail and $224 million for Amtrak (notably, not as severe a cut as the one proposed by the conservative Republican Study Committee, which would have axed Amtrak’s entire federal subsidy). The HUD Community Development Fund stands to lose $530 million. Energy and environmental programs are taking a big hit too, with many EPA programs on the chopping block.

Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) claimed the cuts “represent the largest reduction in discretionary spending in the history of our nation.” But he announced them with more sobriety than bluster.

Make no mistake, these cuts are not low-hanging fruit. These cuts are real and will impact every District across the country – including my own. As I have often said, every dollar we cut has a constituency, an industry, an association, and individual citizens who will disagree with us. But with this [budget], we will respond to the millions of Americans who have called on this Congress to rein in spending to help our economy grow and our businesses create jobs.

As several Democrats have said, it’s subject to debate whether a bill that cuts so much spending will create jobs. Politico quotes committee Democrat David Price as calling that claim “wishful thinking.”

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Sprawl can take a disproportionate toll on older people. Their eyesight might make them nervous about driving at night, or unable to drive at all. It can take them a long time to cross wide, high-traffic arterial roads. Poor transit options can make them feel like a burden on others whom they depend on for rides, or can leave them stranded at home. Besides, if they don’t have places to walk to, the effects of aging can creep up faster on those who aren’t out getting regular exercise.

Charlotte, NC added median refuge islands to help seniors cross the street safely. Photo courtesy of Charlotte DOT.

Recognizing these dangers for older Americans, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) honored four cities yesterday with its “Building Healthy Communities for Active Aging Award.” Combining the principles of smart growth with the concept of active aging, the awards are intended to raise awareness about ways to build communities where seniors can lead active lives.

The population of American seniors – persons 65 years or older – is rapidly increasing. By 2030, there will be about 72.1 million senior citizens, or about 19 percent of the population – up from 12.9 percent in 2009.

Mecklenburg County, NC

One of the EPA’s awardees, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina recognized this silver boom and began improvements in 2005 by adopting the Status of Seniors Initiative (SOSI), making improvements to the built environment to make it more age-friendly.

The county and city of Charlotte have concentrated new growth in several existing corridors, creating higher densities, mixed-use development and a more walkable community. More than 5,000 new housing units have been constructed. Sixteen miles of greenways, 88 miles of bike facilities and 106 miles of sidewalks have been completed.

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When Don White was young, his dad would drive him from the Boston area to Blue Hill, Maine up coastal Route 1. “In those days,” he reminisces, “the road wound through little, small towns. And some of that has been bypassed.”

No wonder the residents of mid-coast Maine don't want traffic and sprawl to dilute this view. Image: Outside

The bypasses have been “hugely controversial, hugely disruptive, hugely expensive,” according to Kate Beaudoin, Chief of Planning for Maine DOT. She worked with local residents like White on a new corridor action plan to keep the small-town quality intact among the communities along Route 1.

It’s not just for nostalgia. Allowing Route 1 to be overwhelmed by traffic and sprawl would be detrimental to the tourism economy and the local culture. So a steering committee, made up of representatives from each of the 20 communities along a 100-mile stretch of the corridor, developed a plan to reduce traffic congestion.

The plan was recognized by the EPA yesterday as one of five winners of the agency’s annual awards for “Smart Growth Achievement.” It’s the first time the EPA has presented an award in the category of Rural Smart Growth.

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