Streetsblog Capitol Hill

OK, truth: Raise your hand if you find federal transportation legislation intimidating and incomprehensible.

T4America's new document will help communities improve mobility and keep everyone safer. Photo: T4America

I thought so. Me too.

The problem, as you know, is that it’s enormously important that advocates not only understand the new transportation law, MAP-21, but that they understand it in granular detail so they can find the small opportunities buried in a depressingly large mass of disappointment.

So a big thank-you goes out to the folks at Transportation for America, who just released exactly the resource advocates need: a guide to the law called “Making the Most of MAP-21.”

In addition to providing a basic outline of the law and its relevant provisions (and omissions), the document contains some excellent how-to’s and talking points for advocates and project sponsors trying to squeeze funding for sustainable transportation projects out of programs biased heavily toward auto-oriented infrastructure.

Here are a few of the excellent ideas that stand out:

Ask states to flex highway funds for bridge repair. One major hidden peril of MAP-21 is that it transferred the responsibility of repairing 460,000 bridges that aren’t on the National Highway System (NHS) to the overburdened Surface Transportation Program (STP), without adding any money for it. In fact, STP has $5 billion of new responsibilities under MAP-21 and only $1 billion of new money.

Source: T4America

Luckily, there’s a solution: States can flex up to half of their National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) funds, normally earmarked for NHS projects, to other uses. After all, NHS gets a disproportionate share of funding: “Although the NHS represents only five percent of all American roads, fully 58 percent of the highway program is committed to its upkeep,” the report says.

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Transit agencies can have a hard time finding the money to expand rail lines and busways. While federal grants for road projects require a 20 percent local match, transit projects need to get 50 percent or more from local funding sources. The byzantine federal funding bureaucracy creates high hurdles, especially for smaller agencies without on-staff expertise in applying for and managing these grants. Loans and private sources of funds are also difficult, since they need to be paid back, and transit tends not to make back its capital outlays from the farebox.

How Tucson funded its streetcar. Source: T4America

Enter Transportation for America’s new how-to guide, Thinking Outside the Farebox [PDF]. It breaks down the many options, delving into the pros and cons of a wide variety of funding and financing mechanisms. It explains why general obligation bonds are cheaper but riskier than revenue bonds, and why GARVEE bonds might be worth it, even though they’re essentially paid for with future formula funding. It points out that one big benefit of federal TIFIA loans is that you don’t have to start paying them back until five years after project completion, so you have a chance to get revenue coming in. And it notes that ballot initiatives to fund public transportation have a 70 percent approval rate over the past decade, but other taxes like those on special assessment districts can be controversial and hard to get passed.

Several success stories show how expansions can be funded — but prove that it’s never easy. Tucson’s half-cent sales tax funds 35 new road projects, but also a modern streetcar connecting downtown with the university. Cleveland’s bus rapid transit line got federal New Starts money and competitive state funds. Los Angeles’ famous 30/10 financing plan for its major transit expansiona used an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach, combining TIFIA loans, sales taxes, bonds, formula funds — you name it.

T4America recommends that agencies plan for operations as they figure out financing, since a shiny new rail line won’t do you much good without funds to keep it running. The report authors are also fans of scenario planning, a way to tease out potential benefits and drawbacks of various plans before implementing them, to save time and money. And they make the connection between system expansions and transit-oriented development, a great way to maximize transit investments and open up potential funding opportunities as the surrounding real estate gains in value.

Last fall, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) proposed diverting all transportation enhancements funding, which goes primarily to bike and pedestrian projects, to bridge repair. “With nearly 25 percent of our nation’s bridges deemed either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, we need to make their reconstruction a priority over errant beautification projects,” Sen. Paul said.

Republicans insisted they were all about bridge repair and couldn't spare a dime for biking and walking, but it turns out they didn't set aside anything for bridge repair either. Image: Partnership Border Study

He also said that the money spent on “movie theaters, squirrel sanctuaries, turtle tunnels and flower beds” could otherwise boost the Highway Bridge Program by $700 million.

Forget for a moment that that’s the world’s most preposterous definition of TE ever. Let’s take at face value the idea that keeping the nation’s bridges in a state of good repair is an important safety issue. Who could disagree with that?

In the MAP-21 transportation bill that the president will sign in just a couple of hours, the Republicans did manage to gut transporation enhancement spending. But did they divert that money over to bridge repair? Far from it. In fact, they gutted bridge repair spending too!

The bill consolidates two-thirds of highway programs out of existence, including the Highway Bridge Program for the rehabiliation or replacement of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges.

Joshua Schank of the Eno Transportation Center says it’s not such a bad thing. “Program consolidation, which if anything didn’t go far enough, will result in more focus on where the money is going and therefore likely cause more funds to be dedicated to existing infrastructure,” he said in an email. “The old bridge program encouraged repair, but without regard to need or prioritization. By contrast, the new National Highway Performance Program focuses more on outcomes, such as pavement conditions, that are consistent with state of good repair and will help prioritize decision-making.”

Indeed, one of the few performance measures in the bill that really has teeth is the one for bridge repair, which requires states with inferior infrastructure conditions to spend more. However, not everyone is convinced that this will do the trick.

“The way they crafted it, yes, [states] could spend a lot on repair,” said James Corless, director of Transportation for America. “They could have spent a lot on repair under SAFETEA-LU.” But they didn’t.

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David Burwell is the director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was also co-founder and CEO of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and a founding co-chair and president of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a national transportation policy reform coalition. 

There is much despair in the transportation reform community about the mugging we took in the MAP-21 conference committee negotiations. And, yes, it was a mugging. It was also unnecessary and unfair — we worked hard for a good bill, got it, and then saw much of our effort left on the cutting room floor. Complete streets, rail, freight, state of good repair, transparency and accountability — all these took hits.

On defense, the TIFIA loan program lost a lot of its performance screens. We lost big chunks of the review process conducted under the National Environment Policy Act, which guards against ill-advised highway projects. Plus we saw the diminishment of separate funding for bike/ped programs, Safe Routes to Schools, and the Recreational Trails Program, which collectively lost about 34 percent of their set-aside funding — cut from about $1.2 billion to about $800 million annually. The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Program is also more porous — but at least we still have the rule that CMAQ can’t be used to build new highways for single occupancy vehicle use.

While this is going to be hand-to-hand combat, we now have the “boots on the ground” to prevail. That’s our new campaign.

Many of these reforms were lost despite the fact that the House didn’t offer a bill with conflicting language — the conferees just rewrote the Senate language to serve their own objectives. If reports are true, many of these losses were in return for dropping Keystone XL from the bill — a rider that was both non-germane and basically a “House hold.” It will be back on any other Senate bill the House leadership wants to hold up until its terms are met, whether or not it has an opposing bill to offer. This is not negotiation, it is extortion.

Our best response? We need to get over it. This is hardball politics over a bill that distributes over $50 billion annually to all the state DOTs and regional transit agencies, backed by major construction industries. Federal transportation bills have historically been a fight over money, not policy, and members of Congress are naturally going to look to their own state officials for guidance on how to allocate program funds, and for what purposes. State DOTs want maximum flexibility to use the funds as they see fit, with the fewest possible federal conditions on their use. We are fighting to bend the arc of transportation history away from a food fight over money to focus on policy — meaning outcomes. It is a worthy and essential goal for a program that determines the physical fabric of our country and our communities.

Based on what we are up against, we did okay. Transportation Enhancements survived — and 50 percent of the money, about $400 million, is directly delegated to metropolitan planning organizations in urbanized areas with populations over 200,000 for project selection and oversight. The rest is still controlled by state DOTs but is up for grabs — if we can convince governors not to opt out of the program.
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Rep. James Lankford, a Tea Party Republican representing Oklahoma City, probably wasn’t responsible for any of the 118 pedestrian deaths in his district between 2001 to 2010. And it’s unlikely Rep. Steve Southerland of Panama City, Florida was behind the wheel when any of the 164 people were killed while walking in his district during the decade.

From 2001 to 2010, 118 people were killed while walking in Rep. James Lankford's district -- a death toll he can reduce with one vote. Photo: U.S. Congress

But they are two of eight freshmen on the transportation conference committee, and their vote over the next few days could mean that those appalling numbers go up — or down.

To remind members of what’s at stake with this transportation bill, Transportation for America has released an addendum to its groundbreaking “Dangerous by Design” report, this time quantifying the death toll by Congressional district. Everyone who cares about safe streets can now be very specific when asking their representatives to support a transportation bill with the Cardin-Cochran amendment to keep at least some bike-ped funding control at the local level.

“Having saddled communities with unsafe streets, it would be the height of cruelty for Congress now to take away resources and latitude from local communities trying to improve those conditions and save lives,” said James Corless, director of Transportation for America, in a statement.

Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett has taken a different position than his representative, James Lankford. Cornett is a vocal supporter of local control over funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects. He co-authored an op-ed recently asking Congress to restore Safe Routes to School and Transportation Enhancements funding. “Many of the more dangerous roads for motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists alike in our communities are federal-aid highways,” he wrote. “House leaders have said fixing these unsafe conditions is a local problem, or a frill we can do without. We strongly disagree, and we urge them to restore dedicated funds for this purpose.”

Last January, a retired minister was killed while crossing the street after attending a college basketball game in Bethany, Oklahoma. He was one of Rep. Lankford’s constituents.

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Now that the Senate has passed a transportation bill and everyone’s waiting to see what the House will do next, Transportation for America has done us all a great service and compared the Senate’s bill to the House’s — well, to the last thing the House showed us before things fell apart for John Boehner’s extreme attack on transit, biking, and walking.

The T4A analysis breaks down each bill, policy by policy, and lays out any pending amendments to the House bill that could potentially change it for the better.

Here’s an excerpt from their detailed comparison:

Public transportation & transit-oriented development

Senate: Continues dedicated funding for public transportation at traditional 20 percent share. Creates some new flexibility to spend federal funds on operations, i.e., keeping buses and trains running, not just buying new equipment. A new transit-oriented development planning program was incorporated into the bill via the Banking title.

House: Original bill ends 30 years of dedicated funding for public transit (read the letter we organized by more than 600 groups and individuals opposing this). Allows loans for transit-oriented development as an eligible expense under the TIFIA loan program. It doesn’t provide large transit operators with any flexibility to spend federal money on operating their transit systems.

Possible House amendment fix:  LaTourette/Carnahan 16 would allow all transit agencies to use a portion of their federal transit funding for operating expenses during times of economic crisis. (This amendment is similar to this bill the two representatives offered back in 2011.)

Walking and bicycling, local control of funds

Senate: Due in part to this amendment offered by Senators Cardin and Cochran and incorporated into the bill, MAP-21 consolidates programs for making biking and walking safer (as well as for other small local projects) and gives 50 percent of this consolidated program directly to metro areas. States and metro areas must create a competitive grant process to distribute that funding to local communities that apply. The Commerce Committee title also includes a new Complete Streets provision.

House: Eliminates most dedicated funding for bicycling & walking. Those uses remain “eligible” but without any dedicated funding for them. The bill also deletes numerous references throughout the bill that encourage multimodal projects. The bill retains the Recreational Trails program.

Possible House amendment fix: Petri-Blumenauer 103 creates consolidated program for bike/ped and other local projects and provides local governments access to new consolidated pot of funding.

Read the rest here.

The Senate is finally making progress towards passing their two-year transportation bill, but the big question seems to be what’s to come in the House — and not even the House knows.

The uncertainty surrounding the House bill, and the threat it poses to the entire reauthorization process, has elicited an impassioned response from representatives of “different levels of governance in three states, across three geographic regions, and from both parties” in defense of bipartisanship.

Writing for The Hill, these experts — Mick Cornett, the mayor of Oklahoma City, Eugene Conti, the Secretary of Transportation for North Carolina, and Steve Heminger, Executive Director of the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission – are urging the House not to come back from recess with the same, bitterly partisan bill as before:

With just a handful of legislative days left before the March 31 expiration, the Senate now seems on the verge of voting on a bipartisan bill. The road has been rougher in the House, but Wed. Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) urged his troops to make one last run at crafting their own measure.

We were heartened to hear that House leaders intend to back away from ending the dedicated funding for public transportation begun under President Reagan. But we hope the changes to the earlier draft will go well beyond that.

Read the whole op-ed here.

Last month, the Senate’s notorious vote-blocker, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, tried to obstruct Senate process until they voted on his measure to take bike/ped funding out of the transportation bill. He failed.

Sen. Rand Paul is trying to strip bike/ped programs out of the federal transportation bill in the name of bridge repair. Photo: Moderate Voice

Then last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) suggested keeping bike/ped money but stripping out lots of other budget items that serve cyclists and pedestrians (as well as everybody else), like streetscaping. He failed too.

And now here comes Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the kookiest of Congress’s Tea Party-affiliated newcomers, with a brilliant idea to shift all bike/ped funding — and everything else that gets funded through the embattled Transportation Enhancement program — over to bridge repair. Paul characterizes TE as a fund for “turtle tunnels and squirrel sanctuaries and all this craziness.”

Now, we’re all in favor of bridge repair. We agree that the crumbling of our nation’s infrastructure is shameful and dangerous. But really, you’re going to restore bridge safety by cutting bike safety? Get real, Senator.

Paul’s spooky amendment is scheduled for a vote the day after Halloween. It’ll be attached to the Senate transportation appropriations bill, which comes up for a vote that day by the full chamber.

Darren Flusche of the League of American Bicyclists noted in his blog post that Sen. Paul should let the Senate EPW Committee, which has jurisdiction over writing the next transportation bill, do its job. Flusche argues that the committee’s November 9 bill markup “would be the appropriate time to discuss changes to the overall transportation program, not during the appropriations process.”

Transportation for America recently criticized Sen. Paul for his misguided attack on active transportation:

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The first shocking thing about Raquel Nelson’s conviction for vehicular homicide was simply that it happened at all. After all, the mother of three wasn’t even driving a car — she was crossing a wide street with poor pedestrian infrastructure when her four-year-old son was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

Image: The Today Show

The second shocking thing about the case was that it captured so much media attention. Sure, Streetsblog was going to cover it. But the Today Show? Fox News?

As encouraging as it was to see so much mainstream broadcast media focused on Nelson’s case — and all in a sympathetic light — little of that coverage got to the root of the problem: dangerous street design in auto-centric communities.

So we’re glad to see the Washington Post remedying that situation by printing an op-ed by David Goldberg, communications director at Transportation for America. In his piece yesterday, Goldberg said:

Nelson was found guilty of killing her son by crossing the road in the “wrong” place. But what about the highway designers, traffic engineers, transit planners and land-use regulators who placed a bus stop across from apartments but made no provision whatsoever for a safe crossing? Those who ignored the fact that pedestrians always take the shortest possible route but somehow expected them to walk six-tenths of a mile out of their way to cross the street? Those who designed this road — which they allowed to be flanked by apartments and houses — for speeds of 50 mph and more? And those who designed the entire landscape to be hostile to people trying to get to work or carrying groceries despite having no access to a car? Are they not culpable?

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