Streetsblog Capitol Hill

“This is the civil rights dilemma: Our laws purport to level the playing field, but our transportation choices have effectively barred millions of people from accessing it.”

So says a report from the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a project of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The coalition wasn’t involved in the transportation reauthorization debate in 2005, when SAFETEA-LU was passed, and they’re determined to be at the table this time.

In March, they quietly published their report, “Where We Need to Go: A Civil Rights Roadmap for Transportation Equity”, and since then they’ve put out three more reports, springboarding off of that first overview. The subsequent reports focus on access to health care [PDF], access to housing [PDF], and access to jobs [PDF].

They never really released these reports to the press, which is why we’re just letting you know about them now. Some media outlets caught wind of it in late July and a small flurry of stories came out in the week or two after the Leadership Conference hosted a “fly-in” lobby day, where nearly 40 constituents from nine target states came to Washington to meet with their representatives’ offices.

According to the Leadership Conference report, racial minorities are four times more likely than whites to lack access to a car and to rely on public transportation for their commute to work. African Americans make up 12 percent of the U.S. population but 20 percent of the pedestrian fatalities. And the problem is far worse for Native Americans on reservations. Pedestrians there have the highest per capita risk of injury and death of any ethnic group in the U.S. While vehicle fatalities are dropping around the country, they’re on the rise on reservations.

All of that explains why the a group focused on civil and human rights would be interested in transportation – it’s an issue of racial justice. It’s also an economic issue, they say: with job sprawl pushing more and more jobs far outside the urban core, access to those jobs can be exclusively by private car. Even three out of five jobs “suitable for welfare-to-work participants” are not accessible by public transit, the report says.

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Do you know the name of your local Metropolitan Planning Organization or Council of Government? Most Americans don’t. In fact, most people probably have no idea these agencies even exist, let alone what they do. Yet they are surprisingly powerful and play a substantial role in shaping the places where we live and work.

Led by unelected boards, MPOs and COGs, as they’re known, are a special breed among government agencies. They lack the authority to issue taxes or impose laws. As such, they go largely unmentioned in the media and are mostly unknown to local residents, outside of the most wonkish circles. But the low profile of MPOs and COGs belies their considerable power.

Despite their limitations, they represent the strongest form of regional governance we’ve got in the United States, crossing city and county lines. More importantly, they disperse hundreds of millions of federal transportation dollars annually. While these agencies often distribute transportation funds more fairly than state DOTs, many of them are structured in a way that favors sprawl and undermines cities.

MPOs and COGs can be profoundly undemocratic. They are governed by boards of public officeholders, but there is no requirement that they be in any way representative of the region’s population. In fact, the general rule that governs the composition of MPO boards is “one place, one vote,” rather than the more traditional “one person, one vote.” This often produces decisions dramatically skewed toward suburban and rural interests.

For example, greater Milwaukee’s MPO, known by the unwieldy acronym SEWRPC, is governed by a board of 21 members, three from each of the counties that make up the planning region. That means that the city of Milwaukee — population nearly 600,000 — has zero representatives on the commission that distributes millions of dollars for transportation throughout the region. It is not guaranteed any votes. The city’s only voting power comes from the three seats given to Milwaukee County — and those must be spread between the central city and many suburbs. Meanwhile, rural Walworth County — population 100,000 — is guaranteed three votes.

Milwaukee is an especially egregious case. But unfortunately, this general pattern is more the norm than the exception. A 1999 Brookings Institution study [PDF] found that central cities were under-represented in as many as 92 percent of MPOs and COGs.

That bias can have a strong impact on policy, further research has shown. A 2003 study by researchers at Virginia Tech found that for each additional suburban member on an MPO board, there was a 1 to 9 percent decrease in funding for transit — with highways being the favored alternative.

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Cross-posted at T4America’s blog. Sean Barry is a communications associate at Transportation for America.

In a Streetsblog post last Thursday, Tanya tackled a question that has been marinating since Transportation for America released “Aging in Place, Stuck without Options,” addressing seniors’ mobility challenges:

Is it the job of overextended transit agencies – and the responsibility of taxpayers – to expand transit to all the inefficient places people have moved to, when they knowingly were moving away from urban amenities like transit in favor of the automobile? When that arrangement no longer works for people, do we encourage them to relocate in places that can better serve their needs, or do we aim to serve everyone’s needs exactly where they are, no matter where they are?

These are good questions, but there are some underlying assumptions that deserve a closer look. First, lets be fair: Automobile-dependent development has been the default setting for at least 60 years, so many people live in such places whether or not they “knowingly” rejected urban amenities and transit. And while it might make sense for some share of seniors to relocate, there simply isn’t enough adequate housing in close proximity to transit to accommodate the surging elder population — even if we could pry them away from support networks in their existing communities.

We don’t pretend for a minute that every cul-de-sac subdivision is entitled to its own transit route. But there are myriad ways that we could help to make the situation better, whether by broadening existing transit networks, expanding the supply of appropriate housing with access to transit or supporting educational programs that help to prepare seniors for getting around without driving.

In many inner suburbs, we have a ripe opportunity to change the dynamic. Many suburban communities are getting denser and more city-like in character, with dynamic job growth and greater proximity between employment and residential areas — Northern Virginia fits this description, for example. Under these circumstances, it not only makes sense to provide increased transportation options, but would be foolish not to. Both seniors and non-seniors deserve the chance to live in places with convenient and affordable access to transit if they choose.

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Youngstown, Ohio has its share of problems.

Once a single-industry steel town, the rust belt poster child has seen its population dwindle from 115,000 residents to barely 67,000 over just three decades. For the better part of the last century, the city was known for its mafia activity, and shaking off the residue of government corruption and violence has been difficult. Its homicide rate — driven upward by a not-yet-recovered economy — puts the city in league with towns three times its size.

But undergirding all of these ills is the problem that might just be Youngstown’s biggest: its built infrastructure is simply to large for its current population.

The starkest example is its excess housing stock. At last count, demolition crews were slogging through some 3,300 vacant houses. But sewers, streets, even stoplights: all of these former amenities linger at a scale meant for the days when the mills were still turning the skies orange and filling the pockets of workers who, in turn, filled the gambling houses.

Now these physical amenities have become liabilities. A diminished tax base limits the city’s ability to maintain its aging streets and sewers. Signals stop drivers on abandoned streets and force them to burn fuel while waiting for the passing of phantom traffic.

Almost a decade ago, Youngstown made headlines by acknowledging this problem. No longer would the city plan for growth, the way every American city had in the history of urban planning. Youngstown was planning to shrink — but to shrink smart. The plan was known as Youngstown 2010.

The city would start by tearing down the abandoned houses that depressed neighboring property values and acted as magnets for crime. Their hope was that some neighborhoods could be depopulated and that the city might even be able to tear out some underutilized streets, in order to dispense with sending around the plows and the patch crews. This revolutionary “right-sizing” concept has since been embraced by cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan.

The plan was called Youngstown 2010, but now — in 2011 — the city of Youngstown is just getting around to removing its first street. Part of the problem is that the state, regional and national policy framework is still oriented for growth. After all, Youngstown can’t go to the Ohio Department of Transportation and ask for money to tear out roads — yet. ODOT’s money is for building roads, and that fuels a dynamic that threatens what progress has made in Youngstown.

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You don’t hear me say this often, but here goes: Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute made a good point.

At yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on transit access for senior citizens and people with disabilities, the sprawl-boosting O’Toole posed this question: “Should transit come to the people or should people come to transit?”

The same issue has come up often in discussions of Transportation for America’s report, “Aging in Place: Stuck Without Options.” On this blog, our readers responded to the report with comments like, “I don’t think that taxing young people and cities to pay for people’s bad decisions is the solution,” and “serving this demographic with demand response service is killing my agency’s operating budget.”

O’Toole has said lots of kooky things about the T4A report, and yesterday’s hearing was no exception – after making the one point that I found compelling, he proceeded to rattle on about driverless cars being the answer to aged and disabled drivers, and that the whole transportation network (or just about) should be privatized.

But his question remains: Is it the job of overextended transit agencies – and the responsibility of taxpayers – to expand transit to all the inefficient places people have moved to, when they knowingly were moving away from urban amenities like transit in favor of the automobile? When that arrangement no longer works for people, do we encourage them to relocate in places that can better serve their needs, or do we aim to serve everyone’s needs exactly where they are, no matter where they are?

The folks at Transportation for America have debated this question as well. James Corless, director of T4A, says O’Toole is wrong when he accuses T4A of trying to build transit in every last corner of the country. “If this is just about seniors, then no, we can’t afford to do that,” Corless said. “But we think this is about reimagining the suburbs and getting creative about the issue of how to make the suburbs work better for everyone.”

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People choose suburban neighborhoods over urban ones for myriad reasons: because they can afford it, because the schools are good, because it’s a quiet street, or crimes rates are low, or everyone walks around with baby strollers and golden retrievers, or their family is nearby. But countless other consequences stream from their decision of where to live.

If people can’t or don’t walk or bike where they need to go, they’ve also bought themselves carbon emissions from excessive driving. Hours lost in traffic congestion. Growing waistlines from spending time behind a wheel instead of on two wheels, or two feet. Stress and relationship problems. And even worse: The suburb they chose “because it’s safe” ends up being far more dangerous than the city they fled.

William Lucy, a professor at the University of Virginia and former chair of the Charlottesville Planning Commission, says that people’s decision making about where to live has such sweeping ramifications that he’s concentrated his professional work on it. And it’s why he focuses on danger and death: specifically, the danger of leaving home.

At a daylong forum yesterday on intelligent cities at the National Building Museum, Lucy could barely wait to lay into cul-de-sacs, which he says were designed for safety but end up being more dangerous than through-streets.

“They turn what should be a 100-yard walk into a two-mile drive, and they put more people in cars for more reasons than they should,” Lucy said. And because they get lulled into a sense of security, he said, parents don’t teach their kids about street safety and the “difference between street and sidewalk and driveway and yard.”

But the greatest danger to a young child, he said, is being backed over by a motor vehicle – usually driven by their own parents in their own driveway. Indeed, “backovers” account for 34 percent of “non-traffic” vehicular fatalities among children under 15 years old. (“Frontovers” account for another 30 percent, meaning that 64 percent of “non-traffic” vehicular fatalities still involve children being run over, according to KidsAndCars.org.)

Because these incidents occur on private property, they’re not considered “traffic” accidents and data is not collected by national traffic safety organizations. Meanwhile, Lucy said, squeamishness over openly reporting on the tragedy of a parent killing his or her own child with a car leads newspapers to bury news of backovers – missing a “teachable moment.”

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The Reason Foundation, a free-market think tank, is not always a transportation reformer’s best friend. Its scholars gave Florida Gov. Rick Scott inaccurate advice he then used to justify killing high-speed rail in his state. They want to prevent the gas tax from funding “peripheral” programs like transit and active transportation. But Reason Foundation experts have teamed up with Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense to champion seven cost-effective and eminently “reasonable” strategies for improving transportation outcomes even in the midst of a budget crisis.

Leaders of the three groups briefed an audience on Capitol Hill today about the points of unity among them. Obviously, there were many issues they couldn’t come to consensus on, but it’s worth spotlighting the things even these disparate groups agree on. And it’s worth asking: if they’re so non-controversial, why aren’t they happening everywhere?

The seven innovations being highlighted by Transportation for America, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and the Reason Foundation are:

1. Transportation scenario planning – Rather than planning for a future just like the present, metros and states can use a more dynamic planning process, often used by the military but increasingly adopted by policy-makers, which brings together a variety of community stakeholders to envision how the future could look under a variety of possible scenarios. They come up with a “preferred scenario” and set policies and goals oriented toward achieving that scenario.

2. High Occupancy Toll lanes – Sometimes derided as “Lexus lanes,” these lanes are reserved for carpoolers but are also open to those willing to pay for a quicker trip with less congestion. HOT lanes can use dynamic pricing to change the cost of driving on the lanes based on demand to keep congestion on those lanes low enough to guarantee a 45 mile-per-hour speed, according to Shirley Ybarra of the Reason Foundation, Virginia’s Secretary of Transportation from 1998 to 2002.

3. Bus Rapid Transit – Latin America has pioneered a host of innovative ways to make bus service faster, more reliable, and more pleasant. The buses travel in their own designated lane, preferably physically separated from other traffic, to keep from getting stuck in the same traffic jams as everybody else. The stations often are more elaborate platforms, with fares collected at the station, to speed the boarding process. BRT is scalable, allowing cities to test the waters with a modest system and then improving stations, real-time bus tracking, fare collection systems, and lane separations as the system matures.

4. Intelligent Transportation Systems – Everyone seems to agree that E-ZPass (and even boothless “open road tolling”), traffic light optimization, electronic transit fare payments, and real-time transit tracking are improvements cities and states can make right now to get the most out of their existing capacity, potentially staving off the perceived need to expand. Despite the consensus on the utility of these tools, however, states are still slow to implement them, so let this be a tri-partisan push for them to get on it. A 2005 GAO report found that ITS reduced delays by 9 percent where it was implemented.

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Here in the Washington, D.C. area, our Metro system is expanding. A new Silver Line will go all the way to Dulles airport and beyond, into exurban Loudon County. The projected station stops are named for highways, not neighborhoods or landmarks: Reston Parkway, Route 28, Route 606, Route 772. Ten of the 11 new stations will be outside the Capital Beltway, almost doubling the number of metro stations outside the unofficial boundary of D.C.’s urban territory.

I’m always happy to see transit flourishing, and it will be nice to be able to take the metro all the way to Dulles without switching to the bus. But does transit expansion give the official thumbs-up to people moving farther and farther outside the urban core? This Silver Line isn’t being built to get me from the inner city to our ridiculously far-flung airport. It’s to provide all the benefits of transit – a reliable, congestion-free ride to work while you read the paper or doze off to your iTunes – to people who have chosen to live several counties away from their work.

Land use expert Reid Ewing, a professor of urban planning at the University of Utah and associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, said transit leads to development – both sprawling and compact – because it improves accessibility. And increased accessibility to jobs in a shorter amount of time is an engine for development.

“It’s the fact that you can reach lots of trip attractions within short period of time on transit that causes development around the station,” Ewing said. “It doesn’t happen inherently. And accessibility, likewise, is a driving force in highway oriented sprawl.”

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Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

An important new report from CEOs for Cities, though, has laid out major problems with the UMR. It shows how commuters in compact regions, whose daily trips look hellish based on the UMR, actually spend far less time in the car than residents of sprawling metro areas.

The misleading metrics in the UMR are a convenient bludgeon for the highway lobby. According to report author Joe Cortright, the UMR serves as “a drumbeat saying we need to spend a lot more on expanding capacity. It gets used in political speeches, it’s used in lobbying.”

The key flaw is a measurement called the Travel Time Index. That’s the ratio of average travel times at peak hours to the average time if roads were freely flowing. In other words, the TTI measures how fast a given trip goes; it doesn’t measure whether that trip is long or short to begin with.

Relying on the TTI suggests that more sprawl and more highways solve congestion, when in fact it just makes commutes longer. Instead, suggests CEOs for Cities, more compact development is often the more effective — and more affordable — solution.

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One of the themes of the financial and economic crisis we've faced over the past two years is that government, pressed into responding to serious economic pain, has often found itself supporting the activities that got us into this mess in the first place.

Irresponsible behavior by banks led them to the brink of collapse -- a collapse which would have sent the global economy into a terrifying period of decline -- and so the government stepped in to prevent bank failures (after learning a lesson from the dreadful experiment with Lehman). But these interventions have put banks in a situation where they stand to gain enormously from taking large and dangerous financial bets.

Similarly, government policies such as low gas tax rates and import protections on light trucks encouraged the development of a bloated domestic auto industry focused on the production of inefficient SUVs.

When high oil prices and deep recession then threatened to push General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy, leading to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, the government felt it had no choice but to step in to keep the companies afloat.

Now the government owns large stakes in companies that will only profit if the American public goes car-buying crazy over the next few years.

The list goes on. The economic crisis that currently afflicts us has made it clearer than ever that we need to change the way we do many things, but because the economy is in such difficult shape, it is hard to pursue anything other than policies designed to keep the economic engine from stalling out completely. Big transitions must wait for later.

Can the same be said for sprawling urban development? Have government interventions essentially bailed out the very places that proved most vulnerable amid oil shocks and housing busts?

Chris Leinberger argued that very point in a recent blog post at The New Republic's Avenue:

While there is no federal or private ... dataset that identifies where exactly in metropolitan areas the most mortgage defaults are, local analyses and some news reports indicate the bulk of the problem is on the fringe...Thus, some of the biggest beneficiaries of federal efforts to stem foreclosures and keep families in their homes are those located in exurbia.

He has a point. Foreclosures have been concentrated on urban fringes, so federal efforts to modify mortgages and otherwise reduce defaults have tended to direct more aid to exurbs than inner suburbs and city centers. In addition, rates of home ownership and car ownership are higher in the suburbs than in city centers, so federal housing subsidies (including the new home-buyer tax credit and low interest rates generally) and automobile subsidies ("Cash for Clunkers") have had a geographic bias toward suburbanites.

To a certain extent, this has been unavoidable. Most Americans live in auto-oriented areas in suburban places, and a large share of those Americans are facing financial difficulty. Any measure that helped stressed households, including checks of equal value cut to all workers, would tend to benefit suburbanites more than urban dwellers.

One should also be careful not to oversell the value of the interventions. Efforts to reduce foreclosures have actually had pretty depressing results.

But certainly the government might have done things differently -- and pursued policies designed to help households as much as possible -- rather than those aimed at keeping households in homes they couldn't afford, or moving families into homes in unsustainably sprawling locations. So it's important to ask: What can we expect for exurban areas and how will the government's policy choices affect them?

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