Streetsblog Capitol Hill

They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. But the people who shape the future of greater Detroit — despite all the urban flight, sprawl, and decline they’ve seen – just can’t seem to acknowledge that they have an addiction to big highway projects. On the agenda Thursday for the regional planning commission, the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, are two highway expansion plans that will cost an astounding $4 billion combined.

On the one hand, some Detroit power players are starting to embrace sustainable transportation. Regional leaders recently brought together urban and suburban officials to create the first unified regional transit system for the area. The city of Detroit is working to add 100 miles of bike lanes this year. And then there are the plans for downtown light rail and bus rapid transit to the suburbs. Efforts like those provide hope that the Detroit region will reverse its decline and emerge stronger than ever.

But amid the signs of progress are two highway projects that threaten to undermine the region’s recovery. The worst of the two, perhaps, is the $2.7 billion plan to widen I-94 through Midtown. SEMCOG and the political leaders who appoint its members apparently believe that ramming more than half a dozen new highway lanes through one of the city’s most promising neighborhoods will help stabilize Detroit.

If you ask the experts, they strongly disagree. Model D Media reports that not only will this project soak up nearly $3 billion that could be used to advance the region’s transit ambitions, it will actually impede mobility for city residents. The project will eliminate 14 freeway crossings in the city, making walking and biking more difficult for city residents with limited options. “After removing these bridges, there will be a mile of impassable expressway,” Todd Scott of the Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance told local website We Are Mode Shift.

Local resistance to this project is, not surprisingly, increasing. The city of Detroit and Washtenaw County, home of Ann Arbor, recently passed resolutions opposing it. Similar legislation is being considered by Ferndale and Hazel Park, two inner suburbs.

On Thursday, SEMCOG will vote on I-94 and another highway plan to expand I-75 through wealthy, suburban Oakland County. Together these projects represent $4 billion in planned spending. There is some concern that if the region were to reject these projects, it would forfeit federal money. But regional transportation officials have indicated that this money could be spent repairing the city’s existing roads, which are in terrible shape. Last year, a survey of the region’s residents found more than 90 percent said the roads are in fair to poor condition. Maintenance costs have doubled in recent years, local officials report, while the population has shrunk.

Imagine how much good $4 billion could do the Detroit region if directed toward some of the region’s biggest problems.

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It truly is a testament to the collective power of denial that Rust Belt city leaders still think highways are going to improve their economies. Decades of experience with sprawl and center city decline apparently haven’t put an end to the notion that prosperity is just one road widening away. In Cleveland, business leaders are clamoring for a new $350 million roadway they insist will revive manufacturing in some very poor, nearly-abandoned neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a bit further east on the Lake Erie coast, there’s a great example of how cities’ seemingly bottomless optimism about road and highway projects can end up putting them in a very bad position.

Since 1990, the Buffalo metro area has lost 5 percent of its population and built 525 miles of new roads. According to One Region Forward, a collaborative regional visioning project that major planning agencies are currently undertaking, that translates into roughly 1,043 new “lane miles,” at an average annual maintenance cost, per lane mile, of $25,328 in Erie County and $16,166 in Niagara County.

Looking at the Buffalo region alone, this means taxpayers have assumed $26 million more in maintenance costs each year, divided among fewer people. That works out to about $35 per person, per year, Buffalo Rising reports. But those costs are really just the tip of the iceberg:

The real cost associated with this new infrastructure is actually much greater. When we build new roads, we often need to expand our sewer, water, utility lines, etc.

In Buffalo Niagara, where we have been slowly losing population for forty years, this new infrastructure has been created with fewer people to contribute tax dollars to pay for it.

For instance, the New York State Department of Transportation in 2011 estimated that an additional $4.03 billion would be needed to bring the state system up to a state of good repair.

It’s a good thing the Buffalo region is finally beginning to critically examine its road spending with One Region Forward. Buffalo Rising mentions a handful of policy tools Buffalo could employ to get a handle on ballooning infrastructure costs — like creating new incentives for infill development and rural land preservation — though it remains to be seen whether the city will actually seize on any of them.

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.

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.”

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.

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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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.

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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The driving boom is over.

After decades of steady growth, U.S. driving rates have stagnated and even fallen. Per capita driving is as low as it was in 1996. And yet, federal and state government estimates continue to predict inexorable growth, relentlessly building expensive new highways for drivers who might not materialize.

A groundbreaking new study from U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group shows that any of three likely scenarios for future U.S. driving trends show far lower vehicle miles traveled than any of the principal current government estimates. That creates a disconnect between the kinds of transportation Americans are choosing with their feet and the kinds of transportation the system is designing for them.

Transit ridership is rising steadily – Americans took 10 percent more transit trips in 2011 than in 2005 – yet more than half of U.S. transit systems have been forced by budget constraints to either raise fares or cut service – or both – since the beginning of 2010. Meanwhile, although Americans are showing a flagging interest in automobile travel, states are breaking the bank to build shiny new roads.

Here are the three possible future scenarios for driving behavior that authors Phineas Baxandall of U.S. PIRG and Tony Dutzik of the Frontier Group laid out:

Back to the Future: This scenario assumes that the decline in driving is a temporary “blip,” largely due to the economic recession, and not a lasting trend. It assumes driving rates will soon pick right up where they left off. In this scenario, driving rates by age cohort and sex return to 2004 levels by 2020 and continue marching upward.

Enduring Shift: Under this scenario, the last decade’s shift in driving behaviors is real and lasting, with people continuing to embrace different forms of transportation and more compact communities. Gas prices stay high, the economy bounces back without leading to a huge jump in VMT, and the digitally-connected world continues to reduce the need for travel. This assumes each age and sex cohort keeps driving at lower rates than the same cohort did in previous generations. “For example, if 20 year-old males in 2009 drove 20 percent less than 20 year-old males did in 2001, it is assumed that eleven years later in 2020 they will similarly drive 20 percent less than 31-year-old males did in 2001,” Baxandall and Dutzik write.

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If you value principles like social and fiscal responsibility, the Wisconsin transportation budget is an unmitigated disaster. Not only does Wisconsin DOT’s spending plan gut funds to transit and local streets, it lavishes $900 million in borrowed money to pay for extravagant highway projects of dubious value to the public.

Good government groups and environmental advocates have proposed an alternative. The 10 Percent Solution, as they’re calling it, would cut 10 percent, or $300 million, from the highway budget and shift it back to transit and local streets. The plan would reduce overall borrowing by 22 percent.

“Demand for transportation choices is increasing, while transit service is being cut and our roads and bridges are crumbling,” said Bruce Speight, director of Wisconsin PIRG, which produced the report jointly with 1000 Friends of Wisconsin and the Sierra Club. “But the transportation budget proposal doesn’t help return taxpayer money to communities for road repair and transit. Instead, it funnels hundreds of millions into highway expansion projects.”

A big problem with WisDOT’s proposed budget, advocates say, is that state leaders continue to prioritize highway expansion even though Wisconsinites are driving less. On average, each resident drove 500 fewer miles in 2010 than in 2004.

“Wisconsinites need a transportation budget that reflects and supports how we travel, not the interests of highway lobby and big road construction firms who profit from taxpayer-funded and high-priced highway expansions,” Speight said.

Meanwhile, the state has been consistently reducing its contributions to local streets. Since 1998, the share of statewide funding that was dispensed to localities for road maintenance has fallen from 32 percent to 19 percent — a policy which is tantamount to increasing local taxes. Over that time, meanwhile, the share of state funds being used for highway expansion increased from 43 percent to 47 percent. To make matters worse, transit suffered a 10 percent cut in the 2011-2013 budget, and this new budget does not restore that funding.

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The majority of the roads and highways built in America are simply bad investments. Continuing this pattern will only ensure that wasteful projects consume larger chunks of our federal, state, and local budgets, without addressing the real need for transportation options.

This Streetfacts chapter has a bit more math than usual, but we think we’ve made an entertaining and accessible profile of how government agencies routinely justify unnecessary road projects. The example we’ve chosen to illustrate the problem is a federally-funded “diamond-deverter” interchange in Colorado. The project as proposed may look like a pretty good deal for taxpayers at first, but after crunching the numbers, you’ll see that’s not the case at all.

Much of the inspiration for this piece comes from the outstanding work of Strong Towns, an organization that emphasizes obtaining a higher return on infrastructure investments. Strong Towns Executive Director Charles Marohn, Jr. has been getting his message out through what he calls curbside chats, and we’ll soon be debuting a Streetfilm that features his work.

From the beginning of today’s hearing, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee made it clear they weren’t going to let Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s last appearance before them be an easy one. While the hearing’s purpose was to examine the department’s budget request, the tough questions LaHood fielded on the budget were nothing compared to the fight one lawmaker picked about the Columbia River Crossing.

Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Tom Latham derided the administration request for $50 billion for “immediate transportation investments” as “a proposal we’ve seen three times before” which, like the 2009 stimulus package, is “not paid for or offset by reductions elsewhere.” He dismissed the plan to pay for transportation with war savings as “dubious,” saying, “Many members hope that the drawdown of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan will provide an opportunity to reduce spending and the deficit, and not serve as excuse for even more spending.”

LaHood told Latham he “can’t have it both ways.”

“The first two years I was in this job you all criticized us for not coming up with a way to fund transportation,” LaHood said. “For the last two years, after receiving criticism for the first two years, for no funding, we’ve come up with a funding mechanism.”

Even worse than defending a gimmicky pay-for, LaHood tied himself in knots promising the U.S. DOT “has never promoted building anything to get anywhere faster.” He defended this position when it came to the Columbia River Crossing in the Portland area, which Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler raked him over the coals for, and even for high-speed rail, which he pledged was not actually about increasing speeds. A weird position, indeed.

Latham noted that the administration budget proposal included $40 billion for rail and wondered when the administration might send over a draft proposal of the rail reauthorization those numbers are based on. He reminded LaHood that the administration never actually sent a draft surface transportation reauthorization.

LaHood tried to turn the tables on Latham, saying the president was busy with guns, immigration and the sequester, and when Congress does its work on those three issues, Obama will bring out his bold plans for transportation. LaHood has made this argument before, and it’s one I find perplexing. Isn’t that why there are Cabinet secretaries, with thousands of people working under them? No one at DOT is working on guns and immigration, but I bet someone there has a pretty good handle on their plans for the next rail bill.

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Congratulations are owed to Bob McDonnell. He’s scored a victory on his transportation funding plan, cementing his legacy (though infuriating conservatives, including his hand-picked successor). His achievement is being called the first bipartisan initiative to pass in Virginia in decades. And what does this great deed accomplish? Secure revenue to fuel a new era of wasteful road-building in the commonwealth of Virginia.

Virginia’s state House and Senate both voted this weekend to approve McDonnell’s funding plan for transportation, despite opposition from anti-tax activists. McDonnell’s original proposal to eliminate the gas tax entirely got massaged a little bit, turning into a 3.5 percent tax on the wholesale price of gas.

His proposal to raise the sales tax survived the legislature, as did the $100 tax on alternative fuels – an idea that is somewhat less backward now that some semblance of gas tax remains. Democrats hate it, though, and McDonnell has already signaled a vague willingness to “review” it.

The sales tax hike, however, is as backwards as ever. McDonnell is raising the sales tax 0.3 percent in most parts of the state but 6 percent in the populous Hampton Roads and northern Virginia areas. Much of the extra funds raised in those areas will go to local projects, but it still means the most urban and transit-rich areas, where most of the state’s non-drivers live, will pay more for a plan that disproportionately funds rural roads.

Drivers will pay five cents per gallon less than they did under the old gas tax, given current prices — shrinking their contribution by about 30 percent. Rather than strengthen the gas tax’s small but important incentive to drive less, McDonnell’s plan turns it the other way.

The other reason the sales tax hike won’t do the trick is that sales taxes aren’t an appropriate tool when what you need is a stable source of funding.

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