Sean Doyle, Author at Transportation For America

Transit will be reeling from COVID-19 for years

When cities and states began shutting down in response to COVID-19, the financial impact to transit was swift and immense, but the immediate impacts only tell part of the story. Given the myriad ways that transit is funded around the country, the fiscal impacts of the pandemic will likely be varied and long-lasting. Congress and state legislatures should strive to find ways to adequately plan for and address those shortfalls in the long-term.

As businesses closed and non-essential workers followed the advice of health experts to stay home, transit lost a lot of riders and fares evaporated with them. On average, fares make up the single largest share (36 percent) of operating revenues for transit. But despite the fiscal cliff that a lack of riders presented, transit agencies actively began urging riders to stay home if possible—for the safety of riders and transit employees.

Combine the loss of fares with increased costs for cleaning (supplies, labor, and personal protective equipment) and it’s easy to see why transit agencies needed emergency operating funding.

But that’s only part of the story.

Public transportation is a public good and as such is funded by a variety of public revenues, like sales taxes, property taxes, and income/payroll taxes. Parking garages, advertising, and bonds are also sources of revenue for transit—both to operate and (especially in the case of bonds) for capital costs like new buses or a new rail line. All of those funding sources have been or will be adversely impacted by COVID-19 and the financial forecasts of transit agencies paint a grim picture.

In places where sales taxes make up a sizable share of funding (like Via in San Antonio, TX) the budget hole will appear fairly quickly. Sales dropped, taxes dropped, and funds stopped coming in. Those revenues will slowly begin to recover if and when businesses start to reopen and unemployment drops substantially—a hard thing to forecast in these unprecedented times. The CARES Act offered some support here, but more will be needed, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that the country’s economic recovery will not be as swift as it was assumed a few months ago.

“Projecting is tricky. There are so many variables and unknowns. It’s like throwing a dart at a fan,” says Karl Gnadt of the Champaign Urbana Urban Mass Transit District. “Our largest revenue stream is our state operating grant which is funded by state sales tax. Sales tax has tanked. The cuts will be significant and dramatic. The CARES Act is a band-aid over a broken bone.”

But the impact on property taxes and payroll taxes will be less immediate and potentially more troubling for that very reason. The impact of the pandemic on property taxes will likely be delayed by months or more given how they are collected. And budget holes from payroll or income taxes may not appear for close to two years from now.

TriMet in Portland, OR gets about 60 percent of its operating revenue from payroll taxes, while IndyGo in Indianapolis, IN receives about a third of its operating revenues from payroll taxes and another third from property taxes. In many other communities, these taxes make up smaller but significant sources of funding. The conversation in Congress and statehouses around the country aren’t taking into account these looming fiscal crises.

IndyGo in particular is expecting a 50 percent drop in revenues that will suddenly appear two years from now. The financial forecast in other cities is likely just as stark, but these projections are getting very little attention.

“The unknown is how deep this recession will be and the impact to property values,” says Elizabeth Presutti, CEO of the Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority. “We’ll see our impact 2-3 years down the road.”

Without action, service cuts are likely. Network expansions and improvements could be halted or abandoned. Old buses or trains might have to continue operating without funds to replace. Layoffs could come, further hampering the ability for transit to provide a useful public service. Degraded service will make it that much tougher for Americans hard-hit by the recession to get to jobs and services right when they most need an affordable option.

As the service suffers, ridership will be harder and harder to attract and our communities will pay the price with worsened traffic and pollution.

As Congress and state legislatures consider additional measures to help communities recover, the long-term transit impacts should be considered as well.

Transit projects slowly leaving the station

Route 603 runs between Ogden Union Station and Weber State University in Utah which will eventually be served by a BRT route funded in part through a federal grant.

After the Trump administration took office, long-planned transit projects applying for federal grants began to run into administrative roadblocks, unexplained delays, and other difficulties that put the future of these projects at risk. In response, Transportation for America launched Stuck in the Station to call attention to these inexcusable delays and slowly USDOT began to respond to the pressure. Now, in light of that progress, our focus will be on policy solutions—changing the law—to make transit easier to build in America.

Nearly two years ago—in August of 2018—Transportation for America started ringing alarm bells. Under the Trump administration, “the pipeline of new transit projects has effectively ground to a halt,” we wrote at the time when we released our Stuck in the Station tool to track the administration’s (lack of) action on transit grants. Seventeen transit projects in 14 communities were waiting for funding; they’d followed all the rules over multiple years to get to the point where a federal grant was finally in sight, “and yet still the administration does nothing.”

As we directed the public’s attention to the unexplained hold ups at USDOT, media outlets started writing about it. Members of Congress started asking questions and holding hearings. The funding delays were the talk of transit conferences where administration officials were speaking. And slowly, our work to hold the administration accountable began to show results. Today the situation is markedly better. Twenty transit projects have been awarded funding and moved forward in the last two years.

That’s not to say everything is perfect—public transparency at the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has plummeted. The FTA is still failing to release project rankings (a key component in eligibility for a grant) and their annual reports continue to include less information than under past administrations. But the situation has changed over the last couple years and there are other ways that we can continue to hold the administration accountable and help transit projects get built: policy reform.

Policy is our bread and butter

Right now, Congress is writing legislation that will govern all of federal surface transportation policy for the next five years, including the Capital Investment Grants program. At the same time, the COVID-19 crisis has devastated local transit budgets, putting transit projects in line for federal grants at risk of ever coming to fruition because of financing, not administrative obstruction. Both of these offer opportunities for us to improve the program by changing the law—to streamline it, to reorient the priorities, to increase transparency, and to make it easier to build transit in America.

And that’s already bearing fruit. The long-term policy proposal from the U.S. House—the INVEST in America Act—would change policy to delay the repayment of local funding matches and authorizes the federal government to cover more of a project’s total cost.

As our focus shifts more to policy reform, it’s our hope that Stuck in the Station will become wildly out of date as new transit projects are funded and the pile of cash for new projects that FTA is sitting on continues to dwindle. We’ll still be keeping an eye on this administration’s actions and be ready to ring the alarm again if fishy business starts anew. But until then it looks like transit projects are slowly leaving the station. All aboard!

“Shovel-ready” projects just dig a deeper hole

Investing in “shovel-ready” projects—projects that are allegedly ready to go but just lacking funding—is an attractive idea for stimulating job growth. But as we learned in the 2009 stimulus, “shovel-ready” projects often aren’t all that shovel-ready, are frequently old road projects designed for the needs of the last century, fail to create jobs, and won’t help us build a safer, cleaner, and more equitable transportation system.

“Shovel-ready” was a good candidate for phrase of the year back in 2009, as the federal government put together a massive stimulus package to jumpstart the economy during the Great Recession. Elected leaders from both parties were enamored with the idea of pumping billions of dollars into so-called shovel-ready projects, putting millions of Americans back to work in the process. On paper it seemed like a great idea—except it didn’t really work. As Congress faces a new economic crisis from COVID-19, talk of “shovel-ready” infrastructure investment is starting to creep into the discourse again.

It would be wise to just stop it.

First, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” as President Obama reflected in late 2010, after championing “shovel-ready” infrastructure spending early in his first term. The Federal Highway Administration doesn’t even use the term. When all was said and done after the Recovery Act, it was pretty clear that most “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects took months or years to get off the ground, versus the days that the Obama administration was hoping for at the time.

Second, even if we could throw billions at highway projects—the thing the federal transportation program was (and still is) designed to pour money into most rapidly—those projects won’t create the most jobs or deliver the greatest return on investment. In fact, of all the ways you could invest in infrastructure, new road construction is the least effective category for creating new jobs. If the goal of a stimulus is to create jobs, then investing in “shovel-ready” projects won’t do it.

Take for example the Alabama Northern Beltline project—a 52-mile proposed highway that would circumvent Birmingham at an estimated cost of $5.3 billion—that’s been on the books for decades. Slated for completion in 2054, nearly three decades away, it’s a good poster child for what “shovel-ready” often looks like with one, unfinished 1.3-mile section of it built and $155 million spent before Alabama ran out of state and federal money and the work stopped. This ill-conceived dinosaur of a project might employ some people, and it’s certainly a hole for us to sink money into, but it will also lead to more pollution, more driving, and only further entrench systemic inequities in our transportation system that COVID-19 has laid bare for all to see. But if our goal is to build back better—to meet pressing needs, employ more people, and create a more resilient society—this project, and “shovel-ready” projects like it, are not the answer.

Just because a project is supposedly “shovel-ready” doesn’t mean that it will meet today’s needs or make any long-term sense.

Ready for a different kind of infrastructure investment

Last month we released a short report—Learning From the 2009 Recovery Act—that provided six lessons learned from the last stimulus and six recommendations for the next. When it comes to creating jobs, we found that investments in public transportation “produced 70 percent more job hours” than equal investments in road projects. And while the 2009 stimulus prohibited populous (>200,000) areas from spending any money on transit operations, that’s an urgent need right now in rural and urban areas alike and would produce the most jobs of any infrastructure spending. Funding transit operations is essentially 100 percent jobs, allowing transit agencies to avoid layoffs, hire more workers for ramped-up cleaning, and run more buses and trains to prevent crowding. If Congress wants to produce more jobs, let’s invest in operations for existing transit. “Operations-ready” if you will, no shovel required.

Beyond transit operations, we found “transit preventive maintenance had by far the highest direct job-per-dollar result, followed by rail car purchase and rehabilitation, transit infrastructure, and bus purchase and rehabilitation.” Similarly, there is a huge unmet need here, with an estimated $98 billion backlog in deferred transit maintenance and replacement according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. “Repair-ready” transit projects would create much needed jobs and address urgent needs that “shovel-ready” funding likely would not.

Repairing our roads, bridges and other infrastructure can also create jobs, but only if Congress actually stipulates that funds are spent on repair. “Crumbling infrastructure” is the rhetoric that’s always used to plead for more infrastructure money but then repair is mostly neglected once the money arrives in state DOT coffers. Time and again, including in the 2009 stimulus, when Congress has given states the flexibility to spend funds on repairing roads and bridges or building new roads, the vast majority choose to build new roads instead.

Every roadway repair project is also an opportunity to identify safety issues, particularly for the most vulnerable users, and make improvements. Most roadways today are designed for speed, not safety, resulting in the carnage that we see on our roads every year. But many localities are interested in redesigning roads to make them safer. And in the era of COVID-19, many localities are also redistributing public road space, opening it up for people that need more space to move while physically distancing. These redesigns can often be achieved with nothing more than plastic posts, potted plants, and paint, and usually lean on the existing transportation, bike/ped, or other mobility plans that localities have adopted. Supporting these “paint-ready” efforts can help us create more livable communities while improving our existing infrastructure.

Rainbow Crosswalk at Christopher Street and 7th Avenue in celebration of NYC pride month Manhattan

Focusing on some mythical “shovel-ready” projects for any future stimulus is an unwise use of public funds, and Congress must ensure that funds actually accomplish their goals, such as creating the most new jobs, actually addressing the repair backlog, improving safety and access, and building infrastructure that will support a long-term recovery.

We need a new way of thinking

It is time for change, but that will only happen if Congress learns from the past and uses the possibility of any stimulus (and the certainty of upcoming transportation legislation) to support different kinds of projects.

We want safer projects—streets that will save lives with slower speeds that are safer for people walking, biking, and rolling. We need cleaner projects—the transportation sector is the largest source of carbon pollution and a major source of other air pollutants that harm public health. We need more equitable projects—Black Americans are dying at disproportionate rates from COVID-19, due (in part) to decades of higher exposure to transportation-related pollution.

We should not use the need for a quick economic stimulus as an excuse to speed up poorly-conceived projects designed in the last century—projects that will fail to serve our needs today and tomorrow.

Dear governor, our congestion “solutions” have failed

Governors and legislators in state houses across the country have a major role to play in ending the congestion con and spending our money on projects that will actually improve our lives—rather than just temporarily shortening some commutes by 30 seconds until the congestion returns. Help us make that a reality by sending your local officials a message.

In the United States, conventional wisdom holds that the solution to traffic congestion is more and wider roads. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. Really wrong.

It’s been well documented for years that wider roads create more traffic rather than reduce it. Research showing this dates back to the 1960s and Transportation for America’s new report—The Congestion Con—shows clearly that on average congestion has more than doubled in the 100 most populous urbanized areas since 1993, despite billions spent on freeway expansions.

Unfortunately, the state officials in charge of directing how we spend transportation dollars haven’t gotten this memo and keep advocating for more roads as a solution to congestion.

It’s time to end the con. Send a message to your state legislators and governor to make sure they have this new data.

Send a message

There are dozens of prominent examples around the country that demonstrate just how futile highway widenings are, like the Katy Freeway widening in Houston, TX or the I-405 widening in Los Angeles. Both epitomize induced demand, where new lanes just entice more people to drive. More insidiously, new freeways also spur sprawl by making previously remote land more readily accessible.

Governors are sometimes the worst offenders here. Many have grand—i.e. expensive—highway plans to “solve congestion” and they appoint transportation secretaries that will make their pet projects a reality. In many cases, governors see their department of transportation (DOT) not as a holistic transportation department, but as a highway department. DOTs could just as easily be put to work eliminating our road maintenance backlog or building robust networks of biking, walking, and transit infrastructure that would reduce traffic burdens instead of digging us into a deeper congestion hole.

But governors are absolutely not the only ones to blame here: state legislatures can and do set limits for or give directives to DOTs through legislation and oversight. Legislators are often just as complicit in the congestion con, whether they know it or not.

Take action and make sure elected leaders in your state have the information they need to make informed transportation investments.

Take action

Real solutions for real relief

It’s time to break this vicious cycle. Instead of spending huge sums of public money on ineffective highway widenings, let’s instead focus on real solutions that can deliver real congestion relief.

The Congestion Con report details five policy recommendations. While many are targeted at the federal government—and would be most effective if implemented nationally—states can and should move forward with these policy changes on their own. In fact, state action almost always precedes major federal policy shifts and states should lead by example.

First, we need a new measure. Using vehicle delay as a proxy for congestion is 1) overly simplistic, 2) car-centric and ignores everyone else not in a personal vehicle, and 3) leads to an expensive focus on spot improvements instead of system-wide solutions. With new technologies that are readily available, DOTs could instead start measuring accessibility—what jobs and services can one easily reach and how. An accessibility measure is much more robust, includes all travel modes—walking, biking, transit, driving—and allows us to more accurately evaluate other important information like trip times, trip lengths, overall travel, mode split, emissions, health impacts, and household transportation expenditures. Some states like Virginia and Hawaii are already using access to prioritize projects for funding and more states should follow their lead.

Second, states should focus on road repair instead of road expansion. As we chronicled in Repair Priorities 2019, states choose to spend about as much money on repairing existing highways as they do building new ones—and the maintenance backlog continues to grow as a result. There is nothing preventing state legislators from directing their state DOT to prioritize repair with highway funding until and unless a certain (high) threshold of roads are in good condition. The federal government has given state DOTs tremendous flexibility to choose how to spend billions in annual highway funds, but in the absence of directives to spend on repair, many shirk that responsibility. The only thing preventing us from reducing our maintenance backlog is the will to act.

Third, we need safer streets for everyone. When streets are designed to prioritize high-speed cars and trucks, it robs people of the ability to walk or bike to their destination, even if it’s nearby. While Congress has a role to play here with the federal Complete Street Act, state legislatures could just as easily dictate that roads surrounded by development be designed for speeds of 35 mph or less.

Fourth, we need to address demand by pricing roads. We will never be able to build enough supply—we have to find ways to reduce travel demand at peak times. The meat of this recommendation is federal: remove restrictions on tolling federal highways and allow the proceeds to be used for other roads, transit, and walking & biking infrastructure. This national restriction on tolling is related to the current hold up on New York City’s congestion pricing plans. But if other states were to pursue congestion pricing in their metro areas as a way to raise more funding to invest in other transportation options, this would put more pressure on the Federal Highway Administration and Congress to change the law.

Finally, we need to curtail sprawl and focus on infill development. A major part of the congestion con is this negative feedback loop: new highway → new development → more traffic → wider highway → more sprawling development → more traffic ad infinitum. On this issue, states can truly lead the way. In Oregon, Virginia, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, and other states around the country, legislators are considering or have passed state level bills to remove overly restrictive zoning rules that raise the cost of housing in existing communities and make it easier to build new homes that are closer to jobs, schools, and other destinations. This reduces the pressure to build new roads out to the fringe to support new homes in sprawling locations

Contact your state officials

BUILDing Complete Streets

By now it’s well known that the Trump administration is no friend to transit funding. (If this is news to you, see here, here, and here). Even the BUILD grant program—which was originally designed to fund complex, multimodal projects—has been warped by the administration’s focus on roads. Traditional roads and highways have received the most grant dollars since the Trump administration took control of the program in 2017.

Our Taming the TIGER analysis showed how the BUILD program changed after two years with the Trump administration in charge.

The administration recently announced the latest round of BUILD grant recipients (which would be BUILD II if added to the graph above) and the story is much of the same: traditional road projects received the largest share of funding, while transit saw a further decrease—from around 10 percent of funding in 2018 to less than 7 percent. Freight held steady at just under 20 percent.

But there is a bit of a silver lining: Complete Streets & other multimodal projects racked up almost a third of the BUILD funding, the highest percentage such projects have received under the Trump administration. This is also particularly notable given the worrying rise in pedestrian and bicycle fatalities across the country, attributable in large part to the lack of safe infrastructure on our roadways for people without cars.

Among the Complete Streets grants this year is $20 million for the Orange County Local Alternative Mobility Network Project outside Orlando. The project will upgrade existing pedestrian and bicycle paths while constructing “shared mobility lanes,” shelter and naturally shaded environments, new wayfinding, and a transit hub. It will also fund “autonomous vehicle infrastructure facilitating local adoption of AVs.” Another multimodal project, The Underpass Project at Uptown Station in Normal, IL, received a $13 million grant and builds on one of the first projects ever funded through the TIGER program. In 2009, Normal, IL received a grant to build a new Amtrak station and civic space that has been a boon for the entire city. A decade later, this new grant will excavate a path for pedestrians, bicyclists, and passengers under the train tracks and allow a second boarding platform to be constructed.

And while transit only received a tiny sliver of the overall funding, some important projects got a nod, like a new BRT line in Memphis, TN that received $12 million for 28 new stations, nine electric buses, and charging equipment.

The BUILD program is one of the only funding options for innovative, complex, or multi-jurisdictional projects that can be difficult to fund with traditional federal transportation programs. But the Trump administration has made it harder for those projects to receive funding by favoring roads over everything else. Read our full analysis—Taming the TIGER—to see how Congress can help ensure BUILD lives up to its full potential.

Rose Lanes get love from Portland City Council

The Portland City Council is moving forward with a plan to improve transit service through a series of targeted improvements to some of the city’s most delayed bus and streetcar corridors. Known as the Rose Lane Project, it’s designed to advance equity, reduce carbon emissions, and increase transit ridership with quick-build projects. It also offers lessons to other cities struggling with sluggish transits systems mired in a sea of cars.

Yesterday, the City of Roses (Portland, OR) unanimously adopted an ambitious plan to speed up transit service by freeing it from traffic and improve racial equity across the city. Aptly named the Rose Lane Project, the adoption of this plan follows high-profile changes in New York City and San Francisco that have closed entire streets to private vehicles in order to free riders from crippling traffic and open up space for pedestrians and cyclists.

But the Rose Lane project, while sharing similar goals, is different. Instead of closing a single street to vehicles, the city is launching a series of improvements to speed multiple bus lines and streetcars through the city with a variety of treatments, including but not limited to bus lanes. And it’ll all happen fast. The Rose Lane Project is designed to be implemented as pilot projects that can be deployed quickly with low-cost materials, evaluated and tweaked over time, and then made permanent if they’re successful.

Phase 1 consists of 29 separate projects from transit queue jumps to traffic light changes to bus lanes that will be implemented this year and next. Projects in Phase 2 will bring further, tailored street improvements to a network of high-priority transit corridors in 2021 and 2022.

The scale, timeline, and explicit focus on equity and climate change makes the Rose Lane Project unlike anything else being done in the U.S. though it is based in part on the success of Seattle in implementing transit priority and the resulting increase in transit ridership.

The city takes action

In many cities, a transit agency operates the transit system—hiring drivers, collecting fares, maintaining rail lines, etc.—while the city controls the street. A transit agency may request changes to traffic lights, bus stops, or lanes but it’s ultimately up to the city to actually implement those changes on public roadways. This divided responsibility can be a huge obstacle to change; political will, more than money, can become the limiting factor in whether or not transit is truly prioritized on the street. The same truth holds in efforts to dedicate more safe infrastructure for people walking and biking.

In Portland, the unanimous adoption of the Rose Lane Project by the city council sends a clear message: transit is our priority. When fully implemented, the Rose Lane Project will reduce travel times for hundreds of thousands of riders everyday, improve access to jobs and services across the entire city—particularly for low-income households and communities of color—and help the city reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by making transit a more attractive choice to more people. Ultimately the city hopes the Rose Lane Project will help it achieve a goal of 25 percent of trips in the city made by transit.

“The Rose Lane Project demonstrates how equity and climate are interconnected. My office developed this bold, transformative vision for transit with PBOT by centering racial equity—setting a goal to reduce commute times for communities of color—and in doing so we created a powerful tool that will advance our efforts to confront climate change,” said Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) Commissioner Chloe Eudaly. “The Rose Lane Project is a major step toward meeting our equity, climate, and transportation goals by making transit a more viable option for more Portlanders.”

PBOT has put together a full report on the Rose Lane Project that is chock full of easily digestible information and great graphics. Cities around the country should take note—inequality and climate change are issues that every community is dealing with and the Rose Lane Project offers a vision of a healthier, safer, more equitable transportation system.

Is this flurry of transit grants a blip or a trend?

A First Coast Flyer BRT bus in Jacksonville. USDOT recently finalized a grant for another line of this service.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has finalized five grants to expand and build new transit lines. It’s a stark departure from USDOT’s history of stonewalling grants under Trump. This surge of grants could signal a shift in the agency’s stance, but the whole mess definitely underscores both how our federal transportation system makes transit hard to fund and why Congress should increase funding and certainty for transit in new, long-term transportation policy. Transportation policy principles released in the House suggest that could be possible.

Five federal grants for transit projects around the country were announced over the last two weeks. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is and it’s a stark departure from the delays and obstruction that have characterized this administration’s approach to public transportation funding over the last three years. Those preventable delays have resulted in a transit backlog, with dozens of projects currently waiting for federal grants to be finalized so they can get off the ground.

But this new flurry of activity offers some hope that perhaps the administration is changing its tune on transit funding. Albany, NY, Jacksonville, FL, Portland, OR, and Spokane, WA all received smaller (<$100 million¹), one-time grants to build bus rapid transit lines. The Federal Way Link Extension received a larger, multi-year grant to extend the light rail system in the Puget Sound region.

Unfortunately, many other transit projects are still waiting for federal grants to come through. The final phase of the Purple Line subway extension in Los Angeles has been in limbo for more than 14 months—the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has made two “allocations” to the project but inexplicably hasn’t finalized an actual grant. Minneapolis is another community facing an extraordinary delay on a federal grant for their Green Line light rail extension. Projects in Phoenix, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and other communities are all still waiting. These delays aren’t merely inconveniences: construction costs have gone up and timelines pushed back; people and businesses will have to wait longer to benefit from more transportation options.

It’s unfortunate that federal funding to build and expand public transportation has been at the mercy of a hostile administration. But this is a product of Congress treating transit like a second-class mode of transportation for decades.

A system designed to fail

The vast majority of transportation funding in the U.S. is dedicated to roads. Over $40 billion a year is automatically divvied up among states primarily to build new highways and make them wider. (In theory, this is also supposed to fund maintenance, but most states don’t.) By contrast, only about $2.6 billion is available for new public transit capital projects each year, and this funding is not guaranteed. And while the federal government will cover 80 percent of the cost of a highway project, it will only pay for up to 50 percent of the cost of a transit project.

In essence, capital funding for transit is orphaned, kept largely separate from other federal transportation funds, while roads are treated to a geyser of funding (that includes billions in general tax revenues because the gas tax no longer brings in enough to pay what goes out). The Trump administration has been able to play games with transit funding because Congress treats it like an orphaned child, putting it in the hands of whoever happens to occupy the White House.

While the current administration has been openly hostile to transit, even under administrations more amenable to transit, this second-class treatment has hampered its uptake. Fortunately, Congress has an opportunity to reform the federal program right now as they begin rewriting federal transportation policy. The next reauthorization should make transit a priority by funding transit at the same levels as highways, providing a higher federal cost-share for transit projects, and making operating support available. Future federal legislation should make transit safe, reliable, and convenient.

It appears that some of this could be possible based on principles released by the House majority on the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, but time will tell.

Cautious optimism

Building transit one grant at a time clearly isn’t working, but for right now, this is the system that we have and we’ll work to ensure it functions as intended. When it became clear that USDOT wasn’t executing grants in 2018, we sounded the alarm: our Stuck in the Station resource was born and media headlines brought the obstruction in this obscure program to light. Our advocacy on Capitol Hill resulted in an oversight hearing in the U.S. House, which did its own investigation into delays.

But in light of these five new grant announcements, we’d like to believe that the administration is done blatantly obstructing transit grants. For one, all the misleading terminology about “allocating” grants (but not actually awarding them) is gone from these recent press releases—and hopefully future press releases will only be about finalized grants and not meaningless allocations. Second, USDOT approved more grants in the past two weeks than in the first 18 months of Trump’s term. Third, as the administration begins its fourth year and priorities change, perhaps the hard-working career employees are being allowed to go about their jobs without interference from political appointees who don’t like the idea of funding transit.

That’s the optimistic view, but it’s also possible that this is only a temporary reprieve. The administration has been asking Congress to eliminate transit funding (grants or otherwise) altogether since taking office, and last year Congress made a $500 million cut to transit grants—a direct result of USDOT slow walking these funds. Rewarding a bully only emboldens them, and that cut was a reward for the Trump administration.

So we’ll keep watching to see if USDOT is ready to get back to work helping build sorely needed transit infrastructure. If that’s the case, we may be able to retire Stuck in the Station and focus our efforts on reforming federal transportation policy in Congress instead of babysitting a federal agency.

Business groups urge Congressional support for transit funding

The business community gets it—public transportation is critical for the strength and growth of local economies and federal funding for transit is needed to get projects off the ground. In a letter to Congress, members of the Chambers for Transit coalition called for fully funding the nation’s largest grant program for public transit and reorienting the entire federal transportation program around clear goals and priorities.

Ahead of striking a deal to fund the government for the next year, the business community spoke out about the need to fund transit. A letter from members of Chambers for Transit, a coalition of chambers of commerce, economic development groups, business districts, and other business groups, laid out the case for robust federal support for public transportation:

“Public transit is critically important to the economic competitiveness and vitality of our local communities. Transit provides affordable access to jobs for many workers. For businesses, transit provides access to employees on a day-to-day basis.

“Over the long-term, investing in public transit is part of an integral strategy for creating the kinds of communities where many people want to live, with vibrant walkable neighborhoods and a diversity of transportation and housing options. This is critically important to our economic competitiveness because these are the places where businesses choose to locate so they can attract and retain a talented workforce.”

Their ask was twofold. Most immediately, they called for fully funding the transit Capital Investment Grant program in the next year, a program with bipartisan support that funds the construction and expansion of bus rapid transit, light rail, commuter rail, and other forms of public transportation. The U.S. Department of Transportation—the executive agency in charge of administering the program—has also been engaged in a well-documented attempt to undermine the program and delay the signing of grants. Therefore, these business groups also urged Congress to exercise their full authority to hold the agency accountable and ensure USDOT executes the program as intended.

Unfortunately, Congress made a $500 million cut to transit funding in this program for next year. The cut is a result of the diligent work by USDOT to slow-walk transit grants and make it appear as if the program was overfunded.

Beyond the immediate policy concerns is a long-term vision for federal transportation policy. The current 5-year federal transportation policy is set to expire in 2020 and Congress has barely begun to rewrite it. The signatories wrote:

“Nearly seven decades ago the federal transportation program 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 many Americans reaped the economic benefits. With the interstate system now complete, we’ve never really updated those broad goals from 1956 in a meaningful way despite diminishing returns and a lack of clearly defined priorities for this century.”

Despite the clear need for an updated vision and new policy goals, what Congress has produced so far is disappointing. Instead of a more fundamental rewrite that acknowledges how dramatically transportation has changed in the last few decades, legislators are largely tweaking policy around the edges.

These business leaders asked Congress to define new goals and priorities and write policy to support those priorities in the next long-term transportation authorization. The Chambers joined Transportation for America’s call to support the following three core principles for federal transportation investment:

Prioritize maintenance
Design for safety over speed
Connect people to jobs and services

With new federal policy structured around those principles and robust federal funding for transit in the next year, communities around the country will be better positioned to become more economically vibrant.

You can find the full letter and the signatories here and learn more about each of the three principles proposed here.

Congrats USDOT, for a job poorly done

Congress required USDOT to spend its 2018 transit funds by the end of this year, and USDOT was poised to fail. But at the last minute, Congress bailed them out by easing the requirement. As the deadline approaches, USDOT is still sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that it refuses to award, unnecessarily delaying critical new transit projects.

The U.S. Department of Transportation is approaching an important deadline. After the agency proved that it couldn’t be trusted to execute transit grants in good faith, Congress imposed a December 31, 2019 deadline for “obligating,” or awarding, 85 percent of the $2.6 billion dedicated to the Capital Investment Grant program in 2018. That was 22 months ago. With only a couple weeks left in the year, USDOT has failed to hit that mark, but earlier this year, Congress blinked and bailed USDOT out by lowering the bar for them.

When initially passed last year, the deadline was an important, bipartisan signal that Congress was unhappy about USDOT ignoring the law, flouting congressional intent, and purposefully sabotaging transit expansion.

But Congress watered down this requirement recently to say USDOT only has to “allocate” funding—a relatively toothless standard. Allocation is not the same thing as obligation and just means that USDOT has made room in a spreadsheet for eventually spending the money on a particular project. It results in zero dollars actually going to build or improve new transit without additional approvals and action by USDOT.

In total, USDOT has failed to obligate more than $2.2 billion in funding for new transit projects since the Trump administration took office.

When it comes to FY18 dollars, though Congress threw them a lifeline, USDOT is still sitting on more than $668 million that it hasn’t obligated to transit projects. One of those allocations was made as far back as November 2018. These perplexing and avoidable federal delays seriously disrupt local project timelines and budgets.

As of publication, USDOT has only awarded (i.e. obligated) about 77 percent of the 2018 dollars Congress dedicated to transit grants that could be used to get new transit projects started across the country. But USDOT has “allocated” 98 percent of the 2018 grant funding available. That’s small consolation to the communities that have been waiting for up to nine months since they received an allocation on a USDOT spreadsheet for their shovel-ready transit projects to receive funding they can actually use.

Given the new standard, we should congratulate USDOT. They have successfully ignored Congress in order to push an anti-transit agenda that is broadly opposed on Capitol Hill and in the public—and they are going to get away with it. The bar has been lowered so much that USDOT can step over it without actually doing its job. Perhaps in the new year, the U.S. Department of Transportation will finally find its sense of purpose and start funding these critical transportation projects, and Congress will be able to find a way to hold USDOT’s feet to the fire. USDOT has already allocated the funding; it’s time to start spending it.

For more information about USDOT’s transit funding delays and how we got here, take a look back through our Stuck in the Station blog. and explore the Stuck in the Station resource.

Trump’s USDOT BUILDs even more roads

Federal grants for multimodal projects announced this month are decidedly not multimodal. As our research has shown previously, the Trump administration has dramatically undermined this grant program by funding traditional road projects that could otherwise already be funded by states, siphoning resources from other, harder to fund projects—the original intent of the program. But the U.S. House has adopted some policy changes to try and salvage some of what made the BUILD program so popular under the Obama administration.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) announced $900 million in BUILD grants to fund transportation projects around the county. Unlike many federal grant programs, BUILD grants are uniquely flexible—any government entity can apply for funding on almost any kind of transportation project, making worthy multimodal projects and complicated projects that cross jurisdictions easier to pay for.

The BUILD program was created under the Obama administration—and originally named TIGER—but after taking over, the Trump administration has more or less ignored this unique flexibility and turned the program into a subsidy for run-of-the-mill road projects that could be built with some of the billions states get each year for roads and highways. The awards released two weeks ago are further evidence of this trend.

We explored these changes last year with an in-depth analysis showing how the Trump administration has dramatically shifted priorities.

In the two most recent rounds of TIGER/BUILD awards—the first two years the program was managed by the Trump administration—only about 10 percent of funding went to transit projects. This is a big departure from the previous eight years when transit projects received between 28 and 40 percent of funding. Conversely, the share of funding dedicated to traditional road projects has grown to all-time highs; in 2018, road projects—most of which are eligible to receive normal formula dollars from their state—received more than 60 percent of the funding for the first time, after hovering below 30 percent for years.

2019 is just more of the same. According to a quick analysis of the projects selected, more than 70 percent of the funding went to conventional road and bridge projects—a huge share for a program still billed as an opportunity “to obtain funding for multi-modal, multi-jurisdictional projects that are more difficult to support through traditional DOT programs.”

But these changes haven’t gone unnoticed. In that same analysis—Taming the TIGER—we included some simple policy recommendations for Congress to fix the BUILD/TIGER program specifically and to improve the federal transportation program broadly. Some of these recommendations have been taken up by the U.S. House in their most recent annual transportation funding bill. Among the changes we’ve advocated for are:

A set aside of $15 million for planning grants and requiring the USDOT secretary to award planning grants with an emphasis on transit, transit-oriented development, and multi-modal projects.
A doubling of the maximum award to $50 million.
A consideration of project benefits beyond its physical location in an urban or rural area to the fullest extent to include all relevant geographic areas.

These are good recommendations, but they were not included in the Senate’s version of this annual transportation funding bill. For the House language to be included in the final bill, it needs to be accepted in the conference committee when the House and Senate reconcile the differences in their bills.

When Congress finally passes their funding bills (repeatedly hung up due to disagreement about funding for a border wall), incorporating the House’s proposed changes to the BUILD program will help it accomplish its stated goals despite the administration’s efforts to use it as a way to give states just a little bit more money to spend on the same old projects.

To connect people to jobs and services, we need to measure what matters: people

Today we largely decide which transportation projects to build and where to build them based on how much delay vehicles experience, while entirely ignoring everyone not in a car in the first place. By ignoring walking, biking, or taking transit, we’re ignoring the impacts on everyone not using a car, particularly low-income persons, people of color, and older adults.

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.

A century ago, we didn’t have GPS and GIS mapping systems. Google Maps on a handheld computer (i.e. your cell phone) that would allow you to instantly look up directions to anywhere with any mode was still in the realm of science fiction. Given those limitations, when the country started spending billions to build a national network of highways—and a bunch of streets to feed cars onto those highways—the easiest thing to measure was vehicle delay. Free flowing traffic = good; delay = bad. If cars were getting stuck in traffic, it was a sign that we needed to build more or wider roads, or redesign an intersection to improve traffic flow.

This was the most sophisticated proxy for success we could manage for many decades but this myopic focus on vehicle speed also ignored anyone outside a car and it actively undermined other transportation options. People walking or rolling were relegated to sidewalks (if they existed) or banished from the street altogether. Transit was now being mired in traffic and wide, free-flowing roads lured those who could afford a car onto the open road. And if you happened to live in the path of a future freeway—a path often selected because an area was deemed undesirable based on racist redlining policies—your home or business was razed. What remained of formerly walkable and vibrant Black neighborhoods were suddenly cut off from the rest of the community to make room for cars.

None of these people outside of personal vehicles are considered or counted when we use vehicle delay to measure the effectiveness of our entire transportation system. The ability of people walking, rolling, biking, or taking transit to get where they needed to go is sacrificed for people who can afford and operate a car.

This old measure hasn’t scaled very well, either. As more and more Americans began driving, traffic became more common. We hollowed out city centers in a quest to keep cars moving and then give them a place to park. Today, we still hear calls to widen roads to keep traffic moving. The problem, as it’s presented, isn’t that we have too many cars, but not enough road space for all those cars.

With technology available now, we can figure out where people are trying to go, we can measure how easy or hard it is to get there, and we can do this for every mode of transportation, not just cars. We call this measuring access and using it to evaluate how our transportation system is performing and to decide what projects to build next would make for a much more equitable transportation system.

Access to a better future

If you don’t own a car and you rely on walking, biking, or transit, your needs are largely ignored under the current paradigm. If you don’t want to spend $9,000 a year to own and maintain a car, improving your access to jobs and services is secondary to the needs of people driving. If you can’t drive, for whatever reason, you can only hope that there are viable options to get you where you want to go.

Using access as the primary consideration to evaluate projects may show that building and repairing sidewalks in a community would dramatically improve access to jobs and services for more residents than redesigning one intersection for cars (and for the same amount of money). It may show that a new bus line would make it easier for residents in a low-income community to access healthcare. It may show that filling a gap in a bike lane network would improve the ease and safety of reaching the closest grocery store from neighborhoods in a food desert. Or it may show that the length of a bus ride to school could be cut in half with a short connector road. Using access to guide our transportation investments may show these things, but we wouldn’t know because most transportation decisions focus only on the delay of cars alone.

That’s why our third principle for transportation policy is connecting people to jobs and services. Instead of using an outdated proxy that gives us an incomplete and indirect view of whether or not the system is actually working to get people to their destinations, let’s measure the actual thing that proxy was attempting to measure. Congress should direct USDOT and states to determine how well the transportation system connects people to jobs and services, and prioritize projects that will improve those connections.

Measuring access alone won’t erase all the structural issues that disadvantage low-income communities and communities of color, but it will solve one of those issues. By measuring access we can begin to make sure that everyone regardless of income, age, race, or ability can get where they need to go by whatever mode they choose.

Safety over speed week: The U.S. builds death traps, not streets

We took a look at one busy road outside of Orlando where a dozen people have been struck and killed by drivers in recent years. The mix of high-speed traffic with people walking, biking, and taking transit is a dangerous combination; in the event of a crash, people die. The Complete Streets Act of 2019 would go a long way to give local government more resources to redesign these dangerous streets so everyone can travel along them safely.

South Orange Blossom Trail isn’t a pleasant path through an orange grove, as the name would suggest, but rather a busy street in the Orange State that runs south from downtown Orlando. South Orange Blossom Trail is like many similar ‘arterial’ roads across the country: grocery stores, places of worship, clothiers, gas stations & auto repair shops, apartments & homes, restaurants, and a multitude of other businesses have sprouted along the route. And like so many similar streets surrounded by development in cities and towns of all sizes, it’s also a death trap for people on foot.

A street view of South Orange Blossom Trail and the location of this image relative to the 12 pedestrian deaths along this stretch of road from 2008 to 2017.

Between 2008 and 2017, 12 people walking were struck and killed by drivers along a 3,400 foot stretch of South Orange Blossom Trail. This six-lane thoroughfare (three lanes in each direction) is a gauntlet for people walking, and with the multitude of shops and homes in the area and bus stops regularly dropping people off on the side of the road, people walking are everywhere.

The nearest crosswalk isn’t even visible from this bus stop outside an apartment building.

This particular segment has a posted speed limit of 40 mph, but there is absolutely nothing about the design of this road that would encourage drivers to observe that limit. The wide, straight lanes and open skies communicate to drivers that this is a highway and you should thus be driving at high speeds. There are even signs that tell you which intersection you’re coming up on (because you’re certainly driving too fast to see it, as in the picture above). The only two signalized crosswalks along this stretch for pedestrians are at either end, 3,400 feet apart or about a 15 minute walk. While there are some unsignalized mid-block crosswalks, you have to be brave, stupid, or have no other choice to try crossing three lanes at a time hoping drivers going 50+ mph will stop for you. This street was built for speed not safety. It’s no wonder that a dozen people have been killed while walking along it in recent years.

South Orange Blossom Trail is the quintessential example of how U.S. street design standards and a focus on speed above all else have created such dangerous roads and why we have an epidemic of pedestrian deaths in this country. It’s a street designed for speed and to avoid vehicle delay. People walking, biking or taking transit are merely afterthoughts, just guests on this road designed for cars. Simply ask the people waiting to cross in the middle of these six lanes if it feels like this street was designed with someone walking in mind.

two images showing pedestrians attempting to cross the street.

It’s also the quintessential example of a street that the Complete Streets Act of 2019 in Congress is designed to fix. The Complete Streets Act would designate a small slice of federal highway funding to create Complete Streets that are safe for people walking, biking, taking transit, or driving. Any community with a Complete Streets policy—be it a county, city, town, or tribal government—would be able to apply for this funding directly to retrofit dangerous streets with safer designs.

Take action

Under the Complete Streets Act, counties could adopt a Complete Streets policy (if one isn’t already on the books) and then apply for dedicated funding to retrofit roads like South Orange Blossom Trail in unincorporated areas. Depending on the context, a safer street could include narrower lanes, protected bike lanes, signals at mid-block crosswalks, street trees, and other design interventions that can help slow cars and make space for different uses. On locally-owned roads, cities and towns could use the same pot of federal funding to implement similar improvements on dangerous roads.

For too long, prioritizing cars going fast above all else has been the top consideration in the design of our streets. It’s how we ended up with dangerous streets that look more or less exactly like South Orange Blossom Trail in all 50 states (even in Alaska, just add mountains along the skyline). According to current U.S. street design standards, this road and its ilk are designed exactly as they should be; that’s the problem.

We have to start putting safety over speed. Safety—literally keeping people alive—is more important than shaving a few seconds off a driver’s commute. And prioritizing safety is fundamentally incompatible with high speeds on these kinds of streets. The Complete Streets Act of 2019 would be a major step in the right direction, if Congress can pass it.

Send a message to your representatives urging them to support the Complete Street Act.

Safety over speed week: Our transportation system values some lives more than others

U.S. transportation policy focuses first and foremost on ensuring that drivers can travel with as little delay as possible. But this laser focus on speed sidelines other more important considerations like the preservation of human life and the health impacts of vehicle pollution. Prioritizing safety in our transportation policy—at the federal, state, and local levels—would be a major step towards a more equitable transportation system.

America’s transportation system is fundamentally inequitable. More resources go to wealthier and more politically connected communities; streets are designed to prioritize high-speed (expensive) vehicles over the safety of people, walking, biking, or taking transit; everyday destinations are out of reach for many people who don’t own or can’t afford a car. Those are just a few obvious examples.

Equity is a key consideration throughout our new principles for transportation, but it’s at the heart of the second one: Design for safety over speed.

In the U.S., our overarching priority in transportation for the past century has been to help cars to go as fast as possible, all the time, no matter the context. The term jaywalking was invented to shame people who dared to use public space that was increasingly becoming the realm of cars alone. We bulldozed entire neighborhoods—almost exclusively communities of color—in cities around the county to make way for new interstates that enabled white flight. And as interstates and other roads filled with traffic we spent vast sums of public money to bulldoze even more homes and businesses to widen the roads, only to watch them fill up with even more traffic.

But our focus on prioritizing speed above all else with the public right-of-way has not had the same negative impact on everyone.

The pollution that this futile pursuit of speed has generated disproportionately impacts lower-income people and people of color. “On average, communities of color in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic breathe 66 percent more air pollution from vehicles than white residents,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. This pollution shortens lifespans and can have lifelong impacts from developmental problems in children to increased rates of asthma, diabetes, and other chronic health impacts.

As our colleagues at Smart Growth America noted in Dangerous by Design 2019, “even after controlling for differences in population size and walking rates, we see that drivers strike and kill people over age 50, Black or African American people, American Indian or Alaska Native people, and people walking in communities with lower median household incomes at much higher rates.”

While federal data on traffic fatalities doesn’t include information on a victim’s income level, it does include where a person was walking when they were killed. And people walking in lower-income communities are far more likely to be struck and killed by drivers than people walking in middle-income communities. (One would logically assume that these victims are more likely to live in those lower-income communities.) The disparities in these fatality rates are a direct reflection of policy and funding decisions. Low-income communities are less likely to have sidewalks (in good condition), marked crosswalks, and street design to support safer, slower speeds.

We need to prioritize the safety of those outside of vehicles

Part of the solution is making sure we’re putting the safety of people walking, biking, and taking transit on equal footing with people driving. In most places, the people more likely to be traveling outside of a vehicle are people who have suffered the most from the previously outlined disparities and inequities. Our call to design local and arterial roads surrounded by development for no more than 35 mph would dramatically improve equity. When you have people walking, shopping, dining, waiting for the bus or otherwise going about their lives, roads designed for drivers to travel at 40 or 50 mph are simply too fast and too deadly. A pedestrian hit by a driver at 50mph is about twice as likely to die as a person hit at 35 mph.

See the full interactive graph at ProPublica.

To be clear, this isn’t just a function of speed limits.

While lowering speed limits is important, what most people don’t understand is that once you’re behind the wheel of a car, you will drive at the speed you feel comfortable. Designing for safety is paramount. Wide, straight lanes and open skies give unspoken cues to drivers that this road is built for speed. In contrast, narrower, perhaps curvier lanes that are enclosed by buildings or streets trees signal to drivers that they should be driving slower.

Beyond being intentional about the safety of people outside vehicles, resource allocation is critical. Many federal grant programs for infrastructure projects, even small but critical ones like redesigning a deadly intersection, require a local funding match. But for many poor cities and towns—both rural and urban—securing such matching funds can be prohibitive. At the local level, officials need to be intentional about tracking where and how funds are being spent to ensure that the streets in lower-income areas designed for safe travel just more affluent areas.

Communities impacted by vehicle pollution should also have a larger voice in planning future transportation investments. Too often these communities are excluded, or their voices are given less weight than others even though they will be the ones who bear the greatest impact from a widening highway or larger road. One example of this is how most projects to widen or expand a roads typically only consider the limited improvements to travel time for commuters traveling through that area, while failing to consider the impacts on those who may need to cross that street, or the increased air pollution for those who live nearby.

It’s simply not part of the typical calculus; all of the underlying metrics in the federal transportation program focus simply on vehicle speed, delay, and throughput. Many states are even planning for more people to die in future years—it’s an implicit acknowledgement that their streets are unsafe yet nothing in federal law requires them to try and kill fewer people. So many simply won’t act.

Safety must be our priority. Making walking, biking, and taking transit safer will save lives and help reduce driving, in turn reducing the health disparities in low-income communities and communities of color.

In the end, this is about whether or not we value the lives of everyone. Today, our transportation policy—particularly at the federal level—values a few seconds saved for motorists each day over the lives of people walking, biking, or taking transit. It values the lives of the wealthy over the lives of low-income people. And it values the lives of white or more affluent Americans over the lives of other Americans. By putting safety at the heart of our transportation policy, we can start to create a more equitable transportation system.

Shutdown averted; another crisis created

people waiting for a train

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) is refusing to obey the rules and Congress has so far been powerless to stop them. At stake are billions in federal funding for new and expanded transit systems that USDOT doesn’t want to award. But a policy change that attempts to reign in USDOT and make it obey the law could just be making matters worse.

Congress today has done its part to avert a government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution (CR) that will fund the federal government through November 21. The president has until Monday night to sign it. While a CR is generally just a continuation of existing policy, this one tweaks a key, but very wonky, policy for the Capital Investment Grant (CIG) program—the main source of federal funding for building new and expanding existing transit systems.

The CIG program has been under attack by the Trump administration, which is ideologically opposed to funding transit, since day one. Because Congress has continued to fund the program, USDOT has instead sought to sabotage the grant-making process by delaying grants, shutting down lines of communication, and making the whole process more opaque and confusing to everyone involved: Congress, project sponsors, and the public.

Now here’s where it gets wonky. In fiscal years (FY) 2018 & 2019, Congress tried to hold USDOT accountable by adding new language to their appropriations bills that required the agency to actually award (i.e. “obligate”) at least 85 percent of the funds for that fiscal year by the end of the following calendar year (so 85 percent of FY18 dollars would need to be spent by December 31, 2019 and FY19 dollars spent by the end of 2020).

The CR that Congress just passed changes that language to say that USDOT must “allocate,” rather than “obligate,” at least 85 percent of those funds. Allocation is not the same thing as obligation and results in zero dollars actually going to project sponsors.

The original “obligation” language was designed to force USDOT to advance projects through the CIG pipeline and actually award funding by signing grant agreements. The change comes from a concern that USDOT will simply ignore the law—let that statement sink in—which would result in Congress clawing back the CIG funding through a lengthy legal process.

In essence, USDOT doesn’t want the money even though Congress gave it to them anyway and ordered them to spend it because they know local communities are counting on it for their transit projects. But USDOT is ignoring the law and spending as little of the funding as they can get away with. To date, USDOT has only spent about a third of what Congress has authorized over the past three years. It’s understandable that Congress would seek another solution to get grants out the door—we agree more is needed—but focusing on “allocating” funds could create a new problem while failing to solve the original one.

Creating a new problem

Changing the requirement for “obligation” to “allocation” through the CR ignores the new realities on the ground. It used to be that an “allocation” meant something. USDOT would allocate funds to projects that were almost finalized and ready for construction to signal that a grant was to follow shortly. Under previous administrations, allocations would inform how much money Congress would provide in the budget for the CIG program and signal an imminent grant. But this administration has broken from precedent. “Allocations” from this USDOT are a big old nothingburger.

As we have previously described, an “allocation” is simply an internal accounting in the ledgers at USDOT. It doesn’t mean funding has been awarded nor does it guarantee that funding will ever arrive. In at least nine cases, communities have been waiting for months without funding despite receiving an allocation. One of those projects—the Purple Line subway extension in Los Angeles—has received two separate allocations without receiving a dime of federal money.

A table of nine nine unfunded transit projects with allocations and the date of the allocations

Congress’s new rules in the CR would unfortunately do nothing to ensure these communities receive funds and would give undue credit to USDOT for “allocating” these funds, regardless of whether that allocation eventually results in a formal grant.

Instead of simply swapping “obligate” for “allocate,” we’ve proposed that Congress requires a strict timeline for DOT between making an allocation and an obligation, along with requirements for the DOT to regularly communicate with Congress and project sponsors about the status of all projects that are seeking CIG funding. While Congress can’t do USDOT’s work for them, it can exercise aggressive oversight that would make it much harder for the agency to just sit on its hands. USDOT’s actions (or lack thereof) to date have more than justified such an approach.

Congress’s heart is in the right place; they’re trying to make USDOT obey the law and administer the CIG program as intended. The fact that Congress is even in this position speaks to the sordid state of affairs at USDOT. But their proposed remedy to this problem—changing policy in the CR to focus on tracking internal accounting (“allocations”) instead of executed grants—could just end up making things a whole lot worse.

Reps. García and Pressley host briefing on transportation and climate, announce caucus

Last week, Representatives Chuy García (IL-4) and Ayanna Pressley (MA-7) co-hosted a briefing on Capitol Hill on the nexus of transportation and the climate crisis and announced the imminent launch of a caucus focused on creating a new vision for our transportation system.

We took our message to Capitol Hill last week, with a packed briefing on the often ignored or misunderstood nexus between transportation and climate change. Transportation is now the single largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG), contributing 29 percent of the United States’ total GHG emissions. While many other sectors have actually improved, transportation is headed in the wrong direction.

When we talk about transportation and climate change, we too often only discuss electric vehicles and CAFE standards or fuel efficiency. The distance we drive, known as vehicle miles traveled or VMT, is entirely left out of the conversation. As we have discussed, federal policy incentives communities to build car-oriented places that are unpleasant or unsafe for anyone outside of a car. This forces people to drive more and further, generating emissions and worsening climate change.

At the briefing, Reps. García and Pressley kicked it off with a pre-recorded welcome video in which both members of Congress expressed the need for a more visionary and equitable transportation policy. Their creation of a caucus that would focus on policy first rather than funding is especially timely. With the next surface transportation reauthorization right around the corner and climate change emerging as a top issue for voters, this is a much needed discussion on Capitol Hill.

Transportation for America’s Policy Director Scott Goldstein then spoke alongside Adie Tomer of Brookings and Rob Puentes of the Eno Center for Transportation about the links between transportation and climate change. The three provided Congressional staffers an overview of how our surface transportation policy has incentivized more driving, which has lead to more emissions.

The briefing was very well attended, with more than 50 Congressional staffers present. Goldstein, Tomer, and Puentes each spoke of the need to reorient federal transportation funding away from highways and instead prioritize spending for repairing the infrastructure we already have and for projects that increase access within communities. Doing so would make it safer and more convenient for people to take transit, make shorter car trips, walk, and bike. These strategies, the speakers stated, are crucial to reducing transportation emissions.

We’re excited to have Rep. García and Rep. Pressley championing these issues and we’ll tell you more about the caucus once it formally launches.

Voters love Phoenix light rail. Does USDOT?

On Tuesday, voters in Phoenix resoundingly voted to reaffirm their support for the city’s transit expansion plans. But while the city can now move beyond this threat to its transit ambitions, the region joins scores of others still waiting on the Trump administration for federal transit funding.

On Tuesday, Phoenix, AZ residents threw their support behind transit, quashing an effort to end all future investment in light rail with 63 percent of votes in favor of continuing the city’s expansion plans. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this vote and it marks the fourth time that Phoenix voters have gone to the ballot box and registered their overwhelming support for transit since 2000. Four years ago voters approved a 0.3 percent sales tax increase to move numerous transit projects forward, and last Tuesday, in even greater numbers, Phoenix voters reaffirmed that commitment.

But will USDOT follow through and match that commitment?

At least three light rail projects in the city can continue to move forward now that the results are in and the south/central extension and downtown hub is ready to begin construction as soon as October—but only if the federal funding comes through. The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has yet to sign a grant agreement and award the money to Valley Transit.

What USDOT has done is “allocate” the first portion of a $345 million grant for this project back in July, but as we’ve explained previously, USDOT “allocating” funds is simply moving around numbers on a spreadsheet. For Phoenix to actually receive their funding, USDOT must sign a final grant agreement, something they’ve been notoriously unwilling to do.

First the Koch brothers, now USDOT

The campaign against light rail in Phoenix was run by local activists but supported and funded by the conservative Koch brothers who have a long history of trying to derail transit investments around the country.

With the referendum out of the way and light rail back on track, the federal government could now be the city’s biggest obstacle to completing the south/central extension on time. Under the Trump administration, USDOT has worked diligently and effectively to hamstring federal funding for transit.

Every time USDOT allocates funding to a project and puts out a press release, local media runs glowing stories about those local projects being “approved” or “advanced,” while often failing to note that no money is actually awarded and projects still aren’t cleared to start construction. There are currently 10 projects that have received funding allocations from USDOT but still have not yet received a grant agreement. Two of those projects were “allocated” money nine months ago. Phoenix received its allocation more recently, just days before a U.S. House oversight hearing into USDOT’s (mis)management of the transit grant program in July.

During the hearing, the acting administrator at the Federal Transit Administration within USDOT, K. Jane Williams, said, “in our administration, when we make an allocation, it is our signal that we will sign a grant agreement.”

The projects that have been waiting nine months might disagree with that statement. Though Phoenix is rightfully taking a well-deserved victory lap after a major win at the ballot box, it remains to be seen how long Phoenix will have to wait for it’s funding.

See Stuck in the Station for more information about federal funding delays for transit projects.

Indianapolis rolls out the red carpet for transit

More than a decade ago, local business and civic leaders in Indianapolis realized that for the city to remain competitive it needed to be better at moving people. Today, after an exhaustive planning process, changes to state law, and a successful local referendum where local voters raised their income taxes to invest in transit, the first major piece of Indianapolis’s transit upgrade is set to open.

This Labor Day weekend, the Red Line bus rapid transit (BRT) will start carrying riders across the city. It’s the first of three planned BRT lines in this midwestern city that, according to transit provider IndyGo, will usher in a “bold, new era of efficient, rider-focused” transit.

The Red Line is the culmination of years of work by current and former elected officials, countless residents and advocates, and business groups representing higher education, healthcare, and IT sectors, to name a few.

“The expansion of transit service in Indianapolis is the collective result from a tireless coalition advocating under one theme: connecting people to places,” Mark Fisher, chief policy officer at the Indy Chamber, told T4America. “It means making sure that our most underserved neighborhoods are as connected as our most established ones. The result is building toward a system for all, one that will boost economic benefits for both residents and businesses.”

Better transit is “key to luring employers, attracting young families and urban-oriented millennials looking for more affordable alternatives to pricey coastal cities, and drawing Indy-born college grads back home,” as we wrote a few years ago in an in-depth story about Indy’s ambitions.²

Backbone of better transit

The Red Line runs north to south for 13 miles, connecting intown neighborhoods with downtown Indianapolis, forming the spine of the improved transit system. One in every four people who work in the county are within walking distance (a half-mile) of the new route and it serves all of the major colleges in the area—that’s 133,000 college students. But this line won’t just serve well-to-do business commuters; about 20 percent of households along the Red Line earn below the poverty rate.

The new Red Line service will bring higher-quality service for residents compared to a traditional bus. Dedicated bus lanes that cover more than half of the route will keep buses moving as will new traffic signals that ban left turns at many intersections and prioritize bus travel. Riders will also pre-buy tickets at the station and can then board through any bus door to speed the boarding process. And new stations in the road median provide protection from the elements, real-time bus arrival information, and flush access with the floor of the bus allowing easier access for people in wheelchairs and with strollers or carts. The Red Line also features electric buses, making it the first all-electric BRT line in the United States.

North or south we have you covered! 🤗 #RedLine pic.twitter.com/LO2qe9MZEj

— IndyGo (@IndyGoBus) August 21, 2019

The corridor was a logical route for the city’s first BRT line: buses along the Red Line route already accounted for about 15 percent of IndyGo’s boardings even though it only covers about one percent of its service area. The Red Line will greatly enhance service with buses running every 10-20 minutes every day; and this is only the first phase. Future phases will extend the line further north and south to reach even more people with high-quality transit.

Part of a system

While the Red Line will be the backbone of an improved transit network, it is not the first improvement that IndyGo has made nor will it be the last. Along with the launch of the Red Line—and funded in part by the same successful ballot referendum in 2016—a number of bus routes will be updated, and every bus route will now run seven days a week, with longer hours and more frequent buses. Many of these improvements began more than a year ago. After proceeds from the 2016 referendum started flowing, IndyGo identified which routes would not be changed with the Red Line rollout and they improved service on those routes as soon as possible. Those simple changes have already increased ridership.

IndyGo is also preparing to roll out a new payment system, MyKey, that will allow riders to use prepaid cards or their phones to pay the bus fare. MyKey will also cap fares to a maximum of $4.00 a day and $15.75 a week. Once riders hit that amount in the course of a day or week, subsequent rides will be free.

https://twitter.com/Indy_Austin/status/1164863518677639169?s=19

And of course there are also the two other BRT lines in the works. The Blue Line will connect some communities east of downtown with the airport to the west. The Purple Line will replace and improve one of the most popular routes in the IndyGo system that runs north from downtown and then east. While neither line has started construction yet, when complete, they will bring many of the same benefits of the Red Line—more service, greater accessibility, and ease of use—to even more communities.

The Red Line and other improvements have been a long time coming, but they’re just the first taste of better transit that will be coming to Indy over the next few years.

“IndyGo is ready to move the city forward and make transit practical for all Indianapolis residents,” said Bryan Luellen, IndyGo’s vice president of public affairs. “The Red Line is a mobility enhancement to the city, and by implementing a reliable transit network, we will contribute to the long-term development of surrounding communities.”

In Indy, better bus service is driving a better transportation system for everyone. With the Red Line’s bus lanes, Indy is quite literally rolling out the red carpet for transit.

Federal transit funding delays cause real harm

USDOT has been slow-walking federal transit funding since the Trump administration took office and the U.S. House is finally undertaking an oversight hearing to hold them accountable. Here’s a look at one major way USDOT is misleading the public about their lack of progress and some of the impact it’s had on local communities.

Today at 10 a.m., the U.S. House is holding its first oversight hearing on the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) efforts to undermine federal transit funding. (Live stream available at the above link.) Since taking office, the administration has inexplicably delayed federal grants for major transit projects, become less responsive, helpful and timely in shepherding projects through the application process, and radically scaled back the amount of information it releases publicly. And the information USDOT does release regarding capital transit grants is often very misleading, designed to make it look like the agency is doing its job when it’s actually not.

Decrypting USDOT

To understand how USDOT is misleading the public it’s important to understand how these capital grant works.

Under previous administrations, USDOT would publish a list of projects it anticipated funding in the following year (it’s a multi-year grant process) and then Congress would fund the program with the requisite amount intended for those projects. As grant applications were tweaked and finalized, USDOT would allocate funding to particular projects before a final grant agreement was signed—which usually happened soon afterward—and money was officially out the door to the project.

Under the current administration, USDOT has stopped publishing a list of projects it anticipates funding next year because they’re ideologically opposed to funding any transit projects. But the transit capital program has bipartisan support and Congress has continued to appropriate funds for it—three times during this administration. Now USDOT—specifically the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) within USDOT—”allocates” funding to projects, they put out a press release lauding their work, newspapers announce USDOT has funded a project (they haven’t), yet no money has changed hands. Getting an “allocation” today just means USDOT moved numbers around on internal spreadsheet, nothing more.

Communities experience real harm

The whole application process is designed to insulate the federal government from losses. Before signing a grant agreement everything has to be in order: local funding must be secured, land acquired, project design finalized, etc. But what happens when communities get their ducks in a row, have put out bids for construction, and then wait…and wait…and wait for a federal agency that doesn’t want to do its job? Materials don’t get less expensive with time (they get more expensive) and bids come with expiration dates; when they expire, the whole bidding process which can take multiple months has to be repeated. While dozens of projects are still waiting for federal funding, here is the impact on three different transit projects, each of which USDOT has “allocated” funds for but which have not received a grant agreement.

The Bay Area
The Transbay Core Capacity Project is a $3.5 billion package of improvements that will help purchase new rail cars for BART and increase capacity in the transbay tube that connects San Francisco and Oakland. According to Railway Age:

BART is ready to move the Transbay Corridor Core Capacity Project into the Engineering phase, and [BART General Manager Grace] Crunican said the agency cannot proceed without FTA funding. She said the project has been delayed by FTA for more than a year, and every year of delay will cost taxpayers an estimated $120 million. BART had been anticipating FTA approval for entry into the Engineering phase by late 2018.

FTA has recently “allocated” $300 million for the Transbay Core Capacity Project from 2018 funds—an unusually high amount—but this does not supply the agency with any funding. Annual grants usually top out at around $100 million (this is a multi-year grant), but FTA has broken with that practice, likely to avoid having to fund other transit projects with the other $200 million.

Los Angeles
The Purple Line Subway Extension, Phase III is the final extension of this subway line that is planned to be completed in time for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. It will connect the Veterans Administration Medical Center and UCLA (which will host the Olympic Village) to the rest of the Los Angeles rail system. According to an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the LA Metro was up against a clock last year with construction bids set to expire:

The construction bid expires Oct. 3 [2018]. If Metro doesn’t get the funding commitment by then, the agency will have to rebid the contract. That could delay the project by nearly two years and increase the cost by $200 million, Metro officials say.

LA Metro did not receive a construction agreement by October 3, but they did get what’s known as a Letter of No Prejudice (or LONP) just before the deadline that allowed them to begin construction using local funds (and with no guarantee of future federal funding). The project has since received two separate “allocation” of $100 million, one from FY 2018 funding and one from FY 2019 funding. While construction has begun, there is still no funding agreement in place.

Twin Cities
The Southwest Light Rail Extension will extend the Green Line—which connects downtown St. Paul & Minneapolis—from downtown Minneapolis to the southeast suburbs, connecting some major employment centers. After unexplained delays and approaching deadlines, the Star Tribune penned an editorial urging USDOT to act:

The Met Council pleaded for Federal Transit Administration (FTA) action before Sept. 30 [2018], when two key civil contractor bids were set to expire and while sufficient time remained in the current construction season for preliminary work to begin. Those pleas went unheeded, with no explanation. This week, Met Council officials asked bidders for a 45-day extension. Only the low bidder, Lunda/C.S. McCrossan at $799 million, agreed. That leaves Ames/Kraemer, which had bid $812 million, out of contention.

Due to federal delays, Minneapolis was left with only one bidder willing to build its light rail line. But USDOT still failed to act. With only days left before the bid expired—after the extension— Minneapolis received a Letter of No Prejudice and was able to begin construction. Like Los Angeles, there is still no grant agreement in place, which means zero guarantee of federal funding.

These are just three examples of how USDOT is harming communities and undermining their progress on the ground. While many others have experienced similar frustrations and unexplained delays, they are reluctant to speak out publicly for fear of drawing the administration’s ire and further jeopardizing their funding.

These unexpected, unexplained, and unnecessary delays from USDOT are inexcusable and it’s heartening that the U.S. House is holding an oversight hearing. Unfortunately, the hearing won’t feature agency heads from any of those three cities or any other city that has been measurably harmed by these delays. It will feature a representative from the American Public Transportation Association, which represents agencies that must work with the USDOT, a representative from a road builders’ association, and the director of the Kansas City Streetcar Authority, which has not experienced any delays from this administration (yet).

While we’re hopeful that members of Congress will ask probing questions and hold USDOT accountable, the witnesses and their prepared testimony do not inspire confidence.

Try as Trump might, transit grants are here to stay

The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to eliminate a critical transit grant program and Congress has repeatedly parried those attempts. The new transportation funding bill from the U.S. House is only the latest evidence that those transit grants are here to stay.

The House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee recently released a funding bill that covers transportation funding—everything from passenger rail, to highways, to various grant programs like BUILD. One program in particular—the Capital Investment Grant (CIG) program that funds new transit and system expansions—has been a target in this administration’s crusade against transit, as we catalogue in Stuck in the Station.

But despite the administration’s repeated requests to eliminate or cut funding for this program, the new Democratic majority preserved funding for this program—just as the Republicans did when they controlled the House. While there are some proposed changes to the program that help illuminate some of what’s happening behind the scenes, here’s the bottom line:

The administration is still very actively trying to kill the program, Congress is doing as much as they can to ensure the program is executed as intended, and every indication is that this program is here to stay.

Let’s talk funding

All the talk in Washington is about money, so let’s just get this out of the way. Transit grants saw a small ($251 million) decrease over last year’s funding, but that’s only because last year’s was $251 million higher than authorized. So nothing new here.

By our calculations, there are more than enough transit projects making their way through the pipeline that are eager for a slice of this funding. That said, the administration is trying to paint a different picture. By failing to sign new grant agreements, adding additional and unclear requirements, releasing less information publicly, and requesting $0 (or massive cuts) for the program, the Trump administration is trying to undermine this transit funding and discourage local transit agencies from even applying. But Congress has stepped up their oversight of the program to make sure good projects continue to apply and get the funding they deserve.

Congress beefs up oversight

In an attempt to force the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to actually award grants, sign grant agreements, and fund new transit projects, Congress added unprecedented language last year’s funding bill requiring 80 percent of funding be distributed to projects by the end of 2019. Stuck in the Station tracks USDOT’s progress toward this requirement.

In response, to avoid signing new grant agreements, USDOT has taken the unusual step of doubling awards to projects they’re already obligated to fund to try and hit that mark. And they’ve misled the public about their intentions to sign new grant agreements with some serious verbal gymnastics.

This year, the House has upped the ante. The same 80 percent requirement exists (USDOT will have to distribute 80 percent of this funding by the end of 2020), but any unspent funds would now be automatically awarded to projects in the pipeline, even if the administration has refused to sign a grant agreement. USDOT either needs to do its job and advance these projects or Congress will do it for them.

Federal transit grants aren’t going away

As communities attempt to manage inexorable growth and change, transit investment is critical. Public transportation is and integral part of retaining a talented workforce, attracting businesses and jobs (and getting workers to those jobs), providing affordable transportation and reducing inequities in our communities, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other dangerous pollutants, improving safety, and reducing congestion.

Undermining federal transit funding doesn’t change those facts; communities are and will continue to invest in transit and the federal government should be a partner in those efforts, not an obstacle. But regardless of USDOT’s actions, there is no indication that grants for new and expanded transit are going anywhere anytime soon. This House appropriations bill is just the latest example.

Are we creating assets or liabilities?

New roads are often considered new assets, but by ignoring repair many states have let those assets become liabilities—as our upcoming Repair Priorities report shows.

Building new infrastructure is sexy—it’s a tangible sign of progress and officials get to cut ribbons. Policymakers often talk about new roads as economic “assets,” but they are more truthfully classified as liabilities, bringing decades of baked-in maintenance costs. Without a regular commitment to upkeep, these liabilities can break the bank.

As Repair Priorities 2019 will show next week, we have a lot of liabilities on our hands.

Look for the full report in your inbox on Tuesday, May 14. Then join us for a webinar on Wednesday, May 15 where we’ll dig into how states are spending their existing money, hear directly from a number of state DOT officials, and discuss our recommendations for fixing this looming financial crisis.

Not all states are in the same situation. Many states make responsible decisions to invest the majority of their money in repair. Other states are borderline irresponsible, spending vastly more on expanding new roads—and creating new liabilities—even as their existing system falls into disrepair. Much of this money comes directly from the federal government with little to no direction about how those funds should be spent.

In the midst of ongoing talk about a purported infrastructure plan—notably, all the talk is about funding levels, not what we want it to actually accomplish—and as Congress begins crafting a long-term replacement for the expiring FAST Act, Repair Priorities will be a wake up call.

More funding won’t fix our infrastructure problem without a serious change in priorities.

Register for the webinar next Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT.