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Author Archives: Beth Osborne

After spending over $1 trillion, the roads are still crumbling, unsafe, and congested. Does Congress care?

Congress is starting to talk about the next federal transportation bill, due next year. But they seem more concerned with how the money is distributed, to whom and how fast it is being spent rather than what the American people are getting for their tax dollars.

With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) sunsetting in 19 months, Congress has to prepare a bill to reauthorize the federal highway, transit and rail programs. But numerous committees so far tasked with that work has not even started to consider the most fundamental question: how well is the highway system working? 

The federal government has spent $1.5 trillion of American taxpayer dollars over the past 30-plus years to build a world-class surface transportation system. In 2012, a strong bipartisan majority—373 to 52 in the House and 74 to 19 in the Senate—passed a transportation reauthorization bill that refocused the program on national transportation goals, increasing accountability and transparency and improving project decision-making through performance-based planning and programming.

The seven national goals Congress wrote into law (23USC150) are safety, infrastructure condition, congestion reduction, system reliability, freight movement and economic vitality, environmental sustainability, and better project delivery. 13 years later, how have we fared on these goals?

Safety

The United States has the most dangerous roads in the developed world. By a lot. Twice as deadly as Greece, three times as deadly as Israel, and six times as deadly as Norway. In fact, the U.S. is twenty percent more deadly than Chile and 30 percent more deadly than Serbia. Most of these countries are getting safer, but not us.

Roads in the United States are so deadly and unsafe that our numbers change the narrative on worldwide traffic safety in the developed world. The 2024 roadway safety report on the 70 countries in the International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD) notes that overall road deaths would have actually fallen by 12.8 percent if the US had been left out. We are dragging the performance of the rest of the developed world in the wrong direction.

For people walking, it’s even worse. Compared to a 29 percent improvement in the rest of these countries, pedestrian fatalities in the US have increased 75 percent since 2010, which you can find in the National Complete Streets Coalition’s report on pedestrian safety, Dangerous by Design.

While the federal transportation program has included a specific program to address safety, the Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP), which has existed since 1973, has always been a tiny part of the overall program—currently, 6 percent of the highway program. Add in the Transportation Alternatives program, which helps build sidewalks and other infrastructure to help people without a car get around safely, and you get up to 9 percent. Whatever constitutes our approach to safety is failing for everyone who uses the road.

Congestion reduction/Reliability/Freight

USDOT chose to assess congestion reduction, system reliability, freight movement, and economic vitality through overly simple measures of vehicle speeds, so we will address these areas together. One of the biggest excuses for not taking established steps to improve safety (the steps every nation doing better than us is taking) is the need to support the economy by eliminating congestion. Saving lives with slower speeds has taken a back seat in favor of trying to eliminate congestion at all costs, which has been the ultimate goal of all federal transportation spending for the last 30 years. Yet, no matter how you measure this effort, it has failed.

Between 1993 and 2017, the most populous 100 U.S. cities added 30,511 new freeway lane-miles, an increase of 42 percent. That rate of freeway expansion significantly outstripped the 32 percent growth in population in those regions over the same time period. So congestion should have gone down, right? Nope, it went up 144 percent. Congestion increased in every single one of these 100 metro areas. It went up in places that tried really hard to build their way out of congestion, like in Brownsville, TX, where the population increased 73 percent, they increased freeway lane miles by 287 percent and congestion increased by 1230 percent. It also went up in places that lost population, like in Detroit, MI, where the population decreased by 5 percent, they increased freeway lane miles by 15 percent, and congestion still increased by 45 percent. Let that sink in. Fewer people, more highways, and congestion increased—a lot!

Infrastructure condition

What have record levels of investment in infrastructure gotten us when it comes to the basic condition of our roads and bridges? USDOT’s Conditions and Performance Report for 2024 found that the share of federal-aid highway pavements with good ride quality improved during the 2008–2018 period—from 40.7 percent to 47.2 percent (not even half). But the share of federal-aid highway pavements with poor ride quality also worsened during that time, rising from 15.8 percent to 22.6 percent. In terms of bridges, the share of federal-aid bridges in good repair decreased from 47.8 percent to 46.0 percent; however, the share of federal-aid bridges in poor repair also decreased from 10.1 percent to 7.6 percent. Pretty lackluster results.

USDOT likes to note that the busiest roads (by amount of vehicle miles traveled) are in (slightly) better condition, as they likely have more repair dollars spent on them. While this is true, either all roads you’ve built are important enough to maintain, or they should not have been built in the first place. This claim also runs directly counter to rhetoric often deployed about the “importance” of rural areas—as if it’s ok if their less trafficked roads are poorly maintained.

Emissions

We covered this just two months ago. Based on current investment patterns, over the course of the current infrastructure law, federal surface transportation spending could increase emissions by nearly 190 million metric tonnes of emissions over baseline levels through 2040 from added driving. This is the emission equivalent of 500 natural gas-fired power plants or nearly 50 coal-fired power plants running for a year.

And we weren’t doing well before the IIJA either, as we showed in our 2020 report, Driving Down Emissions.

Speeding up project delivery

Why would we want to speed up the delivery of projects producing such terrible results? Slow them down. Stop them.

Members of Congress preparing the replacement of the IIJA this year and next should be warned that the collective failure to make improvements in these priority areas will be given as the primary reason to pump more money into the same programs we have been funding for decades. They may have changed names, shifted from formula to discretionary or vice versa, or seen their proportions change, but they are basically the same programs.

If you point out that the results have been truly disappointing, you will hear how the transportation agencies aren’t to blame, even as they ask for more money to do the same things. For example, we regularly hear that roadway fatalities are up because of the misbehavior of people using those roadways rather than the design or function of those roads. Their counterparts in other countries don’t feel that way, which is one reason they are successfully saving lives. If state DOTs aren’t able to improve safety, then we should give funding to other entities that can.

Senator Shelley Moore Capito, whose committee will be writing a large chunk of this law, is starting with the wrong questions and assumptions. She told POLITICO that she wants to look at formula vs. discretionary to see if the discretionary [grants] getting out and to determine kind of efficiencies need to be made. The most essential question to ask is whether or not the enormous amount of spending on transportation has resulted in better outcomes, like the goals Congress overwhelmingly supported and put into the U.S. Code: making the roads safer, reducing congestion, improving infrastructure conditions, and reducing emissions. If the answers are no, then clearly it’s time to stop throwing good money after bad.

Congress is looking at spending another $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. People will point to the overwhelming bipartisan support. Inevitably (as happens at every reauthorization), there will be calls for more money for the same programs, more flexibility for states to spend federal funds however they like, and less accountability overall.

This strategy has failed to deliver, and it won’t deliver anything different, whether we give it more money or less.

We shouldn’t spend another dime on a program that fails so completely to deliver on all of the priorities we have set for it. This is the issue that Congress should be grappling with over the next year as they prepare the next transportation law.

 

The infrastructure stimulus will do more harm than good if policy doesn’t change

The Biden administration is preparing to release an infrastructure stimulus package, potentially as soon as next week. We’re having flashbacks to the Recovery Act of 2009, a package that missed a lot of opportunities. Here’s why the way funding is allocated matters as much — if not more — than how much funding is proposed. 

Is this the transportation system we want to double down on? Fortunately, those involved in this crash on Houston’s I-45 suffered no life-threatening injuries. Photo by Adventures of KM&G-Morris on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

The vaunted “infrastructure stimulus” might be upon us, with rumored price tags (big price tags) for prospective infrastructure investments leaking out of the White House. 

We’ve been here before: the 2009 Recovery Act put a lot of money into existing federal transportation programs—rather than targeting the funding for a specific purpose —in order to move money quickly. But these programs weren’t designed to solve the issue at hand: short-term job creation. So they failed to create the most new jobs as they could have. 

This time around, Americans want an infrastructure package that addresses economic recovery through job creation; rebuilds crumbling roads, bridges, and transit systems; and reduces climate emissions and racial inequities. But our existing federal transportation programs aren’t built to achieve these outcomes—no matter how much more money is pumped into them. In fact, they often produce the opposite result: building new infrastructure we can’t afford to maintain, driving up emissions and creating barriers to people of color trying to get to work and essential services.

So as the White House unveils its approach to infrastructure, listen less to the price tags or the messaging and look more at specifically how they allocate the funding. For example: 

  • If they say they’re “repairing crumbling roads and bridges” but just fund the existing transportation program that has failed to do so for decades then they’re not repairing crumbling roads and bridges. 
  • If they say they’re investing in climate by electrifying vehicles but double down on a vehicle-only transportation system then they’re investing in climate half-heartedly — undermining the efficiencies they are getting from cars with inefficiencies and burdens from the transportation system. 
  • If they say they’re helping communities of color but give states money to displace those communities in order to widen a road (like I-45 in Houston) or allow the construction of deadly roads that disproportionately kill Black and brown people then they’re not helping communities of color. 

When it comes to infrastructure, the words often do not match the funding. We should not be fooled by that. We need to look at what they are doing with the money and hold them accountable for what they are promising.

If we want equitable smart cities, we need support from philanthropy

A close-up of the handlebars of a Lime electric scooter. The scooter has a small computer screen that reads "Scan to Ride". To the right of the screen is a QR code.

Everyone agrees that smart cities—places that deploy technology to deliver government services and improve quality of life—are the future. City leaders and staff are inundated with these new mobility products but have limited capacity to ensure that they are deployed in ways that lead to equitable and sustainable outcomes. Our director Beth Osborne explains why cities, states, and non-profit actors need philanthropic support to pursue policy research and projects that make equitable, sustainable smart cities a reality. 

Close-up of the handlebars of a Lime e-scooter, with “Scan to Ride” written on the scooter’s small computer screen.

Technology holds great promise to help cities monitor and allocate limited public space in ways that ensure safe, equitable, affordable, and sustainable access to jobs and services for everybody, no matter their financial means or physical ability. That’s where we should be heading as a country.  

We hear about the endless possibilities of new mobility technology—like flexible curb management tools and smartphone access to shared scooters, bikes, and cars—in the news and at transportation conferences. However, we know that technology can be deployed in ways that allocate these benefits only to those who can pay, or to the wealthiest neighborhoods, or in ways that benefit the technology provider more than the public. Historically, this has been the case. (Think: automobiles, broadband, and more.) 

To date, the power has been in the hands of those who develop and sell technology. Most of these companies are trying to produce good results for cities and people. But to survive, they have to pay attention to their bottom line. Plus, businesses can only really support cities that have the capacity to explain what kind of technology they need, and are then able to effectively manage that product once deployed and ensure that it supports broad societal benefits, like equity and sustainability. 

That capacity requires funding. Philanthropies are traditionally a powerful force for this support, ensuring that modernization and innovation are used to ways that connect to broad social goals. Philanthropy is already doing this in so many areas, from electric vehicle deployment, transit advocacy, housing affordability, criminal justice reform and more. However, they have been largely absent as cities and non-profits pursue policy research and innovations to make smart cities a reality. 

We learned this the hard way. For the past four years, Transportation for America has hosted the Smart Cities Collaborative, a year-long learning cohort where city transportation officials learn from each others’ efforts to use new mobility technologies in order to improve their transportation networks. The Collaborative has been a success: we’ve brought together  cities from across the country to discuss approaches to new mobility, curbside management, and city innovation, and have launched several useful resources like the Shared Micromobility Playbook.  

However, funding the Collaborative has been difficult. We rely on a combination of fees paid by cash-strapped cities, sponsorship agreements from new mobility and technology companies, and our advocacy peers. While we are so appreciative of the support we received from city participants and our private sector partners, there was a limit to what we could provide Collaborative members with this funding. 

It’s simple: there will never exist a world in which a 1:1 swap between philanthropic dollars and private sector dollars works. Private sector companies have their own priorities that rarely, if ever, line up with city government’s priorities. This is of no fault of the private sector companies. But it’s exactly why philanthropies need to provide funding for smart cities projects and research: philanthropic funding that doesn’t need to boost a company’s profit margins. 

Our Smart Cities Collaborative, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s short-lived Smart City Challenge (the seed that inspired our Collaborative), and similar non-business projects are where cities, states, the federal government, advocates, and philanthropists need to focus their efforts. Philanthropy will be essential for cities to have the capacity to deploy these technologies in ways that promote equity and sustainability. Without them, the future will inevitably be shaped by shorter term private sector interests and as yet unknown long term outcomes of these interests.

A bipartisan transportation bill isn’t always good: but it can be

Last summer, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed a transportation bill lauded by both sides of the aisle. While the bill was indeed bipartisan, it does great damage to the priorities of both the Democrats and Republicans. Our director Beth Osborne explains why bipartisanship on its own doesn’t make a bill good, and how it’s possible to create a transportation bill that achieves both parties’ objectives.

“Blue Skies over the Capitol.” Photo by John Brighenti on Flickr’s Creative Commons

Transportation is the only sector where Democrats and Republicans enthusiastically and bipartisanly agree to undermine their own goals. While Republicans say their priority is to reduce demand for federal spending, avoid wasteful spending and efficiently move goods to market, the current program and the bill they passed fails to do so. While Democrats claim to want to create jobs, reduce emissions, and build a strong and fair economy, the current program and the bill they passed fails to do so. Still these laws have achieved one thing: bipartisanship.

It’s amazing that lawmakers can fail to achieve both parties’ goals in one bipartisan bill. It is obvious why in these divided times, members of Congress would seek and embrace an opportunity for bipartisanship. But is bipartisanship good if it is accomplished by trading so many of your priorities—your reasons for being in office—for an agreement that just makes our country’s problems worse?

In fairness, there are successes both sides can point to. The Democrats can say they are creating jobs even if they aren’t creating as many as they could. The Republicans can say they are reducing regulation even if they are only reducing some parts of the environmental review and permitting processes (and not always the most onerous parts). Both can say they are fixing our crumbling infrastructure even if there is no requirement to do so—which is why that federal funding is often spent on road expansions (that we can’t afford to maintain) instead.

Why is this? First, unlike most other federal programs, lawmakers don’t have to justify funding the transportation program annually because it’s paid for by a trust fund. Money moves out to states, metropolitan planning organizations and transit agencies every year whether the annual spending bills are passed or not. When you don’t have to think about a program but every six or so years, it is hardly surprising that most members of Congress don’t fully understand how it works or what might need to change.

Second, passing these bills leads to a lot of praise from the industry that will make a lot of money from it. The press covers all the money coming home, and often little else. The eventual spending leads to ribbon cuttings, which provides even more good press—even if that infrastructure is fated to fall into disrepair for the same reasons we have a repair problem today.

Transportation is more complicated and nuanced than we appreciate. Building new roads and bridges doesn’t always make travel faster or more convenient—it often makes travel worse and creates hardship on the communities they touch. And investing in maintenance and transit operations actually creates more jobs than new road and bridge construction projects.

It’s time for Democrats and Republicans—and more of the press—to think about what a transportation program can and should achieve: access to jobs for rich and poor, a safe travel environment for those in and out of a car, and a well-maintained system. None of these goals are partisan. Democrats and Republicans may come to each priority for slightly different reasons, but there is a new bipartisanship that can emerge around creating a better transportation system if we just look at what we are building and not just how much we can build.

We can follow the lead of two junior members of the House—Representatives Jesús “Chuy” García (a Democrat) and Mike Gallagher (a Republican)—who are both freshmen members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. With the current transportation program expiring this September, the Committee had a chance to rethink long-term transportation policy and came up with a proposal that included a fix-it-first approach. Representatives García and Gallagher did something unusual: they considered the continuing problem in solving our transportation maintenance problems and connected policy to spending to solve that problem. The two Congressmen submitted an amendment to the reauthorization bill, called the INVEST Act, to require that states spend funding on maintenance before building new roads, which was then adopted unanimously.

Prioritizing maintenance over road expansion is a win-win for both Democrats and Republicans: Democrats reduce carbon emissions from unnecessary road building, Republicans spend taxpayer dollars responsibly by reducing our future liabilities, and both parties create more jobs—more than would be created from new road construction. This is bipartisanship to praise.

The Senate bill does not include this approach, allowing states and regions to build infrastructure they cannot afford to maintain while they are failing to maintain their existing system. But it is bipartisan! This is bipartisanship to shake your head at. The Senate needs to do better. And we all should recognize that bipartisanship can be a cover for failure to think deeply about a program and an excuse to avoid improvement.

It’s time to define transportation success by what actually matters to people: getting where you need to go

For decades, transportation departments have been measuring the wrong thing: vehicle speed.  Instead of measuring the speed of a car, we should measure the success of our transportation system by how many jobs and services people can access safely, quickly and affordably.

It’s “Connecting people to jobs and services week” here at Transportation for America. All week we’ll be exploring why improving access should be the goal of the federal transportation program—not vehicle speed. Check out our post from yesterday discussing why it’s time to throw out the traffic measurement level of service, and tune into our Twitter account later today for tweets by renowned transit planner Jarrett Walker.

The goal of our transportation system, and the $40-plus billion in federal dollars we invest each year on it, should be simple: getting people where they need to go. But that’s far from the case.

When you think back about whether or not you had a successful trip, you probably think about if you got from point A to point B and how long that trip took. But state transportation departments don’t measure success that way: they instead measure whether or not your vehicle was moving quickly at some point of the trip. Whether or not you actually arrived isn’t a consideration. And they rarely, if at all, measure whether or not you can access important destinations like jobs and other services. 

Using outdated measures like “level of service” that assess how fast traffic moves compared to free flow speeds in the middle of the night, they  assume that if the traffic is moving well on a given segment of a road that the trip was high quality and successful. In other words, an hour-long commute at high speed would be considered more successful than a 10-minute commute in a little traffic. Lost entirely in this simplistic proxy are non-car trips—we don’t measure people who walk or bike to work. 

But this 20th century technology isn’t a good measure of whether or not people have access to the things they need in their daily lives. We think that destination access, or accessibility, is a much better measure. 

Connect people to jobs and services—our third principle

Our third principle is not a new concept. What’s new is that we now have technology that makes it possible to measure success by what actually counts—reaching your destination. A few decades ago, we didn’t know where people were starting their trips from and going to. With a transportation program as we know it that began in the 1950s and 60s, we used simplistic proxies like level of service or vehicle delay or blunt measures of congestion because that was the best we could manage at the time. But now we have reams of data about where trips begin and end, where jobs are located, where people live, and where daily needs are located. With the help of cloud computing and GPS, we can measure every aspect of a trip.  

Yet the federal transportation program continues to rely on outdated 1950s metrics that assume a transportation system made up entirely of vehicles (rather than people), where the best measure we can come up with is “did your car go fast or slow for your trip?” 

It’s time to actually measure what matters as we decide where and how to invest billions in federal transportation dollars each year.

Think of destination access as the map app you likely have on your phone. When you search for a restaurant or a store, the app can tell you how long it will take to get there by different modes of transportation. And because of the millions of searches performed each day and the location data transmitted, it is now possible for states and local communities to accurately calculate access to employment opportunities, daily errands, public services, and much more. These tools allow cities, states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)  to design transportation networks that maximize the ability of people to travel by whatever mode they choose and to better understand how transportation investments interact with land-use policies. 

Losing the current dangerous focus on speed and instead measuring accessibility would prioritize efficient travel and a more equitable transportation system, one where low-income communities would have increased access to jobs and services. We can hold agencies accountable to deliver these connections.

Funding should go to projects that will improve these connections, regardless of mode. State DOTs and MPOs should be held accountable by evaluating how well their investments help connect people to destinations—not whether or not they allowed traffic to move a little faster on some segment of road. 

Some states are already starting to evaluate projects this way

The Commonwealth of Virginia started using destination access to prioritize transportation projects in 2017. When deciding what new capacity projects to fund, Virginia measures how much access a given project will create and divides that accessibility score by the cost. It’s a transparent, quantitative way to prioritize limited tax-payer dollars. 

When we tie funding decisions to measurable outcomes, it creates more faith and buy-in from local communities. Connecting people to jobs and services is something everyone can agree to. 

While states like Virginia are voluntarily trying to change the process, to truly experience a sea change, the federal government needs to make improving access a fundamental priority for all transportation dollars.

Safety over speed week: There’s one thing that almost every fatal car crash has in common

We face an epidemic of people struck and killed while walking and biking because our local streets—not just highways—are designed to move vehicles at the highest speeds possible rather than prioritizing the safety of everyone. It’s high time to stop sacrificing safety on the altar of speed with the tens of billions that the federal government spends every year. Here’s how Congress could make that happen.

It’s “safety over speed” week here at T4America, and we are spending the week unpacking our second of three principles for transportation investment. Read more about those principles and if you’re new to T4America, you can sign up for email here. Follow along on @T4America this week and check back here on the blog for more related content all week long.

Let’s start with a number: 49,340. 

That’s how many people were struck and killed by cars while walking on streets all across the United States between 2008 and 2017. Almost 50,000 preventable deaths. 

And yet, by and large, we call these crashes “accidents.” We still believe that these 50,000 deaths, and the deaths of almost 32,000 people every year killed inside of vehicles, are either just the cost of doing business for our transportation system, or were the product of bad behavior: distracted drivers, fatigued drivers, drunk drivers, or drivers not wearing seat belts. 

There’s no doubt that distracted driving increases crash risk and should be punished. But distracted driving can’t explain all of these deaths. There’s one thing that almost every crash has in common, though: high vehicle speed.

When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking.

In 2017—the year in which pedestrian and cyclist fatalities first reached the highest level since 1990—the NTSB issued a landmark study about how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, finding that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds. 

It’s easy to ignore something that you don’t understand, and most policymakers don’t understand when and how high speed roads can be safe—and when they aren’t. 

When are high-speed roads safe, and when are they deadly?

The only way to make a high speed roads safe is by separating opposing traffic; removing conflict points, like driveways and cross streets; and separating or removing cyclists and pedestrians. Of course, this is something we frequently do: it’s called a limited-access highway. 

But we’ve tried to design for similar high speeds on our arterial roadways in existing communities while retaining all the points of conflict that make those speeds deadly. Think of any suburban road lined with retail, offices, schools, and homes. Those streets—with multiple destinations along them—are designed like highways.1


Graphic from Strong Towns

Our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, explains that most cyclist and pedestrian fatalities occur on these 35-50 mph arterial roadways in our urban and suburban areas—roads designed for high speed but with all the conflict points of the slower speed streets, like slip lanes or numerous curb cuts for entrances and exits across a sidewalk. 

Reducing speed is the best solution

If we want these roads to be safe, they either need to become limited-access highways (unlikely, expensive and damaging for the local context) or they need to be designed for lower speeds with lower speed limits.

And we know exactly what speed these roads need to be designed for: 35 miles per hour, or less in many cases. But 35 should be the ceiling for these types of roads, not the floor, when it comes to design speed.

We are pursuing higher speed roadways because we have placed jobs and services far away from the homes of the people who need them. We make up for the inconvenient location of everyday necessities with higher speeds in hopes of shorter travel time, but it never works out that way. Instead, we get a lot of traffic congestion as everyone floods onto the same roads, seeking the same far-away, disconnected destinations. Even in free- flowing traffic, people save seconds or, rarely, a minute or two. And for that, we sacrifice thousands of innocent lives each year. More often than not, those killed are children, the elderly or those with lower incomes.

We need to better measure how speed contributes

Currently we only call a crash “speed related” when someone was driving over the speed limit. We don’t track whether the speed limit was inappropriately high, or if the speed  of the car played a factor in the crash or fatality even if the speed was under the posted limit. In fact, numerous local governments across the country are in arguments with states on who has the authority to lower speed limits. 

It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make a street safe and appropriate for its surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds. 

Congress can make protecting the safety of all people who use the street a priority by reflecting this in the decisions they make about how to fund, design, operate, maintain, and measure the success of our roads. The federal program should require designs and approaches that put safety—for everyone—first. 

It’s time for Congress to actually set a goal for repairing our infrastructure

We shouldn’t build new roads before fixing the ones we have. But that’s not how the federal transportation program is designed. Despite funding boosts, our backlog of maintenance needs have only increased because there is no requirement that federal funds be spent on repair.

The concept of fixing what you have before buying something new—when it comes to really expensive things—is pretty intuitive for most people. You should probably repair your leaky roof before building a new addition. You’d likely buff out that dent in the car you already own instead of buying a brand new one. 

But what’s obvious to everyone is not obvious to lawmakers. Under our current federal transportation law, states are allowed to spend federal funding on building new (and often unnecessary) roads before fixing decaying ones, all without providing a plan for how they will maintain these new roads in the future. 

This leads to massive and unsustainable fiscal problems. 

According to our report Repair Priorities that we co-authored with Taxpayers for Common Sense, states spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion between 2009-2014. These investments in expansion don’t just redirect funds away from much needed investments in repair; they continually grow our annual spending need, widening the gap. Every new lane-mile of road costs approximately $24,000 per year just to preserve in a state of good repair—to say nothing of the long-term lifecycle costs and required eventual major rehabilitation projects in the future. By expanding roads—and neglecting the ones we have—we are borrowing against the future while letting our existing assets wither.

Yet lawmakers insist that the reason why our transportation infrastructure is crumbling is not how we (poorly) spend our money, but the amount of it. “We need more money,” they say. “It doesn’t matter how it’s spent!”

These cries for more money echo throughout Capitol Hill every five to six years when surface transportation funding needs to be reauthorized. I described this Groundhog Day-esque phenomenon in our blog post announcing our three new principles for transportation investment:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to  “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program.  And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble.  And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

As the current transportation law, the FAST Act, expires next year, it’s time to do something different. We simply can’t afford to waste billions of dollars every single year. 

That is why we urge Congress to make a hard and fast commitment to cutting our maintenance backlog in half. We don’t want Congress to create some new federal program to achieve a state of good repair, or authorize more transportation funding. Simply setting a goal for our current dollars would be a sea change. 

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, Congress can tell us what the right target should be. 

But they should have to tell us precisely where we will be in addressing our state of repair when this bill expires in five or so years, not just how much money will have been spent. Until then, we believe cutting the maintenance backlog in half is an achievable goal and we expect Congress to finally tie federal funding to their rhetoric. 

Read our three policy recommendations for cutting the maintenance backlog in half.

Explaining our three principles for transportation investment

Today, T4America is releasing a new set of three concrete, measurable principles for transportation investment.

Last week we explained why T4America is no longer advocating for more money for the federal transportation program and why we need a clear set of explicit goals for the federal program. Today, we’re rolling out our new principles, which are clear, simple, and measurable. You’ll find them incorporated into the “platform” section of our website and we’ll be using them to evaluate every single proposal in the months and years ahead: whether a standalone infrastructure plan or the forthcoming proposals for reauthorizing the nation’s surface transportation law that expires in 2020. 

It’s time to stop spending billions with an unclear purpose for diminishing, marginal returns. We believe these three goals will help finally move us in the right direction.

#1 Prioritize maintenance

The process is inevitable as it is predictable every time the process of transportation reauthorization comes up. We’re stuck in a groundhog day with an infinite loop. Here’s how it goes:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to  “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program.  And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble.  And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

Our first principle is not about creating some new federal program to achieve a  state of good repair. And it’s not about how much money is needed to repair our infrastructure, either. Our principle is simply a commitment to the American people that the maintenance backlog is cut in half. This would be a sea change. 

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, let Congress tell us what the right target should be. But tell us exactly where we will be in addressing state of repair after this bill expires, not how much money will be spent. Until then, we believe half is right and we expect Congress to finally tie the program to their rhetoric. 

#2 Design for safety over speed

When we talk about safety, we typically talk about reducing drunk driving, wearing seat belts, and wearing helmets on motorcycles. In recent years, thanks to leadership from former US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood, distracted driving was brought up to equal importance as these areas. 

Yet what has been largely ignored is the role of speed itself in making our roadways completely unsafe for everyone outside of a motor vehicle. Speed isn’t always necessarily deadly. The way to make a high speed roadway safe is by separating opposing traffic; removing conflict points, like driveways and cross streets, and separating or removing cyclists and pedestrians. That’s called a limited-access highway. But we’ve tried to design for similar speeds on our arterial roadways in existing communities while retaining all the points of conflict that make those speeds deadly. 

Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people who were walking on streets all across the United States, reaching levels in 2017 not seen since 1990. When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking. Our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, found in their report Dangerous by Design that most cyclist and pedestrian crashes occur on these arterial roadways in our urban and suburban areas—roads designed for high speed but without removing conflicts. If we want these roads to be safe, they either need to become limited-access highways (unlikely, expensive and damaging for the local context) or they need to be designed for lower speeds with lower speed limits.

We have to take this seriously. The NTSB issued a landmark study in 2017 about how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, and that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds. Currently we only track whether someone was driving over the speed limit. We don’t track whether the speed limit was inappropriately high. In fact, numerous local governments across the country are in arguments with states on who has the authority to lower speed limits. It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make a street appropriate for its surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds. 

#3 Connect people to jobs and services by prioritizing accessibility

Fundamental to our transportation system (and the hundreds of billions of dollars we invest in it) is that it should provide people with access to jobs and services. This access is essential to an efficient economy, to ensuring that people can make a living and provide for their families, and to providing employers with reliable access to talent. 

Our current federal transportation program uses a poor proxy for measuring access to jobs and services. Transportation agencies measure the speed of vehicle movement along observed portions of roadways and assume that if those vehicles can move quickly, then all trips must be smooth and short. That kind of measurement has resulted in a system that values  a 40-minute commute to work in free-flowing traffic over a 20-minute commute in some congestion.

As it turns out, to make vehicles move quickly means building limited access roadways or widening roads and spreading out all destinations, making trips longer and biking or walking dangerous. So even though vehicles are traveling at high speed, people may not reach their destinations any faster because everything is more spread out. This is particularly true of pedestrians and cyclists, who once may have had to travel across short blocks, now have to cross long distances designed for cars, thanks to the limited-access changes that cut off local streets and eliminate shorter trips.

The technology has finally caught up.  We can now understand, quickly and affordably, how well the transportation system connects people to the things they need. Thanks to aggregated GPS data, we can know where homes and likely destinations are located. We also have congestion data and real-time transit arrival information. With this data, we can accurately calculate how easily people can access the things that they need and how various proposed transportation investments would improve or worsen it.

Some states, particularly Virginia and Hawaii, have already started scoring potential projects under consideration for funding based on the extent to which they improve access to jobs and services. Massachusetts and Utah are investigating doing the same. Congress should follow their lead.

As Congress considers the next surface transportation policy bill, they should ensure that these destination access data are available nationwide. Congress should also update performance measures to replace 1950s proxy measures like speed of travel with accurate, updated 21st century measures. People don’t talk about the average speed of a trip: they talk about how long it took. We should evaluate transportation projects and the overall system the same way.  

By the end of this next reauthorization cycle, the federal transportation program should be reoriented from a program focused on the fluidity of vehicle movement to one that prioritizes and measures access to jobs and services.

Go more in-depth on our principles here, and read our specific policy proposals for reauthorization here. 

Why we are no longer advocating for Congress to increase transportation funding

Since our inception in 2008, Transportation for America has always primarily advocated for reforming the federal transportation program. But raising the gas tax or otherwise raising new funding overall has also been a core plank of our platform since 2013. With the release of our brand new policy platform and principles coming this Monday, Transportation for America is no longer asking Congress to provide an increase in money for federal transportation program. Why?

Picture of Bellevue, WA light rail construction

For as long as I’ve been working in transportation and probably longer, the debate surrounding the federal transportation program has been a one-note affair: a never-ending fight over who gets money and how much money they get. Those who get money want more flexibility to spend it however they want. Those who get a little money want a bigger piece of the pie. And then both political parties come together in a “bipartisan” way to grow the pie and keep everyone happy.

This two-dimensional debate always leaves out an urgently needed conversation about the purpose of this federal transportation program. What are we doing? Why are we spending $50 billion a year? What is it supposed to accomplish? Does anyone know anymore?

Nearly seven decades ago we set out with a clear purpose: connect our cities and rural areas and states with high-speed interstates and highways for cars and trucks and make travel all about speed. These brand new highways made things like cross-country and inter-state travel easier than we ever imagined possible. We connected places that weren’t well-connected before and reaped the economic benefits (while also dividing and obliterating some communities along the way).

We’ve never really updated those broad goals from 1956 in a meaningful way. We’ve moved from the exponential returns of building brand new connections where they didn’t exist to the diminishing, marginal returns of spending billions to add a new lane of road here and there, which promptly fills up with new traffic.

Why in the world would we just pour more money into a program that is “devoid of any broad, ambitious vision for the future, and [in which] more spending has only led to more roads, more traffic, more pollution, more inequality, and a lack of transportation options,” as I wrote in the Washington Post during Infrastructure Week?

What the program should be about is accountability to the American taxpayer—making a few clear, concrete, measurable promises and then delivering on them. The program should focus on what we’re getting for the funds we’re spending—not simply whether or not money gets spent and how much there was.

Does anyone doubt Congress’s ability to successfully spend money? We all have supreme confidence in their ability to spend hundreds of billions of dollars. Our question is whether that money can be spent in a way that accomplishes something tangible and measurable for the American people.

Taxpayers deserve to know what they’re getting for their spending. Today, they don’t, and nothing about the debate so far in 2019 with Congress has indicated that will change. So we’ve scrapped “provide real funding” from our core principles. T4America has concluded that more money devoted to this same flawed system will just do more damage.

Coming next week: our new principles

With the conversation about money put behind us, on Monday we’re releasing three new principles for what we expect this upcoming surface transportation bill to accomplish. We believe that whether Congress decides to spend more money or less, these three things should be paramount.

Every time federal transportation reauthorization comes up, we hear endless cries about the poor state of our crumbling infrastructure. How many bridges are structurally deficient, how poor our roads are, the long backlogs of neglected maintenance, the (severely inflated) costs of congestion, perhaps even a few voices about the alarming increase in people struck and killed while walking…the list of woes goes on and on.

And then, predictably, states, interest groups, members of Congress and others call for more money for the federal transportation program as the only logical solution, with no clear promises made for how this money will solve any of the problems outlined above or precisely what will be better or different after five years of spending yet billions more.

So let’s stop limping along and spending billions with an unclear purpose and marginal returns. We need a clear set of explicit goals for the federal program. We’ll be back here on Monday as we unveil our principles.

See T4America’s new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy >>

 

There’s a reason why Missouri voters twice rejected gas tax increases

A truck painting lane markings on a two-lane road in Missouri.

Missouri spends more of its transportation budget on building new roads than maintaining its existing roads—23 percent of which are in poor condition. If it did a better job prioritizing maintenance, perhaps it wouldn’t need to ask taxpayers for a bailout. 

A truck painting lane markings on a two-lane road in Missouri.

A truck painting lane markings on a two-lane road in Missouri. Photo by MoDOT.

The state of Missouri gets over $1 billion a year from the federal government to support their highway needs. They match that with another $1.5 billion in state transportation funding for a total of $2.5 billion in spending a year. 

This large sum is what they have to cover the maintenance and upkeep of 77,000 miles of roadway. At ~$24,000 a mile per year to keep a new road in good condition, that means the state has somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.85 billion in baseline maintenance needs for its existing system each year. Of those miles of roadway, 23 percent are in poor condition. (Their repair costs could be much higher: to restore bad roads to good condition costs more than the $24k per lane-mile figure for keeping new roads in good repair.)

The bottom line is that Missouri has a lot of built-in, predictable costs that they need to cover and a pretty deep well of existing transportation funding. But Missouri, along with 20 other states across the country, is actually spending more money on building new roads than on maintaining the ones they already have. According to their own reporting, Missouri is spending 31 percent of their federal funding on new roads while spending only 20 percent on repair of existing roadways. (Note that Missouri’s largest metropolitan area, St. Louis, is heralded for having the least traffic congestion in the country, which makes you wonder why the state feels the need to widen roads.) 

After spending more money on expansion than repair, Missouri cries poverty and asks its taxpayers for more money. Perhaps it’s no surprise that voters have said no to them—twice. Should a bank loan you money to expand your deck while your roof is leaking?

Now the state is selling bonds to cover the cost of replacing rural bridges—an important investment. But one has to wonder, how many bridges and roads could they have already replaced with existing funds if those funds were prioritized to maintaining existing infrastructure before building the next shiny new highway or adding more lanes somewhere? At the very least, shouldn’t taxpayers expect as much money to go into highway maintenance as into expansion? 

Unfortunately, neglecting repair while spending more money on building new roads is perfectly legal and permissible under the federal transportation program. Congress is just fine with Missouri neglecting needed repairs and increasing their overall need by adding more lanes, and as a result, Missouri is not alone. 

This lack of accountability and clear priorities is why Missouri’s roads—and other roads, bridges, and transit systems in poor condition across the country—won’t be fixed by simply spending more money. In spite of unprecedented high levels of transportation funding, including from the Recovery Act, roadway conditions nationally have deteriorated over the last 10 years. Even if we double nationwide transportation spending, there is no guarantee that roads will improve in Missouri or elsewhere without a change to the underlying policies. This is why every conversation about transportation policy that begins and ends with money just isn’t good enough right now.

Missouri is fortunate to have powerful members of Congress that are uniquely positioned to change and improve policy. We can require states receiving federal money to maintain roads before building new ones. They could also require it of themselves.

Prioritizing repair is common sense. We cannot afford to waste any more time and money.  

Read more about Missouri and 20 other states making the same mistake in our report Repair Priorities. 

We must address the climate crisis—which requires changing transportation and land use

Good news! Since the time Beth wrote this, we put our money where our mouth is and wrote a Green New Deal for Transportation. You can check it out here.


The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gasses in the United States and it’s also the one that federal officials have the most control over with the power of the purse. Yet the Green New Deal is largely devoid of the bold reimagining of federal transportation spending which encourages more roads, more driving, more sprawl, and more emissions.

Yesterday, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Markey (D-MA) introduced the much anticipated Green New Deal resolution. The brains behind the Green New Deal (GND) should be commended for treating the climate crisis as the existential threat it is. As a policy framework, the GND acknowledges the need to use cleaner fuels and invest equitably. But like most conversations around climate change, it gives only a glancing mention to the transportation system and completely ignores the role development patterns play in driving the climate crisis.

Transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG), outpacing the power sector and comprising at least 28 percent of the United States’ total GHG emissions. Surface transportation represents 83 percent of transportation emissions, and transportation has now surpassed electrical generation as the top emitter. Pollution from transportation comes from three drivers: the efficiency of vehicles, the carbon content of fuels, and the distance people travel. And transportation emissions keep climbing in spite of the fact that vehicles are getting more efficient and fuels are getting cleaner because people are driving more and further.

Why is that? Our surface transportation program is designed to keep people in their cars. For example, Congress distributes transportation funding to states based on how much fuel is burned. The more gas burned in a state, the more money that state gets. It should hardly surprise us that states have built systems tailored to driving or that this system has pushed people to drive more over the past 60 years. Moreover, the transportation program dedicates 80 percent of those funds to highways and only 20 percent to transit—and the highway funding is guaranteed over multiple years while transit funds are on the chopping block every year. Further, if you build a new highway, a transportation agency has to come up with a 20 percent local match. But if you want to build new transit, you have to come up with at least 50 percent. Is our priority clear yet?

Back in 2012, Congress gave state departments of transportation more flexibility over how they spent federal transportation funds. In exchange, they created a performance management system to establish some accountability over that spending. That system requires states—most of which are organized around building highways and have very little staff focused on less polluting modes of travel—to set targets for their performance in safety, state of repair, and traffic flow. Strangely, Congress allowed them to set targets in these areas to do worse every year. And even in this embarrassingly weak “accountability” system, efficiency measures and GHG emissions were completely left out.

Considering the GND is a statement by Congress about what we should do to make every sector more efficient and less polluting, it would be nice if they would look at their own spending (i.e. federal dollars) and consider aligning it with their climate priorities.

Underlying these transportation challenges is the fact that our local governments are pushing housing further and further from the jobs and services that people need. And they have been doing this since the beginning of the highway era. It turns out that if houses are spread out and placed far away from all the things people need then they will have no choice but to drive more often and further.

While the development rules that create these patterns were set by the federal government in the 1920s, the federal government likes to pretends it is a purely local issue and that they have no role in the solution. Of course, many federal programs today continue to support and even encourage this spread out development that predictably creates long car trips and traffic congestion.

If the supporters of the GND are serious about addressing GHG emissions, they are going to have to spend time on the sector that is going in the wrong direction—a sector they have more direct responsibility for than any other. Without that, it looks like they are throwing stones from a glass house.

“We count on T4America to lead at the national level”

“If Transportation for America doesn’t do what they do at the national scale, we would be in trouble at the local level. We count on them to lead at the national level and equip us with the knowledge and expertise to do the same locally.”

“T4America is the only national group that really pulls everyone together in the same room: advocates, elected leaders, engineers, planners, researchers, transit agencies, safety experts, the business community…”

Those were just two comments I heard over the last week while we were in Atlanta for the last 2018 meeting of our Smart Cities Collaborative and Capital Ideas state policy conference. 

Will you help make more of this work possible in 2019 with a small donation to cap off the year?

Why support our transportation work in 2019? We can think of a few reasons, but a big one is that we’re headed into another reauthorization of the federal transportation law next year. Unlike the negotiations over the last bill in 2015, there is no more money in the congressional piggy bank to keep the status quo limping along.

None.

We currently have a gas tax that covers only about 70 percent of the transportation spending that Congress has approved. Do you remember what happened the last time we faced this situation? We do, because we successfully led the effort to kill a plan by the House of Representatives to end all federal funding for transit.

This administration has already twice asked Congress to do the same for expanding & improving transit, though Congress has thus far twice rejected those requests with a bipartisan vote.

But when Congress is faced with a gas tax that doesn’t cover the bills, it is almost inevitable that someone will start looking at transit, multimodal projects, or complete streets as the so-called “extras” or “easier” places to cut.

And, among other issues, who will hold Congress’ feet to the fire (and has been already this year) to ensure that the next transportation law isn’t 100 percent silent on the potential impacts of automated vehicles to our communities, as the 2015 law was?

That’s why T4America is here at Smart Growth America. And we know that local advocates and leaders are counting on us to do what we’ve always done.

Help us stand in the gap.

Make a tax-deductible, end-of-year gift to Smart Growth America to support our transportation work and get a free gift.

Thanks for your support.

Donate to T4America and Smart Growth America

 

Make an end of year gift and then, if you missed them, read our reflections and lessons learned from two great events we held last week in Atlanta: Capital Ideas 2018 and the last 2018 meeting of our Smart Cities Collaborative.

Why don’t DOTs pick routes like we do?

Your GPS gives you the choice of two routes.

One would take 15 minutes, but you’d travel at only 20 miles per hour. One would take 46 minutes, but you’d get to travel at 60 miles per hour. Which do you pick?

We’d pick the 15 minute trip, every time. This seems basic to anyone who has used a smart phone. But DOTs have long used travel speed as a (poor) proxy for how efficiently things are moving, partially because, for decades, it has been nearly impossible to measure every trip taking place within a city or a transportation system.

But it’s not 1950 anymore. New technologies can tell us where trips happen and how long they take, and empower travelers to choose a variety of routes spread between driving, walking, biking, and transit.
DOTs must learn to use the same approach, and at Capital Ideas 2018, we’ll be talking about how DOTs can measure system success in new ways.

Most DOTs measure the functionality of their transportation system using a standard called Level of Service or “LOS”. We explained a lot of the problems with LOS back in 2016. The short answer is that measuring the wrong thing leads to the wrong outcomes. Focusing on speed would mean making every road as wide and straight as possible — but no community wants all its roads to be freeways. Residential streets and local roads work just fine, but DOTs haven’t had a good way to measure that — until now.

“Measuring Access to Jobs and Necessities,” a panel on December 6 during Capital Ideas, will discuss publicly for the first time a new set of metrics that can help DOTs understand travelers’ needs more comprehensively.

Register today to be among the first to learn about these new metrics. You’ll hear from three transportation agencies that are among the first putting this measure into practice.

Here at T4America we often say “we measure what we treasure.” What we treasure is transportation options that support regional economies and strong communities in addition to moving fast. We hope you’ll join us to discuss making them happen.

The hosts of Capital Ideas 2018 are working together for a more connected Atlanta region

Atlanta, GA isn’t just the location of Capital Ideas 2018 — the region itself is part of the agenda.

Atlanta’s work to build a more walkable, bikeable, transit-accessible city has lessons every city can learn from. Expanding their transit system, creating multi-use trails, investing in light rail, expanding bike share, funding bus rapid transit, and raising new funds for projects in the future are just some of the Atlanta region’s recent successes.

This work takes partnership, and we are proud to have more than a dozen organizations working for a more connected Atlanta region serving as our Host Committee for this year’s conference.

The full committee includes the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce (our Host Committee chair), the City of Atlanta’s Office of Mobility Planning, Atlanta Beltline, Atlanta Regional Commission, Atlanta-Region Transit Link Authority, American Council of Engineering Companies of Georgia, Center for Working Families, Inc., Central Atlanta Progress, JACOBS, MARTA, Midtown Alliance, the Partnership for Southern Equity, Perimeter Community Improvement Districts, Siemens, and the Urban League of Greater Atlanta.

You might notice that several of these organizations do not work directly on transportation. Why is state transportation policy important to them?

“Ensuring modern, multimodal and well-maintained transportation infrastructure is essential to the long-term quality of life and economic vibrancy of Downtown Atlanta. We are focused at the hyper-local level to encourage targeted transportation investments, policies, and programs that strive to balance jobs and housing in Downtown, support Downtown attractions and events, and promote equity. As a bridge between the Atlanta’s private sector business community and local government, we convene people, catalyze change, and provide leadership for mobility issues facing the center city.” — Central Atlanta Progress

“The Atlanta metropolitan region’s inadequate state of transportation infrastructure, access, and funding exists largely as a result of a legacy of detrimental policies deeply rooted in race and class. The Partnership for Southern Equity (PSE) believes that an equitable approach to transportation requires the collaboration of all governments within a region, including state government, and coordinated transportation and land use planning. PSE seeks to offer equitable and innovative approaches to regional transportation in order to confront the Atlanta metro’s inequitable, racialized past and to create the conditions necessary for shared prosperity.” — Partnership for Southern Equity

Join us in Atlanta in December to learn about creating cross-sector partnerships for transportation innovation in your own state. Register for Capital Ideas 2018 today.

Choosing transportation projects that actually match our priorities

Arial views of the Des Moines, IA region, one of the metro areas Transportation for America worked with. (Image: USDA photo by Preston Keres)

Transportation for America recently wrapped up a year of work with six metro areas to direct their transportation dollars to projects that help them achieve their goals and become the kinds of places they aspire to be.

Here’s a simple and perhaps obvious fact about transportation funding: There will never be enough money to do all the things we want to do. Even when the federal government, states, or localities come up with additional new money through a ballot measure or a gas tax increase or the like, the list projects that we want to build just grows along with the dollars.

So what’s the recipe for success? Like most truths in life, the answer is simple, but hard. Transportation agencies that want to succeed must: 1) articulate their goals, 2) evaluate transportation projects to ensure they are well-connected to those goals, and then 3) track how those projects perform after they are built. That is the simple idea behind performance measures in transportation. And sadly, their use is rare.

While 75 percent of the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) we surveyed in 2017 (78 of 104) used performance measures in some fashion in their last long-range plan, less than half (45 out of 104) actually used them to explicitly select which projects to include in the plan. Less than half of them actually created a system to determine “whether or not this project will move the needle on our overall goals.” (MPOs are the federally created regional agencies that plan and distribute federal transportation money within metro areas.)

Pretty much every metro area across the nation has a clear list of priorities or goals for their transportation dollars, but those goals are rarely used to choose projects for funding. For example, “repair” is a top, stated priority for transportation agencies everywhere. But all too often, the state or metro area is more likely to fund new, expensive projects that add capacity—projects that also come with years of embedded maintenance costs. And then you end up with a situation similar to Mississippi’s, where they’ve spent millions building highways across the state that they can’t afford to maintain.

This isn’t a funding problem, this is a failure to set priorities.

Over the last year, thanks to support from the Kresge Foundation, Transportation for America has worked closely with six MPOs that want to change this paradigm. We worked with these transportation leaders to create more effective systems that fund the transportation projects that best line up with their stated priorities. Those MPOs were:

  • Des Moines Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (Des Moines, IA);
  • Imperial Calcasieu Regional Planning and Development Commission (Lake Charles, LA);
  • Michiana Area Council of Governments (South Bend, IN);
  • Rapides Area Planning Commission (Alexandria, LA);
  • Roanoke Valley Transportation Planning Organization (Roanoke, VA); and
  • Sarasota/Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization (Sarasota, FL).

Beth Osborne presenting at a workshop with the Sarasota/Manatee MPO. (Image: Staff)

Our work with these six unique metro areas was intended to align their project funding with their regional priorities. None of these metro areas are huge cities or regions with a large staff or tons of funding to buy elaborate models; but all six of these MPOs are well on their way to becoming national leaders in using performance measurement to better line up the projects they choose with the goals they’re pursuing.

Throughout or work, we were also encouraged by how every single one of these MPOs were interested in moving beyond the traditional, simple performance measures like pavement condition, congestion, or safety. All six were interested in coming up with measures that work for all of their residents and better reflect what their residents deal with on a daily basis—not just measures that assess how the system works for people who drive everywhere. There was a strong undercurrent of concern about equity and ensuring that they create processes that steer transportation investments in ways that create opportunity for everyone.

The challenges that these six metro areas are facing are unique and really digging in to solve them demands a tailored approach. For example, Sarasota is facing housing and transportation costs that might be distorted because a percentage of their housing market is made up of second vacation homes, while a place like Roanoke has faced challenges attracting a labor pool and maintaining its young adult population. The kind of tailored assistance that the Kresge Foundation enabled us to provide relevant support that, in turn, made change possible on the ground.

Transportation is a particularly difficult field to change—we’ve done things the same way for generations. Change does not come overnight, but we’re excited to see how these six metro areas lead with performance measures. Our sincere thanks goes to the Kresge Foundation for their support of this valuable work and we hope other MPOs are given the opportunity to learn like these six did.

What applicants need to know about TIGER’s replacement program: BUILD

The ever-popular TIGER grant program has returned for a ninth round, but this time with triple the usual amount of funding, a brand new name (and acronym), and new criteria and qualifications that were added to the program by appropriators in the Senate and House. Our resident expert takes a closer look at the changes.

On Friday April 20th, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) released the FY 2018 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development or BUILD program, previously known as the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER). Having worked on Capitol Hill when this program was passed in 2009 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and then at USDOT where I helped run multiple rounds of competitive grantmaking, I want to take a deeper dive, but also add some context about the changes to this program.

First, to say this program has always been popular is a gross understatement. It was not only the most popular program at USDOT but one of the most popular programs across all of government. USDOT routinely received 10 times the requests for funding than was available and overwhelmed grants.gov, the online portal for federal grant programs.

Flexibility has always been the key to its popularity. While most federal transportation dollars go to state DOTs (with a small amount going to transit agencies and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)) for specific types of projects written into federal law, TIGER funds could go to any governmental entity, including counties, cities, and rail authorities. This aspect continues in the BUILD program. Likewise, most transportation funds are divided up by “mode”—roadway vs. transit vs. rail vs. waterway. For example, if you have a roadway resurfacing project that includes the replacement of bus stops and the purchase of buses, for conventional federal transportation dollars, you would have to apply separately to different roadway and transit programs, which can involve multiple agencies within your state DOT and also within USDOT.

With BUILD, you can continue to get the necessary funding for your entire project in one application at one time.

As an aside, let me address the name change. I can’t pretend to be happy to see the name TIGER go away. As a proud graduate of Louisiana State University (LSU), I’ve been asked for years if the program was named after my LSU Tigers. The name preceded me but I have always loved the association. Still, as a product of the Recovery Act, TIGER’s focus was on projects that were both ready to go and could provide an economic shot in the arm. In the years since 2009, we have moved beyond the need for the intensive and immediate economic recovery that we sought in 2009, and it is time for a new name too. BUILD is a good one.

What makes BUILD different?

So what makes BUILD different from previous rounds of TIGER? Congress required the administration to keep the 2016 criteria (safety, economic competitiveness, quality of life, environmental sustainability, and state of repair), so the short answer is not a whole lot.

But the changes that were made are still notable.

First, there is a whole lot more money available: $1.5 billion. This is the most that Congress has appropriated to this program since the Recovery Act and triple the $500 million made available in the last round in FY2017. Additionally, up to $15 million of that $1.5 billion may be used for planning, preparation, or design grants for eligible projects (as happened in TIGER’s 2nd and 6th rounds.) USDOT Secretary Elaine Chao has the discretion on whether she wants to award any or all of that $15 million.

Congress also capped individual awards at $25 million. This one is quite a shame. In the first round of TIGER, we were able to fund a piece of the CREATE project in Chicago—a huge multi-billion effort to rationalize rail movement through the region and de-conflict it with transit and roadways—an enormous project with benefits that rippled throughout the country. We were able to fund double-stacking rail projects like the National Gateway Freight Rail Corridor and the replacement of the I-244 bridge in Tulsa. In subsequent rounds, projects tended to top out around $25 million because Congress shrank the overall size of the program but still required geographic equity, modal balance, and a fair rural/urban split. These factors combined to make it incredibly hard to fund any larger projects and still check all of those boxes. With the increase in funding for this round, USDOT had an opportunity to fund more of these larger, transformative projects; but Congress has unfortunately made that option unworkable.

Third, USDOT will now evaluate applicants on how well they secure and commit new, non-federal revenue for projects. This is a major new criterion worth elaborating on. USDOT defines new revenue as “revenue that is not included in current and projected funding levels and results from specific actions taken to increase transportation infrastructure investment.”

It is important to note that USDOT won’t consider any local or state revenue authorized before January 1st, 2015 as new revenue and nor can such revenue be applied as matching funds for BUILD projects. So, for example, if a state increased its gas tax before January 1, 2015, USDOT will not count the resulting revenue raised as new revenue. That includes the 12 states that took the bold step of increasing their state transportation funding between 2012 and 2014. Examples of new revenue according to USDOT are asset recycling, tolling, tax-increment financing, or sales or gas tax increases. Under this definition, bonds do not qualify as a new revenue source.

Fourth, Congress provided a strict timeline for making awards. USDOT must announce the recipients of BUILD grants no later than December 17, 2018. In order to meet that deadline, USDOT released this notice quickly and has set a deadline of 8:00 p.m. EDT on July 19, 2018 for all applications. Five months to make award decisions may seem like a long time to folks on the outside, but given that USDOT received 451 applications in the most recent round (for just one-third of the amount of funding available here), it will take a lot of hard work from the folks at USDOT to hit their deadlines.

Questions for USDOT

The emphasis on non-federal resources is not new from this administration. For the localities that haven’t raised new funding since January 2015, they’ll be hard-pressed to do so in the next few months before applications are due. And it will be difficult to balance the preference for new funding with USDOT’s other priorities. For example, the Trump administration wants to prioritize rural projects, but rural areas have the least ability to toll or raise new funding. Which of these competing priorities will win out? I tend to think the rural priority will.

If your state has raised the gas tax, do localities within that state get to take credit for it? What if a state prohibits its localities from raising funds? I assume that the administration will excuse state DOTs from this exercise, but will they hold these restrictions against states in their applications?

These are the sort of questions I plan to ask USDOT officials on our members-only webinar, scheduled for May 14 at 4 p.m. EDT. T4A members can email their questions in advance to Program Manager Alicia Orosco.

The last point I will make is that transit was basically locked out of the most recent round of TIGER awards. Many people have asked me whether it is worth the effort to apply for funding for transit projects this time. My answer is an unqualified “yes!” With three times the funding as last year and a cap on the size of awards, we can expect USDOT to fund 2-3 times as many projects. It will be harder for the administration to not select transit projects, especially projects that have some value capture or other funding associated with it. Further, many members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have complained mightily about the lack of transit projects in the last round. If they fail to fund transit reasonably this time, Congress will probably slap another requirement on them, and I think USDOT knows that and would like to avoid it.

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Hawaii can reach their clean energy goals with the help of smarter growth and land use

Ten years ago, Hawaii set ambitious goals to reduce their dependence on imported oil and create a clean energy future by 2045. But when it comes to their transportation system, Hawaii has to look beyond just electrifying their vehicle fleet or finding cleaner sources of energy. Smarter land use will reduce the length and frequency of car trips, and encourage more walking, biking, and transit use.

The Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative is charting a new path toward an energy-independent future for Hawaii. Today, imported oil supplies 80 percent of Hawaii’s energy. Our dependence on oil threatens our most precious resources—the land, air, and water that sustain us. And it places our economic security at risk. Simply stated, our current way of meeting our energy needs is not sustainable. Hawaii must alter its course.

– Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative

Hawaii leaders and residents have a vested interest in both reducing their dependence on foreign oil and also finding cleaner sources of energy. Ten years later, on Earth Day 2018, how can Hawaii continue moving toward this vision? What are the key changes required, and what can the state to do make it happen? To analyze what it would take to get Hawaii to a clean energy future by its goal of 2045, The Elemental Excelerator turned to Smart Growth America (T4America’s parent organization) and the Rhodium Group.

Download the report, Transcending Oil:Hawaii’s Path to a Clean Energy Economy

 

What did we find?

If Hawaii did manage to shift to an all-electric vehicle (EV) fleet—included in our recommendations—but continued growing in the same form as today, the energy grid would need to produce one-third more energy than it does today. The power industry will already be struggling to find enough renewable energy without having to add such a large load. But if they pair EVs with building more connected, compact, mixed-use development with improved facilities for non-auto travel, vehicle miles traveled would go down by over 20 percent from what is projected, making it easier to meet Hawaii’s clean energy goals and saving people money.

To make the shift to clean energy, Hawaii needs to convert all vehicles to electric, such as today’s Nissan Leaf or the Ford Focus Electric. But no state can make this happen overnight, as the lifespan of a new car can be about 15 years. That means even if Hawaii required 100 percent of vehicles sold in the state to be electric by 2025, it would still take until around 2040 to see the fleet turn over from gas/diesel engines to EVs. And electrifying the fleet would be a monumental challenge. Hawaii would only have the authority to do this by joining California, who through a federal waiver has the authority to set their own vehicle emissions standards. Otherwise, fuel standards are controlled by the feds—standards that the Trump administration recently announced they’d like to roll back.

Compounding the problem, during that time period, Hawaii would also need to build out the infrastructure needed to fuel and charge all of those EVs, including a way to pay for transportation maintenance and improvements when there is no gas left to be taxed.

An all-electric fleet is only as clean as its energy sources

The Clean Energy Initiative aims to reduce petroleum use for transportation, which today accounts for two-thirds of the state’s overall energy use. In order for Hawaii to reach their clean energy future with an all-electric fleet, all of the energy used to power those vehicles would need to come from clean sources—solar, geothermal, wind, etc.

Even still, with no other structural changes, the net energy required would increase. If Hawaii kept growing and developing across the state in the same form, an all-electric fleet would add a 33 percent load to the electric grid in Hawaii.

Clearly, more is needed than just producing cleaner vehicles powered with cleaner energy sources.

Reduce transportation energy demand by pairing these changes with smarter growth

One reason the transportation sector uses so much energy is because we’ve put people’s homes far away from all the things they need—like jobs, groceries, schools and medical care. We don’t have to do this: we do this by choice.

This development pattern leaves residents little choice but to drive—usually alone. Rarely are two neighbors’ destinations located close together with everything so spread out. This drives the cost of living up by essentially requiring most people over the age of 16 to own a vehicle just to participate in the economy. Imagine that: a $10,000 cover charge to enter our economy. We want everyone to be able to participate in the economy, especially those that don’t have $10,000. Yet we exclude them in the way we design and build our communities.

Don’t be fooled—the free market did not create these conditions. In fact, prices in walkable communities with amenities near homes are worth a premium these days. But the supply of homes in these places doesn’t even come close to keeping up with demand. And our zoning codes prohibit the types of development seen in many of those in-demand neighborhoods that save residents money and cut down on fuel use. We require big houses set back from the street, separated from other houses with lots of parking and no amenities nearby. We engineer the “flood of traffic congestion” that results from all of it.

Just think: changes to state or local zoning codes would allow more traditional development where apartments are close to townhouses and single family detached housing, where houses are close to retail, restaurants, groceries, parks and schools. All types of households—young, single, married, seniors—could all spend less on transportation and put more money into retirement/housing/education/savings, and we could easily use less energy.

Reducing the demand for energy through smarter growth will help Hawaii make all its energy renewable and clean. This is the future we are encouraging for Hawaii—and indeed the rest of the country. Read our full report to see how it can be done. While Hawaii is unique, there are more lessons in common with the other 49 states than not.

 

Three critical considerations for evaluating AASHTO’s new Bikeway Guide

As a valued T4A member, we are dedicated to providing you timely updates on transportation topics.

On July 25th, The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) met to consider changes to their Bikeway Guide, including the long-awaited addition of designs for protected bike lanes.

AASHTO deserves credit for creating and updating this guide for building bike infrastructure, but AASHTO is largely responding to the massive, growing interest from cities across the country. Many cities have been the leaders in this area. San Jose, CA, and Champaign, IL, have had protected bike lanes since the 1970s, and Boulder, CO, and Denton, TX, since the 1980s. People for Bikes started the GreenLane project in 2011 to help more cities build protected bike lanes. The result is that — without any formal guidance from AASHTO — almost 300 protected bike lanes exist across the country today.

Aashto1

Flickr CC photo by Zane Selvans

It is important to recognize the limitations of AASHTO’s action and why it’s ultimately unlikely to lead to the significant expansion of new bike and pedestrian infrastructure onto more roadways across the country. Why? Here are three reasons.

First: AASHTO’s Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities is wholly separate from their standard manual for road design, the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets, also known as “The Green Book”. Unlike this new bike guide, The Green Book is the industry standard that sits on every transportation engineer’s desk.

Second: The Federal Highways Administration adopts The Green Book by federal regulation. Not so for the Bikeway Guide. This reinforces the message to engineers and local policymakers that one document has primacy over the other.

Third: These two documents are not written in conjunction. This often sends designers in different directions.

Aasto2

Flickr CC photo by Spencer Thomas

A local transportation agency interested in building bike facilities might seek out the AASHTO’s Bikeway Guide for assistance. If they do, they will be steered to some very interesting designs, but not the most cutting edge designs being deployed in many cities. For a more up-to-date approach, communities turn to the National Association of City Transportation Official’s (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide. NACTO’s authors have analyzed designs across the world, and worked with local governments more likely to build bike infrastructure.

While the AASHTO Bikeway Guide might help design bike infrastructure, the overall guidance in their flagship guide, The Green Book, pushes engineers toward roadway designs that make bike infrastructure difficult at best. The Green Book encourages wide lanes and wide roads with fast-moving traffic, which makes additional right-of-way for bicycles unlikely and creates a hostile environment for those outside of a car.

When these shortcomings in The Green Book are pointed out, many say it allows for flexibility (like this page from the Federal Highways Administration about context sensitive solutions). I work with state DOTs to analyze the barriers in their project development processes that stand in the way of building complete streets (roadways that safely accommodate all users from trucks and cars to transit users and people on foot or bike). In my experience, it’s a persistent challenge for transportation agencies to exercise flexibility that’s theoretical.

To use that flexibility, a project designer must first make up their own design without guidance from The Green Book, then undergo a challenging and strict review process for approval. For engineers judged on delivering a project quickly, this flexibility is really a Hobson’s choice.

I am excited to see AASHTO recognize the need for guidance in bike infrastructure design and support separated bike lanes, which are essential for making biking safe, convenient and attractive for far more people. Protected bike lanes appeal to seven times more people than unprotected bike lanes, according to People for Bikes. But, for AASHTO to demonstrate true enthusiasm for bike infrastructure and become a partner in building safer roads for non-motorized travelers, the organization needs to bring these designs and concerns into its flagship document, The Green Book.

More on the engineering metric that has an outsize impact on the design of our communities

California changed how the state measures the performance of their streets in 2013, shifting away from a narrow focus on moving as many cars as fast as possible — level of service (LOS) — and taking a more holistic view and measuring their performance against a broader list of other state goals that were often in conflict with LOS. But what is LOS? How does it impact how communities can design their streets?

In this second post of a longer series on level of service (LOS) only for T4America members, we walk through this metric in more detail and explain how it often works against a state’s, metro area’s or city’s other stated goals. Read the first post here.

Introduction

You may be familiar with this story: a community has plans to rejuvenate the economy by redesigning the local street (yet also state highway) running through its downtown, only to be told by the state department of transportation (DOT) that their proposed changes will slow down traffic and doesn’t rate high enough on their metrics to make it onto the short list of projects. Worse yet, the community is told that in order to make a street safer, they actually need to widen it and smooth out any curves, making it a virtual speedway, which would undercut the economic development opportunities.[1]

How do DOTs come to this conclusion that the proposed changes or new development would cause the roadway not to perform well? Most DOTs, metropolitan planning organizations and traffic engineers rely on a metric known as level of service (LOS). According to Jason Henderson, professor of geography at San Francisco State University, “Every city I’ve ever come across has some use of [LOS].”[2] Because of the ubiquity of LOS, this largely misunderstood measurement has profound influence on the design of our communities.

What is level of service?

Level of service is a system by which road engineers measure road performance on a graded scale of A through F. LOS measures how well a road is performing based on the number of cars and the delay automobiles experience on that roadway. Letters designate each level, from A to F, with LOS A, B and C representing free flowing conditions, while LOS F is stop-and-go traffic.[3] The score is assessed based on the highest level of congestion on that roadway, even if it only occurs a few minutes a day. Traditionally, roadway conditions are acceptable if they score a C or higher on non-urban streets and a D or higher on urban streets.[4]

Example of level of service graphic[5]

Santa Clara County Expressway Level of Service Map

The LOS measurement is calculated by first measuring the amount of traffic during the busiest 15 minutes of an evening rush hour. Then traffic engineers project the amount of traffic on the road in 20 or 30 years using the result of that measurement to determine if the road has enough capacity to cover the lifespan of that asset.[6]

One surprising aspect of the usage of LOS that many people don’t realize is how LOS is not just about how a road functions today. If a road is projected by traffic engineers to lack capacity 20 years in the future — an incredibly fuzzy practice that’s more art than math — that road still receives a failing LOS grade today, even if the road is adequately suiting capacity needs.[7]

The history of LOS

The 1965 federal Transportation Research Board Highway Capacity Manual introduced the LOS metric and it quickly became accepted as the standard measure of roadway performance.[8] One reason that states adopted the LOS so quickly was that it suited the country’s transportation goals in the 1960’s of building out a network of interstates and prioritizing automobiles to travel.[9]

Although LOS became the standard, transportation agencies at any level are not explicitly required to use it: there are no planning or project design requirements that mandate the use of either LOS or travel modelling. Planning manuals from both the the Association of American State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Federal Highway Administration “clearly state that these are guidelines to be applied with judgment — not mandate(s)”[10]

It is important to point out that although LOS was initially meant exclusively for highways and cities aren’t required to abide LOS as a course of law, over the years the measure has hardened into convention for all roads. The adoption of this convention means that LOS has routinely been used for the design of city streets.[11] Eric Jaffe of Atlantic Cities in 2011 noted that “By the time cities recognized the need for balanced transportation systems, LOS was entrenched in the street engineering canon.”[12]

What’s next in the series on LOS?

In our forthcoming third post in this series, we will explain in more practical detail how LOS has damaged communities, organizations, and advocates promoting smart-growth. As Gary Toth from the Project for Public Spaces brilliantly put it, transportation professionals, “in search of high LOS rankings have widened streets, added lanes, removed on-street parking, limited crosswalks, and deployed other (anti-smart growth) strategies” all because LOS has been the de facto standard over the last 50 years.[13]

If we are going to change the way our streets and communities are designed, we will need to change the way we measure their performance.

Citations

Providing a roadmap for starting passenger rail service between New Orleans and Baton Rouge

New Orleans and Baton Rouge are the two biggest cities in Louisiana, but they lack a passenger rail connection. On Monday, The Southern Rail Commission (SRC) released a gubernatorial briefing book, authored by Transportation for America’s Beth Osborne, that provides the Louisiana governor and legislature with a how-to guide for starting daily passenger rail service between the two cities.

A rendering of the proposed station in Gonzales

A rendering of the proposed station in Gonzales

Click to download

Click to download

This briefing book was produced in cooperation with the Center for Planning Excellence.

The idea of connecting Louisiana’s two busiest cities with intercity passenger rail has long been a popular one with residents, local leaders and the business community in both cities. But no matter how popular, starting that service won’t happen without strong leadership from the governor and legislature. This route has been researched in the past, including feasibility studies in 2014 and 2009. But with this report, the SRC and local stakeholders wanted to provide a clear, step-by-step guide to how a new governor could lead the effort to bring passenger rail to southern Louisiana in just a few years time.

The proposed passenger rail service would start with two round trip trains per day along an 80-mile corridor with more than 2.2 million people and nearly 1 million jobs and could serve 210,000 riders per year. But to get to those two roundtrips per day, the report lays out and explains five basic steps needed.

Past efforts to plan potential service were done in full cooperation with Amtrak and the railroads that own the tracks for proposed service. Unfortunately, Governor Bobby Jindal withdrew his support after Amtrak and the railroads had already put staff time and resources toward the plan. To help convince these other partners that the state is serious this time, the Louisiana leadership will have to start with what is normally step two: securing the funding for capital and operations.

Normally, once a state knows what kind of service they want to start and have determined the cost of any capital improvements and operating support needed, the leaders from that state would designate funds for that project. But considering this recent history in Louisiana, it is unlikely that Amtrak or the other freight railroads the state will have to partner with would be willing to commit any time or resource until they have evidence that the state is fully committed.  The report discusses ways to raise funding at the state or local level as well as federal programs that can used to support passenger rail service.

The proposed route with seven stops

The proposed route with seven stops

From there, an operating agreement must be negotiated with the host railroads, Canadian National Railway and Kansas City Southern. This step is easier and more certain to be successful if the operator of the service is Amtrak, due to a special authority granted to Amtrak by Congress to operate on any freight rail line in the country, so long as they pay the incremental cost of that service and it does not significantly harm freight service. With other operators, the freight railroad could refuse to permit access to their line or charge the operator more than they would charge Amtrak.

With money in hand and partners on board, the state could begin needed capital improvements, such as building stations — seven stops are proposed — and finally the rail operator would begin hiring and training workers to prepare for service.

With the strong support of the Louisiana governor and the state legislature, this service could be available to Louisianans in just a few years. The Southern Rail Commission is hopeful that the next Louisiana governor sees the strong economic potential of a new passenger rail line connecting millions of residents and jobs to one another. With seven parishes, a state, a railway authority and freight railroads involved, the strong leadership of a central figure like a governor is essential to making it happen. In fact, all other instances of newly created intercity passenger rail service have had strong leadership from a governor.

We partnered with the Southern Rail Commission and the Center for Planning Excellence to produce this SRC report. Can we help you with something similar? That’s a service we provide. Get in touch.