Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Joseph Schofer is a professor at Northwestern University. Johanna Zmud is director of the transportation, space and technology program at the RAND Corporation. Mortimer Downey served as Deputy Secretary of Transportation during the Clinton administration.

Bridges are falling down, or being built to nowhere. Highways are getting more congested, airports more crowded, and transit systems struggle to cover costs and keep up with growing demand. How can we address the problems of passenger and freight mobility with limited resources?

Saving money at the expense of informed transportation decisions is pennywise and pound foolish.

In hard economic times, America’s leaders are looking for every opportunity to spend less and get more bang for the taxpayer’s buck. It’s a time for smarter decisions – especially transportation investment and policy choices based on independent and objective information. We must understand where and what the needs are, what works and doesn’t, and where the payoffs are greatest. That takes data – and good data are hard to find.

Yet in passing the long-overdue two-year, $109 billion highway finance reauthorization bill, the Senate dropped a modest provision to assure timely travel data needed to make the smart choices that will keep people and freight moving safely and efficiently.

The federal government allocates about $50 billion each year from motor fuel tax dollars to assure that we have the passenger and freight mobility to keep society productive and the economy ticking. State and local governments spend even more for the same purposes. Making the best use of such funds – for highways, transit systems, passenger rail services, airports, ports — is especially important when costs are outstripping tax revenues and needs are continuing to grow.

Smarter transportation decisions require comprehensive, accurate and timely data about infrastructure condition, travel time reliability, crashes and their causes. These data can inform decision makers about what really works – how best to relieve congestion and improve supply-chain connectivity to make freight transportation – and hence the U.S. economy – more competitive. Good data can enable people and businesses to use the transportation system more efficiently and ensure universal mobility.

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With all eyes on today’s Iowa caucuses, it’s worth noting that this year’s vocal crop of GOP candidates has been mostly silent on the subject of transportation and urban issues in general.

The candidates have given precious few hints as to what their transportation policies would look like if elected. Photo: Lehigh Valley Live

A common theme across most candidates’ platforms is the elimination of federal programs in favor of state ones, and incentives (read: tax cuts) for the private sector to come in and do things themselves. A transportation policy under any member of the GOP field would likely favor state infrastructure banks over a national one, favor loan programs over grants, and favor automotive infrastructure over bike/ped/transit. But the truth is that we just don’t know, since for the most part they won’t say.

Here’s a recap of what’s on record:

• As senator, Rick Santorum was honored by APTA for his commitment to mass transit. He supported more money for Pennsylvania transit in SAFETEA-LU, saying, “Public transportation provides communities with an affordable means of mobility, offers individuals greater opportunity, saves energy, and reduces congestion and pollution.” During his time in Congress, he voted in favor of most transportation bills, except for IS-TEA in 1998, which passed the Senate by a margin of 96 to 4.
• At a September debate, Rick Perry vowed to rebuild Afghanistan’s infrastructure, but attacked Obama’s proposal to rebuild America’s.
• Back in February, Michele Bachmann knocked Obama for spending “$53 billion we don’t have on rail projects” (though she was responding to the 2012 budget, which only contained $8.3 billion for rail), but she had championed “smart and targeted investment” in highway construction in a couple of 2009 op-eds.
• Ron Paul’s press secretary recently told the New York Times that the Congressman “thinks high-speed rail is a very exciting idea and could be a very worthwhile project in many cases.” Rep. Paul signed a letter in 2009 asking for federal money for high-speed rail in Texas, but Paul’s spokesperson explained that this was less about supporting high-speed rail than it was about ensuring Texas’ slice of federal dollars. (High-speed rail? Golly, no! I was just after the pork! …And pork is bad!)
• Mitt Romney told audiences in New Hampshire and South Carolina that he would support borrowing as a way to pay for new infrastructure (especially roads and bridges), provided that infrastructure came with a revenue stream. (As we’ve reported, Romney earned a reputation as a smart-growther as governor of Massachusetts.)
• And then there’s Newt Gingrich, who professed a desire to “go head-to-head with the Chinese” in developing and implementing maglev train technology. But that was in 2009, and he hasn’t said anything similar since.

Not much to go on, but fear not. Though it may not feel like it, we are only at the beginning of the primary process, so there should be plenty of time for the candidates to make their views known.

The New Hampshire primary is January 10. Campaigning heavily there is Jon Huntsman, who touted his infrastructure record en route to winning two gubernatorial terms in Utah.

Last week, the Ridesharing Institute sent out its first press release. Based in New Zealand (at least, that’s where the Executive Director is, though the group did recently incorporate in Delaware), the organization doesn’t yet have a website, though it does have a Facebook page and a wiki. As its first foray into U.S. politics, the Institute took on the Senate transportation bill, MAP-21. “Where is ridesharing in the bill?” the institute wondered.

The new Ridesharing Institute would have liked to see more support for carpooling in the Senate transportation bill. Photo: Matt Duench's Blog

They call it “a missed opportunity.”

In a blog post for the Eno Foundation, where she serves on the Board of Advisors, Cynthia Burbank of Parsons Brinckerhoff (and vice chair of the new Ridesharing Institute) lamented the exclusion of ridesharing in the Senate bill (though, she acknowledges, “almost everyone” overlooks carpooling and vanpooling). She groups the two modes together to call it “C/V.”

C/V currently serves 10 percent of work trips – more than transit, biking, and walking combined. It saves money for households and increases options for commuters everywhere. It is a policy and modal option that could improve system performance and reduce congestion, could be planned and implemented in one to two years, does not require an EIS or streamlining angst, complements and reinforces transit, and works as well in rural and small/mid size metros as it does in the mega cities. But it has been in decline, in part because of lack of Federal emphasis and support. We need to reverse that trend.

SAFETEA-LU, the current transportation law, includes many mentions of encouraging C/V but no dollar amount to support it. Official transportation policy has encouraged carpooling since ISTEA passed in 1991. The law “hereby declared” that “special effort should be made to promote commuter modes of transportation which conserve energy, reduce pollution, and reduce traffic congestion” and directed the transportation secretary to “assist both public and private employers and employees who wish to establish carpooling and vanpooling programs” and so on. Still – no money.

Perhaps the most significant federal investment in ridesharing is the implementation of HOV lanes, and FHWA doesn’t quantify the amount it spends on that separately from the amount it spends on other road maintenance projects in the states.

Some transit agencies sponsor ride-share matching, or even subsidize van pools, with Federal Transit Administration dollars — but the FTA doesn’t have any data on how much federal money is spent for these activities.

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In about an hour, Congressional appropriators will vote on how much money to allocate for transportation in the next fiscal year. It won’t be pretty.

This smiling man (THUD Chair Tom Latham) is getting ready to take the axe to prized livability programs. Photo: Iowa Independent

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) is planning deep cuts to many programs, some reminiscent of House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s notorious budget proposal, which wanted to slash transportation spending by about a third.

The subcommittee is led by Iowa Republican Tom Latham, whom we profiled when he took the gavel. At the time, we were worried he would end up cutting important livability programs, and here he is, doing exactly that.

At least transit and highway spending share the pain, both getting cut the same 34 percent. Highway funding goes from about $41 billion to $27 billion; transit funding (excluding New Starts) goes from $8.3 billion to $5.3 billion.

Bizarrely, the bill regresses to a pre-cooperation era and returns to the age of agency silos. One great accomplishment of the Obama administration has been the Sustainable Communities Partnership which joined USDOT, HUD and the EPA to work together on common development programs, planning inexorably linked programs of housing and transportation in conjunction with each other, and in consultation with the environmental regulator. But the appropriations bill prohibits HUD from using any funding for anything related to the Partnership.

In his excellent analysis of the dismal news, Transportation for America’s Stephen Lee Davis also delivers this blow: the innovative TIGER grants, TIGGER grants and high-speed rail programs are cut entirely. And more, Davis writes:
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Grand Central stood eerily empty as the MTA shut down all transit service. Photo: MTA/Marjorie Anders.

Sometimes the best way to understand the ordinary is to examine the extraordinary. Watching Hurricane Irene wreak havoc on the entire transportation system from North Carolina to the Canadian border brought certain patterns and questions into high relief. Here’s some of what we thought about while the power was down.

Most striking to me was the palpable absence of the transit system in New York City. The New York Times called the closure of the subways “perhaps the most unsettling element of a prodigious storm preparation effort.” Even on national television, the idea of New York City existing without transit was held up as the ultimate symbol of the seriousness of the storm. A lot of people seemed only to realize the absolute centrality of the transit system in its absence.

Life without transit also highlighted the value of building places with multiple transportation options. In the streetcar suburb where I was during the storm, people ventured out on foot to see neighbors, survey damage and even head to the few open stores long before most felt safe driving or transit service had resumed. Taxis provided a backup transportation option for normally transit-dependent New Yorkers who really needed to get somewhere.

In contrast, those with only one means of travel — such as drivers in upstate New York, where floods rendered hundreds of roads and bridges impassable — are stuck at home. Irene helped us see the value of multiple transportation modes, or even multiple options within a single mode.

The hurricane also cast the decisions we make about transportation safety in a different light. Storm-related incidents killed 21 Americans, six of whom died in their cars. With most people holed up, though, and those behind the wheel proceeding slowly and carefully, it’s possible that more than six people might have died over a weekend of driving in the affected area, or that the hurricane kept overall traffic injuries down. If that were in fact the case, what would it tell us about efforts to prevent people from being killed and maimed in traffic crashes?

Along those lines, as of last Friday, New York City considered shutting down taxi service on safety grounds. It was ultimately decided that the need for mobility outweighed the need for caution — an interesting case of transportation goals in conflict. It was instructive to watch drivers and pedestrians negotiate normally signalized intersections with the power off — when does the motorist decide to yield? — and to observe the natural traffic calming effects of fallen tree branches.

What did Hurricane Irene make you think about the way we get around?

As Deron Lovaas said this morning on NRDC’s Switchboard blog, “If recent events are any indicator, it might take Congress a while to agree on a policy that will put our underfunded, inefficient, oil-dependent transportation program on the right track.”

It's working in San Francisco. Now USDOT can help expand dynamic pricing to other cities around the country. Image: SFMTA.

Well now, that’s an understatement.

Between the uncertainty of the supercommittee and the bicameral bickering over the size and length of a bill, the only thing we can be sure of is that we’re heading toward yet another extension of SAFETEA-LU when it expires at the end of next month – if the two parties can agree to even that. Negotiations broke down over a whole lot less recently, when Congress let the FAA shut down over a measly couple million bucks.

But even if it’s a while before we see legislation passed that enacts new policies, there’s a lot the USDOT can do with existing authority to make smarter transportation investments that reduce congestion and carbon emissions. NRDC has documented them in a new report, “Federal Actions to Reduce Energy Use in Transportation” [PDF].

• Dynamic pricing. Fifteen states are participating in the DOTs Value Pilot Pricing Program, which allows states more flexibility in levying tolls and other pricing measures. San Francisco’s innovative new parking pricing system is a fruit of this program. Other variable pricing measures, like congestion pricing, could also help reduce fuel use and pollution, says Lovaas.
• Realism. USDOT should enforce the fiscal constraints of regional long-range transportation plans, being upfront about realistic costs. Lovaas says this will address a “pet peeve” of his and force states to reconsider “costly highway projects that have been on the books forever.”
• Transit benefits. Without further authority, USDOT could expand and promote the transit benefit program, which allows companies to give employees $240 per month in tax-free transit and vanpool benefits. Lovaas says the program is currently run by the IRS without any DOT involvement, and is vastly undersubscribed.

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Transit investment lagged in regions where MPO boards did not give equal representation to city populations, Detroit (SE Michigan) being an especially bad example. In more democratic metros, investment was much more balanced. Image: Nelson, 2003

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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The National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Urban Bikeway Design Guide was 20 years in the making, and already it’s having an impact, says the organization’s Mia Birk.

Bringing together transportation officials from 20 major cities to discuss progress on bikeway designs in the U.S. produced quite a few “aha moments,” said Birk. For one, transportation officials learned that many of the bikeway innovations they had been adopting from Europe aren’t as innovative as they had thought.

The protected bike lane on New York City's Ninth Avenue.

For example, Birk said, 20 American cities use bike boxes, one of the design features that isn’t specifically endorsed by the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of Highway Transportation Officials’ design guide.

“It’s not like it’s some fringe thing anymore,” Birk said.

She added: “There’s a comfort in knowing that your colleagues are on the same wavelength.”

Conversations throughout the course of the NACTO guide development process also revealed that federal officials aren’t as unfriendly to new bike treatments as many city-level transportation officials had expected. Federal transportation officials have indicated that many of the 20 bike treatments recommended by NACTO are allowable within federal guidelines — while not explicitly endorsed — and therefore eligible for federal funding, Birk said.

“They’ve basically green-lighted a few of them a yellow-lighted a few others,” she said.

Birk described the conversations with federal transportation officials as “really effective and positive.”

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A few weeks ago, I put together a little cheat sheet listing the last three transportation reauthorization bills, their dates of passage, and the dollar amounts. It helped me save some time I would have spent Googling.

Standing-room-only launch of Transportation 101. Photo: T4 America

Now there’s a more comprehensive cheat sheet. I’ll never again be at a loss to remember what the gas tax was before 1993 or how much money has been taken from the general fund to bail out the Highway Trust Fund or how many earmarks were included in SAFETEA-LU or the names of all the core highway programs. All of that information is included in Transportation for America’s new primer, “Transportation 101: An Introduction to Federal Transportation Policy.”

T4A was inspired to publish the document after November’s election ushered in 94 freshman House members and a handful of new Senators, many of whom are new to transportation policy. Twenty of the 59 members of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are new. Members, and perhaps more importantly, their staffers, would need to be caught up on the ins and outs of the reauthorization.

“It’s sort of like walking into a movie 15 minutes late, if you’re coming to the transportation debate right now,” said T4A’s Steve Davis. “There’s a lot of history that, if you’re just walking into the room right now, can be very confusing.”

Transportation 101 isn’t necessarily something that everyone will want to devour in one sitting, Davis acknowledges. (Of course, Streetsblog readers are another breed – I see you clearing out your agenda to spend some quality time with this document.) In any case, it will be a useful reference for legislative aides new to the issue who are tasked with becoming an expert overnight. And not just Congressional staff – Davis says they expect the document will be just as useful to T4A’s 500+ partner organizations.

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As transportation advocates adapt their messaging to a new, more conservative Congress, the language of fiscal conservatism has become the mother tongue of the movement. Smart Growth America and the Bipartisan Policy Center have recently used the fiscal responsibility argument to urge policymakers to invest more strategically, especially as infrastructure budgets shrink.

Robert Puentes. Photo courtesy of the Brookings Institution.

Now the Brookings Institution jumps into the mix with its new report, “State Transportation Reform: Cut to Invest in Transportation to Deliver the Next Economy.” In it, author Robert Puentes, Senior Fellow at Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program, blames state fiscal crises on poor policymaking in addition to diminishing resources.

The Brookings report, along with the SGA analysis, focuses on state decision-making around transportation funding. Puentes says that the focus on poor strategy at the state level is really an “indictment at the federal level that the federal government has abdicated responsibility to the states and doesn’t have much oversight on how federal transportation dollars are spent at the state level.”

Despite the importance of the transportation sector, which employs more than 4 million people in this country, Puentes says the process for allocating resources is “sadly out-dated”, taking a “peanut butter” approach, spreading money evenly (and thinly) across a state, rather than making “strategic, targeted investments.”

He highlights the “recent dust-up over high speed rail” to illustrate two points. First, “states and governors are still in the driver’s seat when it comes to transportation decisionmaking and project selection.” And second, federal money often comes with “on-going maintenance demands are more than [states] want to bear.” Sort of like a free puppy, he says. But whether it’s operational costs or anything else, federal money does come to states with responsibilities attached, and the states should prove that they’re capable of spending those dollars wisely.

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