Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Will a new rail authorization find a way to help states make needed repairs to keep the whole Northeast Corridor running smoothly? Photo: NJ Transit via Second Avenue Sagas

Now that the surface transportation bill fight is over — at least for the moment — transportation reformers are eying the expiration date of another key piece of legislation later this year. The reauthorization of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (PRIIA) could be a chance to make some needed changes to jump-start progress in the passenger rail system. Or it could be the next partisan battleground, making it a process as unnavigable as the lead-up to the passage of MAP-21.

PRIIA shouldn’t be as contentious as the surface transportation bill for three reasons. First of all, no one’s expecting a seismic shift in rail policy to come with this bill. Second, reauthorizing the passenger rail title doesn’t necessarily require a big conversation about funding (though there are certainly those on both sides of the issue who would like to have one). And third, Rep. John Mica isn’t wielding the gavel anymore.

The new chair, Bill Shuster, headed the Rail Subcommittee before taking over the top job, so he’s likely to take a special interest in shepherding the legislation through. And he’s already proven to be a much more bipartisan — and bicameral — collaborator, so many Democrats are hoping for a less rancorous, more inclusive, process.

Even though PRIIA likely won’t bring a sea change in rail policy, insiders say there are a few areas to watch:

State of Good Repair. The Northeast Corridor Commission released a report in January on infrastructure maintenance backlogs on Amtrak’s most popular line. Speeds can’t increase on the corridor without addressing some choke points and repair needs.

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Job markets are regional. So in order to serve a metropolitan region’s workers and by extension the local economy, transit must also be regional, seamlessly serving both central cities and their suburbs, whose share of employment has grown. Almost everyone recognizes that.

Suburban voters in Ohio, Michigan and Maine showed their support for transit Tuesday. Photo: Toledo Blade

That’s why for decades, the nation’s cities have been combining agencies and expanding tax districts to create regional transit systems. It’s gotten to the point now where the only major city in the country that still lacks a regional transit system is Detroit — and officials from the Federal Transit Administration are leaning hard on state and local officials to remedy that.

Which is why a handful of Balkanizing ballot initiatives in suburban communities in Ohio, Michigan and Maine this election were so alarming. Voters in four suburbs in these states were asked if they wanted to opt out of regional transit systems in greater Toledo, Ohio; Grand Rapids, Michigan and Portland, Maine.

Luckily, voters saw through those proposals. All four of those communities rejected the proposals, choosing to remain a part of their regional transit systems — and all by fairly wide margins.

In Walker, Michigan, 73 percent of voters weighed in in favor of remaining in Grand Rapids’ bus system. A similar referendum in Falmouth, Maine failed, with 70 percent of voters electing to remain part of Portland’s METRO.

Meanwhile, in the Toledo, Ohio suburbs, Sylvania and Spencer Townships rejected the idea of withdrawing from regional transit by about a 60-40 margin. That was very good news for Toledo’s regional transit system, TARTA, which lost the suburb of Perrysburg to an identical ballot measure this spring.

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Phineas Baxandall is a senior analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

It’s now common knowledge that annual changes in the volume of driving no longer follow the old patterns.

For 60 years, the amount of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) rose steadily. Predicting more driving miles next year was like predicting that the sun would rise or that computer chips would be faster. The only direction seemed to be up.

Then, after 2004, per-capita VMT fell 6 percent, which has led to a decline in total VMT since 2007.

The most recent data are from July, traditionally America’s biggest month for driving. In July 2012, Americans clocked over 258 billion miles behind the wheel, a billion fewer miles than the previous July despite a slightly stronger economy and cheaper gasoline. In fact, you’d need to go back to 2002 to find a July when Americans drove fewer miles than July 2012.

Has America’s long increase in driving turned a corner or just taken a prolonged pause? The answer matters a lot. Consider four scenarios:

Graph: Phineas Baxandall, U.S. PIRG

1. If the volume of annual vehicle miles traveled switches back to the average rate of increase between 1987 and 2005, then by 2025 VMT will be 27 percent greater than the 2012 level.
2. If VMT changes at the average rate it sustained over the entire period between 1987 to 2012, then it will grow by almost 19 percent by 2025.
3. If instead VMT changes at the average rate that has prevailed since 2004, then the number of miles driven will fall 2.3 percent by 2025.
4. And if VMT changes at the average rate that has prevailed since 2007, then VMT would fall off by almost 8 percent by 2025
   

   Table: Phineas Baxandall, U.S. PIRG

The difference spanning these scenarios amounts to over a trillion vehicle miles per year. How we decide to invest in transportation should be very different, depending on which scenario we are planning for – especially since the roads, railways and other infrastructure we build today will be with us long past 2025. Continuing to build new highways at the current pace might arguably make some sense if driving were to return to pre-2005 rates of growth. But those outlays indisputably would be a colossal waste if more recent trends prevail.

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Shown in red are some of the arterial roads the Oregon Department of Transportation thinks will need to be upgraded to comply with MAP-21. Photo: Bike Portland

An obscure provision of the new federal transportation bill is sparking concerns that it could erode walkability and bikeability in communities around the country. The so-called “Enhanced National Highway System” provision would require all major arterial roads to be folded into the national highway system. That could provide greater pressure for local entities to comply with AASHTO’s often highway-inspired standards, like wide lanes and shoulders that encourage car capacity at the expense of pedestrian safety.

The provision will result in a near doubling of the number of roads that will be part of the national highway system. But what will it mean for livable streets? There are lots of different opinions out there.

Jonathan Maus, at Bike Portland, who broke this story, said:

The significance of these roadways becoming part of the National Highway System is that if PBOT engineers want to make any changes that deviate from FHWA design standards for “principal arterials”, they would have to go through a cumbersome process of applying for exceptions.

In the words of a source at ODOT, “this designation basically forces state and local governments to treat arterials like major highways… Speed will increase, certain designs, like bulb outs, won’t be allowed without an exception. So on and so on.”

Travis Brouwer, senior federal affairs adviser for the Oregon Department of Transportation, echoed those concerns to some extent. Brouwer said the state was racing to reclassify its major arterials, up to 600 miles of road, by October 1, when the new law goes into effect.

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The MAP-21 transportation bill was just signed two months ago, and its funding levels, agreed to by a difficult and fragile compromise between warring political parties, are already under attack.

Sen. Boxer toured a BART construction project last month in San Jose. Photo courtesy of Office of Sen. Barbara Boxer.

In Congress, authorization and budgeting are two different processes, run out of different committees. And right now, House budgeters are looking to shave down the $52.6 billion a year MAP-21 allocated for transportation. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who presided over the passage of MAP-21, would like to see those authorized numbers stay sacrosanct.

Meanwhile, Congress is bound by the Budget Control Act, passed by Congress last summer as part of the debt ceiling deal, to cap overall funding levels at $1.047 trillion for next year. The House is working on a six-month continuing resolution to fund the federal government at that level for FY2013. (That’s the way Congress has been passing budgets lately – since they can’t agree on a real budget, they just pass continuing resolutions and agree to keep the previous year’s budget, sometimes with a little tinkering.)

The House’s continuing resolution would cut transportation funding half a billion dollars below MAP-21 levels.

In a letter sent yesterday to House Speaker John Boehner, Boxer reminded him that MAP-21 was “bipartisan legislation which passed the House of Representatives with an overwhelming vote of 373-52” and that it “included an inflationary adjustment for fiscal years 2013 and 2014” which the House bill “failed to protect.”

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Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) confirmed she is already working on the next transportation bill — “two months to the day after President Obama signed MAP-21 into law and before the new policies even kick in on Oct. 1,” according to Politico, which broke the story this morning.

Sen. Barbara Boxer is already thinking about the next bill. Photo: flickr/JD Lasica

In an interview with Adam in Charlotte, Boxer said her “goal is to find a dependable funding source and to work in a bipartisan way to find that funding source. I really believe that the Highway Trust Fund should be funded through user fees.” That might include indexing the gas tax to inflation, but probably not a vehicle miles traveled fee, which raises privacy concerns for the California senator. Even a gas tax bump won’t be enough if vehicles keep getting more and more efficient.

Reformers have some ideas for the next bill, too. Making the Highway Trust Fund self-sustaining is a good goal, since a strapped fund leads to some really bad ideas, like jettisoning mass transit and even the tiny sliver of the pie allocated to active transportation. Putting national goals like emissions reductions and public health improvement front and center would help too — as long as real performance measures are attached.

In any event, that was a quick honeymoon period. If you thought you were going to have at least six months to rest on your laurels before getting back into the ring to fight for a better bill next time around: Surprise! It’s game time.

The MAP-21 transportation bill in many ways made it tougher for cities and towns to provide safer streets for walking and biking. Projects to build bike lanes and sidewalks now have to compete harder for the tiny bit of funding they’re eligible for. And right now, states are deciding whether or not to “opt out” of the Recreational Trails Program (RTP). Instead of spending RTP money on bicycle and pedestrian trails — both urban and rural — states can “opt” to spend it on something else.

Even rail-trail-hating Gov. Sam Brownback says Kansas will use their Recreational Trails funding. Will he make the same promise of other bike/ped funds? Photo: Pitch

But the fact is that RTP made it out of the conference process more intact than some of its sister bike/ped programs. It kept its “dedicated” funding, although that dedication is awfully porous. Then again, it always has been.

MAP-21 put the Recreational Trails Program under the umbrella of the larger Transportation Alternatives program, but RTP retained $85 million of its own funding, with each state getting the same amount they were apportioned in 2009. While Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to School lost their dedicated funds, RTP kept its money because it comes from a different source: a gas tax on off-road vehicles.

That unique funding source has more or less safeguarded a program that’s focused on recreation — albeit with many important urban connectors under its belt — while throwing more transportation-oriented programs under the proverbial bus.

RTP got off relatively scot-free in what was a bruising bill process for other bike/ped programs. “What can I say?” said Marianne Fowler, senior vice president of federal relations at the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. “We’re really happy.” She also added that recreational trails built from this fund have another benefit: They’re not treated as federal-aid highways, since the facilities aren’t roadways. That means they don’t need to comply with the same onerous project reviews and contracting processes. Unfortunately, Safe Routes to School hasn’t had the same luck, meaning simple crosswalk projects can sometimes get tangled up in red tape.

All isn’t rosy with RTP, though. Governors can opt out of the program, meaning the money would go back into their total amount for Transportation Alternatives (which can then be squandered on road-building or anything else they like).

It used to be that there was only a “back door” opt-out, according to RTC’s Fowler. That back door is still open, but there’s a “front door” now too.

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Rep. Steve LaTourette, that rare thing -- a moderate, urban Republican -- will be missed for his leadership on transportation. Photo: National Journal

We mentioned last week that transit advocates were losing one supporter in Congress: Russ Carnahan of Missouri. They’ll be suffering another grave loss come January: Ohio Republican Steve LaTourette.

It was clear that the romance was over last year when he called his own party’s freshmen members “knuckledraggers.” He announced two weeks ago that he had decided not to seek re-election.

LaTourette is one of a disappearing breed of moderate Republicans in Congress — and urban ones, at that. He co-sponsored Carnahan’s measure to help out struggling transit agencies and pushed for higher funding levels for transit. “How are we going to build America and put people back to work without robust funding in the transportation sector?” he said at a transit conference last year, exhorting agency officials to demand more from Congress. “If you don’t [ask for more funding], shame on you when your systems deteriorate.”

After once dismissing the job-creation potential of bicycle infrastructure, LaTourette was converted by cycling advocates and has since become a champion for federal bicycle and pedestrian funding, as well as Complete Streets legislation.

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Congress has done its job, such as it is, and passed a transportation bill. Now it’s handed off the policymaking to U.S. DOT, which must issue a raft of rules, definitions, and guidance to accompany the new law, known as MAP-21.

The wrong way to measure travel performance: "Travel Time Index" awards a better score to Charlotte than Chicago, even though commutes in Chicago are shorter, because drivers in Charlotte spend a higher percentage of their time in free-flowing traffic. Graphic: CEOs for Cities

According to sources with intimate knowledge of this process, much depends on how DOT decides to measure congestion. New performance measures for the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement program (CMAQ) — and quite possibly for the entire national highway system (depending how they define “roadway performance”) — require a working definition of congestion.

If the agency follows the prevailing orthodoxy, states could be rewarded for wasteful highway spending. If it adopts better measurements, smarter investments and less wasteful spending will follow.

The CMAQ measures will also require a definition of “cost-effectiveness,” a related but somewhat separate can of worms.

U.S. DOT Should Include Distance Driven in Any Measure of Congestion

Performance measures in the MAP-21 law have been criticized for being toothless, since many of them don’t have consequences attached. However, there is still the possibility that state performance rankings could be made public. And a spotlight on state failures could be an effective way to encourage good decisions.

Streetsblog asked Joe Cortright for his advice to DOT officials struggling to define congestion. Cortright is an economist and senior policy advisor for CEOs for Cities. In 2010 the organization commissioned him to write Driven Apart, a critique of prevailing methods of measuring congestion. His words of wisdom for U.S. DOT: “Don’t make the mistake the Texas Transportation Institute makes.”

TTI’s Urban Mobility Report, released every year, invariably gives top honors to places that have overbuilt road capacity. The institute measures congestion only by looking at the degree to which traffic slows down people’s commutes. The problem with that, Cortright says, is that “you end up rewarding places that encourage people to drive longer and longer distances, and then you look at those long distances that they’re traveling, and say because they’re moving at a relatively higher speed much of the time that they’re driving, that the system is somehow performing better.”

Over the past few years, U.S. DOT has been very deliberately working hand-in-glove with HUD and the EPA to treat transportation and land use as one cohesive system. It only makes sense that the agency use the same ethic in measuring roadway performance and congestion. By doing so, DOT would have to acknowledge that a long commute along miles and miles of free-flowing highways is no bargain compared to a short commute in dense traffic, not to mention an even shorter commute on transit.

Clark Williams-Derry, research director for the sustainability-focused Sightline Institute, suggests that congestion may simply be the wrong thing to measure. “Focusing on congestion is like, in a basketball game, focusing only on the number of assists you get,” Williams-Derry said. “It’s an interesting fact, but it doesn’t tell you the final score.”

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One of the most popular elements of the new transportation authorization is its consolidation or elimination of 60 federal programs. But this cleanup is not without its casualties. One of those casualties is the off-system bridge program. And another one, indirectly, is bicycle and pedestrian programming.

Source: Transportation for America

As you can see, the Highway Bridge Program is no more. It’s been replaced by the National Highway Performance Program (NHPP). But bridges that fall outside the National Highway System — more than half the country’s bridges — aren’t covered by the NHPP. Those “off-system” bridges are now part of the Surface Transportation Program (STP).

There’s just one problem with that.

“All of the bridge money went to NHPP but less than half the bridges went there,” said Nick Donohue of Transportation for America. “The others went to STP with no money.”

The Surface Transportation Program, or STP, is a large, flexible and multimodal program, and has historically been a good source of funds for bicycle and pedestrian projects. Though states have spent an average of just 0.8 percent of their STP funds on biking and walking over the last five years, according to an analysis by the League of American Bicyclists, that equals $333 million — a significant chunk of change when you’re talking about such cost-effective projects. As a point of comparison, that’s about a quarter as much as was spent over that same period by the Transportation Enhancements program, which was aimed more specifically at bike/ped projects.*

Shifting bridge repair into STP without a proportionate increase in funding will make competition stiffer than ever for STP funds, according to the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

To make matters worse, there’s now less local control over those dollars. Under the new bill, metropolitan areas are getting a smaller slice of the STP pie. It used to be that 62.5 percent of STP funds were sub-allocated to cities and towns according to population. Now, it’s only 50 percent.

That means that local entities, not just states, will be left with too much to do with too little STP money, according to Donohue. “They left 180,000 bridges out in the cold,” he said, “and now local communities and MPOs have a false choice to make with STP money — fixing these bridges or using the funds for the innovative projects they build with STP funds today.”

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