Transportation bill being finalized, window closing quickly! Call your rep and senator
May 23, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
Today’s the day. We’re joining with dozens of other groups and thousands of individuals for a day of calls to Congress on the transportation bill as a select group of senators and representatives are reconciling the House and Senate bills in a select committee.
It’s all in their hands — whether or not the bill prioritizes repair of our roads and bridges, preserves local communities’ access to funds that can make walking and biking safer, or helps struggling transit agencies keep buses and trains rolling along — and we need your help to impact the transportation bill’s final outcome as the clock ticks down to a final product.
Can you take a moment to call your Senators and representative and let them know that the conference committee must preserve the strong, bipartisan provisions contained in the Senate’s transportation bill MAP-21?
Simply click here for a one-stop page to look up your legislator, get the script and report your call — or you can simply call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and use this script below. Leave your message with the person who answers the phone
Hi, my name is [NAME] and I live in [PLACE]. I’m calling to ask Representative/Senator [NAME] to support several important provisions from the Senate’s bipartisan transportation bill during conference committee. The conference committee on the transportation bill must do at least three things:
- Preserve the Senate provisions that provide dedicated funding for repairing our roads and bridges — and hold states accountable for repairing them.
- Protect my community’s access to funds in the Senate bill that make walking and biking safer by preserving the local grant program created by the Cardin-Cochran amendment,
- Keep the flexibility for public transportation “operations” in the Senate bill that allows struggling transit agencies of all sizes to maintain service during a fiscal crisis.
Please support the provisions in the strong, bipartisan Senate transportation bill during the conference. Thank you for your time.
Hang up and then if you can, report your call to us. If you live in the 50 states, repeat to call your Representative and two Senators. And ask your friends to join you in making calls by sharing via email, Twitter and Facebook. Time is running out.
Final House-Senate bill must prioritize the repair of our bridges and roads
May 17, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
| The House and Senate are hashing out differences between their transportation bills right now.
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After months of hard work and thousands of calls and e-mails from many of you, we’re close to finally seeing a full transportation bill reach a final vote. A select group of House and Senate members are negotiating the final transportation bill right now in a conference committee, and they have immense power to affect the final product.
More than 69,000 U.S. bridges are structurally deficient and almost half of our nation’s roads are rated below “good” condition. We continue to spend limited transportation dollars to build roads we can’t afford to maintain — while our existing infrastructure cracks and crumbles due to deferred maintenance.
The Senate’s bill would make the upkeep of our roads and bridges a top national priority. Now we need to make sure that this same priority is adopted as part of the final transportation bill that will go back to the House and Senate for a final vote.
It’s urgent that the final bill preserve these strong Senate provisions for repairing roads and bridges, and those decisions are being made right now. We’re so close. Tell your senator or representative to to support these provisions in conference committee.
There’s no way to know how much longer these conference negotiations will go on — time is short to signal our support for the strong provisions from the Senate bill.
Graphic: The process of passing the transportation bill
May 17, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
As negotiations continue between the Senate’s bipartisan transportation bill and the House’s policy provisions, it’s a good time to look once again at the process of drafting and passing a transportation reauthorization and see where things currently stand. Fortunately, we have this useful graphic from our Transportation 101 book that shows a simple view of how things usually proceed — complete with a “you are here” marker, just like a helpful wayfinding sign on a street corner.
As you can see, we’re currently in the “conference committee” portion of the process, where a selected group of senators and representatives meet together to reconcile the differences between the two versions of their transportation bills passed by each chamber. In this case, that’s the Senate’s full, bipartisan, two-year MAP-21 bill, and the House’s extension of current policy and funding, with a few non-transportation-related policy riders they wanted to bring to the negotiating table.
The 14 senators and 33 representatives are meeting together regularly — the meetings are not public — to negotiate a final bill to send back to the House and the Senate for a final vote. The numbers of members by party are determined by the majority in each chamber, so there are more Republicans from the House, and more Democrats from the Senate.
As you can see from the graphic, once they finalize a bill that the conference votes to approve, it will go back for what should be the final vote in each chamber.
It’s still unclear if the House will be able to muster enough support to approve any bill, especially since they haven’t had enough votes up to this point to pass any transportation bill, choosing not to even bring HR 7 to the floor for a vote. Will the House vote for a final product that is composed mostly of the Senate’s bipartisan bill, even if it does include their preferred provisions to deregulate coal ash, approve Keystone XL and gut the environmental review process? Only time will tell.
Until then, we are continuing to weigh in with the conferees (and hope you’ll join us!) to urge them to do five important things in their final bill.
First up for action? Ensure that the final bill makes it a top national priority to repair our roads and bridges, and holds states accountable for doing it.
Saving a transit system and turning the tide for the future of a mid-sized city
May 15, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
Last month, the citizens of Baton Rouge, LA, voted to raise their taxes to preserve and expand their struggling bus system. The landmark measure will nearly double transit funding — saving the system from meltdown while laying the groundwork for dramatically improved service.
To pass it, churches, faith-based groups and local organizers teamed up with businesses and institutions. As we’ve seen in similar local measures, they won by explaining exactly what taxpayer money would buy, building a diverse coalition and getting out the vote.
This in-depth story is part of our Transportation Vote 2012 coverage. Communities across the country are preparing to vote on the people, plans and projects that will set the tone for transportation progress in the months and years to come. These are the places that will provide the energy, innovation and inspiration for the next national vision for transportation. Transportation Vote 2012 will help educate voters, advocates and candidates and keep abreast of transportation-related issues as they unfold.
A crisis point
Even before the prolonged fiscal crisis hitting governments everywhere, Baton Rouge’s Capital Area Transit System (CATS) struggled to do more with less. Over the last few years, service had degraded to the point that the wait for a bus exceeded 75 minutes and average rides were over two hours long. The system was saved repeatedly only by last-ditch city budget shuffles, creative grants and even private donations.
The biggest recent blow came when Louisiana State University backed out of the CATS system after years of student complaints and contracted with a new (more expensive) private operator. That meant a loss of $2.4 million from the CATS annual budget.
In 2010, a parish-wide tax to support the transit system failed at the ballot box, in part because large parts of the parish (same as counties in other states) don’t use or have access to the service. When projections came in that the transit agency would be so far in the red they’d have to shut down in summer 2011, it became painfully clear that something major needed to be done.
After cobbling together grants and funding to make it through 2011, the mayor appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission to make recommendations not only to save the service, but to create something much better. But the first job was to save the system, as Rev. Raymond Jetson, the chair of that commission, told the Baton Rouge Advocate: “Before there can be a robust transit system, before you can do novel things like light rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and before you can have street cars from downtown to LSU, you have to have a backbone to the system,” he said. “And that backbone is a quality bus system.”
The commission learned that Baton Rouge was the largest city of its size in the country to have a transit system without a dedicated revenue source, subsisting on annual local government appropriations.
But before putting a funding measure to voters, the commission recommended significant reforms to the composition of the transit board and an end to the ability of the Metro Council to veto the board’s decisions. “Governance reform and long term accountability … helped separate it from the previous failed measures,” said Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge, a broad, multi-racial, faith-based coalition of institutions backing the measure.
Photo courtesy of Frank McMains, www.frankmcmains.com
So how did they do it?
Coalition building
The first step was to build the core coalition that would push this measure to victory.
Enter Together Baton Rouge, a relatively new organization of churches, faith-based groups, social workers, and university students and groups. Together Baton Rouge led the way as the grassroots behind the measure, coordinating call banks, get-out-the-vote rallies, more than 120 educational “transit academies” and door-to-door canvassing of tens of thousands of homes by hundreds of volunteers. (Note that LSU students chose to get actively involved even though CATS was no longer the provider of their transit service on campus.)
They began with three informational meetings with 300-400 people each, where “community members told other community members why things were bad and what the new plan was,” said Bagert.
“We asked two questions on the sign-in card: ‘Do you want to be part of a voter outreach campaign?’ and, ‘Are you part of an organization and would you be willing to organize one of these sessions?’ We built a strong base of people that wanted to help do outreach and educate their fellow community members.”
Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge
In part because of the groundwork of the Blue Ribbon Commission and other partnerships, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber got on board along with other business groups. Hotels and hospitals, whose leaders realized how much of their workforce depended on CATS each day, joined in.
Colletta Barrett, vice president of missions for Our Lady of the Lake hospital system told the Advocate that 10 percent of OLOL’s staff, or 400 people, use CATS.
It is imperative, she said, that a transit system is available to move people from North Baton Rouge to the medical corridor in the southern part of the parish.“It’s unacceptable that it takes an hour and 45 minutes to get to this side of town,” she said. “We have told our employees that we have an individual social responsibility to take care of each other.”
And:
Ralph Ney, hotel general manager for Embassy Suites [hotel], said about 15 percent of his workforce uses CATS to get to work, which sometimes results in his employees being late.
“It’s difficult to hire and maintain employees who don’t have transportation,” said Ney, who was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission. “It’s evolved to where a lot of our employees don’t even take the bus because they can’t get to work on time, so they’re riding bikes or catching rides.”
A key part of the coalition was the Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX), a T4 America partner and non-profit that helps Louisiana communities with planning issues and addressing complex problems with effective, forward-thinking, implementable solutions. They became involved through their CONNECT initiative to build a diverse coalition across the New Orleans to Baton Rouge super region to advocate for smarter housing and transportation investments. The CONNECT initiative concluded that one of the critical pieces for regional connectivity is a viable, robust transit system serving the metro area. This was also strongly recommended in the new comprehensive plan for Baton Rouge, called FutureBR.
CPEX worked with many of the former members of the Blue Ribbon Commission to create the Baton Rouge Transit Coalition, a diverse set of partners who provided information, resources and conducted educational outreach to the Baton Rouge community. They hosted numerous outreach meetings, advocated for the changes to CATS governance in the state house, created a website that became a clearinghouse for facts and research during the campaign, and worked closely with the Baton Rouge Area Chamber to solicit support from the business community — in addition to being a strong part of the grassroots effort led primarily by Together Baton Rouge.
In the end, the boosters of the transit measure had built a coalition that had strong grassroots, wide reach, and a diverse range of interests. Without the participation of any one of the core coalition members — Together Baton Rouge’s grassroots and trusted community members, CPEX and their coalition of transit boosters and others, and the area Chamber and the business community — the effort would not have had the same success.
Trusted messengers — and message
Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge summed up this strategy simply: “We let the community leaders be out front leading the way. Not professionals, not paid staff, not elected officials, not transit officials.”
“One of the strengths of this effort was that the plan was created by community leaders and many of the important people were already behind the plan,” said Rachel DiResto of CPEX. “It certainly took some effort to get new folks on board, but the important pillars were already on board. We didn’t need to convince them.”
For the message, especially in the key districts with heavy transit usage and service, the campaign kept it very basic. “Save our system.” They noted that Baton Rouge was the only city of its size without a decent transit system, and talked about the people who depend on it each day: Perhaps the nurse who cares for your mother at the hospital, or your neighbor or friend. The campaign steered clear of some of the typical statistics in transit campaigns about reducing traffic congestion, gas prices or environmental impacts.
The above story about the hospital and hotel workers shows how the advocates built a larger, inclusive narrative and a vision for the community’s future. The events were filled with personal stories and made the impact of the system (and the potential impacts of not having it or having it improved) clear to everyone, regardless of who they were, where they lived, or whether or not they rode CATS.
Success wasn’t due to being the smartest person in the room armed with the most data and facts. It was about making the impacts real and relatable through powerful stories helping people realize the bonds and impacts of community.
“Outreach, outreach, outreach”
To deliver that message, Together Baton Rouge and the coalition held an insanely ambitious number of community outreach sessions they called “transit academies” or “civic academies” in churches, community centers and other venues. In the four-month campaign leading up to the April 21 vote, they hosted 120 of these sessions.
“Anywhere anyone wanted to hear more, we did a presentation,” said DiResto of CPEX. “And it paid off with more people who hadn’t been active voters showing up at the polls for a special election.”
Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge
These meetings were largely targeted to areas and precincts where support and heavy turnout would be needed to shift the outcome of the vote. “The diversity of those meetings was a huge plus,” DiResto said. “People who would never ride CATS were sitting in the same meetings with those who ride it every day. And their stories really impacted the former.”
The Advocate told one such story, about Fred Skelton, a 70-year-old Baton Rouge homeowner who had never ridden a CATS bus before. But during one community meeting he said he would be “first in line at his voting precinct to support” the 10-year, 10.6-mill property tax. The reason, he said, is because before his mother died, she used to stay at a nursing home where he’d visit her. When he visited, he said, he remembered frequently seeing groups of employees waiting for the bus.
“Those people who were waiting for the bus are the people who were taking care of my mother,” he said. “If we shut down the transit system, who will take care of those people?”
Strategic precinct targeting
Resources are always limited in a campaign, and therefore best deployed where they can make the most impact. The overall strategy — change minds of people on the fence, increase support from typically opposed groups, or focus primarily on the base — determines where resources should be targeted.
One of the biggest differences between this successful measure and the recent failed measure in 2010 was the use of more strategic targeting of resources in key precincts. Though the campaign did deploy some resources in suburban areas with small amounts of service, mostly to blunt opposition, the brunt of their efforts focused on getting out the vote in their strongest precincts.
Canvassing team. Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge
“We did detailed analysis of the electorate,” said Bagert of Together Baton Rouge. “We referred to the recent failed measure for background, which helped analyze the lay of the land. We focused our direct energy on turning out the strongest [most supportive] precincts, leaving out voters that had no voting history in the last 4 years. We tried to get 10 percent of the 2008 presidential election voters to vote for the measure.”
As a result of this strategy, the campaign was well poised to bounce back and succeed when The Advocate threw a curveball late in the game and editorialized against the transit tax, which likely cost the campaign a significant amount of support in precincts with already low support or people and groups that were undecided.
Making the benefits tangible and measurable
Whether it is the federal program or a local ballot measure, voters need to know what our dollars are really “buying” at the end of the day. Are they going to fix our bridges? How will they better connect workers with jobs, make their lives eaier, save them money?
On this count, the coalition in Baton Rouge did an admirable job of making this crystal clear — backed in large part by the commission recommendations that had large buy-in from day one. In every meeting they offered a list of promised CATS improvements:
CATS promises the following changes if the tax passes:
- Decreased average wait times for buses from 75 minutes to 15 minutes.
- Eight new express and limited stop lines, serving the airport, universities, mall and other areas.
- GPS tracking on the entire fleet, with exact arrival times accessible on cellphones.
- New shelters, benches and signage at bus stops.
- Expanded service to high-demand areas and increased routes, from 19 to 37.
- Three new transfer centers operating in a grid system to replace the outdated route system that leads all buses back to Florida Boulevard.
- A foundation for Bus Rapid Transit, a system in which buses get their own right-of-way lanes.
The ambitiousness of the promised changes was part of the success. Given the (somewhat unfair) perception that CATS was a poorly governed money drain, simply offering up a plan to pour money into CATS and hope for the best was not going to fly. People had to be inspired to believe that things actually would get better.
Similar specificity and transparency, including a long-range map of projects, helped win 67 percent of the vote for Measure R in Los Angeles. Supporters in Atlanta hope that a pre-approved list of transit and road projects will help convince voters to support a regional sales tax this July. The Baton Rouge formula – specific improvements, accountability reforms and relentless grassroots engagement – could offer a path to similar success.
Wrapping it up
The transit ballot measure was approved on April 21 in Baton Rouge, 54 percent to 46 percent and the municipality of Baker, 58 percent to 42 percent. In Zachary, a more suburban area with little service, it was rejected, 79 percent to 21 percent. Early returns showed the measure losing with only 40 percent support, but “then the precincts we had worked came in and voted in historic levels, supporting the measure at around 90 percent in those key precincts,” according to Bagert. “The key was really getting strong vote in supportive precincts.”
The story isn’t over, however.
The governance reforms for CATS, including changing the Metro Council’s veto power, are still passing through the state legislature. (The council’s veto power over changes in fares, routes, schedules and other operations was cited by the Blue Ribbon Commission as a key factor crippling the transit system.) The board nominating process will also change so that 13 different groups that have a stake in transit system (hospitals, businesses, etc.) can nominate members to the board.
Though some groups that were opposed are considering some legal challenges to the tax itself, the Baton Rouge story shows us a great success story of how a community rallied around their important transit system, fought to save it and improve it, and built a winning campaign to do exactly that.
Advice for others
Facing a ballot measure in your area? Planning one? Here are four last smart pieces of advice to take with you from Rachel DiResto from the Center for Planning Excellence.
- Bring core partners to the table early and find your champions who have to be willing to speak well to various audiences and who are willing to expend time and energy for your cause;
- Frequent communication with other partners is critical to maximize resources and not duplicate efforts;
- Focus on the voter outcome – grassroots advocacy is essential – target those folks who are supportive and mobilize them to show up to vote instead of spending all of your energy combatting those opposed.
- Frequent outreach to different sectors – know your message for various audiences
The election day team for Mid City. Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge
Excited? Encouraged? Learn something that you didn’t know before? Let us know in the comments.
Our sincere thanks go out to Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge and Rachel DiResto and Lacy Strohschein of the Center for Planning Excellence for their time and information for the behind-the-scenes story of their success. And also to Rebekah Allen of the Advocate, whose solid reporting on the issue for the last few years was invaluable for understanding and background, as well as the source of valuable quotes.
Follow all Transportation Vote 2012 coverage here.
Kicking off “Transportation Vote 2012″
May 10, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
Local communities across the country are preparing to vote on the people, plans and projects that will set the tone for transportation progress in the months and years to come — with many communities already showing us how it’s done. Transportation Vote 2012 will help educate voters, advocates and candidates and keep abreast of transportation-related campaigns as they unfold.
As the House and Senate struggle to come to agreement over renewing the federal program, local governments and voters are feeling urgency about the state of our infrastructure. And voters across the political spectrum are supportive of spending their money on improving it – despite an ongoing a fiscal crisis and the anti-government rhetoric that permeates political discourse.
With maintenance needs growing along with population and travel demand, local governments increasingly are asking voters to approve ballot measures to fund transportation – and usually succeeding.
What is Transportation Vote 2012?
For the next six or seven months, we’ll be offering a series of online presentations, including interviews with experts and lessons we’ve learned, that will help individuals and non-profit groups talk about transportation effectively; engage in educating candidates around transportation reform and infrastructure investment; understand why and how local transportation ballot measures are winning at the polls. We’ll be sharing inspiring success stories from other communities; profiling local leaders and communities who are showing Congress how it’s done.
Whether covering the upcoming historic transportation ballot measure in Atlanta, telling the story of St. Louis’ successful transit referendum that saved their bus service and expanded rail transit in 2010, showing you what you can do in an election, or highlighting a spate of candidates making transportation a key issue in a local election, we’re going to equip you to get more engaged and help improve transportation decisions in your community.
Join us for the first presentation. Free and open to the public.
This first Transportation Vote 2012 online presentation is coming up next Thursday May 17th at 2 PM EDT, so register today and save the date. It’s completely free and open to the public — not just T4 America coalition members or supporters.
Do you work for a non-profit organization and want to raise the profile of transportation issues during the election but are unsure of the “do’s and don’ts” when engaging in educational activities around an election? For this first event, we’re going to talk about the types of educational activities that 501(c)3 non-profit organizations can legally engage in around the elections to raise the profile of transportation.
And look for the TV2012 banner above on the T4 America website to mark more coverage and events, coming soon!
U.S. communities step up, hoping a strong federal commitment to infrastructure will follow
May 10, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
Is the era of massive, transformational infrastructure investment over? Or are we merely in a transitional phase as the gas tax loses its former power and we debate both new revenue sources and even more importantly, new priorities, for the next generation of transportation investment?
One thing is certain: as Congress is finally close to passing a transportation bill more than 953 days after it first expired, many cities and communities have charged ahead with more “fine-grained” approaches to transportation funding and construction. These cities and regions have a sharp understanding that the choices made about infrastructure today affect their economies for years to come and are taking steps to make those needed investments today.
But will they be enough without the strong federal partner we’ve had for the last 50 years leading the way?
That remains to be seen, according to this compelling new report from the Urban Land Institute out yesterday, which lays out the state of infrastructure investment here and around the world. But it also points out innovative ways to take the situation we have — flat-lined federal investment and no likely windfall of cash for large scale infrastructure anytime soon — and do all we can with the dollars we have to build the system that will carry us deep into the 21st century.
One key change ULI suggests we might see is one we’ve been pushing for from day one at T4 America — and also in the current House/Senate conference: measuring the performance of the dollars we spend to see if they’re helping us meet our goals, and holding states accountable if they don’t. “Ironically, fiscal constraints finally may compel some better results,” they say, “figuring out what matters most, and what will get the best bang for the buck, becomes even more urgent.”
The report is a good overview of the state of our country’s infrastructure, how we fund it, and the challenges we’re currently facing right now — all of which are things we’ve all heard regularly. There’s been no shortage of reports and calls to action and reminders of the sorry state of our country’s infrastructure over the last few years. Which is why the most exciting parts of this report chronicle all the different ways that states, cities and local communities are stepping out on their own, raising funds from innovative sources, casting their own vision for transportation, and hoping that the federal government will soon again reaffirm its commitment as a strong financial partner.
As we’re fond of pointing out, when there’s transparency and accountability for exactly what transportation dollars are going to buy — this new transit line, that new busway, this new bridge project — transportation ballot measures pass close to 70 percent of the time, even when voters are taxing themselves. Check out this graphic from the report on transportation ballot measures.
Click to enlarge.
There’s also a great section on Measure R and America Fast Forward, Los Angeles’ innovative plan to build 30 years of transit projects in 10 years. Two-thirds of L.A. voters approved a 30-year sales tax as a dedicated funding stream for the program that will also be used to leverage what they hope will be loans and low-cost financing from the federal government. This L.A. story, just like so many others of innovation highlighted in the report, are indeed examples of innovation, but examples that urgently need federal help and partnership to truly succeed. They’re stepping up with innovation and local funding, but they can’t go it alone.
Let’s hope that Congress passes a strong transportation bill soon and affirms a new role for the federal government in both supporting and rewarding the kind of innovation highlighted in this report that’s beginning to bubble up around the country.
Five things that the final House/Senate transportation bill should do
May 9, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
The “conference” on the transportation bill between the House and Senate began yesterday, with opening remarks and a long public hearing — though much of the real work will happen behind closed doors. (Conference is where the House and Senate reconcile their two transportation bills and produce a single final bill that both chambers will vote on. The Senate passed a two-year bill with changes to funding and policy, while the House passed a 90-day extension of current law as just a vehicle to negotiate, though with several environmental policies.)
As the conferees finalize this long-deferred transportation reauthorization, they must keep in mind the priorities that millions of Americans of all political and socio-economic stripes have expressed in polls, town hall meetings, and countless events. Many of these can be found in the bipartisan, compromise bill passed by the Senate and should be preserved during negotiations. MAP-21, the Senate bill, establishes funding levels necessary to preserve and expand our transportation infrastructure while beginning to update federal policy for the 21st century in these following ways:
- Establishing accountability measures for federal investment;
- Consolidating programs and ensuring faster project delivery;
- Taking care of our bridges and roads by prioritizing repair;
- Supporting local control of funds to improve our communities; and
- Protecting transit riders in areas of all sizes from drastic service cuts and fare increases.
Here’s a detailed look at the five things we believe the final conference bill must do.
1. Prioritize repair of roads and bridges, while easing the burden on local communities
The conference report should continue to provide dedicated funds for repair and upkeep – saving money and improving safety – while ensuring that local communities are not left holding the bag maintaining facilities historically eligible for broad federal support.
Our nation’s infrastructure is in dire need of repair. Less than half our road network is in good condition, and more than 69,000 of the nation’s bridges are structurally deficient. Poor road conditions not only impose safety hazards, but impose direct costs on drivers: Americans on average pay $335 each year due to rough roads. According to AASHTO, every dollar spent on highway repair can save up to $14 down the road. Both chambers have proposed consolidating the existing Interstate Maintenance, National Highway System and Highway Bridge programs into a single program focused on improving the national highway system (NHS).
The conference report should retain provisions that:
- Provide dedicated funding for repair of existing infrastructure – from Interstate pavement to more local, “off-system” bridges;
- Encourage states to practice “asset management” through financial incentives to properly maintain Interstate highways and bridges on the National Highway System;
- Direct states and regions to use performance measures and establish targets for infrastructure condition;
- Ensure that non-NHS, federal-aid bridges remain eligible for funding under any major highway program; and
- Broadened the number of roads and bridges included in the National Highway System
2. Provide for Local Access to Community-Based Transportation Funding
The conference report should provide dedicated funds to empower regions and local governments to revitalize their communities while building out a full transportation network.
Members in both chambers agree that local leaders—who know the transportation, safety, and economic development needs of their constituents— should have more direct control over funds and projects in their communities. States usually build larger projects that connect local communities, but those projects often need further connections within those communities in order to function well. These larger projects can also sometimes create health, safety or other impacts that local communities are eager to address. Local communities have a wide range of needs for travel solutions that are critical to making the overall system work for everyone.
There also are critical safety needs: Over the last decade more than 47,700 pedestrians were killed in the United States – the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of passengers crashing roughly every month.
MAP-21 consolidates the current Transportation Enhancements, Safe Routes to School and Recreational Trails programs into a new program called “Additional Activities”. The program covers a broad range of eligible projects, including Main Street revitalization, street safety improvements, street and boulevard redesigns, bus stop and rail station access improvements, creating safe routes to schools, recreational trails, among many others. It then creates a grant program so that local communities can apply for these funds to do exactly these kinds of projects (Read about the bipartisan Cardin-Cochran amendment to learn more about this provision.)
The conference report should retain provisions that:
- Continue to provide dedicated funding for activities that promote safer, healthier communities, economic redevelopment and tourism;
- Provide the opportunity for smaller communities to apply directly to the state for funds; and
- Provide funding directly to larger regions for these activities.
This would provide flexibility and funding certainty to local planning entities to ensure that a portion of their gas taxes are used to address the specific transportation needs in their communities, improving health, safety and the bottom line.
3. Allow more local flexibility for public transit funding
The conference report should provide local transit agencies with flexibility to use federal transit funds to keep buses and trains running during tough economic times.
Currently, transit providers in areas over 200,000 in population are prohibited from using federal transit funds for operating costs. While this prohibition may make sense during times of economic prosperity, it can have significant impacts on transit service during economic downturns – just as many citizens are turning to transit to save money and get to work.
Over the last several years as local budgets shrank, more than 90 percent of transit agencies cut service or raised fares. This rule change could help to prevent more of the same.
The conference report should retain provisions that:
- Allow large transit agencies to use federal funds to run buses and trains on a temporary and targeted basis during times of economic crisis; and
- Provide increased flexibility to small bus operators in regions with populations over 200,000.
4. Promote transparency and accountability in the planning process
| Federal programs have evolved into what is essentially a block grant model, with little accountability for specific outcomes. …State and local agencies prepare metropolitan area transportation plans, and projects receiving federal funds go through environmental and design reviews, but there is little or not accountability for meeting specific performance standards. - National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission report, p.37 |
The conference report should ensure that our limited dollars are spent in smart ways that address multiple issues at once.
Despite growing levels of highway spending over the years, we face severe congestion in almost all major metropolitan areas, rising household costs for transportation, crumbling roads and bridges, and a lack of transportation options for our changing population.
Today, states and regions engage in making “long-range” plans to guide transportation investments and meet future development needs. However, these plans typically lack concrete goals and accountability to ensure that our billions in transportation spending is leading to tangible progress on important goals. We should encourage states to move in this direction – making a commitment to taxpayers that their dollars are being spent in a way that demonstrates performance and accountability.
The conference report should retain:
- Performance measures and targets for infrastructure condition and performance, air quality, congestion, goods movement, and safety;
- Incorporating performance measures and targets into the long-range planning and short-term program- ming processes;
- The ability for regions to undertake scenario planning as a part of the development of long-range transportation plans; and
- Overarching objectives and goals for the national surface transportation program.
5. Ensure the public and local officials have a meaningful voice on projects that affect them.
The conference report should find ways to speed up construction of well-vetted projects without eliminating the ability of local officials and the public to provide input to government bureaucrats on how their tax dollars will be spent.
We all agree that it would be beneficial for transportation projects be constructed faster. However, many efforts to help speed up project construction have been focused on the environmental review process. While the process can certainly be improved, it is imperative that the integrity of environmental protection and public input is maintained. It is not appropriate to exempt potentially multi-billion dollar projects from project reviews or require that massive construction projects be reviewed in a limited number of days as the House has proposed.
Given that only about 7 percent of projects go through a full environmental review process, targeting environmental review clearly is not the silver bullet for speeding up project delivery.
The conference report should: Retain the compromise provisions on project delivery and environmental review from MAP-21. The provisions in HR 4348 will undermine the ability of citizens and local governments to provide input on how state departments of transportation spend tax dollars.
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Download this full post as a separate printable document here. (pdf)
As the House and Senate prepare to negotiate, a look at what House leaders want
April 25, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
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| Missouri Highway 61 Originally uploaded by GREDF to Flickr. |
A House provision to undermine basic environmental safeguards and squelch citizen involvement was included in the three-month extension intended for conference with Senate.
House leaders last week passed their three-month transportation bill extension to serve as a “shell” to get them to the negotiating table with the Senate. But in order to keep more conservative members happy, they included three anti-environment provisions, two of which — the Keystone XL pipeline and de-regulation of coal ash — unrelated to transportation.
Under the guise of “speeding up projects,” the third provision would undermine basic safeguards to protect human health and the environment, and limit the right of citizens and stakeholders to have a say over projects that affect them. Our coalition is eager to build publicly vetted projects as quickly as possible and we’ve put forward a number of ideas for improving and accelerating the project selection process so that moving them to construction can happen faster and more smoothly.
But the House provision goes too far, trampling on local control and potentially degrading our air, water and land in the process.
So how would these provisions work out in reality? A few examples:
- The House bill would allow only 270 days for all environmental review and challenges to completed, regardless of the impact or complexity of the project. After that it would be automatically approved. So a mega-project like Boston’s $14 billion Big Dig – an incredibly complex undertaking that took years simply to engineer – would have to be fully reviewed in just nine months. Certainly, smaller projects should be approved in that window, but the House would treat a quarter-mile spur the same as a new super-highway. What sense does that make?
- Call this the “More Bridges to Nowhere” clause: Today, state DOTs proposing a big project are required to look at various locations and types of improvements to compare costs, assess the impacts on congestion, the environment and other issues. Under the new House regulation, if a powerful politician says, “I’d like a Bridge to Nowhere, please,” a DOT could just build it, without providing a full analysis. How can we ensure we’re getting the most bang for our buck if we’re not even studying whether or not a different project or option would give us a better result?
- Under the House bill, states would be allowed to use federal dollars to buy right-of-way for “long-range needs” and capacity for expansion for a 50- to 100-year period. But here’s the tricky part: A second change permits them to avoid environmental review for any projects carried out within that previously obtained right-of-way. This could mean that billions of federal highway dollars could be spent on new roads without any environmental review or requirement to address citizens’ concerns about them.
- Another change would prevent citizens from bringing a lawsuit against a project if they didn’t formally protest it early on in the process — even if the project is changed or altered during the review period. Shouldn’t we be empowering local communities to help make better decisions, not taking them out of their hands and giving a state bureaucracy the power to treat them however they like?
Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber (pdf), one of many state and local critics of these provisions, warned in a letter to Oregon’s congressional delegation that it “goes about regulatory streamlining the wrong way, exempting most projects from NEPA review and classifying all projects within the right-of-way as categorically excluded from NEPA regardless of their impacts.”
The Senate bill — a compromise bill itself, it’s important to remember — already has bipartisan provisions on speeding up project delivery and environmental review to get transportation projects built faster while still ensuring that local citizens have a voice and that projects don’t run roughshod over local environmental concerns.
The conference negotiators would do well to stick to the Senate’s bipartisan agreement already in place.
Senate budget restores some sanity to transportation programs
April 18, 2012By Stephen Lee Davis
Just a few weeks after Rep. Paul Ryan released his House budget that proposed cutting or eliminating many important transportation programs, the key Senate committee’s budget for transportation (and housing) for next year contains some good news. Thanks to all of you who sent emails last week to your Senators on the committee!
TIGER, one of the most important programs that communities depend on to fund innovative local transportation projects, was well funded after the House proposal totally eliminated it in their budget.
Whether repairing a pair of deficient bridges that connect two communities in Michigan, extending transit service into an underserved area in Orlando, improving a busy rail crossroads in Texas to move freight faster cross-country, or bringing different modes of transportation together under a brand new roof in Moline, Illinois, the competitive TIGER grant program has been a huge boon to more than 130 communities, funding many innovative projects that often have a hard time getting funding from the state DOT or federal formulas.
New Starts, the small, oversubscribed program that funds almost all new transit construction across the country, was funded at a little more than $2 billion after being also totally eliminated by the House. It’s a prudent move: transit usage is booming across the country while vehicle miles traveled peaked a few years ago and has been slowly declining ever since — especially among people under age 34.
And the small but very influential Partnership for Sustainable Communities was funded again after receiving no funding last year. This program brings together the federal environmental, housing and transportation agencies to make decisions in concert and make small grants to communities that want to engage in better planning to ensure that their communities become or remain great places to live.
This doesn’t mean that the fight is over for this year — this budget will still have to be reconciled with the House, which is no easy feat. And we’ll have a battle at that point once more. It’s been tougher and tougher in the last few years to pass actual budgets for these individual programs. This year will be no different, especially heading into an election this fall.
The full list of notable programs and their funding levels:
- Highways: $39.1 billion.
- Transit: The summary doesn’t explicitly give an amount but it’s fairly safe to assume that it’s $8.4 billion, in line with MAP-21 levels, just as the above funding for highways matches MAP-21.
- TIGER: $500 million
- New Starts: $2.05 billion. This is the core program that funds construction of new and expanded transit systems.
- Amtrak: $1.45 billion
- Passenger Rail Grants: $100 million
- Partnership for Sustainable Communities: $50 million
Are you confused about the difference between the long-term transportation bill and these yearly budget battles? In short, it’s the difference between “authorizations” and “appropriations.” The multi-year transportation bill is an authorization, which means the policy is put on paper and the targeted overall funding amounts are determined. We are still working to see that multi-year bill passed with important policy reforms. But in the meantime as we roll along under extension after extension of the old law, it’s still up to appropriators in the House and Senate each year to decide how much money to actually spend on transportation —especially how to divvy up the discretionary money between different programs, like Amtrak, TIGER grants, or high-speed rail, just to name a few.
Guest Post: In Honor of Powell Calhoun and Donna Williams
April 16, 2012By Transportation for America
Editor’s note: This guest post by Barbara McCann is cross-posted from the National Complete Streets Coalition. We’re re-running this here because we’ve previously highlighted the work of Dr. Scott Crawford in Jackson, Miss. to bring attention to the danger posed to residents by streets that aren’t safe for everyone that needs to use them. Sadly, that turned out to be more true than any of us would have wished for.
The next time someone refers to a sidewalk as a too-expensive “amenity,” think about Powell Calhoun and Donna Williams.
Right: the crash site, where Powell Calhoun and Donna Williams traveled on Friday, March 30. (16 WAPT News)
They were hit by a car as they walked and rolled along a frontage road in Jackson, Mississippi two weeks ago. Ms. Williams uses a wheelchair and Mr. Calhoun helped push her around the streets of Jackson. He died at the scene; she died a few days later of her injuries. The deaths were all the more painful because three years ago, another man using a wheelchair was killed as he traveled in the breakdown lane of another Jackson road without an accessible sidewalk.
Dr. Scott Crawford, a longtime supporter of Complete Streets and a member of Jackson’s ADA advisory council, was friends with Ms. Williams. He blames a failure to build Complete Streets for the deaths.
“Many may wonder: ‘Why were they in the street with a wheelchair?’ ” says Crawford. “The answer is simple. Our society hasn’t yet decided to build and maintain roadways that are safe for ALL its users, including vulnerable ones like bicyclists and pedestrians, and especially those with disabilities.”
Right: Donna Williams, exiting a bus. (Photo: Dr. Scott Crawford)
Dr. Crawford says Williams had spoken to ADA Council members about the need for ADA compliance, and the fact that when she encountered a road without a sidewalk, she didn’t have the option of walking in the grass.
The man driving the car that has not yet been charged, and police made a sympathetic comment that the couple may have been in his ‘blind spot’ – an attitude that recalls the case of Raquel Nelson in Georgia.
From our perspective, even more glaring is the fact that the public right of way had no safe place for Calhoun and Williams to travel. I’d guess that right now hundreds of people who use wheelchairs are out in the street across the United States, because there is no sidewalk, or an obstructed sidewalk, or no accessible curb ramp between their home and their destination.
At this point, I could quote statistics about pedestrian deaths from Dangerous by Design. But right now, I’m not thinking about statistics. I’m thinking about Powell Calhoun and his wife, Donna Williams, and their friends and families.
Let’s build Complete Streets for them.
T4 Editors note: Today, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger published an op-ed by Dr. Crawford about this incident and the larger issue of making streets safer for everyone. Read that in full here.
Lest readers think these are simply isolated incidents, consider the fact that in the first decade of the 21st century, there were more than 47,700 pedestrian deaths on America’s roadways, the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every month for an entire decade. Media attention for disasters like this would be intense, and the public outcry would be enormous.
Are not pedestrian deaths on our streets at least as avoidable as plane crashes? Aren’t those individuals on bicycles, walking, and riding wheelchairs at least as valuable as those driving automobiles or flying?
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- Transportation bill being finalized, window closing quickly! Call your rep and senator
May 23, 2012 - Saving a transit system and turning the tide for the future of a mid-sized city
May 15, 2012 - U.S. communities step up, hoping a strong federal commitment to infrastructure will follow
May 10, 2012 - Graphic: A closer look at the Senate MAP-21 vote by state
March 27, 2012 - Fixing the House bill: Cutting regulatory burdens and bureaucracy
March 15, 2012
- Transportation bill being finalized, window closing quickly! Call your rep and senator
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