Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The driving boom is over.

After decades of steady growth, U.S. driving rates have stagnated and even fallen. Per capita driving is as low as it was in 1996. And yet, federal and state government estimates continue to predict inexorable growth, relentlessly building expensive new highways for drivers who might not materialize.

A groundbreaking new study from U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group shows that any of three likely scenarios for future U.S. driving trends show far lower vehicle miles traveled than any of the principal current government estimates. That creates a disconnect between the kinds of transportation Americans are choosing with their feet and the kinds of transportation the system is designing for them.

Transit ridership is rising steadily – Americans took 10 percent more transit trips in 2011 than in 2005 – yet more than half of U.S. transit systems have been forced by budget constraints to either raise fares or cut service – or both – since the beginning of 2010. Meanwhile, although Americans are showing a flagging interest in automobile travel, states are breaking the bank to build shiny new roads.

Here are the three possible future scenarios for driving behavior that authors Phineas Baxandall of U.S. PIRG and Tony Dutzik of the Frontier Group laid out:

Back to the Future: This scenario assumes that the decline in driving is a temporary “blip,” largely due to the economic recession, and not a lasting trend. It assumes driving rates will soon pick right up where they left off. In this scenario, driving rates by age cohort and sex return to 2004 levels by 2020 and continue marching upward.

Enduring Shift: Under this scenario, the last decade’s shift in driving behaviors is real and lasting, with people continuing to embrace different forms of transportation and more compact communities. Gas prices stay high, the economy bounces back without leading to a huge jump in VMT, and the digitally-connected world continues to reduce the need for travel. This assumes each age and sex cohort keeps driving at lower rates than the same cohort did in previous generations. “For example, if 20 year-old males in 2009 drove 20 percent less than 20 year-old males did in 2001, it is assumed that eleven years later in 2020 they will similarly drive 20 percent less than 31-year-old males did in 2001,” Baxandall and Dutzik write.

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In 1962, President John F. Kennedy called for a federal transit funding plan. Two years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson took baby steps toward starting that program, but Johnson’s true transportation legacy was signing the bill that created the Department of Transportation, bringing all modes under one roof.

Nixon oversaw the creation of Amtrak. Ford had a strong, personal role in rail restructuring when all the railroads were going bankrupt. Carter did deregulation and the first multi-modal surface transportation act. Reagan passed a gas tax increase. George H.W. Bush helped get IS-TEA passed and Clinton signed TEA-21, the biggest transportation bill in history (even adjusted for inflation).

What about George W. Bush? What about Obama? Presidents haven’t been as active in setting and guiding transportation policy in recent years. Neither our current president nor our most recent ex-president really made his mark on transportation at all. The University of Virginia’s Miller Center set out yesterday to figure out whether presidents still wield any power whatsoever in transportation policy discussions. To do so, the Center held a series of panel discussions of its own.

Obama has gone out on a limb in promoting several big transportation ideas, from high-speed rail to an infrastructure bank to a $50 billion job-creating infrastructure program — but none have come to fruition. Why is that?

There’s been a disconnect lately between Congress and the White House, said Emil Frankel of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a high-ranking DOT official under George W. Bush. President Obama has broken with tradition by refusing to submit a draft transportation bill to Congress. He just lays out his ideas and says, “There you are; go write a bill.”

Maybe that’s for the best, though. “If Obama were to lay something out, there’s a certain segment of the House that would just be against it,” said Marcia Hale, the president of Building America’s Future and a veteran of Democratic Party politics. Others agreed: Putting Obama’s name on an initiative is the best way to kill it.

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We continue our Streetfacts series by looking at the data on driving in the U.S. Per-capita driving has declined every year since 2005. That’s not a blip, it’s now an 8-year trend.

The reason? Neither the state of the economy nor changes in gas prices offer a satisfactory explanation. Social preferences and demographic shifts seem to be playing a role. Young people today are less likely to own a car or have a driver’s license than young people several years ago. At the same time, America’s growing population of seniors are no longer in their peak driving years.

Whatever the combination of factors, people are riding transit, walking, and bicycling more. Even Motor Trend is examining the shift away from cars.

The upshot is that we need to start making smart transportation investments that align with the new reality: Americans are driving less.

Who will be looking out for the interests of transit riders in the 113th Congress? It’s easy to figure it out, said Cap’n Transit over the weekend: Just check whether they have an R or a D next to their names.

The Cap’n ranked House Transportation Committee members, from both parties, by the percentage of car-free households in their district and the percentage of people who primarily commute by transit, according to Census numbers. His results weren’t shocking, given what we know about the differences between urban and rural voting patterns. But they were eye-opening all the same.

The committee Republican with the highest proportion of car-free and transit-using constituents was Sam Graves of Missouri. His district comprises the entire northern section of the state, including some suburbs of Kansas City and then north and east into the hinterlands. That is the T&I Republican district with the most urban transportation profile.

Compare that with New York City Democrat Jerrold Nadler: 64 percent of his constituents are car-free, with 54 percent of them riding transit. My non-voting delegate here in DC, Eleanor Holmes Norton, presides over a city where 26 percent of residents don’t have a car and 38 percent ride transit.

Sure, there are plenty of rural and suburban Democrats, and those numbers aren’t a clear indicator of how someone will vote. Peter DeFazio of Oregon is a strong voice for transit, and 97 percent of his constituents have a car, with just 2 percent commuting primarily by transit.

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“Innovative” might not be the first word you think of when you think of state DOTs. But Smart Growth America and the State Smart Transportation Initiative are out to change that. The two groups have published a menu of options for states looking to get out of the cash-for-highways rut. “The Innovative DOT: A Handbook of Policy and Practice” outlines myriad ways states can save money and create better transportation options for their residents. If states take note, we could see a lot more innovation coming out of some unlikely places.

Tennessee has already done some soul-searching and has come up with a plan to turn around the state’s transportation system, partly due to the realization that the state had nine times more spending in the pipeline as it had money for.

Indeed, SGA and SSTI frame the need for innovation as, primarily, an economic solution. “Revenues are falling and budgets are shrinking while transportation demands grow,” they write in the introduction. “The only answer is innovation.” They have a long list of goals for the transportation system and suggest that everything from safety to system preservation to livability can be solved with their prescriptions.

“Traditionally, a DOT has seen its avenues of addressing a state’s transportation issues as narrow,” SGA’s Tom Madrecki told Streetsblog. “It could widen a road, invest more in this corridor vs. that corridor, etc.” But what if they dip their feet into an area they don’t normally address, like land use? Or consider road pricing or transit, instead of going back to the old ways of reducing congestion that actually end up just inducing more driving?

Al Biehler, former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, wrote in his foreword to the document that when he was secretary, Pennsylvania had 26 expansion projects on deck with a $5 billion price tag. “At the same time, our roads and bridges were crumbling and we couldn’t maintain our infrastructure,” he wrote. “After an honest evaluation, we came to a stark realization — we couldn’t keep spending money we didn’t have on projects that didn’t protect our assets.”

He said DOTs have to invest smarter — and that means “wring[ing] more and better performance out of their existing systems,” rather than always building new.

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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.

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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Cross-posted from Streets.MN.

We spend billions every year in this country on our transportation network, large percentages of it based on traffic projections. This despite the fact that we have a long record of not being able to accurately project traffic. The answer isn’t better projections but a better transportation system, one that is robust to modeling error.

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.

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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As if the drama surrounding the reauthorization weren’t enough, there is another transportation battle brewing between the House and Senate. Last month, the House voted to eliminate funding for the American Community Survey, which is the Census Bureau’s way of getting a yearly pulse-check of how the country is doing and where investment is needed. The Senate’s version of the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill [PDF], approved at the committee level, does not include this ill-advised amendment to defund the survey.

The difference in the bills will have to be resolved in conference or in a year-end agreement on the FY2013 budget. A Senate floor vote has not yet been scheduled to take up the bill.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the American Community Survey. In addition to state- and local-level demographic information such as income, employment and housing, the survey includes data on where Americans work, how we get to work, and how long we take to get there. It’s the primary source of information on rates of bicycle commuting, for example, and advocates and planners carefully analyze its results to determine when more bike infrastructure is needed.

No other survey done by the government – or anyone else – provides such a rich source of information about the economy and American society.

In the unlikely event that the House bill becomes law, transportation planners could be left without a reliable guide for making decisions. The survey results guide the distribution of more than $400 billion, including funds for transportation projects.

The U.S. Department of Transportation, states and local governments use the findings to develop transportation plans and identify the need to fund public transportation, roads and transit options for the elderly and disabled.

Businesses also rely on the data to decide where to establish operations, recruit workers and gain information on consumer behavior. Eliminating funding for the ACS would leave the business community without a reliable data source to make intelligent decisions and avoid wasteful spending.

In introducing the amendment to eliminate funding, Representative Daniel Webster (R-FL) cited constitutional and privacy concerns. He compared the Census Bureau to the Environmental Protection Agency and bank regulators, saying that these agencies intrude on people’s lives.

These comments expose this freshman’s lack of understanding of what the American Community Survey is and does.

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If 80 percent of the American people agree that federal infrastructure investment will create jobs, and two-thirds say better infrastructure is important, why is the call for a robust transportation bill being made in whispers? And why is Congress already two and a half years late in producing one?

There are many political reasons — from the earmark ban to wariness of “Bridge to Nowhere” projects to the anti-spending frenzy that’s taken over the House — that it’s been a tough time to pass a transportation bill. But five former U.S. Secretaries of Transportation have said that the voice for change has to be louder. They released a report yesterday, with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, calling for a new communications strategy. (See “Is Transpo Funding Fundamentally a PR Problem? Five Ex-DOT Chiefs Discuss,” Dec. 2, 2011, for more on the conference the report is based on.)

The communications strategy is both visionary and tactical. Its more nuts-and-bolts elements include social networking campaigns and election-year news hooks to bring attention to the issue and make candidates talk about infrastructure.

The strategy is aimed at both leaders and the public. After all, both say they want better transportation infrastructure (and the jobs that will be created to build it), but no one wants to pay for it. The American people haven’t woken up to that contradiction. “Seventy-one percent of voters oppose an increase in the federal gas tax,” the Miller Center report says, “with majorities likewise opposing a tax on foreign oil, the replacement of the gas tax with a per-mile-traveled fee, and the imposition of new tolls to increase federal transportation funding.”

That’s a pretty comprehensive list of funding mechanisms, and the public has rejected them all. Part of a communications strategy, therefore, has to explain to the American people – not just about transportation but about all government services – that you can’t get something for nothing.

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