Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Tuesday morning, Rep. Earl Blumenauer took his usual place behind the podium at the National Bike Summit. (He never misses a Bike Summit.)

Rep. Earl Blumenauer never misses a Bike Summit. Photo: Brian Palmer

“I’m coming up this morning and smiling at someone going past me on the bike lane on Pennsylvania Avenue,” Blumenauer said. “Remember four years ago, I talked about risking my life on Pennsylvania Avenue. And I talked from a podium not unlike this and said, ‘Maybe we could just put bike lanes on Pennsylvania Avenue.’ Some of you clapped; others of you said, ‘I agree, but not in my lifetime.’ [Four] years later: It’s there, it’s a fixture, it matters to people. And it’s part of the renaissance in our nation’s capital.”

Blumenauer encouraged the 750 assembled cycling advocates to be “proud and modestly aggressive” in driving home the point that cycling infrastructure creates good, family-wage jobs. Safe Routes to School “gives us an opportunity to reduce [congestion during] the morning commute 30 percent and not have so many morbidly obese fourth graders,” he said.

Summit participants were already planning to spend the next day on Capitol Hill, talking to members of Congress and their staff about increasing federal support for cycling programs. But Blumenauer told them not to stop there — they should be lobbying even harder when the members are at home, and the district staff are trying to fill their schedules with events that will put them face-to-face with constituents. Inviting them out for a ride to try out a trail that was made possible by federal funds would be a good way of showing them the concrete (and asphalt!) benefits of programs like TIGER and Transportation Enhancements (now Transportation Alternatives).

Another member who made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to speak to the Bike Summit was Sen. Ben Cardin, who solidified his standing as Bike Hero when he fought for the Cardin-Cochran amendment, which preserved some local control over bike/ped funds, even as dedicated funding was stripped out of the federal bill.

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When you talk to policy-makers, do you complain about how bicyclists lost out in the last transportation reauthorization and demand that cycling get its “fair share” of funding? Do you tell them that more and more people are riding bikes, and maybe they ought to try it too?

Doug Meyer, left, and the Bike League's Caron Whitaker tweak the message before cyclists descend on Capitol Hill. Photo: Brian Palmer

If so, you’ve been doing it all wrong.

Nonprofit strategist Doug Meyer surveyed 30 policy-makers in the House, Senate, and DOT, about evenly divided by people the bicycling movement thinks of as allies and opponents. He identified the winning ways to talk to influential people about support for cycling – and the losing ways. (Check out his results here [PDF].) Meyer unveiled his somewhat surprising results at the National Bike Summit yesterday.

First, people in power are really catching on to the cycling boom. Partly, it’s the beauty of those Pennsylvania Avenue bike lanes and the remarkable success of Capitol Bikeshare – representatives from all over the country see the explosion of active transportation in DC. They’re beginning to change their mental image of a cyclist from a spandex-clad weekend warrior to a business-suited professional with a laptop in her panniers. And they’ve heard Secretary Ray LaHood’s talk about elevating bicycling to be on par with other modes. They know the game has changed.

So, cyclists can stop begging for a seat at the table, Meyer said. “It’s time to sit down.”

Policy-makers think of the rise of two-wheeled transportation more as a shift toward urbanism than just a bicycling phenomenon. And they still don’t care that much if bike facilities are good for bicyclists. They want to hear that they’re good for everybody. Bring local officials, public health workers and other non-cycling interests to meet with policy-makers to plead the case, Meyer advised. “If you’re not speaking traffic safety and economic competitiveness, then forget it,” Meyer told the Bike Summit audience.

Meyer also recommended that cyclists “tone down” their cyclist identity. Convince lawmakers that you’re interested in cycling as part of your concern about larger issues, and present your message as one that’s not just the special interest of a sport enthusiast.

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In a sense, there’s not much to say about the joint appearance at the AASHTO conference yesterday of House Transportation Committee Chair Bill Shuster and Senate EPW Chair Barbara Boxer. They thanked AASHTO for all its help getting MAP-21 passed. They addressed the big question of how to raise revenues without actually making any proposals. They agreed that infrastructure should be a non-partisan issue. None of these are breaking news.

Bill Shuster seeks to reach across the aisle in what rapidly became a highly polarized committee in the last Congress. Photo: Rep. Shuster's Picasa gallery

But still, there was some excitement in the air. Boxer and Shuster joked about who was and who wasn’t wearing a baseball cap when they sealed the deal on MAP-21. (She’s sure it was him, but he still says she was in sweats.)

But then, Boxer always had a collegial relationship with John Mica too, who would kid her about opting for smoothies when they ordered pizza during late-night negotiations.

Shuster is a different animal from Mica. He’s more personable, less strident. His sense of humor is less quirky. And most important, his positions are more moderate.

Shuster never misses a chance to expound on the importance of the federal role in transportation and makes it clear that he’s going on the offensive with more conservative members, especially new ones, to convince them.

He’s conversant in the history of the founding of the republic and lectures audiences that infrastructure was the thing that convinced the founders that the Articles of Confederation wouldn’t work. He ribbed the Heritage Foundation for giving an Adam Smith award but not recognizing that the father of capitalism was also a proponent of federal infrastructure spending. “Sometimes I ask them about that and it kind of draws a blank stare,” he said.

But nothing says “I’m a reasonable guy you can work with” better than his refreshingly non-polarizing comments on the third-rail issue of rail:

I’ve watched, in the last 40 years, the debate in Congress. Republicans used to stand up and say, “Amtrak has failed; sell it off and do away with it all.” I don’t agree with that. There is a need for passenger rail in this country. My counterparts on the other side of the aisle talk about, “There’s no passenger rail system that’s not subsidized in the world,” and they’re right. But I think it’s wrong that we can’t get Amtrak to a place where they’re not taking as big subsidies from the federal government. They can get to a place where they may be able to get close to break-even.

Yes, this the same man who co-sponsored a bill to privatize the Northeast Corridor. Looking back, he may have been the reason the privatization proposal wasn’t more radical than it was.

Shuster reiterated his position — identical to Mica’s — that high-speed rail should start in the Northeast Corridor.
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The consequences of the near-certain sequester for aviation have been well publicized by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s recent media blitz, but less well-known are the effects for surface transportation.

New York's Second Avenue Subway is one New Starts-funded transit expansion that could be complicated by the sequestration cuts. Image: MTA

LaHood broke that silence in a memo to department staff earlier this week and released yesterday by Politico, warning that even after taking measures like “instituting hiring freezes, cutting contracts, and taking other administrative reductions,” furloughs may be necessary in the Federal Transit Administration and the Surface Transportation Board.

FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff said last month that he’ll move “heaven and earth” to keep people working in the event of a sequester, but he may not be able to avoid furloughs. The entire FTA staffing budget is subject to the 6 percent sequester cut. (See my story from Monday detailing how the sequester works and what transportation programs will and won’t be affected.)

It could also impede transit construction projects. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has made a list of crucial projects that could get caught in the sequester’s web, from TIGER-funded intermodal facilities in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to the New Starts-supported Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan.

“Right now, I can tell you that the sequester would require a 5 percent cut to the New Starts/Small Starts program, which would reduce funding for critical transit projects by approximately $100 million this year, creating unplanned borrowing and financing costs for states and local government,” said FTA spokesperson Brian Farber yesterday. “The cuts would also require FTA to revise its payment schedule for New Starts/Small Starts projects, slowing the payments the federal government previously committed to making.”

Welcome to Sequestration Week. Congress has until Friday to strike a deal that would avoid a set of dreaded automatic budget cuts.

Transit expansions, like this BRT project currently underway in Grand Rapids, Michigan with FTA funds, could be undermined if the sequester goes through on Friday. Photo: MLive

The president is blaming the crisis on House Republicans, who are in turn laying blame on Senate Democrats. Unlike any number of previous budget crises, no one really thinks that Washington can pull a last-minute solution out of a hat this time. These cuts probably will take effect, at least for a while.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was the administration’s spokesperson this weekend, tasked with publicizing some of the cuts that will hit hard. More than $600 million of the $1 billion DOT will need to cut is set to come out of the Federal Aviation Administration, which LaHood said will lead to furloughs for the vast majority of FAA personnel, who will lose one or even two days per pay period. That will mean delays for travelers and probably canceled flights, since air traffic controllers will only allow the amount of traffic they can manage safely.

The cuts to air travel are certainly the most dramatic, but surface transportation will suffer some wounds as well. As we reported last month, the Federal Transit Administration is facing painful cuts to an already bare-bones staff. Amtrak funding and New Starts grants for transit expansion will also get a 6 percent slice taken out of them. (Note: Before the year-end fiscal cliff deal, the cut would have been 8 percent, but some fancy maneuvering lowered it.) The popular TIGER grant program for innovation transportation projects will also be cut.

Programs funded according to formulas aren’t safe, either, even though the money come from a “protected” account, the Highway Trust Fund, which is generally not subject to the sequester. The reason is that general fund money propped up the HTF under the MAP-21 transportation bill, so the portion of the account that doesn’t come from fuel taxes is subject to the sequester.

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New House Transportation Committee Chair Bill Shuster (R-PA) clearly knows he’s got some devolutionist conservatives in his caucus (and on his committee). While many Republicans would like to see the federal government get out of the business of infrastructure and just let the states raise and spend their own money, Shuster has always been clear that he is in favor of a strong federal role.

Before the session gets underway, Transportation Committee Chair Bill Shuster wants to make one thing clear. Photo: PoliGu

He likes to remind conservatives that Adam Smith, the godfather of free-enterprise capitalism himself, argued that there were three essential functions of government–security, justice and transportation. He notes that many Republican presidents have overseen massive infrastructure expansion, and that the work continues.

So Shuster is devoting the first committee hearing of the session to clarifying his view that the work of the committee is not just to channel all decisions and funds down to the states. Before anything else — before anyone on the committee has a chance to undermine the very purpose of the committee — Shuster hopes to dispense with that entire line of argument.

So next Wednesday’s hearing, entitled “The Federal Role in America’s Infrastructure,” will give a platform to three of the most vocal advocates of increased federal infrastructure spending: U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, Building America’s Future Co-Chair and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, and Laborers’ International Union of North America President Terry O’Sullivan all have been invited to testify.

They’ll have a lot of minds to change. The lobby for devolution to the states is growing, and not just among conservatives. Rohit Aggarwala — former director of long-term panning and sustainability for New York City and now top advisor to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group — made the same case a few weeks ago in a Bloomberg News op-ed.

“Every bipartisan commission that has studied the situation has advocated raising the [gas] tax, but a polarized Congress has been unable to do it,” Aggarwala wrote. “A strong, smart, well-funded federal program would be great. But if Congress can’t pass one now, it should just get itself out of the way, by eliminating the federal gas tax entirely and cutting Washington’s role in surface transportation. It would streamline government. And it would probably lead to more investment in infrastructure and greener transportation policies.”

Shuster and Aggarwala have flipped traditional roles, with the green sustainability leader now calling for Washington to get out of the transportation biz and the conservative rural Republican defending the importance of federal involvement.

Pounds lost and population gained: Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett's prescription for a healthy city begins with a pedestrian-friendly environment. Photo: Brett Deering, Governing

In 2008 Mick Cornett, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City — ranked as one of the fattest cities in the country – stood in front of the elephants at the zoo and announced he was going on a diet, and taking the rest of the city with him. Oklahoma City lost a million pounds, 37 of which were his.

Cornett’s zeal to make Oklahoma City a healthier city led him to take a hard look at the built environment. He realized that car-centric, pedestrian-unfriendly streets weren’t just costing residents their health, they were costing brainpower — too many of Oklahoma City’s talented young people were leaving. Businesses didn’t want to locate there because their employees didn’t want to live there.

So Mayor Cornett sought — and got — public support for a $777 million package of investments to construct a new downtown park and recreation areas by the riverfront, build out the streetcar system, expand sidewalks and biking trails, and create new senior wellness centers. Another $180 million was raised to redesign downtown streets. If Oklahoma City is a different place now than it was 10 years ago, residents have the mayor to thank.

I caught up with Cornett at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors last week in Washington, DC, right after he spoke at a luncheon panel — sponsored by Weight Watchers — about what mayors can do when they inherit a city “zoned as a series of drive-thru restaurants.”

Tanya Snyder: Oklahoma City isn’t New York City. It doesn’t have that kind of density. With pedestrian-friendliness, there are things like crosswalks and sidewalks that you can do but you also have to have places to walk and make sure the distances between destinations are reasonable distances. How do you address that in a city, like Oklahoma City, that is spread out?

Mayor Mick Cornett: The first thing you have to do is change the perspective. The way I describe it is: We have built this city for cars. We have to start building this city for people.

When that message percolates inside City Hall, inside your public works department and inside your planning department, they start to look at things differently. And what I noticed was, it wasn’t a lack of enlightenment. It was a lack of direction. They were doing what they felt like they were supposed to be doing. And when we exposed this new direction, I was amazed how much creativity was inside those departments that I hadn’t seen before, that hadn’t been tapped. It was as if they’d been unleashed — all these new ideas.

The downtown park funded as part of MAPS 3.

There was also an increase in green spaces. We didn’t have sidewalks in a lot of communities and so we’re going back in and building, literally, hundreds of miles of sidewalks throughout the city. It’s a lot better to do it on the front end and not go back in later and put those in. It’s more expensive to do it the way we’re doing it. But it is what it is.

We’re completing our bicycle trail master plan. We were using some federal money every year that came in to extend our bike trail plan. One day I asked the parks director in a public meeting, I said, “At the rate we’re going, when are we going to finish our master plan?” And he was speechless. And what I realized was, we were all going to be long gone by the time we finished our master plan.

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After fighting to maintain reasonable funding levels in the transportation bill – and for the inclusion of dedicated transit funding in the first place – the Federal Transit Administration now finds itself up against almost certain funding cuts that imperil rail and bus expansion projects, as well as the agency’s own staffing.

FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff is hoping to keep staffing steady through near-inevitable budget cuts. Photo: U.S. DOT

The fiscal cliff deal hasn’t answered many questions. Spending cuts of about 8 percent (the “sequester”) could hit at the beginning of March. The current interim budget, or “continuing resolution,” expires at the end of March. And on top of all of that, another debt ceiling deadline is looming, and Republicans will certainly try to extract spending cuts again in exchange for raising it.

“None of us knows what’s going to happen,” said Sylvia Garcia, U.S. DOT deputy assistant secretary for management and budget, at the Transportation Research Board’s annual conference Wednesday. “No matter what happens, the message from Congress right now is, ‘You’re going to have less money to do what you need to do.’”

While the Federal Highway Administration’s staff is safe from layoffs from the sequester, since they’re funded out of the Highway Trust Fund, the FTA isn’t so lucky. General-funded FTA programs — including the New Starts program for transit expansion, some research, and all FTA administration — are still vulnerable to cuts. Worse, the “across-the-board” nature of the sequester means the FTA would have to apply the cuts evenly among those three areas.

Administrator Peter Rogoff told the TRB audience yesterday that he’ll move “heaven and earth” to keep people working, especially since the agency is already running on a bare-bones budget, and they’re “one person deep in a lot of critical areas.” He’s desperately trying to avoid furloughs, and he pledges to fill vacancies in important positions.

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OK, truth: Raise your hand if you find federal transportation legislation intimidating and incomprehensible.

T4America's new document will help communities improve mobility and keep everyone safer. Photo: T4America

I thought so. Me too.

The problem, as you know, is that it’s enormously important that advocates not only understand the new transportation law, MAP-21, but that they understand it in granular detail so they can find the small opportunities buried in a depressingly large mass of disappointment.

So a big thank-you goes out to the folks at Transportation for America, who just released exactly the resource advocates need: a guide to the law called “Making the Most of MAP-21.”

In addition to providing a basic outline of the law and its relevant provisions (and omissions), the document contains some excellent how-to’s and talking points for advocates and project sponsors trying to squeeze funding for sustainable transportation projects out of programs biased heavily toward auto-oriented infrastructure.

Here are a few of the excellent ideas that stand out:

Ask states to flex highway funds for bridge repair. One major hidden peril of MAP-21 is that it transferred the responsibility of repairing 460,000 bridges that aren’t on the National Highway System (NHS) to the overburdened Surface Transportation Program (STP), without adding any money for it. In fact, STP has $5 billion of new responsibilities under MAP-21 and only $1 billion of new money.

Source: T4America

Luckily, there’s a solution: States can flex up to half of their National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) funds, normally earmarked for NHS projects, to other uses. After all, NHS gets a disproportionate share of funding: “Although the NHS represents only five percent of all American roads, fully 58 percent of the highway program is committed to its upkeep,” the report says.

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One state's plan for Transportation Alternatives: Utah will use some of its $6.4 million for Recreational Trails and Safe Routes to School, give some to metro areas, and spend the rest on any type of surface transportation they want. Image courtesy of UDOT

The current transportation law dealt a few hard knocks to bicycling and walking programs. One big one was the restructuring of the Transportation Enhancements program into something called Transportation Alternatives, which has to fund more types of projects with less money.

The idea is that each state’s TA money will get split in half. Fifty percent gets allocated to Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and Transportation Management Areas (TMAs) based on population. Let’s call that the “Local 50.” Then the state gets the other half – the “State 50” – and is supposed to distribute it via a competitive grant process.

Local 50: It’s not quite 50

The first thing to know is that even the Local 50 isn’t always entirely under local control. The Local 50 gets distributed according to population to whatever entity represents each area. For large metro areas and sometimes even small urbanized areas, there’s an MPO or TMA in charge. But for rural areas, sometimes it’s just the state that run things.

President Obama signed MAP-21 nearly five months ago, but states are still trying to figure out what it all means. Photo: Fastlane

Take Michigan, for example. The state is looking to get $26 million in Transportation Alternatives funds. Of that, $2.9 million comes off the top for Recreational Trails, a separate program with its own money (raised from off-road vehicle fees) that’s administered by the Department of Natural Resources, not MDOT.

That leaves $11.6 million each for the Local 50 and the State 50 in Michigan.

About $6.5 million of the Local 50 will go to the TMAs in jurisdictions of more than 200,000 people. But the rest of the money — over $5 million from that supposedly “Local” 50 — goes to the state to distribute.

That’s before you even get to the half that the state is supposed to control.

This is how the Cardin-Cochran amendment is being interpreted on the ground. The amendment was a creative and hard-fought way to make sure that some TA money actually went to the sorts of projects the old Transportation Enhancements program used to fund – primarily bike and pedestrian infrastructure, plus some safety education.

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