Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Last year, the D.C. region ran away with the dubious honor of Most Congested Metro Area. D.C. area drivers wasted 74 hours and 37 gallons of fuel sitting in traffic last year, which would have cost about $100 over the course of the year. But the gasoline cost is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to the 2011 Urban Mobility Report, released today by the Texas Transportation Institute, this delay cost the average D.C. driver $1,495 once you factor in lost productivity and increased trucking times. In Chicago, it’s $1,568. L.A., $1,334.

Every year, TTI puts out their Urban Mobility Report, and every year we criticize it for its autocentrism. After all, its sole measure is how fast a vehicle can speed down a given mile of roadway. Maybe your city is dense and friendly to pedestrians and bikes, so that it’s easy to glide past the automobile gridlock on your short commute to work. Or maybe transit provides an excellent and affordable alternative to traffic jams. None of that matters to TTI. If someone, somewhere, is sitting in traffic, that’s all that matters. All other measures and modes of urban mobility are ignored.

TTI doesn’t bother to figure out how much time is saved if one avoids that congestion by taking transit, but they do examine how much time transit riders save drivers by taking vehicles off the road.

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The Chamber of Commerce released its annual Transportation Performance Index (TPI) last week [PDF], and you can tell it’s due for a total overhaul, because according to the Index, recession-battered 2009 was a banner year for transportation performance.

Using 2009 data, the Chamber, a powerful lobbying group that represents millions of American businesses, determined that the performance of the nation’s transportation infrastructure is improving. However, even the Chamber dismisses the significance of its own results, saying the “improvement” is illusory — due to the decline in driving, and thus congestion, during the recession. But there’s another good reason to dismiss the results: The Chamber is measuring the wrong things.

The Chamber uses the TPI “to track the performance of transportation infrastructure over time… and demonstrate the connection between infrastructure performance, rather than spending, and the economy.” It claims to be the first organization to ever measure the correlation between the quality of transportation systems and economic growth.

But the Chamber’s metrics produce some truly baffling results. During the economic torpor of 2009, the index experienced its greatest improvement in a single year since 1990. Despite the nonsensical figures, the Chamber uses the report release as an opportunity to call for renewed infrastructure investment.

“By all accounts, the nation’s transportation networks continue to languish.” said Janet Kavinoky, head lobbyist for the Chamber’s infrastructure program. “The improvement of the TPI is not sustainable and does not represent a long-term trend… It is due to the economic downturn, rather than strategic policy and regulatory reforms or new investment.”

That’s all true, but that’s not the only reason to question the results of the TPI.

Of the 21 indicators the Chamber uses in its complex formulas, none deal with emissions. Of all of the ways the Chamber chooses to evaluate the U.S. transportation system, none investigates the effect on air and water quality. They certainly don’t take public health into account, ignoring the effect of our transportation choices on our waistlines or our lungs. In fact, the Chamber completely glosses over non-motorized transportation. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure doesn’t count as one of the “fixed facilities” the Chamber examines.

Here’s all you need to know to be convinced that the Chamber’s measurements of transportation performance don’t add up: Though it didn’t name the top states for transportation performance this year (that listing only comes out every other year), these were the top winners last year:

Maybe that’s what you get when you evaluate performance on congestion based on “route-miles per 10,000 population” — the higher the better. That’s right. The Chamber judges congestion using a simple formula: asphalt divided by people.

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Jeff Wood at Reconnecting America attended the Congress for the New Urbanism’s annual gathering in Madison last week, and he recently posted this short Q&A with CNU President John Norquist. It happens to be a pretty timely and snappy interview.

Angie wrote this morning about Kaid Benfield’s ideas about “right-sizing” Detroit. Benfield focuses on how sprawl has hollowed out the inner city, expanding the footprint of metro region while the overall population held relatively steady. In his interview with Wood, Norquist expresses his take on Detroit:

In an interview with Ben two years ago, Norquist made this point even clearer:

You can of course defeat congestion. Environmentalists sometimes say that you can’t build your way out of congestion; that’s not true. It’s been done in Detroit, they built their way out of congestion. They built all these freeways all over Detroit and congestion is now probably their lowest priority problem. They have a lot of other problems, like they lost more than half their population, most of the jobs, the real estate values collapsed. They tore down all the streetcars by 1956 and built these freeways all over the city. So it does work, if the only priority you have is reducing congestion, you can do it by building these giant roads across cities. But then it’ll hurt the city in every other way and they hurt the national economy too, because your cities are what really drive value.

I know I said I wasn’t going to post during my vacation, but I thought you’d be interested in this new report from the FHWA, and, perhaps more notably, the Republican reaction to it. The agency just submitted a report to Congress on the use of highway shoulder lanes as traffic lanes. (It’s not online, or we’d link to it.) Update: here it is. [PDF]

The report, written by the FHWA and the Texas Transportation Institute, recommended setting clearer agency guidance on using shoulders for traffic. Incoming Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) heralded the idea as a way to “achieve cost savings by better utilizing existing highway capacity.” He emphasized that he’s not interested in ”paving over America’s landscape.”

Expanding the existing footprint of our nation’s highway system can be costly and time consuming.  Our interstates have become parking lots and this report confirms low cost and effective solutions exist to relieve congestion.  By using existing highway footprints and right-of-way, States will have another effective, low cost means to reduce congestion and enhance mobility.

Encouraging words, to an extent. But the FHWA report, while acknowledging potential benefits for alleviating traffic congestion, says the safety impacts of opening shoulder lanes to traffic are unclear. Europeans have gained safety benefits by utilizing shoulder lanes, the report says, but “the shoulder use is only a part of a much larger investment in ATM [Advanced Traffic Management] technology and resources to manage them.”

In the U.S., where they have been studied, safety impacts have been negative. “There have been longer incident clearance times in areas that don’t have shoulders available to move incidents off the highway. Also, responders don’t have the benefit of traveling the shoulder to reach the incident scene.”

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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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The Transportation Enhancements program, which requires states to set aside 10 percent of their federal transport money for new bicycle and pedestrian facilities, among other projects, turns 19 years old this year. But you'd almost never know it after reading Saturday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in which the paper tallies -- with no shortage of alarm -- the federal money not being spent on new roads.

The Star-Telegram story, which soon got snapped up by the Associated Press, begins by challenging Dallas' Woodall Rogers Deck Park, a groundbreaking effort to cap the city's Woodall Rogers Freeway and create a 5.2-acre green space for the public. The park, aimed at creating a walkable link between Dallas' local districts, received $16.7 million in stimulus funding from the Obama administration.

From the Star-Telegram:

The Woodall Rodgers project is a glaring example of how, at a time when many Texans distrust their transportation leaders, huge chunks of federal and state money are being spent on projects that have little or nothing to do with directly improving traffic.

"Texans should be outraged by it, especially when they’re being asked to support tax increases for transportation," said Justin Keener, vice president for policy and communications at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a nonpartisan research institute in Austin.

The Star-Telegram reviewed 515 state projects awarded funds under the federal transportation enhancement program during the past 18 years and found projects large and small that had little to do with mobility.

As it happens, the "nonpartisan" Texas Public Policy Foundation makes no bones about its political alignment on its website, which outlines a mission of "limited government" and offers a litany of pro-industry critiques of the Democratic health care bills.

The group's leadership is stocked with veteran advisers to Republican Gov. Rick Perry (TX), and chairman of the board Wendy Lee Gramm is a former Enron lobbyist who aided her husband Phil Gramm, a former Texas GOP senator, in his late-1990s push to de-regulate Wall Street.

Yet aside from Gramm's group, the Star-Telegram story includes no sources criticizing Texas transportation enhancements, which have received $997 million since the program began in 1991.

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Former Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who served for eight years in George W. Bush's DOT, sat down with Streetsblog Capitol Hill yesterday to urge that Congress add a dedicated funding stream of $1 billion each year for transportation technology to the next long-term infrastructure bill.

Since leaving office, Peters has transitioned to private consulting work in her home state of Arizona and joined the board of directors at Aldis, a Tennessee-based traffic management company.

Alids' GridSmart program, a panoramic camera that captures vehicles and pedestrians at intersections and helps "smartly" synchronize traffic signals accordingly (see the above video), would stand to gain if Congress heeds Peters' advice and directly funds transportation technology.

Peters acknowledged that her proposal for the next infrastructure bill would help Aldis, but she described the billion-dollar dedicated funding as an opportunity for states and cities to choose their own high-tech solutions for traffic management. "This is a great application," Peters said of the GridSmart, "but there are others out there."

The House's original version of the 2005 transportation bill, which was recently extended for another month amid political wrangling, included $3 billion over five years for technological upgrades, also known as "intelligent transportation." But that money was removed from the legislation during conference talks with the Senate, Peters noted, leaving states without federal help with modernizing their congestion management.

The annual $1 billion fund Peters is backing would be distributed to states by formula, but state DOTs would have to report back to Washington on how effectively their technological investments were meeting specific performance targets. (For more on Peters' support of a federal role in setting transportation standards, see Part I of the Streetsblog interview.)

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Let's say you're at the movies, and you look up at the box office only to see no ticket prices listed. You know you're going to have to pay for the show eventually -- perhaps even during income-tax season -- but for now you can watch all you want, seemingly for free.

How many movies would you see? One, two ... or as many as you wanted to?

Former federal highway official Steve Lockwood presented that hypothetical at today's University of Virginia conference to illustrate the nation's wacky notion of transportation pricing.

"The reason we don't have a flexible dialogue when it comes to pricing is that we don't know how much things cost," he said.

Right now tolling is prohibited on existing interstate highway systems built with federal funds, with a few exceptions. But conference speakers on both ends of the political spectrum agreed that the transportation system must be priced more accurately in order to avoid catastrophic consequences.

In other words: It's time to start properly labeling the price of a movie ticket.

Douglas Foy, the former development secretary of Massachusetts, and transit critic Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation, sparred on many issued but agreed that any new highway capacity should include charges beyond the gas tax.

The comparison of film-going to driving is an imperfect one, to be sure, but the core need to inform the public about the consequences of decision-making applies to both activities.

"People love to believe they can be free riders," Jay-Etta Hecker of the Bipartisan Policy Center told conference attendees today. "People need to be educated that this isn't a free-rider system."

The federal effort to encourage sounder urban transportation pricing remains in its infancy, however. Mary Peters, George W. Bush's second transportation secretary, introduced the Urban Parternship Agreements (UPA) in 2007 to incentivize congestion mitigation efforts, but New York City lost its chance at the UPA cash after the state legislature voted down congestion pricing.

As Washington conventional wisdom has it, raising gas taxes or creating a vehicle miles traveled tax to pay for transportation is impossible during the current recession. After all, who would want to squeeze cash-strapped commuters during tough economic times?

As it turns out, the public is very willing to pay for the shorter commuting times that result from less traffic -- and they're willing to pay top dollar, as IBM's new Commuter Pain Index (CPI) shows.

When asked what value they would place on every 15 minutes sliced from their daily commute, 36.5 percent of CPI respondents said between $10 and $20. That's about five times the recent trading price of a ton of carbon emissions on the nation's climate-change exchanges.

And the price of a shorter commute was higher in more congested cities. In Los Angeles, 22 percent of residents said every 15 minutes not spent en route to work would be worth between $31 and $40 -- or more than $100 per hour.

What does the data mean? For one thing, those who fear that voters would revolt if asked to pay more for a more efficient, less congested transport network shouldn't let that stop policy-making. As every successful politician knows (and the president is re-learning on health care), messaging is the key to winning over the public.

In other words, Democrats who feign unwillingness to subject voters to higher gas taxes are ignoring their ability to control the message. When a greater contribution to transportation is pitched as a way to shorten commutes and give workers more free time, the prospect becomes more desirable.

And it's not that lawmakers don't know how to decrease congestion, particularly in the urban areas that were polled to produce the CPI. Reducing the number of car trips and lowering demand during peak travel times are proven to be a cheaper and more effective method of battling congestion than expanding highway capacity.

Is it time to nickname the White House's Sustainable Communities Initiative the "Shorter Commutes Initiative"?

The latest edition of the Texas Transportation Institute's influential urban mobility report was released today, prompting a flurry of mainstream media coverage focused largely on a faux-ironic theme that would do Alanis Morrissette proud -- the bad economy is giving us less traffic!

The TTI found a one-hour drop in the annual traffic delays suffered by the average urban American in 2007, a result attributed to the run-up in fuel prices and the beginning of the economic slowdown. The Wall Street Journal deemed the one-hour reprieve "The Upside of Recession," while LA Weekly dubbed Southern California's congestion decrease a "Recession Bonus."

Other coverage of the TTI report emphasized a different breed of cold comfort, playing up the congestion rankings that were given to major cities. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution resorted to surveying drivers on their local roads' drop from second-worst to third-worst in the nation (surprisingly, no one was celebrating), while D.C.-area outlets seemed to take morbid pride in their ascension to the No. 2 spot.

If only the TTI report had a solution to urban traffic woes that had a measurable impact on congestion! Oh, wait. As the chart above shows, transit service saved the nation's cities 645 million hours of delay in 2007. That's more than double the number of hours saved by all five most prominent road "operational improvements" combined -- with HOV lanes being the most notable of those latter options.

The report's authors devote an entire section to solutions to congestion, recommending "a balanced and diversified approach" tailored to the needs of each area. Promoting "denser developments with a mix of jobs, shops and homes, so that more people can walk, bike or take transit" is featured on the list.

But unfortunately, the value of transit and denser urban development got only sporadic mention in most coverage of the TTI report. The Oregonian was one of the exceptions; its reporter drew a line between Portland's less grim traffic situation and its planning priorities. Here's an excerpt:

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