Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Darren Flusche is the policy director of the League of American Bicyclists.

Should the performance of this road…

…be measured like this one?

Under the new federal transportation bill, known as MAP-21, the performance of these two roads could be measured the same way — even though one is a bustling business district, and the other is an interstate highway. (Example provided by Transportation for America.)

MAP-21 expands the scope of the National Highway System by 60,000 lane-miles; now it will include many streets, called “primary arterials,” that don’t feel like highways at all. At the same time, the law directs U.S. DOT to set up performance measures for the $22 billion National Highway Performance Program – the largest transportation program under the new law – that will ultimately reward and penalize states for reaching or failing to meet these targets.

So, unless the performance measures are set appropriately, state DOTs will treat many streets that cut through neighborhoods essentially the same way they treat interstate highways: prioritizing speed over other factors. (Jonathan Maus at BikePortland has investigated what this could mean for his city, where he says local transportation leaders will have “much less leeway and independence to do innovative designs and to make changes to the streetscape without a potentially onerous process of seeking federal approval.”)

Which streets will that affect in your state? You can find the primary arterial routes that will be added to the NHS on the Federal Highway Administration’s website.

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UPDATE 9/18 with comments from DOT officials.

In July, Congress handed U.S. DOT a transportation bill with a lot of holes in it, especially relating to performance measures. We’ve reported on some of the more significant holes, and suggested some ideas on how to fill them. But there’s much more to say – and U.S. DOT has opened a web-based dialogue to solicit opinions on how they should design performance measures for the new bill. There is also a page devoted to soliciting stakeholder input on how to design the new national freight policy.

Participants on U.S. DOT's public comment page have asked for better data collection on bicycle crashes. Photo: Canton, SD Police Department

Transportation bills haven’t historically been opened up to this sort of process, but with more sophisticated web tools now than in 2005, the last time a bill was passed, DOT officials say we’ll be seeing a lot more of it. I had wondered if they focused in on these two issues because there was internal dissent at DOT and they were looking for a tie-breaker, but officials frame it a different way — just an attempt to see if there is an “emerging consensus” that they should be tuning in to.

It’s especially important, as one official told me, because so many people felt left out of the legislative process around MAP-21. “We are trying to make sure we don’t repeat the mistake in implementation.”

They say the freight policy, especially, has generated a lot of interest, and they want to make sure their outreach captures all the good ideas out there. The call for comments on freight policy separates out different issue categories, each with a set of questions, but the page on performance measures is far more open to interpretation.

This is an opportunity not to be missed. We’re all stakeholders in the U.S. transportation system, and this is a way we can all have U.S. DOT’s ear — not just those who hire expensive lobbyists.

So far, there are 29 ideas on the performance measures page, and some of them are very thoughtful.

Alexandra Tyson suggested prioritizing state of good repair, essentially leading states to maintain existing capacity rather than constantly seeking to build more. Bill Barlow wants transit systems with good safety records to get some kind of bonus. “In the highway world,” he said, “projects get extra credits for high volumes of serious crashes.” Clearly there needs to be a better way.

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Bike and pedestrian funding got slashed. Federal assistance for transit operations was rejected. Even the performance measures – arguably the high point of the recently passed federal transportation bill – are too weak to be very meaningful. For Americans who want federal policy to support safe streets, sustainable transportation, and livable neighborhoods, there were few bright spots in the transportation bill Congress passed last month.

AASHTO Director John Horsley is thrilled with the new transportation bill, which gave state DOTs just about everything they wanted. Photo: International Transport Forum

But state transportation departments are celebrating. They scored victory after victory, getting a bigger share of federal funding with fewer rules and regulations attached.

In the Senate, advocates were able to work some reforms into the bill and mobilize grassroots support for amendments like the Cardin-Cochran provision, which put funds for street safety projects in the hands of local governments, not state DOTs. But the House never managed to pass a bill of its own, and the opaque conference committee process was an exercise in horse-trading that advocates found difficult to penetrate.

The final product, which included measures like raising the federal contribution for certain highway expansions, seemed finely tailored to benefit DOTs in several ways. “This is a bill written by and for the benefit of state DOTs at the expense of both federal oversight and regional and community outcomes,” wrote David Burwell, director of the climate change program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in an email shortly after the bill passed. He said the policy changes “are too elegantly crafted and specific in their effect to have been written, or even conceived, by members of Congress or their staff.”

For state DOTs, access to lawmakers is a given. “We worked very closely with the House and Senate to craft those measures,” AASHTO Director John Horsley confirmed to Streetsblog in an interview yesterday. He said that while AASHTO offered recommendations, no text written by AASHTO made it into the bill verbatim, as far as he knows.

According to Horsley’s account, AASHTO followed a pretty standard script when it came to advocating for their interests on the Hill. Every stakeholder and special interest under the sun had its lobbyists knocking on lawmakers’ doors, offering their two cents – everyone from gravel producers to equipment manufacturers to environmentalists to free market fundamentalists. It’s just that the state DOTs seemed to get everything on their wish list.

Horsley said AASHTO had been laying the groundwork for many, many months before conference started, working with Republican House Transportation Committee staffers as well as aides of both parties in the Senate. (He didn’t mention working with House Democrats, who were shut out of the process from day one.)

The House is where the magic happened for AASHTO. “We’ve been very pleased with where the Senate bill started,” Horsley said. “And we were even more pleased when the House and the Senate in conference agreed to incorporate a lot of the House provisions that were even better for states.”

What were those House provisions? Horsley went through the list:

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The House of Representatives approved the transportation bill conference report this afternoon by a vote of 373 to 52. [UPDATE 4:00 PM: The Senate has also approved the bill, 74-19.] This is a bill that’s been called “a death blow to mass transit” by the Amalgamated Transit Union, “a step backwards for America’s transportation system” by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, “a retreat from the goals of sustainability and economic resiliency” by Reconnecting America, “a substantial capitulation” by Transportation for America, and “bad news for biking and walking” by America Bikes.

Remember the empty highways that symbolized the House Republicans' vision of America's transportation system? The final transpo bill might as well have the same unfortunate cover.

After more than 1,000 days of waiting since the last transportation bill expired, the nation’s new transportation policy is a grave disappointment to people seeking to reform the current highway-centric system.

The fact that the House GOP tried and, for the most part, failed to reverse the progress made under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder offers a small degree of consolation. “Some of the worst ideas pushed initially by House Republicans went nowhere – funding the highway system with new oil drilling revenues, taking transit out of the highway trust fund, de-federalizing transportation funding – to mention some of the most radical proposals that were seriously being put forward,” wrote Deron Lovaas of NRDC this morning. “But… that pretty much exhausts the good news.”

So what does the bill actually do? Overall, it doesn’t change a whole lot, and the most significant changes tend not to benefit livable streets or sustainable transportation. Here’s a breakdown.

Length and funding. The bill lasts a year longer than the Senate bill would have, expiring at the end of September 2014. That gives states, cities, and the construction industry substantially more stability and allows them to move forward on projects that have been delayed for years because of the uncertainty surrounding federal funding. It maintains funding levels at around $54 billion a year, as did the Senate bill, which is roughly current levels plus inflation.

While some have criticized the complex funding mechanisms that prop it up and its departure from a user-pays model, the Congressional Budget Office reported this morning that the bill actually reduces the deficit by $16.3 billion.

Everyone seems to understand that Congress won’t be able to pull this kind of magic for long and will soon have to deal with the long-term insufficiency of current Highway Trust Fund revenues to cover the nation’s transportation needs. However, the gas tax was not raised, and at the same time the House passed this bill, it also approved an appropriations bill that prohibits even studying the possibility of moving toward a VMT fee.

Non-transportation-related items. The Keystone XL pipeline and the EPA’s ability to regulate coal ash as a hazardous substance, introduced into the transportation negotiations by the House Republicans, were stripped out of the bill. The RESTORE Act to spend BP oil spill fines on Gulf Coast restoration is included.

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Last week, I published a list of seven questions I had as the Transportation Conference Committee started meeting. I was examining the politics, not the policy. Turns out some readers wanted to hear more about the policy.

I asked the Cap’n what his questions would be. The reply:

Meanwhile, reader Ryan Richter sent in his revised list of questions too. They’re a little more specific, so I’ll start with Ryan’s. With any luck, the answers to Cap’n Transit’s questions will be woven into the answers below.

Thanks to both of you for keeping me focused on what really matters in this whole political hullabaloo.

Ryan’s first question:

1. How will public transportation fare after being practically decapitated in the last round?

Public transit came out a winner when members of the House GOP mounted their full-frontal assault against it. “The uprising was so immediate and so bipartisan [the Republicans] backed off,” said Deron Lovaas of NRDC. Democrats and some urban and suburban Republicans blew up at the idea that transit would no longer be eligible for its 20 percent of Highway Trust Fund dollars, which it’s gotten since the Fund’s Mass Transit Account was created under Ronald Reagan in 1983. Surviving an attempt against it makes transit that much stronger now – its opponents know that defunding transit is a losing issue for them.

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Streetsblog had a chance today to ask the former Democratic chief of the House Transportation Committee, Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, about life since the 2010 election, when he lost by a hair to Republican Chip Cravaack. He said he’s spending his post-Congress time traveling to France, getting paid to say things he used to say for free, and telling his four kids and seven grandkids the story of his wife, who succombed to breast cancer 20 years ago.

We also asked him for his thoughts about some major themes in transportation today. 

Chairman Jim Oberstar calls transportation enhancements "the point of transformation" for transportation. Photo courtesy of Oberstar's office.

On the “dissipation” of high-speed rail funds:

We reshaped Amtrak in the 2008 authorization, designating 11 corridors and creating a mechanism by which there could be competition from private sources and from state consortia, with Amtrak, to provide the passenger rail service in a particular corridor.

At first, I didn’t like that idea, but I spent a lot of time talking to Mr. Mica about it and as we talked, I said, “You know, that’s beginning to make more sense. We ought to challenge Amtrak. That’s a good idea; let’s put this into the bill.” And then we got consensus that high-speed should be defined as 110 mph, and that was in the bill. And we got a bill that George Bush signed!

So there was a structure against which to pit [the $8.5 billion in stimulus dollars for high-speed rail]. I thought that was going to happen. Instead, it was all put up for competition for various states to come forward and put a proposal on the table.

Wisconsin, for example: to Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago. That should have been done as part of the Midwest High-Speed Rail Initiative, with Chicago as the hub, south to St. Louis, east through Detroit to Cleveland and eventually to Cincinnati, and west to Minneapolis-St. Paul. That would have been one very defensible, manageable anchor.

The Northeast Corridor could have been another important anchor. The west coast, which is already underway: a third anchor to this system. And then some other amounts in the other corridors, depending on proposals that they would have and should have submitted to DOT.

Allowing pieces to be bid or requested by states dissipated the critical mass of investment. And I’m not saying that in hindsight – that was my concern at the time.

On the attack on Transportation Enhancements in Congress:

Transportation Enhancements was the pivotal point of transformation at the end of the interstate era — an era in which travelers went where the road took them — to the era in which users of our system had a say in their quality of transportation and where that road should go in the future and how their transportation experience should be managed.

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Tomorrow is the deadline for Congressional committees to advise the super committee on how they’d like to see the deficit reduction plan formulated. The Democrats on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee submitted theirs today [PDF], divided into three sections: “Creating Jobs,” “Eliminating Waste, Fraud and Abuse,” and “Promoting Efficiency and Reform of Government.”

For transportation, they push for a transportation reauthorization more along the lines of President Obama’s long-forgotten $556 billion proposal and less like the House majority’s idea of capping spending at $230 billion over six years. (Of course, even the House majority is now backpedaling from those low numbers and hoping to come up with a more robust proposal.)

The Dems also put in a pitch for the American Jobs Act and its $50 billion investment in transportation infrastructure, but after Tuesday’s Senate vote, that looks like a moot point.

This proposal rescinds $154.9 million in excess contract authority provided to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, and the Federal Highway Administration in the past few years. Most of it comes out of NHTSA’s seat belt program, which only ended up awarding one grant, but NHTSA lacks the authority to reallocate the funds. The FTA funds the Committee Democrats propose to rescind are $17.4 million in contract authority for formula and bus grants that were authorized but not appropriated.

They also recommend that the super committee consolidate many of the 108 transportation programs — a plank of every proposal that’s come out this year — and set performance targets to ensure that federal transportation funds are spent wisely and efficiently. “Currently, DOT does not measure how Federal transportation investment achieves national goals, nor does the Department distribute funding based on performance criteria,” the committee Democrats write. “The budgetary impact of specific performance measures will result in much more efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and provide taxpayers with tangible and measurable results for their investments.”

The budgetary impact of these efficiency measures is not estimated in the report to the super committee.

The report also recommends using federal highway dollars to reduce bridge deficiencies, which they say would then reduce the amount of bridge funding needed in future surface transportation authorization bills.

The super committee is gathering ideas from many Congressional committees in order to make its final decisions on how to cut up to $1.5 trillion from the budget deficit. They will vote on the plan by Thanksgiving and pass it off to Congress by December 2, so that Congress can vote on it by Christmas. A series of “automatic” cuts and measures will be enacted if the super committee fails to act, or if Congress fails to pass its recommendations.

Republicans on the Transportation Committee have not yet submitted their ideas, but they plan to.

The results of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission's performance monitoring program. Source: EPA

In the vein of several other recent reports that have highlighted significant transportation reforms that can be made now, with or without a reauthorization bill, the EPA has published guidelines for states and MPOs to make livability plans a reality [PDF]. They illustrate how using performance metrics can lead to better-designed transportation networks, especially when it comes to livability.

The EPA focuses on 12 important indicators that transportation agencies should be measuring:

• Transit accessibility
• Bicycle and pedestrian mode share
• Vehicle miles traveled per capita
• Carbon intensity
• Mixed land uses
• Transportation affordability
• Distribution of benefits by income group
• Land consumption
• Bicycle and pedestrian activity and safety
• Bicycle and pedestrian level of service
• Average vehicle occupancy
• Transit productivity

The EPA recommends a range of tools familiar to urban planners and reformers, like scenario planning and performance monitoring.

It acknowledges in the fine print that in some places, lack of data is still an obstacle to adequate performance measurement – especially on issues that DOTs are less likely to invest in, like bicycle mode share. Meanwhile, everyone collects data on VMT, for example. And when San Francisco established their performance measures through a planning process like the ones recommended by the EPA, they discovered just how far they were from their objective — even if they put ideal conditions in place:

San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Commission measures VMT per Capita under Investment and Policy Scenarios. Source: EPA

You don’t decide to start measuring transit access through long-range planning and corridor studies without having a goal in mind, though, and the EPA has several. It seeks to “protect natural  resources, improve public health, strengthen energy security, expand the economy, and provide  mobility to disadvantaged people”  by improving states’ accountability for making sure these livability measures are implemented.

Speaking of transit access: the guidelines get specific about how to measure access, explaining that access is determined by establishing how many jobs, residents, trip  origins, or trip destinations are within a ¼- to ½-mile radius of a transit  stop. And getting even more detailed, the EPA spells out exactly what those measurements should be:

• Share of population with good transit-­job accessibility (100,000+ jobs within 45 minutes).
• Number of households within a 30-minute transit ride of major employment centers.
• Percentage of work and education trips accessible in less than 30 minutes transit travel time.
• Percentage of workforce that can reach their workplace by transit within one hour with no more than one transfer.

Determining success in mixing land uses is a little more complex. It goes a little something like this:

Source: EPA

Follow all that? Yeah, me neither.

Performance measures, as a tool for getting the most value out of what we spend, are working their way into the mainstream discourse on transportation, embraced (at least rhetorically) by both sides. Planning, on the other hand, is still seen by many conservatives as the occupation of coneheaded urbanists, always trying to rein in man’s wild nature (which, I suppose, is to drive SUVs in exurbia).

Getting specific about how planning can be used to hold government accountable for its spending – and how those tools can help improve out health, economy, and environment, as well as our traffic throughput – could be a big step forward for transportation reform, even if Congress never passes a reauthorization bill. And by the looks of it, “never” sounds about as reasonable a timeline as anything else.

At a Commerce Committee hearing today, Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) spoke out in favor of their infrastructure bank proposal, while Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and John Rockefeller (D-WV) championed their own legislation. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who is a member of the Commerce Committee as well as chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, also spoke strongly in favor of an infrastructure bank, although the transportation reauthorization outline she released yesterday didn’t say anything specifically about such a bank.

Steve Bruno of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen cautioned against over-reliance on the private sector when building public infrastructure.

“Isn’t it wonderful to see the bipartisanship behind the infrastructure bank?” Boxer said. “Count me in. I think it’s a wonderful thing.”

She and other senators affirmed that raising the gas tax, or switching to a VMT fee, is off the table. Still, she criticized House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica for “walking away” from the Highway Trust Fund since it’s coming up short. “It’s a 36 percent cut in our basic program,” she said. “That’s a loss of 630,000 jobs.”

In the absence of new revenues, it becomes more important to leverage the scarce public dollars that are available, so the committee hearing focused on financing tools – specifically, an infrastructure bank.

Kerry and Hutchison have put forward a bipartisan bill to create an infrastructure bank with $10 billion in seed money that would fund not only transportation but energy and water projects as well. It would only make loans, not grants.

A somewhat more idealistic proposal is the Lautenberg/Rockefeller bill, which focuses exclusively on transportation. They also propose $10 billion, but over just two years, with $600 million a year for grants. Another major difference is that it would be housed within USDOT, whereas Kerry’s proposal was to create a completely independent entity. The Lautenberg/Rockefeller plan hews more closely to the administration proposal than Kerry’s does.

“I think our bill is the answer,” said Sen. Hutichson today. Addressing Sen. Rockefeller, who chairs the committee, she said, “I would love for this committee to pass our bill, and I bet you probably want your bill to be passed. So maybe we can work together or maybe we can report both of them.”

“Well, we usually work together,” Rockefeller said, and indeed, all subsequent comments from all the bill sponsors included messages of “marrying” the two bills.

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Update 7/20: It has come to our attention that the complete draft of the Senate bill will include a hard commitment to bike-ped programs. Senate staff tells us that Sen. Barbara Boxer worked hard and was able to maintain her priorities in the bill, including dedicated federal support for bike infrastructure. More details will come out at tomorrow’s hearing on transportation in Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee, and we look forward to seeing a complete legislative draft soon. The rest of this article was written yesterday, before we received these assurances from staff.

The Senate EPW Committee just posted a transportation bill outline on their website, and despite previous assurances by committee chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA), there appears to be no dedicated funding for bicycling and pedestrian programs in the bill. The outline focuses on the consolidation of programs and streamlining project delivery, much like the House bill. The performance measures mentioned in the outline – while not necessarily a comprehensive list – don’t include emissions reductions, undoubtedly at the insistence of climate-denier Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), ranking member of the committee.

One of Chicago's celebrated new bicycling facilities, the Kinzie Street protected bike lane. Will any federal support for bike/ped projects remain after the next transpo bill passes? Photo: Josh Koonce/flickr

The outline confirms that the Senate is working on a two-year bill but does not include the dollar amount. “Consolidation” is the name of the game these days and the Senate plays along, making seven core surface transportation programs into five, including a new Transportation Mobility Program, which “sub-allocates” some funds to metropolitan areas, and a National Freight Program, which proponents of multi-modalism have long pushed for.

It preserves the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program, which funds some bike and pedestrian programs. Transportation Enhancements, another major way such programs are funded, will probably now be under CMAQ. It’s unclear whether the Recreational Trails Program will move to CMAQ as well. But although bike and pedestrian projects will still be eligible for funding, there appear to be no explicit funding guarantees for bike-ped projects, and how funding levels will shake out in the final analysis is anybody’s guess.

Like the House, the Senate bill offers states “the flexibility to fund these activities as they see fit” – which amounts to a revocation of the federal commitment to funding this work. Many states, absent a federal mandate, will spend virtually nothing on bike/ped infrastructure.

Bicycling advocates had asked for dedicated funding that doesn’t pit them against road projects, the same funding proportion as they had in SAFETEA-LU, and changes to Safe Routes to School. None of those features appear to be in this bill.

“It’s hard to know without seeing the details, but at first blush it doesn’t look good for bike and pedestrian issues,” said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. “Perhaps it’s to be expected that there’s nothing upfront in the language about protecting dedicated funding, given that it was a topic of some contention among the protagonists. But it’s pretty troubling to see no reference to any of the issues that affect cyclists and pedestrians – nothing about complete streets, nothing about dedicated funding.”

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