Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Last month Streetsblog asked whether President Obama would select transportation projects that reduce congestion, improve air quality, and create jobs when he picked several infrastructure investments, among those recommended by agency officials, to fast-track. The selection of these projects, intended to help spur short-term job creation, could avoid the mistakes of the 2009 stimulus program, which funneled billions to “shovel-ready” projects that will also promote sprawl. Leading up to the announcement, the president’s rhetoric seemed to indicate that the administration would opt for road maintenance and transit projects rather than newer, wider highways.

The Tappan Zee bridge overhaul is supposed to include transit facilities, but some fear that those may get dropped later on. Photo: SamuelWantman / Wikimedia

Today the administration announced its list of 14 projects, and at first glance, it seems like most of the transportation-related projects take transit, bicycling, and walking into consideration. Some of them will induce sprawl nonetheless, because they expand traffic capacity.

These projects won’t get more federal funds, but they will get federal help in expediting the process. The president promised that this fast-tracking won’t shortchange environmental reviews. The projects were highlighted by officials in several agencies and final selection was done by the White House.

Here’s the list of surface transportation-related projects, most of them recommended by the Department of Transportation:

Tappan Zee Bridge, New York: The bridge is rated structurally deficient as well as functionally obsolete, meaning that in addition to carrying more traffic than it was designed for, the structure is unsafe to carry vehicles. Constant repairs have made the bridge into a money pit, and a significant overhaul could produce long-term savings on maintenance. Notably, this project is not close to “shovel-ready” status, so its selection seems to indicate that the administration had long-term goals in mind, in addition to short-term job creation. There are plans to include a Bus Rapid Transit lane and a commuter rail line on the bridge, as well, but some advocates worry that all that widening could happen without the transit components coming through in the end.

Crenshaw/LAX, California: LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has become a champion for federal loan programs because of his zeal to expand transit in his city. The Crenshaw/LAX project is a cornerstone of his efforts and will provide a critical transit connection to the airport. The city has done a good job attracting federal interest and assistance, and the FTA is already helping them shorten the approval time for the project.

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President Obama stands in enemy territory to push for his jobs bill. Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

President Obama chose the home turf of two of his principal political opponents to highlight the need for more infrastructure investment in the U.S. Standing beneath the Brent Spence Bridge, which connects Cincinnati (the home city of House Speaker John Boehner) with Kentucky (the home state of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell), Obama made his demand of Congress: “Rebuild this bridge!”

The president was making a push for his $447 billion jobs bill, which could create an estimated 1.9 million jobs.

The Brent Spence Bridge is considered “functionally obsolete.” “It’s safe to drive on, but it was not designed to accommodate today’s traffic, which can stretch for a mile,” Obama said.

Many transportation reformers would rather see transportation agencies attend to “structurally deficient” infrastructure — which is not safe to drive on, despite the fact that thousands of people do it every day — instead of widening safe, existing roads. This particular bridge project, which local smart growth advocates have been warning about for years, would add more lanes and induce sprawl.

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It’s generally difficult to determine exactly how and to what extent the shadowy hand of Big Oil is at work in our publicly funded infrastructure decisions.

ExxonMobil wants to move its headquarters 10 miles further from the city of Houston. And that's all the reason Texas needs to spend $5.2 billion on a highway. Photo: Bloomberg

Some of the more notable exceptions over the past few years have included the Koch Brothers-Scott Walker Wisconsin roads bonanza. Or the attempted assassination of the Cincinnati Streetcar by Ohio’s asphalt lobbiest-turned-DOT Director, Jerry Wray.

But Texas has just taken self-interested interference in public infrastructure projects by an oil company to a whole new level.

Nevermind that the state can’t afford it. Or that the region doesn’t have the congestion to justify it. The Houston region is renewing its push for a $5.2 billion third outerbelt at the behest of ExxonMobil.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the state is short about $315 billion — with a b — short of what is needed just to keep its existing highways in good repair and moving smoothly.

But Exxon has apparently pulled the well-worn trump card for private businesses seeking massive public subsidy in the form of roadways: it has threatened to leave the region. The multinational oil corporation has plans for a 385-acre campus, naturally, outside the reach of Houston’s two existing outerbelts, according to the Huffington Post.

The commission’s vote in support of the project was unanimous, and if all goes as planned, the segments of the road adjoining ExxonMobil will go online just as the company’s new campus, which sits about 10 miles up the road from its old campus, is completed in 2015.

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Yesterday, Miller-McCune’s Michael Scott Moore accused Southwest Airlines of helping to bury a potential Texas bullet train 15 years ago.

Texas high-speed rail corridors. Photo: TX Comptroller

“Southwest understood better than most high-speed rail critics just how well the trains could work,” Moore wrote. “[High-speed rail in Spain] has reduced Spanish highway traffic — even for cargo, by freeing up space on the older rail network — and it’s cut dramatically into domestic airline business.”

Miller-McCune quotes a 2006 story in The Austinist:

Dallas-based airline company Southwest Airlines launched a sweeping, aggressive public relations campaign throughout the state in order to discredit TGV and prevent the company from meeting its fundraising deadlines. Why? Because they dominated (and still dominate) the friendly skies between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio with a business plan identical to the one proposed by TGV. It was their monopolized turf. In a huge state with no other high-speed transportation options available, Southwest Airlines has always been the intra-Texas transport of choice for many people going from city to city who don’t want to make the long drives.

Regional air travel is a significant consideration when assessing a corridor’s potential for high-speed rail, since short-jump flights are so easily replaced with a train that goes as fast, provides more legroom, lets you skip long security lines, and begins and ends in downtowns (not far-flung airports). When America 2050 studied the best potential high-speed rail in the country, the report authors couldn’t help noticing, “Texas has a relatively large short haul air market, with 4.4 million passengers in 2008 moving between Dallas and other points in the Texas Triangle and Gulf Coast.” That factor helped several Texas corridors score high on America 2050’s ranking for rail potential.

The organization also noticed, “To accommodate its fast growing population, Texas has invested billions of dollars over the last decade adding more than 1,000 lane miles of highways and upgrading its major air terminals. Despite this, metropolitan congestion has continued to worsen and the change in congestion in the Houston and Dallas metro regions is among the worst in the nation over the last decade.”

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Got a road that needs fixing in your state? Don’t hold your breath. Chances are your state DOT has been busy building new roads, while neglecting maintenance.

A new report from Smart Growth America [PDF] finds that states spent 57 percent of their highway funds building new roads between 2004 and 2008. As a result, 23,300 new lane miles were constructed — a 1.3 percent expansion. Meanwhile, the existing 1.9 million lane miles deteriorated under a regime that prioritizes expansion of the system over its maintenance.

New roads got more than their share of tax money between 2004 and 2008. Image: Smart Growth America

The Federal Highway Administration reports that half of all major state roads were in “fair” or “poor” condition in 2008.

“It’s imperative that states rethink how they invest their precious transportation dollars,” said Erich Zimmermann, a policy analyst with Taxpayers for Common Sense, a co-sponsor of the study. “Since 1956 federal taxpayers have invested in the neighborhood of $1 trillion the nation’s highways and therefore have an interest in making sure these investments are kept in a state of good repair.”

“Unfortunately nobody gets to cut a ribbon when a road is fixed,” Zimmermann continued.

The lack of attention to existing infrastructure is likely to have a long-term cost, well beyond the immediate “savings” of doing nothing. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials reports that every dollar spent to keep a road in good condition helps save $6 to $14 that would otherwise be required to rebuild a significantly deteriorated street.

“It just becomes incredibly expensive to fix these roads when they’ve passed a certain state of disrepair,” said Grace Crunican, former Director of the Oregon and Seattle DOTs. “We’re not doing a good job prioritizing what the needs are.”

Perhaps most significantly — and rather obviously — states’ fetish for new building means that road networks are actually expanding as they continue to fall into worse condition. Smart Growth America determined that states would collectively need to spend $43 billion every year for 20 years to bring “poor” roads into “good” condition and keep them that way. That’s more than the $38 billion all the states combined had to spend each year on both new construction and maintenance between 2004 and 2008.

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We hear it all the time: The road lobby insists that the only way to reduce mind-numbing traffic congestion on the roads they built is to build new roads. Federal funding gives huge blank checks to state DOTs, which tend to prioritize road building over transit, bridge maintenance or anything else. But mounting evidence suggests that building new roads won’t do anything to alleviate congestion.

In a paper to be published soon in the American Economic Review, two University of Toronto professors have added to the body of evidence showing that highway and road expansion increases traffic by increasing demand. On the flip side, they show that transit expansion doesn’t help cure congestion either.

We’ll spare you the calculus in the report. Here’s the upshot: “Roads cause traffic.”

Duranton and Turner: If you build it, you will sit in traffic on it. Photo: Arch and the Environment

Professors Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner analyzed travel data from hundreds of metro areas in the U.S., resulting in what they call the most comprehensive dataset  ever assembled on the traffic impacts of road construction. They write:

For interstate highways in metropolitan areas we find that VKT [vehicle kilometers traveled] increases one for one with interstate highways, confirming the “fundamental law of highway congestion” suggested by Anthony Downs (1962; 1992). We also uncover suggestive evidence that this law may extend beyond interstate highways to a broad class of major urban roads, a “fundamental law of road congestion”. These results suggest that increased provision of interstate highways and major urban roads is unlikely to relieve congestion of these roads.

Duranton and Turner say building more roads results in more driving for a number of reasons: People drive more when there are more roads to drive on, commercial driving and trucking increases with the number of roads, and, to a lesser extent, people migrate to areas with lots of roads. Given that new capacity just increases driving, they find that “a new lane kilometer of roadway diverts little traffic from other roads.”

Given the huge amount of time consumed by driving (the average American household spent nearly three hours per day in a car in 2001), the authors note that “the costs of congestion are large.” Considering the economic value of time spent doing anything but sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, that becomes an economic problem of the first order.

“Transportation accounts for about one dollar in five that Americans spend,” Turner said in an interview with Streetsblog. “The interstate highway system eats up on the order of two dollars of every $100 of every market transaction in the United States. That’s a huge part of the economy and a huge part of people’s lives. Understanding how that works is really important; you don’t want to make mistakes on something that important. You don’t want to build roads and have them not deliver the effects that you expect them to.”

The implications for this research are significant, especially as Congress considers whether to integrate performance measures into federal transportation spending decisions. These findings make a strong case that Congress should not allocate too many scarce resources to road expansion when that’s not a real solution for congestion.

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A $125 million “road to nowhere.” Another $100+ million for a bypass around a town of 2,711. Welcome to the era of “fiscal austerity” in Gov. Scott Walker’s Wisconsin.

Potholes and rough roads cost each Wisconsin driver an additional $281 annually, according to a new report. But they won't get any relief under Scott Walker's budget. Instead, they're getting more highways. Photo: The Daily Reporter

A new report from the Public Interest Research Group examines $1.2 billion in proposed highway projects green-lighted by the Walker administration while the state rolls back funding for transit, education and local communities.

The findings indicate that in all his zeal for cutting public spending, Walker has a blind spot for highways. Despite a $3.6 billion budget deficit, Walker’s Wisconsin is forging ahead with a fortified highway budget. The Walker administration has proposed a 13 percent increase in highway construction. Meanwhile, $10 million in transit cuts have been proposed, in addition to a reduction in $48 million for maintaining local roads.

Wisconsin is hardly crying out for new road capacity. The state already ranks 13th in the nation on transportation spending per capita, or 24 percent above the national average, the report notes. So it’s not clear why highways have garnered such a privileged position in the state budget, said report co-author Bruce Speight.

“This is spending gone wild on questionable projects at a time when we should be prioritizing maintaining our existing infrastructure and transit,” he said.

Of the four projects analyzed by WISPIRG, the group found all of them to be justified by outdated data and generally of questionable merit.

I-90 Widening

Wisconsin is planning to widen 45 miles of I-90 south of Madison to the Illinois border from four lanes to six. The project is slated to cost $715 million, but local press reports have put it at as a high as $1.5 billion. PIRG reports that the project was justified using traffic data from 2002. Furthermore, crash data indicate safety problems could be remedied with less expensive interventions at interchanges.

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There’s a place just outside Houston where the vinyl siding and attached garages thin out and recede into grasslands.

The Katy Prairie, one of the country's last remaining natural grasslands and an important bird habitat, may be replaced with a highway and sprawl. Image: Houston Tomorrow

In this place — one of the country’s few remaining tall-grass prairies — something amazing happens each fall. First hundreds, then thousands, then millions of birds arrive here at Katy Prairie, an international wintering grounds for migratory birds, especially waterfowl.

Over the decades, this 1,000 square mile sanctuary has largely survived the encroachment of farmers and relentless development pressure from neighboring Houston, thanks in no small part to its dedicated supporters.

But the Katy Prairie has never faced a opponent like the Grand Parkway before. Piece by piece, the Houston area has been building a third — yes, third — bypass for the region. And much to the horror of local environmentalists, the next segment is planned to directly bisect this extraordinary habitat.

Development of this pristine land isn’t just collateral damage — it’s the point of the project. Project sponsors make no bones about it: The 15.2-mile Grand Parkway segment through Katy Prairie is a $462 million development project as much as it is a transportation project. Known as “Segment E,” it would be the third phase in a 180-mile “scenic bypass” for Houston. Each of the 11 segments is considered a separate and “independently justifiable project.”

Billy Burge of the Grand Parkway Association says right now there isn’t much need for Segment E, in terms of traffic. Burge and his colleagues don’t shy away from the fact that the project will generate more car trips and sprawl. In fact, they have what you might call a “build it and they will come” philosophy about road-building and traffic.

“There’s real demand in 15 to 17 years to have this,” said Burge, who chairs the association overseeing the project for the state and the region. “Once that link is completed, you’ll have a steady stream of traffic.”

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On Earth Day last Friday, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell issued a “transportation challenge” to the people of his state: to “try a form of transportation other than driving alone once every two weeks.” The language he used would please any reformer:

Gov. Bob McDonnell signed his transportation plan into law last week. Photo: AP/Patrick Kane

Virginians must begin a fundamental shift in the way we travel to take greater advantage of the transportation options available to us today.

Using the vast array of transportation options available in Virginia can deliver significant benefits. Public transportation options reduce harmful gas emissions in our environment and gallons of gasoline used each year, remove cars from our congestion highways [sic], and can help families save thousands over the cost of owning and operating a car. Options such as telework can remove the need to commute completely, saving millions of vehicle miles traveled.

Two days before Earth Day, however, McDonnell had announced more than 900 projects that would be funded by his transportation plan, which he calls “the most significant investment in the Commonwealth’s transportation system in a generation.” The plan would spend $3 billion to “not only address the needs of the aging highway system upon which we all depend” but also “provide a needed injection of funding into our economy to spur recovery from the difficult recession of the past several years,” according to McDonnell.

Experts are still analyzing the numbers that came out last week, which are exceptionally confusing. For instance, the first slide of a VDOT powerpoint presentation Streetsblog obtained shows that $8.1 billion will go to highway construction with $2.3 billion for rail and public transportation – a similar split to what transit gets from the federal government. But those numbers only include construction, not operations and maintenance, and clearly they add up to much more than the $3 billion investment that’s the centerpiece of McDonnell’s transportation plan. Reformers caution that a closer look at the numbers proves that transit isn’t getting a good deal.

Indeed, in its announcement of the 900 recipient projects, the state DOT highlighted 14 flagship projects that would be funded — all road projects, most of them involving roadway widening. There are also several replacements of aging bridges. In a separate list, the press release lists several rail and transit projects, though it doesn’t give a dollar amount dedicated to transit.

“State law requires that at least 14.7 percent of the [Transportation Trust Fund] go to transit,” said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the capital area’s Coalition for Smarter Growth. “I would be quite surprised if the total six-year plan surpasses this share.”

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This article was written by Steve Hiniker, executive director of 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin, and was reprinted with permission of that organization. It originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Governor Scott Walker’s proposed budget has more than enough pain to go around. Schools get hit with more than $800 million in cuts over the next two years. Recycling programs are not funded. Health care for seniors and the poor is slashed. Local road aids are cut. Some transit systems may not survive the proposed reductions. State revenue sharing is going down, putting more pressure at the local level to cover the costs of cuts to state aids – and without raising property taxes.

Scott Walker is fighting for you, highway builders! Photo: Will's Words of Wisdom

It’s called austerity.

Unless you happen to be a road builder.

Then this budget is called a bonanza.

While other programs are cut, highway expansion projects totaling more than $400 million get the green light. Highway expansion raids the general fund of more than $140 million, crushing any arguments that “highway users pay for the costs of roads.” In fact, the general fund and property taxes will pay about half of roadway costs in the future. So-called user fees are soon to be eclipsed by decidedly nonuser fees.

When you look at the increase in highway spending, it is also important to pay attention to where the money goes. Local road aids are cut, meaning that even though there is more money going for major highway expansion, there is less money for local units of government to fix those bone-jarring potholes that crop up every spring. Maintenance dollars for highways are down as well.

Walker has said that the highway expansion is needed for our economic recovery. The governor is putting a lot of faith – and capital – in having superhighways be the cornerstone of the state’s economic recovery. After all, he could have put the money in building better communities with better schools as a basis of economic development.

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