Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The way Texas throws around money for highways — $5.2 billion for a third outer-belt for Houston, $2 billion for Dallas’ eighth downtown highway – you would think TxDOT was running over with cheddar. This is a state, need we remind you, that “found” $350 million for a stalled highway project local leaders freely admit was designed to encourage sprawl, not solve any pressing mobility problems.

A Texas-sized pothole in Dallas. Photo: CBS DFW

But the Lone Star State is on a crash course toward a big infrastructure crisis, according to a new report from TRIP [PDF], a think tank supported by road builders, insurance agencies and other interest groups.

In 2010, the group reported, 18 percent of Texas’ urban roads were in “poor” condition — in need of replacement — and 27 percent were in “mediocre” condition — in need of resurfacing. Three percent of the state’s bridges were “structurally deficient” and another 15 percent were “functionally obsolete.”

The group estimates that road conditions contribute to one-third of all traffic fatalities and serious injuries. In addition, poor road conditions cost the average Texas driver $400 annually in repair costs, or $6.1 billion statewide, annually. And the toll is worse in metropolitan areas, according to the group.

“Because maintenance is just not sexy with the voters, public officials have decided to spend that money on expansions and new facilities, new capacity,” said David Crossley, of the smart growth think tank Houston Tomorrow. “TxDOT, while complaining it doesn’t have enough for proper maintenance of the existing system, has nevertheless embarked in earnest on the social engineering project that is SH99, euphemistically called ‘The Grand Parkway,’ which is intended to open up new land for sprawl development at the very edges of the region. That’s a $6 billion project.”

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You all excited to watch the presidential debate tonight? Here’s a glimpse back to 2007, when the old Barack Obama was getting us all hyped up on a sugar rush of hope and change. Check out this video, care of the conservative Daily Caller, which is making a lot of hay about some racially-charged remarks Obama made on the campaign trail back then.

The part that interests us comes at about 3:45, and it’s not the part Tucker Carlson is crowing about. It’s where then-candidate Obama says:

That’s why we need additional federal public transportation dollars going to the highest need communities. We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs if we have people in the cities right now who want to work but have no way to get to those jobs. We got to help connect them to the jobs that exist. We should be investing in minority-owned businesses in our neighborhoods so people don’t have to travel from miles away.

The Washington Post’s Brad Plumer took this to mean that Obama was advocating a fix-it-first strategy. But that’s not quite the way I see it – it looks to me like a more incisive critique of the way urban areas get the shaft in favor of rural and suburban areas. It’s specifically an argument for urban transit instead of suburban road-building. It’s even a rejection of job sprawl and a promotion of urban businesses where people could get to work without driving.

Wonder if he’ll bring back any of that fiery urbanist zeal tonight?

Interstate 64, running between downtown Louisville and the Ohio River, was once listed on the Congress for New Urbanism's Freeways Without Futures list. Now, it looks like it will be widened. Photo: Broken Sidewalk

Louisville, Kentucky, is, by all accounts, a city with a lot of potential. An old river city, it has a wealth of beautiful, historic architecture. It’s mid-sized, but large enough to have some good urban amenities. It’s affordable, with a downtown waterfront and some unique cultural charms. As the New York Times said in its article about the city earlier this week, “Louisville has good bones.”

But, regrettably, Louisville seems to be on the verge of taking a giant step backward. Even back in the early 1960s, Jane Jacobs was warning that the “biggest threat” to a popular downtown shoe market was “an expressway that will cut diagonally across.” That market, along with much of the downtown’s pre-expressway vitality, is long since history. But the expressways live on.

Which is why the project to widen a nexus of highways and add a bridge between downtown and Indiana has been so controversial. The Times seemed perplexed about why Louisville — a city whose director of economic growth and innovation would proudly proclaim “urbanism is the preferred lifestyle now” — is expanding the downtown real estate it dedicates to highways, when so many other cities are choosing to remove them:

As for the notion that expanding the interstate tangle and adding the sister bridge next to the Kennedy might bring more people and jobs into the city, I can only say that 40 years after the interstates supposedly started pumping life into Louisville’s downtown, the streets here looked pretty empty, especially at night.

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Source: NRDC

When asked what would solve traffic problems in their community, 42 percent of Americans say more transit. Only 20 percent say more roads. And 21 percent would like to see communities developed that don’t require so much driving. Two-thirds support local planning that guides new development into existing cities and near public transportation.

That’s the result of a new poll released this morning by the Natural Resources Defense Council [PDF]. The national phone survey of 800 Americans was supplemented by smaller surveys to gauge attitudes in the Cleveland region, Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina. The poll follows similar surveys NRDC conducted in 2007 and 2009.

Of the national respondents, only about a third had taken transit or a bike any time in the last month, and only two-thirds had ever done so. But even they support local investment in transit by more than a two-to-one margin.

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“There’s an inverse proportion of the size of a transportation program to the amount of transparency,” says Deron Lovaas of the Natural Resources Defense Council. While anyone can easily find in granular detail anything they would ever want to know about where bike/ped money goes, and they can get a pretty good idea of what’s going on with transit capital investments, highway spending is a black box — and that’s 80 percent of U.S. transportation dollars.

Why should this bike/ped path be subject to more rigorous reporting requirements ...

... than this highway? Above photo: National Transportation Enhancements Clearinghouse. Bottom photo: This is Broken

But that could change if an unsung provision of the new transportation bill, MAP-21, is implemented as fully as it should be.

Right now, finding information about highway projects is incredibly hard. Want to find out how much a certain project cost and what money was used to build it? Great. You can search “104(j)” in the Federal Highways Administration website and get reports from 2008 and 2009. Looking for anything less than three years old? Better luck next time, buster. Hoping for a searchable database? Here’s a scanned Excel spreadsheet. I hope you don’t mind that every state reports from a third to half of their spending as “other.” Want to drill down deeper than topline numbers for programs and states? You’re asking a bit much, don’t you think?

Meanwhile, the world is your oyster if you’re curious how states are spending the pocket change devoted to bike/ped. The Transportation Enhancements Clearinghouse lets you filter projects by state, type, and year on a digital database, going all the way back to the start of the Enhancements program in 1992 and updated through 2011.

Curious about the bike lane and sidewalk put in near Santa Fe High School in Alachua County, Florida, in 2009? It cost $86,511 total, consisting of $13,500 in federal funds, $67,963 in stimulus funds and a $5,048 local match. Would you like fries with that?

If only as much accountability were demanded of multimillion dollar highway projects as they were of $86,000 bike lanes.

Thanks to Section 1503(c) of MAP-21, it could get easier to hold states accountable for the highways they build. The section, titled “Transparency and Accountability,” says U.S. DOT will have to make expenditure data for highways and transit publicly accessible, organized by project and state, regularly updated “to reflect the current status of obligations, expenditures, and Federal-aid projects” – and it should be searchable and downloadable. And it should be submitted to Congress.

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In the late eighties and nineties, every traffic issue the Tennessee Department of Transportation faced was assigned the same solution: a bypass. But over the years, the department has come around to a new way of doing things, according to 40-year TDOT veteran Ralph Comer. Comer says the current commissioner, John Schroer, wants to become known as the “no-bypass commissioner.” He simply believes there are usually more cost-effective ways of solving transportation problems.

"Context sensitive solutions" preserve main streets like this one in Franklin, Tennessee instead of turning them into high-speed thoroughfares. Photo: Westhaven

This way of thinking led Schroer, Comer, and the department into a conversation with Smart Growth America. They teamed up to examine the state of Tennessee’s transportation system and devise a path forward, bringing together an impressively diverse coalition, from the Tennessee Disability Coalition to the Sierra Club, the public transit association to the road builders association. One irrefutable fact brought them together: The TDOT project pipeline would cost nine times more to construct than available funding would permit. Something had to change.

Tennessee is in better fiscal shape than most states and is one of a small handful of states with zero debt – meaning it pays zero percent of its budget toward debt service, leaving a lot more for infrastructure. That’s a luxurious position in today’s economic context. So if a close examination of cost-effective transportation strategies can be transformative for Tennessee, just imagine what it can do for states even more desperate to get costs under control.

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Over the past two weeks, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association has sent letters to the Republican National Committee [PDF] and the Democratic National Committee [PDF], asking them to consider inserting a plank in their platforms about transportation. And they were clear in their letter that, despite being major cheerleaders for road-building, the future they see is multi-modal.

ARTBA reminds Republicans that the Transcontinental Railroad was their idea -- and a good one, at that. Image: Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco

They also made a strong argument for transportation as a federal responsibility. To many, this is a no-brainer. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) likes to remind people of the example of the Kansas Turnpike, built in 1954, when transportation was left to the states. Oklahoma ran out of funding for the project — “So for the next 18 months, the turnpike ended in Amos Switzer’s field at the Kansas/Oklahoma border,” DeFazio said. “For months on end, Amos was left to fish drivers out of his field until the start of the interstate system that finished this badly needed roadway.”

Conservatives in Congress have been arguing the unthinkable: taking the country back to a state-based system where there’s no federal role in transportation. “We settled that debate with Dwight David Eisenhower,” DeFazio said.

ARTBA wants to settle this argument once and for all with a little founding-father-speak — always popular with the right. Here they bring out the big guns — George Washington himself — who in 1785 said, “The credit, the saving, and convenience of this country all require that our great roads [and by this I'm sure he also meant light rail, bullet trains, and the national bike network] leading fromone public place to another should be straightened and established by law… To me these things seem indispensably necessary.” Not to mention that the federal responsibility for “post roads” is written into the constitution.

Writing to the Democrats, ARTBA celebrates Thomas Jefferson, who authorized funding for the National Road from Cumberland, Maryland to Vandalia, Illinois; Woodrow Wilson, who signed the Federal-Aid Roads Act; Franklin D. Roosevelt, from whom infrastructure building was a key strategy out of the Great Depression; and other Democrats right up to 2008. Take note, straphangers and complete streets advocates: Tailoring your message to butter up your audience is a lobbying strategy well worth stealing from these guys.

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Source: Smart Growth America

Last week, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign revealed how states prioritize spending: 20 percent for transit, 2 percent for bike/ped, 38.5 percent for maintenance, and about 22.5 percent for highway expansion. Looking just at those last two numbers, that breaks down to 71 percent more spending on repair than sprawl-inducing new lanes.

But Smart Growth America cautions that these figures may be misleading.

“It’s important to note that the Tri-State report is based on an analysis of State Transportation Improvement Programs, so it’s looking at planned funding, not necessarily real spending,” said SGA President and CEO Geoffrey Anderson in a statement.

In a 2011 study, Smart Growth America found a very different story. Between 2004 and 2008, states spent an average of 36 percent more on road expansion projects than they did on road repair projects, based on data collected from the states by the Federal Highway Administration.

Between 2004 and 2008, states spent $37.9 billion annually on repair and expansion of roads and highways. Of these funds, 57 percent went to road widening and new road construction – just 1.3 percent of roads. 43 percent went to preservation of existing roads, which make up 98.7 percent of the system.

There are two different conclusions one can reach when looking at the disparity between current state transportation plans (the numbers that Tri-State crunched) and the history of state DOT spending patterns (the numbers emphasized by SGA).

One, we can assume that states are road expansion addicts, always promising to quit and then falling back on their old ways.

Or, two, we can assume, as Anderson charitably (albeit cautiously) does, that “states are coming to grips with the huge backlog of upkeep and maintenance that need to get done” and that the near future will be different than the recent past.

AASHTO Executive Director John Horsley insists it’s the latter. In fact, he disputes Smart Growth America’s analysis, saying the FHWA biannual reports on state spending – up to 2008, the latest year available — show “a consistent upward trend in the percentage that’s spent on rehabilitation and preservation, as opposed to system expansion.”

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Cross-posted from Streets.MN.

We spend billions every year in this country on our transportation network, large percentages of it based on traffic projections. This despite the fact that we have a long record of not being able to accurately project traffic. The answer isn’t better projections but a better transportation system, one that is robust to modeling error.

The projections say California's I-710 isn't wide nearly enough yet. Photo: Cameron Bevers / Can Highways

My home town newspaper recently ran the standard repeat-what-the-engineer-says article on traffic projections. Essentially, the report indicated that we’re going to be inundated with traffic. As things continue to “full build out” (it was in quotes so I’m assuming it is an engineering term), traffic is going to increase by 75 percent, an astounding amount since most locals will attest we are already drowning in traffic (we’re not, but most would attest that we are). The recommendation for dealing with all this traffic seems sensible: make some prudent investments today to acquire more land for future road expansion and then, as they are built, oversize the roads to meet this future demand.

A lot of the rationale for these projections — as well as the public’s acceptance of them — comes from the fact that growth has been robust. In fact, if you go back decades and look at the projections that were made for the present time, they are laughable in how dramatically they underestimated the amount of traffic. We projected out based on what our experience had taught us to anticipate, but we were wrong, and it cost the city a lot of money to retrofit all of the places that were inundated with cars.

This reality fits a national trend. My experience is backed up by studies demonstrating that, the higher the functional classification and the larger the traffic volumes, the greater the degree of underestimate. This correlates with work by Patron Saint of Strong Towns Thinking, Nassim Taleb, who has made the same observations of economic systems, governments, etc… (For one example, go to the 5:10 mark of this recent video.)

Amazingly, the fact the we have been so consistently wrong doesn’t make us any less confident today, either in my hometown or nationwide. We’ve “enhanced” our models now and believe we have it figured out this time, revising the data upward to reflect what we have experienced in the “real” world. This is the essence of modeling, and what else could be more rational?

Or more foolish. In these models, we’ve taken something that is unpredictable — driver behavior — and treated it as if it were actuarial science, akin to estimating life expectancy or your odds of drawing a face card when the dealer is showing fifteen. The idea behind our hubris is that, while one driver may be unpredictable, the average driver will react in a predictable way and, thus, we can model based on a normal distribution. These models are failing to account for things like consumer preference, the ability to access financing, overall market growth, cost of construction materials, gas prices, government employment levels, and on and on and on…. We assume all drivers make predictible traffic decisions. They don’t.

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There’s a lot at stake for metro Atlanta on July 31. That day, voters will go to the polls to decide the fate of a proposed one percent sales tax that promises some $8 billion in transportation funding, to be split relatively evenly between transit and road projects over 10 counties. If it fails, experts warn, the only fundable transportation project going forward could be toll roads.

The Altanta Beltline -- a circular rail and trail system -- is one of the projects that would receive funding under the $8 billion transit referendum coming up at the end of this month. Photo: Curbed Atlanta

Early voting started last Monday and poll results have been all over the map. Some have shown the referendum trailing badly and others give passage a slight edge — but with high rates of undecided voters.

It’s been a long, heated campaign. Promoters of the spending package, namely the local chamber of commerce, have spent some $8 million crafting a message they hope will sway the public. But the issue has been divisive. An odd coalition of opponents has come together including the local Sierra Club, the DeKalb County NAACP and the Tea Party Patriots, according to WSB in Atlanta, raising objections to everything from road expansions to the lack of rail investment in communities of color to the whole premise of raising taxes.

But if there’s one thing everyone agrees on it’s that Atlanta has a big problem when it comes to transportation. The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce has called the region’s notorious gridlock the biggest threat to the region’s prosperity. Four years ago, Forbes said that the city’s traffic problems are the worst in the country, noting that only five of the 13 counties that make up the Atlanta region even have transit service.

And that was before a budget crisis did away with transit in Clayton County, just south of Atlanta — where the household average income is less than $20,000 — roughly two years ago. Meanwhile, MARTA, Atlanta’s underwhelming rail system, is dealing with a crisis of its own. While $600 million from the referendum would be earmarked for MARTA maintenance, that still leaves the agency with a projected $2.3 billion backlog over the next 10 years, just to keep its system in working order. Its reserves are set to expire next year. MARTA is the largest transit system in the country that receives no state support.

“Part of what has made this city so great is a sense of excitement about the future,” real estate executive Clark Gore, of Cassidy Turley, wrote in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, “but unless we deal with our traffic, our best days may be behind us.”

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