Streetsblog Capitol Hill

It is an oft-lamented fact, both locally and nationally, that the city of Cleveland hasn’t taken full advantage of its position on the shore of Lake Erie. The national media, in its seemingly boundless enthusiasm for stories about the declining fortunes of the city where I live, is quick to point out that we haven’t taken advantage of what may be our best asset.

Whether the publication is Forbes (Most Miserable City, Sixth Fastest Dying City) or Portfolio Magazine (Third Most Stressed City), the attention can start to feel like a cheap shot. Inevitably, they turn the blame for the city’s problems onto itself with observations like this one: Why hasn’t Cleveland developed its lakefront into an asset like the city of Baltimore or San Francisco?

Now NPR has run a story on the “teardown” of the West Shoreway freeway, highlighting plans to turn it into a tree-lined boulevard and break down a major barrier to the lake. The reporters liken the project to Milwaukee’s rejection of the Park East Freeway and San Francisco’s refusal to rebuild Embarcadero Freeway, turning high-speed roadways into parks.

But what’s really going on in Cleveland is a little less revolutionary. Ironically, the city is getting positive press for a project of debatable merit.

NPR may have jumped the gun when it said the city was converting the freeway into a “slower, tree-lined boulevard.” So far, project sponsors have been unable to get the speed limit reduced legislatively. Other important attempts to make the road more pedestrian-friendly — such as the addition of stoplights and crosswalks — have been thwarted at the state level. It’s not clear just yet that the angry driver quoted by NPR has anything to worry about.

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A pair of bills making their way through Virginia’s House of Delegates threaten to slam the brakes on smart growth and livability efforts in Arlington and throughout Northern Virginia.

House Bills 1998 and 1999, put forward by Delegate Jim LeMunyon (R-Fairfax), have been dubbed the “Anti-Livability” bills by local transportation reformers. HB 1998 seeks to mandate that congestion reduction be used as the primary criterion for evaluating transportation projects. HB 1999 would require that highway construction take priority in all funds flowing from the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.

Dan Malouff, a transportation planner with the Arlington County Department of Transportation, said his organization has been watching the bills with concern, particularly HB 1999, which employs the more hard-line inducement of the purse strings.

“If 1999 passed, we would be very strictly reduced to spending money only on a few key highways,” Malouff said. “It means we can’t think about local growth. It means we can’t think about local streets. It means we can’t think about transit.”

“It essentially forces us to spend money only applying Band-aids instead of addressing real problems.”

Reporting on the progress of HB 1998, David Alpert of Streetsblog Network blog Greater Greater Washington said:

This bill is, in essence, the exact opposite of the USDOT’s “livability” push. That agency has been retooling the formulas for federal transit funding to move away from only favoring projects that move the most people the longest distance.

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Speaking at an event in Midtown yesterday morning, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood let it be known that New York City can still claim hundreds of millions of dollars in federal transit funding -- if local lawmakers implement congestion pricing. NY1 reports:

The city was slated to receive about $350 million in federal transportation funds to implement the plan, but it was was stalled by State Assembly Democrats in Albany.

LaHood said the money is still there if lawmakers change their minds.

"The money that was going to be provided for that particular project is still at the Department of Transportation," said LaHood. "If New York got its act together around that kind of opportunity, I think we would look at it."

Most of that $354 million would have gone toward transit enhancements targeted for areas underserved by subways. Citing, in large part, their distrust of the MTA to spend congestion pricing revenue wisely, state legislators turned down the offer from George W. Bush's DOT and killed the proposal last April.

Here we are a year later, and Albany just passed a toll-free MTA financing package that leaves the agency's capital plan largely unfunded. Congestion pricing would go a long way toward filling that gap, and self-styled watchdogs Malcolm Smith and Richard Brodsky say the new bill will make the MTA "transparent and accountable" to their liking. So if Barack Obama's DOT comes back with that $354 million offer, would NYC's state legislators still walk away from all those transit improvements for their constituents?

Former MTA CEO Lee Sander spent the last two-and-a-half years doing his best to make the MTA a transparent, accountable public agency, and in doing so restore its reputation. He let the sunshine in, but was unable to undo the damage to the agency's image caused by years of attacks from transit advocates, unions and politicians.

In politics, reputation matters. The scapegoating of the MTA has undermined the political case for transit funding and given cover to the hypocrites in Albany who blame the MTA, instead of themselves, for the agency's funding woes. Looking forward, it is critical that the MTA burnish its reputation as an effective and accountable public agency and excellent investment for public funds. There are many political forces that benefit from keeping the MTA as a scapegoat, its reputation besmirched. So, a clean bill of health for the MTA requires an unimpeachable, politically formidable force far above the gutter of the New York political fray. How about President Obama?

The president has spent enormous energy restoring public confidence in the banking system. A key part of his efforts has been the Treasury Department’s careful scrutiny of bank management and finances. Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson should ask President Obama to help restore public confidence in the MTA by ordering the Federal Transit Administration to send in a team of management, finance and policy experts. The MTA receives millions in federal support and the U.S. government has a strong interest in seeing that money well spent. The FTA team would definitively and publicly assess the state of the MTA, detailing both its good and bad management practices while clarifying and vetting agency finances.

Most transit experts believe the MTA is a relatively well run public agency which compares favorably with other big American and foreign transit systems. The agency’s biggest problem is that the state and city have spent the last two decades reducing their financial support, loading the agency with debt, and making it overly dependent on volatile, cyclical funding like the mortgage recording tax. The FTA's assessment would bring these facts to the fore and lay the political groundwork for a stronger case for transit funding.

The Municipal Art Society came out with a report yesterday urging New York State to start analyzing greenhouse gas emissions in its environmental review process (SEQRA). MAS argues that the policy could be adopted without changing existing laws, which raises an interesting question to ponder on this Earth Day afternoon: Would the State Senate's latest MTA funding plan pass muster if it were subject to an EIS that factors in climate change?

The MTA rescue package does not, in fact, fall under the purview of SEQRA, even though it's probably the most important piece of climate policy that the state legislature will consider this year. The Senate's latest stab would keep the trains and buses running for a few more months, but it's an eco-stinker compared to the Ravitch plan and any other package that includes road pricing or tolls on currently free bridges.

Let's go back to the spring of 2008. Remember all the carping from Richard Brodsky and other state legislators about congestion pricing not going through the SEQRA process? That was regarding a policy projected to take 112,000 cars off the road each day. Now we have an MTA funding plan getting serious consideration that would create worse traffic bottlenecks and more incentives to drive, but so far not even a peep about environmental consequences from Albany.

Just how bad are the service cuts and layoffs that transit agencies across the country will soon be forced to enact? Severe enough to weaken the national economy, the New York Times reports -- all while Congress pieces together a stimulus plan that does nothing to address the problem:

The new federal money -- $12 billion was included in the version passed last week by the House, while the Senate originally proposed less -- is devoted to big capital projects, like buying train cars and buses and building or repairing tracks and stations. Money that some lawmakers had proposed to help transit systems pay operating costs, and avoid layoffs and service cuts, was not included in the latest version.

It's not too late for the President, who set a mid-February deadline to pass the legislation, to step in, writes Times columnist David Leonhardt:

The odds that, a year from now, Mr. Obama and Congress will regret not having been more aggressive seem bigger than the odds that they’ll think they overdid it. Why not redouble efforts to find a few other ways to spend money quickly? More than 50 mass transit agencies across the country are cutting services or raising fares, and the stimulus bill does nothing for them.

On the same day that the Times ran these stories, representative Carolyn Maloney held a press conference to tout the stimulative effects of mega-projects like the Second Avenue Subway and East Side Access. Not a word about keeping the buses and subways running.

The pols at Maloney's presser might as well be taking a lead from the MTA itself. Last week, we wondered why the nation's largest transit agency, with its lobbying chops and $1.2 billion deficit, hasn't been more vocal about the desperate need for operating assistance from the feds. A spokesperson wrote back, saying the agency is now focused primarily on Albany after making its case to Washington:

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