Streetsblog Capitol Hill

This is the second of two posts examining Rep. Bill Shuster’s candidacy for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Yesterday, we took a look at Shuster’s positions on rail and his leadership style. Here we delve into his record on active transportation and the always-thorny topic of funding.

Legendary wheeler-dealer Bud Shuster got emotional when his son, Bill, took his seat in Congress. The younger Shuster now stands to take his father's old place at the helm of the House Transportation Committee. Photo: Gary Baranec/Altoona Mirror

While you might not agree with him that privatization is the best medicine for a struggling passenger rail program, by most accounts Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) has a genuine interest in the future of rail in America. It’s hard to make the case that he cares nearly as much about making streets safe for walking and biking.

Bike Paths Kill!

Indeed, perhaps the most alarming aspect of a Bill Shuster chairmanship is what it would mean for progress on street safety. Shuster is no friend of the movement to make American cities and towns more bikeable and walkable.

He fell in line with the Republican army against Transportation Enhancements, a program that mostly funded bike/ped projects under the previous transportation law. “Not everybody uses a bike path,” Shuster said at the time. He chafed at what others in his party called “set-asides,” saying, “That’s for [the] community to decide, not for our federal government to sit up here in Washington and decide.” He claimed that eliminating TE was “fundamental to the reforms that we are trying to include in this bill.”

Indeed, Shuster’s conviction that transportation is a federal responsibility ends at the interstate. “When you start getting into the inner city, the federal government has less of a role to play,” he told an audience at the Transportation Research Board’s annual conference in January, ignoring the fact that much interstate spending is used to provide capacity for local car trips on highways. “It’s up to the local community and state to decide [their transportation priorities].”

His position that federal transportation dollars should be “focused like a laser [yes, one of his favorite phrases] on the national highway system” alarmed the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, which issued an action alert to Pennsylvania voters when Shuster was appointed to the conference committee negotiating the final surface transportation bill. RTC noted that during his official conference statement, Shuster “regrettably… call[ed] out ‘bike paths’ as wasteful, even dangerous.”

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Why do traffic delays jump in September? Obviously, fewer people are on vacation. But it’s not just commuters back to the grind getting to and from work. It’s parents dropping their kids off at school, often with even less forgiving start times than an adult workday.

Region Forward, a DC-based livability partnership, shows that the delay is getting worse year after year.

Source: Region Forward

According to the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, up to 20 or 30 percent of morning traffic can be generated by parents driving their children to school. Today, about three-quarters of school-aged kids in America get to and from school by car [PDF]. In 1969, half of all schoolkids walked or biked to school, but that rate has fallen to 13 percent, according to the SRTS Partnership.

This creates a dangerous mess of cars pulling over and merging back into traffic in front of schools — with small children walking around. The result: child injuries and deaths, especially on high-traffic streets with on-street parking. A 2007 Department of Justice report [PDF] found that, to make matters worse, delayed drivers often speed when congestion eases, in order to “make up time” and out of a perverse sense of road rage.

“One can view such threats to child safety as both a cause and a symptom of school congestion,” said the DOJ report. “On the one hand, parental concerns about traffic hazards could lead more parents to drive their children to school, thereby increasing congestion. On the other hand, traffic congestion could lead to more child pedestrian accidents, with backed up cars’ blocking the views of small children crossing the street to enter school.”

So perhaps it’s no surprise that this is a nasty week for local traffic congestion. Parents are working out the kinks in their morning routines, getting used to new commutes at the start of the school year and feeling stressed (and driving badly) when they don’t budget enough time.

Part of the problem is sprawl, says the DOJ — but even kids that live within easy walking distance hitch a ride to school these days. Hoofing it is seen as “uncool” in some quarters. Maybe enough parents will get stuck in enough traffic and be late to work enough times to finally encourage kids to get to school on their own steam — and encourage schools and towns to make the necessary changes to ensure there’s a safe way for their kids to do so.

The MAP-21 transportation bill in many ways made it tougher for cities and towns to provide safer streets for walking and biking. Projects to build bike lanes and sidewalks now have to compete harder for the tiny bit of funding they’re eligible for. And right now, states are deciding whether or not to “opt out” of the Recreational Trails Program (RTP). Instead of spending RTP money on bicycle and pedestrian trails — both urban and rural — states can “opt” to spend it on something else.

Even rail-trail-hating Gov. Sam Brownback says Kansas will use their Recreational Trails funding. Will he make the same promise of other bike/ped funds? Photo: Pitch

But the fact is that RTP made it out of the conference process more intact than some of its sister bike/ped programs. It kept its “dedicated” funding, although that dedication is awfully porous. Then again, it always has been.

MAP-21 put the Recreational Trails Program under the umbrella of the larger Transportation Alternatives program, but RTP retained $85 million of its own funding, with each state getting the same amount they were apportioned in 2009. While Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to School lost their dedicated funds, RTP kept its money because it comes from a different source: a gas tax on off-road vehicles.

That unique funding source has more or less safeguarded a program that’s focused on recreation — albeit with many important urban connectors under its belt — while throwing more transportation-oriented programs under the proverbial bus.

RTP got off relatively scot-free in what was a bruising bill process for other bike/ped programs. “What can I say?” said Marianne Fowler, senior vice president of federal relations at the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. “We’re really happy.” She also added that recreational trails built from this fund have another benefit: They’re not treated as federal-aid highways, since the facilities aren’t roadways. That means they don’t need to comply with the same onerous project reviews and contracting processes. Unfortunately, Safe Routes to School hasn’t had the same luck, meaning simple crosswalk projects can sometimes get tangled up in red tape.

All isn’t rosy with RTP, though. Governors can opt out of the program, meaning the money would go back into their total amount for Transportation Alternatives (which can then be squandered on road-building or anything else they like).

It used to be that there was only a “back door” opt-out, according to RTC’s Fowler. That back door is still open, but there’s a “front door” now too.

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Every week, the White House honors leaders and innovators in a chosen field, and yesterday was transportation’s turn. Their choices of honorees spoke volumes about this administration’s principles around transportation.

“We’re not talking about the past,” Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood said at yesterday’s ceremony. “We’re not talking about building more roads and bridges. We’re talking about building new and creative communities with innovative and creative ways of getting people around those communities.”

Each one wrote an entry on the White House blog, excerpted below. It’s a good opportunity to get to know some heroes you might not have known existed.

Jason Roberts is the Founder of the Oak Cliff Transit Authority.

Photo: The White House

I began studying maps of my inner city neighborhood and realized that many of the vacant historic buildings in my community were built along street car lines that traversed the city. After WWII the streetcars were removed, and streets grew bigger while sidewalks became smaller… By removing the streetcars, widening the streets and changing our zoning to focus on auto centric development, we eliminated the local neighborhood deli, flower shop and tavern. Kids no longer had safe places to walk. Seniors became prisoners in their own homes and relied on family and friends to transport them for basic needs. Beyond this, what we really learned was that these businesses were much more than commercial enterprises – they were the community gathering places where neighbors shared theirs stories, joys, sorrows, hopes, and dreams. Also, shop owners provided extra eyes on the street, and residents had many of their needs within walking distance from their homes.

In 2006 I began studying and meeting with transportation experts throughout the nation. I started the Oak Cliff Transit Authority which brought together civil engineers, residents and property owners to return the streetcar as a means to revitalize our community. Streetcars were already proving themselves to be vital economic catalysts in cities that were bringing back their rails.

While the streetcar effort was in place I began to focus my attention on the buildings and streets themselves. A team of artists, residents, and property owners helped begin our first Better Block project, an effort to temporarily revitalize a single blighted block with any means at our disposal… We took our wide streets and thinned them by creating bike lanes and outdoor café seating so children and families could more easily access the area and seniors could have a comfortable place to sit. We brought in historic lighting and shade trees, and began converting the vacant buildings into pop-up business such as local cafes, markets, flower shops and art studios for kids. We filled the sidewalks with fruit stands and life!

Veronica Davis is the Principal Planning Manager at Nspiregreen LLC (and founder of Black Women Bike DC).

Photo: The White House

As a result of many casual discussions with others about transportation options in my community, Black Women Bike DC was founded. Although it started as a twitter hash tag (BlackWomenBike), it grew into a movement within the District of Columbia. I have always been an advocate of sustainable transportation but after noticing the absence of black women on two wheels Nse Ufot, Najeema Washington and I founded Black Women Bike in May 2011. The organization has grown to over 550 African American women in Washington, DC ranging in age from late 20’s to late 60’s. The news spread to women via word of mouth and social media. Although the group takes a monthly group recreation ride to help novice riders get prepared for riding on the road, we encourage the women to use biking as an alternative form of transportation for running small errands and getting to work. Biking is an important form of transportation and recreation in the community because it allows people to have fun while receiving benefits of exercise at the same time. Black Women Bike is building a community of women who bike in the District.

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One of the most popular elements of the new transportation authorization is its consolidation or elimination of 60 federal programs. But this cleanup is not without its casualties. One of those casualties is the off-system bridge program. And another one, indirectly, is bicycle and pedestrian programming.

Source: Transportation for America

As you can see, the Highway Bridge Program is no more. It’s been replaced by the National Highway Performance Program (NHPP). But bridges that fall outside the National Highway System — more than half the country’s bridges — aren’t covered by the NHPP. Those “off-system” bridges are now part of the Surface Transportation Program (STP).

There’s just one problem with that.

“All of the bridge money went to NHPP but less than half the bridges went there,” said Nick Donohue of Transportation for America. “The others went to STP with no money.”

The Surface Transportation Program, or STP, is a large, flexible and multimodal program, and has historically been a good source of funds for bicycle and pedestrian projects. Though states have spent an average of just 0.8 percent of their STP funds on biking and walking over the last five years, according to an analysis by the League of American Bicyclists, that equals $333 million — a significant chunk of change when you’re talking about such cost-effective projects. As a point of comparison, that’s about a quarter as much as was spent over that same period by the Transportation Enhancements program, which was aimed more specifically at bike/ped projects.*

Shifting bridge repair into STP without a proportionate increase in funding will make competition stiffer than ever for STP funds, according to the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

To make matters worse, there’s now less local control over those dollars. Under the new bill, metropolitan areas are getting a smaller slice of the STP pie. It used to be that 62.5 percent of STP funds were sub-allocated to cities and towns according to population. Now, it’s only 50 percent.

That means that local entities, not just states, will be left with too much to do with too little STP money, according to Donohue. “They left 180,000 bridges out in the cold,” he said, “and now local communities and MPOs have a false choice to make with STP money — fixing these bridges or using the funds for the innovative projects they build with STP funds today.”

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Bike and pedestrian funding got slashed. Federal assistance for transit operations was rejected. Even the performance measures – arguably the high point of the recently passed federal transportation bill – are too weak to be very meaningful. For Americans who want federal policy to support safe streets, sustainable transportation, and livable neighborhoods, there were few bright spots in the transportation bill Congress passed last month.

AASHTO Director John Horsley is thrilled with the new transportation bill, which gave state DOTs just about everything they wanted. Photo: International Transport Forum

But state transportation departments are celebrating. They scored victory after victory, getting a bigger share of federal funding with fewer rules and regulations attached.

In the Senate, advocates were able to work some reforms into the bill and mobilize grassroots support for amendments like the Cardin-Cochran provision, which put funds for street safety projects in the hands of local governments, not state DOTs. But the House never managed to pass a bill of its own, and the opaque conference committee process was an exercise in horse-trading that advocates found difficult to penetrate.

The final product, which included measures like raising the federal contribution for certain highway expansions, seemed finely tailored to benefit DOTs in several ways. “This is a bill written by and for the benefit of state DOTs at the expense of both federal oversight and regional and community outcomes,” wrote David Burwell, director of the climate change program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in an email shortly after the bill passed. He said the policy changes “are too elegantly crafted and specific in their effect to have been written, or even conceived, by members of Congress or their staff.”

For state DOTs, access to lawmakers is a given. “We worked very closely with the House and Senate to craft those measures,” AASHTO Director John Horsley confirmed to Streetsblog in an interview yesterday. He said that while AASHTO offered recommendations, no text written by AASHTO made it into the bill verbatim, as far as he knows.

According to Horsley’s account, AASHTO followed a pretty standard script when it came to advocating for their interests on the Hill. Every stakeholder and special interest under the sun had its lobbyists knocking on lawmakers’ doors, offering their two cents – everyone from gravel producers to equipment manufacturers to environmentalists to free market fundamentalists. It’s just that the state DOTs seemed to get everything on their wish list.

Horsley said AASHTO had been laying the groundwork for many, many months before conference started, working with Republican House Transportation Committee staffers as well as aides of both parties in the Senate. (He didn’t mention working with House Democrats, who were shut out of the process from day one.)

The House is where the magic happened for AASHTO. “We’ve been very pleased with where the Senate bill started,” Horsley said. “And we were even more pleased when the House and the Senate in conference agreed to incorporate a lot of the House provisions that were even better for states.”

What were those House provisions? Horsley went through the list:

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In the immediate, panicked moments after the MAP-21 conference report was released, I missed some of the nuances of just how bad a deal this bill is for bike policy.

Under the new transpo bill, the fight to get states to invest in infrastructure for biking and walking will get a lot tougher. Photo: Jim Hash / Ped Bike Images

Three things stand out:

• States can use their Transportation Alternatives (TA) money on anything they want.
• Bike/ped programs are facing anywhere from a 33 percent cut in funding to a 66 percent cut, depending how each state reacts.
• The mandatory sidepath law was included.

Let’s start with Number Three. The law states that if there’s a paved bike path within 100 yards of a federally owned road, cyclists have to use it — given the speed limit on the road is at least 30 miles per hour. When this was first included in the Senate bill last fall, bike advocates called it “paternalistic” and said it ignores cyclists’ fundamental right to the road.

“If the path is any good, you shouldn’t have to force anyone to use it; they will use it voluntarily because it works,” wrote Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. Unfortunately, he said, many paths are “dangerous, slow, and out of the way” – and cyclists would still be forced to use them under this law.

The concerns were partially addressed between this provision’s appearance in the Senate bill and the final conference report. It now states explicitly that cyclists are prohibited from using the road unless “the bicycle level of service on that roadway is rated B or higher.” So, if the road is more bikeable than the sidepath, in some instances, the cyclist can choose the road.

However, there’s no uniform way of measuring how bike-friendly a roadway is. The FHWA has developed a measurement for “bicycle level of service” but it’s not universally utilized. Besides, I wouldn’t count on every cyclist knowing the rating of every roadway they ride on.

Advocates’ concern about being forced off of streets and onto shoddy paths remains.

Three Ways States Can Filch Bike/Ped Money

On to the funding “transferability” in the Transportation Alternatives section, which now includes bike and pedestrian funding. If you’ll recall, half of TA money gets distributed, proportionally to population, to metropolitan planning agencies or local governments. The other half is supposed to capitalize a grant program in each state, to be overseen by their DOTs, allowing municipalities to apply for the funds.

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Just days after Congress passed a bill allowing states to spend funds supposedly designated for biking and walking on completely unrelated projects, transportation officials are already circling like vultures over that money.

An AP story from Covington, Kentucky on Sunday quotes several transportation officials and executives parroting the GOP line that transportation enhancements funding, as that pot of money used to be called, is used for “beautification.”

Just to refresh folks’ memory, here’s the actual breakdown of how transportation enhancement grants were spent.

The spending breakdown for Transportation Enhancements from 1992, when the program started, until the end of 2010. Source: National Transportation Enhancements Clearinghouse

As you can see, bicycle and pedestrian projects make up 63.2 percent of the TE pie. Even if you find every single other use of TE funds frivolous, you can’t just pretend that this money doesn’t primarily go to transportation projects that are good for people’s health and the environment.

But opponents of investment in safer biking and walking do go on pretending. Brent Cooper, chair of the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, said he likes to compare infrastructure to teeth. ”If your teeth are falling out, it does no good to whiten them,” he said. “If roads and bridges are falling into the river, we need infrastructure, so in general it makes more sense to me to focus on the infrastructure than the beautification piece.”

Nice analogy, but it doesn’t work. Here’s a better one: If your teeth are falling out, stop stuffing your face with candy and start brushing and flossing every day. If your infrastructure is in bad shape, stop getting distracted by shiny new projects and spend your money on repair. In no way are bike lanes to blame for states’ infrastructure maintenance problems.

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David Burwell is the director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was also co-founder and CEO of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and a founding co-chair and president of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a national transportation policy reform coalition. 

There is much despair in the transportation reform community about the mugging we took in the MAP-21 conference committee negotiations. And, yes, it was a mugging. It was also unnecessary and unfair — we worked hard for a good bill, got it, and then saw much of our effort left on the cutting room floor. Complete streets, rail, freight, state of good repair, transparency and accountability — all these took hits.

On defense, the TIFIA loan program lost a lot of its performance screens. We lost big chunks of the review process conducted under the National Environment Policy Act, which guards against ill-advised highway projects. Plus we saw the diminishment of separate funding for bike/ped programs, Safe Routes to Schools, and the Recreational Trails Program, which collectively lost about 34 percent of their set-aside funding — cut from about $1.2 billion to about $800 million annually. The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Program is also more porous — but at least we still have the rule that CMAQ can’t be used to build new highways for single occupancy vehicle use.

While this is going to be hand-to-hand combat, we now have the “boots on the ground” to prevail. That’s our new campaign.

Many of these reforms were lost despite the fact that the House didn’t offer a bill with conflicting language — the conferees just rewrote the Senate language to serve their own objectives. If reports are true, many of these losses were in return for dropping Keystone XL from the bill — a rider that was both non-germane and basically a “House hold.” It will be back on any other Senate bill the House leadership wants to hold up until its terms are met, whether or not it has an opposing bill to offer. This is not negotiation, it is extortion.

Our best response? We need to get over it. This is hardball politics over a bill that distributes over $50 billion annually to all the state DOTs and regional transit agencies, backed by major construction industries. Federal transportation bills have historically been a fight over money, not policy, and members of Congress are naturally going to look to their own state officials for guidance on how to allocate program funds, and for what purposes. State DOTs want maximum flexibility to use the funds as they see fit, with the fewest possible federal conditions on their use. We are fighting to bend the arc of transportation history away from a food fight over money to focus on policy — meaning outcomes. It is a worthy and essential goal for a program that determines the physical fabric of our country and our communities.

Based on what we are up against, we did okay. Transportation Enhancements survived — and 50 percent of the money, about $400 million, is directly delegated to metropolitan planning organizations in urbanized areas with populations over 200,000 for project selection and oversight. The rest is still controlled by state DOTs but is up for grabs — if we can convince governors not to opt out of the program.
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The House of Representatives approved the transportation bill conference report this afternoon by a vote of 373 to 52. [UPDATE 4:00 PM: The Senate has also approved the bill, 74-19.] This is a bill that’s been called “a death blow to mass transit” by the Amalgamated Transit Union, “a step backwards for America’s transportation system” by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, “a retreat from the goals of sustainability and economic resiliency” by Reconnecting America, “a substantial capitulation” by Transportation for America, and “bad news for biking and walking” by America Bikes.

Remember the empty highways that symbolized the House Republicans' vision of America's transportation system? The final transpo bill might as well have the same unfortunate cover.

After more than 1,000 days of waiting since the last transportation bill expired, the nation’s new transportation policy is a grave disappointment to people seeking to reform the current highway-centric system.

The fact that the House GOP tried and, for the most part, failed to reverse the progress made under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder offers a small degree of consolation. “Some of the worst ideas pushed initially by House Republicans went nowhere – funding the highway system with new oil drilling revenues, taking transit out of the highway trust fund, de-federalizing transportation funding – to mention some of the most radical proposals that were seriously being put forward,” wrote Deron Lovaas of NRDC this morning. “But… that pretty much exhausts the good news.”

So what does the bill actually do? Overall, it doesn’t change a whole lot, and the most significant changes tend not to benefit livable streets or sustainable transportation. Here’s a breakdown.

Length and funding. The bill lasts a year longer than the Senate bill would have, expiring at the end of September 2014. That gives states, cities, and the construction industry substantially more stability and allows them to move forward on projects that have been delayed for years because of the uncertainty surrounding federal funding. It maintains funding levels at around $54 billion a year, as did the Senate bill, which is roughly current levels plus inflation.

While some have criticized the complex funding mechanisms that prop it up and its departure from a user-pays model, the Congressional Budget Office reported this morning that the bill actually reduces the deficit by $16.3 billion.

Everyone seems to understand that Congress won’t be able to pull this kind of magic for long and will soon have to deal with the long-term insufficiency of current Highway Trust Fund revenues to cover the nation’s transportation needs. However, the gas tax was not raised, and at the same time the House passed this bill, it also approved an appropriations bill that prohibits even studying the possibility of moving toward a VMT fee.

Non-transportation-related items. The Keystone XL pipeline and the EPA’s ability to regulate coal ash as a hazardous substance, introduced into the transportation negotiations by the House Republicans, were stripped out of the bill. The RESTORE Act to spend BP oil spill fines on Gulf Coast restoration is included.

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