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.

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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USDOT has made public the breakdown of President Obama’s $50 billion plan to create jobs through transportation infrastructure investment. The administration says: “It will put people to work upgrading 150,000 miles of road, laying/maintaining 4,000 miles of train tracks, restoring 150 miles of runways, and putting in place a next-generation air-traffic control system that will reduce travel time and delays.”

Specifically, they lay out the numbers:

• $27 billion for rebuilding roads and bridges
• $9 billion for repairing bus and rail transit systems
• $5 billion for projects selected through a competitive grant program
• $4 billion for construction of the high-speed rail network
• $2 billion to improve airport facilities
• $1 billion for a NextGen air traffic control system

It’s encouraging to see the words “upgrading” and “rebuilding” when it comes to roads, indicating that the administration might be adhering to a fix-it-first approach to transportation spending. But, as we mentioned last week, the bridge Obama highlighted recently as a prime target for jobs-bill money isn’t actually in need of repair — transportation officials just want to widen it to allow more traffic to go through faster.

Certainly, the administration has shown a desire to attack the maintenance backlog in the country, but that doesn’t guarantee that highway expansions and sprawl projects won’t get a slice of the “rebuilding” pie.

That said, it’s good to see the plan includes $5 billion for projects funded through a competitive grant program (think TIGER). And it also hits a somewhat more equitable balance between rail/transit and roads than Congressional transportation bills generally do.

The president’s plan also includes an infrastructure bank, funded with $10 billion seed money. The administration says projects will be evaluated on the basis of how badly they’re needed and how much they would help the economy.

Some have said over the last couple of weeks that the I-bank concept is in trouble after the GOP pounced on the Solyndra loan story, in which a solar company filed for bankruptcy soon after receiving half a billion dollars in government-backed loans. Experts say the infrastructure bank proposal would vet projects well and protect taxpayers from risk.

Building America’s Future, led by former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has added their voice to the chorus calling for greater investment in U.S. infrastructure, lest the country fall behind its global competitors. In a new report, Falling Apart and Falling Behind, BAF recommends more focus on mass transit, a switch away from formula funding without performance requirements, and more emphasis on metropolitan areas.

A couple weeks ago, we took some heat from some of you, dear readers, about our coverage of a somewhat similar report from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Indeed, that report called for more infrastructure spending, but without specific recommendations on how to build a bettertransportation system. Charles Marohn at Strong Towns wrote a scathing critique of the report, questioning the urgent need to “spend trillions to save seconds” of commute time – especially the assertion that the U.S. should spend $2.2 trillion in order to save $1.0 trillion. Marohn went on to say:

At Strong Towns, we want our infrastructure maintained. In fact, it’s the common denominator of a Strong Town. But the reason why we can’t maintain our infrastructure is not because we lack the money or are afraid to spend it. It is because the systems we have built and the decisions we’ve made on what is a good investment are based on the kind of ridiculous math you see reflected in this ASCE report. We spend a billion here and a billion there and we get nothing but a couple minutes shaved off of our commutes, which just means we can build more roads and live further away from where we work. (Or, as we call that here in America: growth.)

Well put. And we’re glad to see that today’s contribution to the infrastructure debate goes deeper than the ASCE report in recommending concrete ways to build smarter, not just more.

Building America’s Future urges more spending, but says that to do it right, funding priorities should adhere to national strategies. And they’re not shy about spelling out what those are: more economic growth and mobility, less congestion and pollution. “Largely run on gasoline, our transportation system is environmentally, politically, and economically unsustainable,” they write.

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Highway maintenance has been getting short shrift in state budgets, according to a recent report from Smart Growth America. But a bill introduced in the Senate today seeks to address the imbalance between road construction and maintenance.

Maryland Senator Ben Cardin’s Preservation and Renewal of Federal-Aid Highways Act would require states to develop targets for road maintenance. It would also give USDOT authority to establish and hold states to standards for “state of good repair” on federal highways.

Smart growth advocates and transportation reformers applauded the announcement today, saying it would help put the country back on a sustainable, fiscally responsible path.

“Roads in many states are falling in to disrepair and these declining conditions cost taxpayers billions of dollars in preventable expenses,” said Geoff Anderson, president and CEO of Smart Growth America. “Investing in repair makes good fiscal sense, good safety sense, and good business sense for our country.”

In his statement on the proposal, Cardin emphasized the costs of neglecting road maintenance. He noted that poor road conditions are a “significant factor” in approximately one-third of fatal crashes, adding that poor roads add to the repair and operating costs for motorists to the tune of $67 billion a year, or approximately $333 per driver. Poor road conditions also contribute to 42 percent of America’s urban highway congestion, he said.

“Investing in our nation’s highways and infrastructure has been one the best federal investments we have ever made,” said Cardin, a member of the EPW’s Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee. “Our nation’s highways are critical to growing our economy, and repairing and maintaining their quality is required to ensure lasting efficiency and safety.”

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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.

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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Few people think that this could happen to their local bridge or highway overpass, but a snowballing epidemic of deferred maintenance could mean more and more bridge closings across the country. How we got here is the subject of Transportation for America’s new “Fix It“ campaign, which was launched yesterday with the release of a special report on the country’s aging bridges. “The Fix We’re In For: The State of Our Nation’s Bridges” [PDF] aims to motivate Congress to significantly increase “common sense” funding for the repair, reconstruction and upgrading of existing bridges and overpasses. It addresses the political and fiscal challenges that transportation officials face in maintaining the infrastructure we already have. The report marks a significant contribution of data to the national transportation debate and presents an interactive online map that people can use to check the safety of the bridges in their area, offering a new level of transparency on the status of our bridges.

In just the last month, several reports have quantified, in various ways, how investing in transportation infrastructure pays off in jobs and economic health. Now Smart Growth America is out with new research showing that it’s not enough to plunk down a bunch of money and expect miracles. You’ve got to do it right.

Doing it right, SGA says, consists of the following recipe:

• Preserve existing roads and bridges
• Build public transportation

In its report, “Recent Lessons from the Stimulus: Transportation Funding and Job Creation,” released Friday, SGA found that on average, road repair produced 16 percent more jobs per dollar than new road construction. And public transportation beat that handily, creating 31 percent more jobs per dollar than new road construction.

SGA also suggests building connections between existing transportation hubs and regional centers. And it says that focusing on areas hard hit by unemployment will create a bigger bang for your buck.

Looking at how different states invested the $26.6 billion in stimulus money for transportation, SGA picked some winners and losers in the game to use stimulus dollars most effectively:

• Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maine, New Jersey, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Vermont used 100 percent of their stimulus allocations for roads on repair and maintenance, rather than new capacity.
• Texas, Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas, and Kansas went for new capacity instead of maintenance.

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When President Obama announced his push for a long-term transportation bill on Monday, he introduced a report by his Council of Economic Advisors and the Treasury Department analyzing the economic impact of infrastructure investment [PDF]. At face value, the numbers in the president’s plan might not look so impressive. It calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, laying and maintaining 4,000 miles of railways, and the restoration of 150 miles of airport runways.

If you’re hoping for an all-out push for sustainable transportation and livable streets, you may be wondering whether this signifies much of a change to the highway-centric status quo. Look at the underlying message, and it does.

The headline numbers sit on top of a broad strategy that groups including Transportation for America, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Transportation Equity Network, and U.S. PIRG have all applauded. There are still few specifics in the administration’s plan, but here’s a quick cheat sheet to the elements of the report that transportation reformers find so encouraging.

It emphasizes the need to provide American families with a range of transportation options, not just driving.

The report calls attention to the heavy burden that high transportation costs place on the middle class. “The average American family spends more than $8,600 a year on transportation, one-third more than they spend on food,” it states, pointing out that the wealthiest 10 percent spend only 9 percent of their income on transportation, while everyone else shells out 16 percent of our income to move from point A to point B.

The report links high transportation costs to car dependence and makes the case for increasing access to transit and other transportation options, asserting that “[t]his burden is due in large part to the lack of alternatives to expensive and often congested automobile travel. Multi-modal transportation investments are critical to get American families moving again without wasting their time and their money sitting in traffic.”

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In the first year of the Obama administration's economic stimulus law, 59 percent of its $27 billion in transportation formula funds went to projects that preserve existing roads, while 33 percent was used to build new pavement, according to an analysis by the advocacy group Smart Growth America (SGA).

The new data, unveiled today by SGA state policy director Will Schroeer at a green jobs conference in Washington, brings a measure of good news to clean transport advocates who had viewed the stimulus as somewhat of a disappointment for its failure to fund roads and transit on a more equal footing.

The SGA analysis does not include the law's $8.4 billion in transit aid, looking solely at the formula funding that is often depicted as dedicated to highways and bridges.

In fact, states were allowed to redirect some of that larger pot to transit, though not all took advantage of that flexibility. "Some states were really, I have to say, dishonest with the public about what the money could be spent on," Schroeer said today.

Here's how SGA's one-year analysis of the $27 billion in stimulus money shook out:

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That is the thesis posited in a new investigation from the Center for Public Integrity, which sent a reporter to sprawl-saturated South Florida to examine how much of a return the transportation construction industry is getting on its multi-million-dollar contributions to congressional campaigns.

In a time of sluggish economic recovery, when federal dollars can make the difference between cash-strapped states cutting projects and the jobs they create, the Center observes:

[T]he road lobby is no longer the only one in the driver’s seat when it comes to setting transportation funding priorities. The Obama administration is determined to make its own mark on transportation policy by completing and repairing the current highway system while adopting an increasingly diverse menu of investments in mass transit, bike paths, and pedestrian walkways for neighborhood residents who don’t own a car.

Indeed, many lawmakers and advocates for all modes of transport are already feeling the effects of the White House's endorsement of a more balanced agenda, in which roads share space and attention with rails and bike-ped infrastructure. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), state DOTs' voice in Washington, has begun retooling its funding pitch to emphasize the "livability" of road projects, a branding campaign that tickles triumphant transit and bike-ped forces.

But what evidence does the Center marshal for its depiction of hemmorhaging power within the road lobby? AASHTO executive director John Horsley is quoted remarking that road-builders "don't think we're chopped liver," but the budgetary realities for federal highway and transit programs make clear that Congress has no intention of striking fear into the hearts of Horsley's members.

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