Streetsblog Capitol Hill

For the past two years, Amtrak has been under constant attack from House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL), who has used his gavel to bully the rail company. He likes to call it a “Soviet-style” monopoly and he goads it for losing money on everything from long-distance routes to food service. His vitriolic diatribes against Amtrak have become white noise, and they’re about to fade into the background as Mica surrenders his post to Rep. Bill Shuster next year.

Will Amtrak's reorganization plan be enough to turn the rail line around? And will it be enough for the GOP to call off the dogs? Photo: Amtrak/Gary Pancavage

Still, Mica got a chance to trot them out yesterday at a Transportation Committee hearing on Amtrak’s reorganization plan.

Mica and Shuster teamed up last year to push a plan to privatize Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service – the only place where Amtrak makes money. Republicans have also ceaselessly advocated for ending – or at least dramatically cutting – Amtrak’s government subsidies.

That demand doesn’t sit well with Democrats like Rep. Laura Richardson, who pointed out in yesterday’s hearing — as some Democrat always does — that “we spent more in one year with the oil and gas and energy companies and their industry than we have spent in the life of the program of Amtrak.”

The Mica-Shuster privatization proposal also met with such a fierce backlash that Mica and Shuster were forced to shelve it.

Amtrak has a different idea for how it’s going to move into the 21st century and, they hope, become “more like a business and less like a government agency,” according to Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman. The Government Accountability Office criticized Amtrak in 2005 for not having a strategic plan, and the rail agency jumped into action – if acting six years later can be considered “jumping” – and is now in the middle of a reorganization that started last year and is due to be complete by the end of next year.

The strategic plan includes safety improvements, better risk management, energy efficiency, and lots of internal operational changes that the public will probably not perceive.

The plan’s main dish is to segment the company into six “business lines”: Northeast Corridor Infrastructure and Investment Development, Northeast Corridor Operations, State Services, Commuter Services, Long-Distance Services, and Corporate Asset Development.

Again, such internal corporate restructuring may not get most people’s pulses racing with excitement – but Dan Schned of the Regional Plan Association says there’s a nugget of gold buried in there.

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Big oil makes $374 million a day in profits -- which gives them ample resources to pump into presidential politics. Source: Center for American Progress

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney unveiled his energy plan today [PDF]. The idea is to break our addiction to foreign oil — by increasing our addiction to domestic oil. If by “domestic” we mean Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.

Essentially, the plan is to go bananas on oil drilling. States would have the right to drill off their own shores, with merely a federal rubber stamp. Grist’s Philip Bump explains why oil drilling isn’t something that should be left to the states:

There’s a reason that the federal government has a legitimate role in monitoring extraction and resource development: Pollution and impacts don’t stop at state lines. It’s why the EPA is trying to figure out how to regulate cross-state air pollution. Air doesn’t care about borders.

And then there’s the obvious problem: Do residents of Florida want Georgia to build a series of unsafe oil derricks off its coast? Will any state still want to border Texas? Hard to see how this doesn’t result in a production boom — of complaints and lawsuits filed in federal courts.

There’s nothing in the document about reducing fossil fuel consumption. That just doesn’t figure in. No examination of how the nation uses energy and how it could use less. ”By 2025, [Obama's] increased CAFE standards are expected to reduce U.S. oil consumption by about 2.2 million barrels per day,” Brad Plumer writes in the Washington Post. “Without those rules, energy independence looks nearly impossible. And Romney, for his part, has pledged to overturn those fuel-economy rules.” To say nothing of Paul Ryan’s plan to continue outdated policies that enable sprawl and eliminate federal transportation programs that don’t involve highways.

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According to Bikes Belong, only 13 percent of Americans want to see the amount of federal money spent on biking and walking reduced. But apparently those folks are overrepresented in the halls of Congress.

National transportation reform groups released a collective groan yesterday, as the details of the two-year transportation bill agreement hashed out in committee were made available. While many acknowledged the bill could have been worse, it’s still something of a kick in the shins for anyone who cares about safer streets and smart transportation policy. Here’s a round-up of what people are saying.

Caron Whitaker at America Bikes noted that the bill’s erosion of dedicated funding for safer streets is diametrically opposed to Americans’ clearly expressed preference for more transportation options:

Across the country, people are biking and walking more, and vehicle miles traveled are decreasing. Young people are delaying getting their driver’s licenses and the real estate market shows that people want to live and work in areas where they can walk and bike safely. Yet this new bill ignores current trends and includes drastic and disproportionate cuts to biking and walking.

As Andy Clarke at the League of American Bicyclists added, cutting bike/ped funding won’t be the big deficit-slayer that House GOP leaders made it out to be:

These drastic cuts to biking and walking funding do not save the federal government any money. Rather, it keeps current levels of funding and directs funds away from street safety projects.

In fact, as Deb Hubsmith at Safe Routes to School pointed out, it will likely cost Americans more in the long run:

The annual cost to hospitalize children for injuries due to bicycle and pedestrian collisions is more than the entire amount of Transportation Alternatives funding in the new transportation bill, and Safe Routes to School will only get a fraction of those dollars.

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In 12 major cities, transit agencies are paying much more interest than the going rates, thanks to deals reached with banks before the financial collapse of 2008. Image: Refund Transit

In the midst of major funding crises and unprecedented demand, transit agencies across the country are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to big banks because of bad deals made in the pre-recession, pre-bailout days. That’s according to a new report from Refund Transit, a coalition of transit unions and community organizations calling for banks to voluntarily renegotiate these deals.

The financial products that got transit agencies in trouble are called interest rate swaps — deals that were supposed to protect transit agencies against increases in borrowing costs. Instead, after the economy fell off a cliff in 2008, interest rates are now at historic lows, and transit agencies are stuck paying many times the current competitive rates.

Refund Transit’s survey of 12 major transit providers found that public transportation agencies were overpaying by $529 million thanks to these deals, which were sold as a way to minimize risk and save money. Los Angeles’s transit system is losing $19.6 million annually compared to the interest rates they would otherwise be paying. Detroit — where low-income workers face up to three-hour transit waits and are occasionally stranded — loses $54 million annually. The state of New Jersey’s transit system loses $83 million, according to the report.

The Refund Transit coalition includes the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Transportation Equity Network, and a handful of grassroots community groups, and they are calling on banks to renegotiate.

“Banks sold these deals as insurance policies that would let taxpayers lock in lower interest rates without having to worry about rates shooting up in the future,” the organization says in the report. “However, these deals were actually more of a gamble than an insurance policy.”

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Can you blame me for taking so much time off? Or for including a gratuitous baby picture?

Happy Monday! After a five-month transition period, I am now back as your faithful full-time editor. Abundant gratitude goes to Ben Goldman, who stepped into the role seamlessly and kept the blog focused like a laser on the transportation bill drama unfolding in Congress. He’s put up with an unusual schedule that threw him in full-time and then tapered down as I slowly ramped back up, and he impressed us all with his knowledge of urban planning, rail transportation, and PhotoShop. Thank you, Ben!

I would also like to report that Luna, now four and a half months old, is a true Streetsblog baby. She loves buses and trains and cries every time she rides in a car.

Send your tips, news leaks, press releases, insider information, thoughts and dreams to me at tanya@streetsblog.org. Thanks for reading!

We’re rounding the final turn in our spring fundraising campaign, and thanks to hundreds of generous donations to Streetsblog and Streetfilms the finish line is within sight. Just $3,500 in donations this week and we’ll reach our goal of raising $30,000 by June 1. Your support enables us to produce high-impact content making the case for livable streets and green transport. So if you haven’t given yet, no more holding back – now’s the time to contribute. The pledge drive ends Friday at midnight.

Our next giveaway: Three lucky supporters will win a complete set of Yehuda Moon comics. For the uninitiated, Yehuda Moon is the all-weather cyclist and crusading bike shop owner heading up a cast of characters who tell stories from the streets and bikeways of northeast Ohio. The comic is the work of Rick Smith and Brian Griggs, and it’s full of brilliant, universal insights into bike culture.

Thanks to Brian and Rick, we’ve got three Yehuda Moon compilations (each consisting of four volumes) to award at the end of the week:

Many thanks to all our readers who contribute to this pledge drive and support our work. One more push and we’ll reach our goal.

Charles Marohn — our planner/engineer friend from Baxter, Minnesota and Strong Towns – and I appeared on a Minnesota Public Radio show on Friday about “the death of the exurbs.” The starting point of the conversation was the article I wrote last month about the new census numbers and what they tell us about the shifting patterns of housing development.

We entertained calls from people who feel the need for a two-acre buffer between them and their neighbors and from some whose own dalliance with exurban living ended in a bitter breakup. Later that day, I published the results of a Demand Institute study that found that the exurbs remain a “toxic” place that the housing recovery isn’t reaching.

Is the turn away from the exurbs really all about gas prices? And what is an exurb anyway? Are they getting too crowded? And what does it have to do with lobster?

Take a listen.

Image: Arizona Department of Transportation

Does walkable development really lead to worse traffic congestion? Opponents of urbanism often say so, citing impending traffic disaster to rally people against, say, a new mixed-use project proposed in their backyards. But new research provides some excellent evidence to counter those claims.

A recent study by the Arizona Department of Transportation [PDF] found that neighborhoods where houses are closer together actually have freer-flowing traffic.

Researchers compared some of greater Phoenix’s denser neighborhoods – South Scottsdale, Tempe, and East Phoenix — with a few of its more sprawling ones – Glendale, Gilbert, and North Scottsdale. Some interesting patterns emerged.

In the more compact neighborhoods, the average household owned 1.55 cars, compared to 1.92 in more suburban areas. Residents of higher-density neighborhoods also traveled shorter distances both to get to work and to run errands, the study found.

The average work trip was a little longer than seven miles for higher-density neighborhoods; in the more suburban neighborhoods, it was almost 11 miles. Residents of the three compact neighborhoods traveled just less than three miles to shop, while residents of sprawling locations traveled an average of more than four miles. All of this led the more urban dwellers to travel an average of nearly five fewer miles per day than their suburban counterparts.

The density divide also played an important role in transit use. Rates varied from as high as eight percent transit ridership in high-density neighborhoods to as low as one percent in the more sprawling areas.

All of this translated into a reduced strain on roadways in the places that had more people — running counter to one of the strongest objections to mixed-use development. Comparing one suburban corridor to two of the streets in the more dense neighborhoods, the study found that on the more urban streets, traffic congestion was “much lower,” or about half as high (measured by the ratio of the capacity of the roadway to the actual volume of cars on it).

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