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Divided by Design: Quantifying the damage of our transportation program

Our new report examines the racist roots of our current transportation system. Most importantly, it demonstrates how today’s policies and practices were shaped by the past, leading to racial disparities today. Without a fundamental change to the overall approach to transportation, today’s leaders and transportation professionals, no matter their intent, will perpetuate and exacerbate the damage.

Beginning in the 1950s, highways devastated communities of color and changed our cities forever. But the consequences continue, even as we begin to acknowledge our past mistakes.

To create a better system, we can’t settle for small changes. We need a total shift in approach. To learn more about the report and our analysis, join our webinar on July 25 at 2 p.m. ET.

Read the report Register for the webinar

A guide to this report

Part I examines the damage and inequities deliberately created by and in the federal transportation program from ~1950 onward. It concludes with a unique analysis of both an unbuilt and built highway segment within Atlanta and Washington, DC to quantify what was lost, who bore the brunt of the damage, and what could have been lost with highways that were never built.

Part II examines our current transportation program to demonstrate how the programs, standards, models, and measures have their roots in the previous era and exacerbate inequities—whether intentional or not.

Part III outlines what needs to change—concrete steps we can take to fundamentally reorient the program around unwinding those inequities.

Two cities divided

Divided by Design also quantifies the damage caused by highways in two U.S. cities: Atlanta, GA and Washington, DC. Like hundreds of others in the U.S., these cities are forever scarred by highways that demolished communities of color, robbing them of opportunity and potential.

Atlanta’s I-20 displaced over 7,500 people and destroyed 1,400 occupied homes. In DC, I-395/695 displaced over 5,000 people and demolished 2,200 homes. These numbers only scratch the surface of the full damage and dislocation.

More significant damage was also avoided in these cities. To understand what might exist in these communities if they hadn’t been disrupted by highways, we looked at two planned highway segments that were never built and the hundreds of businesses, office buildings, and homes that wouldn’t exist today. Click to read these stories:

The damage continues

The models, policies, and practices we use today took root in the highway era, and they continue to inflict the most harm on people of color. Our approach leads to worse health outcomes, greater congestion, and deadlier roadways. It leaves millions of Americans without access to reliable transportation options to get where they need to go. We can’t build a better system on a rotten foundation. It’s time for a paradigm shift.

We need a new approach.

Read Divided by Design

Explore the report’s full content—jump to one of the three parts with the graphics below.

report cover graphic showing a stylized highway cutting through a city.graphic showing a stylized scene of construction of a highway through a city neighborhoodgraphic showing a stylized scene a few blocks away from a highway running through a city neighborhoodgraphic showing a stylized scene of what a neighborhood could look like after tearing a highway down

Don’t miss supplemental maps, videos, and animations in the DC and Atlanta case studies which are not in the hard copy. Download a PDF version of the report.

 

Over 75 organizations and elected officials want the greenhouse gas performance measure reinstated

Reducing transportation emissions is necessary to slow down climate change. Which is why in less than a week, over 75 organizations and elected officials signed a letter by Transportation for America urging the Biden administration to reinstate the greenhouse gas (GHG) performance measure for transportation. This letter supported a similar effort in Congress led by Senator Cardin and Rep. Blumenauer. 

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States, and the bulk of them come from driving. Reducing these emissions is critical—but in 2018, the Trump administration repealed a performance measure that would have required states to measure greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions when planning new highway projects.

That’s why in less than a week, over 75 organizations and elected officials urged the Biden administration in a letter to reinstate the GHG performance measure. This letter was sent to Secretary Buttigieg along with a letter by Senator Ben Cardin and Congressman Earl Blumenauer, signed by 47 Senators and Members of Congress, who asked the secretary to “urgently” restore this performance measure. 

Restoring the GHG performance measure can be done immediately through executive action initiating a notice of proposed rulemaking. According to Transport Topics in 2018, “The proposed measurement rule would have required state DOTs and MPOs to undertake administrative activities to establish targets, calculate their progress toward their selected targets, report to [the Federal Highway Administration] and determine a plan of action to make progress toward their selected targets if they failed to make significant progress during a performance period.”

Please read the full letter—with the list of 80 signatories—here. For more on the connection between transportation and greenhouse gas emissions, check out our latest report: Driving Down Emissions.

The House bill needs some changes to make repair the number one priority

UPDATE, June 17: A bipartisan amendment to fix the issues we detailed below was accepted by unanimous consent in the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Thank you Chair Rep. Peter DeFazio, Rep. Jesús G. “Chuy” García, and Rep. Mike Gallagher for your tremendous support and leadership. View our amendment tracker for the INVEST act here, get real-time updates by following @t4america on Twitter, and take action by sending a message to your representative if they sit on this House committee.

The House’s new INVEST Act made a strong effort to prioritize maintenance, but there are still loopholes that can allow states and metro areas to avoid the legislative intent of a real, concrete focus on repair first. Here’s a run down on our concerns with the repair provision and how it could be strengthened in next week’s markup in the House transportation committee.

Flickr photo of bridge resurfacing by WSDOT. https://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/49921039787

We’ve spent 60-plus years building an unparalleled highway system with hundreds of thousands of bridges, in addition to scores of metropolitan transit networks and a network of other streets. But we have failed to steward our assets well. For no good reason at all, we’re still spending money like it’s 1956, expending money we don’t have to build roads we can’t afford to maintain which fail to bring the promised economic returns—all while neglecting repair needs. Liberals have supported and aggressively funded the status quo, ignoring the transportation program’s impact on climate, public health, and access to opportunity. Conservatives have joined them, failing to take a stand for bedrock values of good stewardship of federal dollars and keeping federal spending low. We must make repair and maintenance the core, number one priority of the federal transportation program. We cannot afford to keep expanding our system without any plan for maintaining it.

When we first read through the INVEST Act last week we were excited to see that the committee clearly made a good faith effort to prioritize maintenance and after a cursory look we were inclined to give it a passing grade on our first principle of prioritizing repair. But the deeper we looked into the language, the more we saw the loopholes.

It is indeed a major change that the committee proposes dedicating 20 percent of the two biggest sources of state DOT funds toward repair. In addition, states have to fulfill some new conditions to add new capacity with the largest highway program. Both are good steps and we applaud them. However, the INVEST Act’s fix-it-first language still needs to be strengthened to ensure a true focus on prioritizing repairing what we have before building new things that come with expensive, long-term repair costs. There were three misses in the House’s approach, but all can be fixed if the House is truly committed to ensuring that we preserve and maintain our existing transportation network.

1) Too many definitions are either missing, or too vaguely defined

Because the committee left a lot of the vital details to the USDOT Secretary to determine via regulatory language, the final verdict on repair won’t be decided in the legislation (as it should). As an example, for states to add new capacity with core highway funds, they have to fulfill three conditions: They have to demonstrate that they are making progress on repair, they have to consider operational improvements and transit and show that expanding roadway capacity is more cost-effective than either, and they have to demonstrate that the expansion project would meet another performance target, like congestion reduction.

Those three terms in italics will be left up to the USDOT rulemaking process, and can already have a long history of being manipulated to add new capacity. It would help to put more explicit parameters on what defines “progress on repair.” Does it mean meeting the state or MPO’s own repair targets, which could be unambitious? And when it comes to measuring cost-effectiveness and benefit cost analysis, the way these have been applied to transportation projects in the past have overstated the benefits of highway capacity expansions and undervalued or failed to value climate, equity and public health benefits. 

2) To truly prioritize repair, states should prove they can maintain the new things they build

Even if states fulfill these conditions above to add new capacity, there’s no language requiring the project sponsor to prove they can maintain the asset they are building. This is a big miss, and this is one of the primary reasons we’re all in this mess in the first place.

Even if states make valuable and measurable progress on state of good repair, it would be negligent to allow them to build new things without requiring that they consider and plan for how they will take care of them. You don’t buy a house when you manage to secure some of the upfront costs (a downpayment), you also have to prove to the bank that you have a plan for paying that monthly mortgage for the next 15 or 30 years. We already require transit capital project sponsors to provide a plan for long-term maintenance when they apply for federal funding. It’s time to start requiring this degree of stewardship and responsibility to a highway program that has been sorely lacking it. Simply adding this as a core requirement to the conditions for expansion via an amendment could bring about this powerful change. 

3) All the tools the states have to fulfill this repair focus were designed to justify new highways

The biggest challenge here is that the House is counting on an entrenched culture that was organized around the building and expanding a national highway system to accomplish something entirely new. The tools that transportation agencies have at their disposal—the ones the House is asking them to use to fulfill this new focus on repair—were developed specifically to justify new highways. Without other changes, they will continue to do so. 

The transportation demand models assume the same amount of driving in a neighborhood built only for cars as they do for a neighborhood built for walking. These models do not foresee that making space on a highway might invite more driving in the space cleared up. They often predict, strangely, that narrowing a lane in the city from 12 to 10 feet somehow means that the road can accommodate fewer 6-7 feet wide vehicles. These tools are old, flawed and often wrong. Comparing costs and benefits is a great idea, but we need to make clear that the benefits should be calculated in a way that is reasonably likely to be correct. And that can be done by simply asking the agencies to look back and report on how often their projections actually turn out to be right when making a justification for a massive new investment with taxpayer dollars.

We are hopeful that we’ll be able to report news of a specific amendment to make many of these fixes when the committee considers the bill, so stay tuned. We will need your support!

Wrapping up

If infrastructure is as bipartisan as everyone always claims then commonsense should prevail on this point. Republicans should care deeply about conserving taxpayer funds. Democrats should care about climate and equity impacts. Both should seek to maintain faith and public trust in the program. Strengthening these repair provisions should be an easy, bipartisan win and we urge Chairman DeFazio and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee members to make it happen.

Two bills put “access” at the heart of transportation policy

For too long, the focus of the federal transportation program has been vehicle speed, not helping Americans access jobs, schools, grocery stores and more. It’s time to focus our funding on improving people’s access to jobs and services—and U.S. Rep. Chuy García’s (IL-4) two new bills will do exactly that. 

An “L” underpass in Chicago.

Transportation is fundamentally a means for getting people and goods where they need to go. Making sure you get your children to school on time, and yourself to work; having a safe, convenient and affordable way to reach grocery stores and healthcare. 

But our federal transportation program doesn’t make improving these connections its goal. U.S. transportation policy focuses on avoiding any delay to vehicles, making our roads wider and our communities more spread out and disconnected in the process. As a result our transportation system is in crisis. Americans are stuck in congestion on crumbling roads and transit systems, often forced to travel further and further because our system fails to provide safe and convenient choices other than a car trip. 

That’s where two new bills from Representative Jesús “Chuy” García (IL-04) come in. Today, Rep. García—along with his two co-chairs of the Future of Transportation Caucus—introduced the Improving Access to Jobs Act and Improving Access to Services Act to Congress with 12 co-sponsors, including Representatives Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Mark Takano (CA-41), Rashida Tlaib (MI-13), Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-03), Steve Cohen (TN-09), Jan Schakowsky (IL-9), Nanette Diaz Barragán (CA-44), Bennie G. Thompson (MS-02), Jahana Hayes (CT-05), Bobby L. Rush (IL-01), Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-02), and Darren Soto (FL-9). 

These two bills would finally align federal spending with how people intuitively think about transportation: whether or not they can access their destinations. 

“Our transportation systems are failing Americans who face growing congestion, roads and transit systems in disrepair, and long-standing inequities that disproportionately hurt marginalized communities,” said Rep. García. “Any future transportation policies must make smarter investments to improve access, cut travel times, and lower the financial barriers to mobility for all.”

The two bills will create performance measures that make improving access the goal of federal transportation policy, and hold states accountable to improving access by all modes of travel. The bills would prevent metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) from increasing the ratio of automobile to non-automobile access in urbanized areas, empowering MPOs and states to balance transit, bike, and pedestrian investments alongside new roadway investments over an entire region. This would guarantee that any new roadway investments do not degrade transit, bike, and pedestrian access. 

If states fail to improve access, they must invest 10 percent of federal transportation funds apportioned to a state from the previous fiscal year into efforts to improve access overall. This requirement is in effect until the Secretary of Transportation certifies that a state is in compliance.

This intuitive concept—prioritizing access, not speed—is revolutionary in the world of transportation policy, which adopted speed as a metric for success before we had technologies like cloud computing and GIS that make measuring access possible. Some states already use access to allocate state transportation funding, like Virginia DOT. 

Two bills, one goal

There’s an important reason why Rep. García introduced these transformative performance measures as two seperate bills, though: People perceive commutes to work and trips to services differently. This has implications for transportation planning. 

People generally have a higher tolerance for longer commutes to work. Tolerance is lower for long trips to services—like grocery shopping, doctor’s appointments, recreation, and more—because they are often linked in one trip, rather than multiple round-trip journeys to and from homes. So while people might consider a 30-minute commute to be manageable, an area that’s 30-minutes one-way to the grocery store qualifies as a food desert—hence the need for different performance measures. 

Together, these two bills are one huge step towards prioritizing access in federal transportation legislation. But there are additional actions the federal government can take to truly make access a priority. T4America has called for the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop a national assessment of access to jobs and services and set national goals for improvement; to phase out outdated metrics such as level of service; and to provide accessibility data to states, MPOs, and local communities. (You can read our full recommendations here.) 

Proposing a new way of doing things is never easy, particularly when it challenges how America fundamentally measures the success of our transportation system. We thank Rep. García for leading this effort toward a better, more accessible future.

Why we’re thrilled to support the Build Local, Hire Local Act

A bike commuter wearing a suit, tie, and a helmet flashes a thumbs up to the photographer while biking on a busy road in San Francisco.

Last month, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Representative Karen Bass (CA-37) introduced legislation that would create transportation accessibility performance measures and a grant program to reconnect communities divided by highways. 

A bike commuter wearing a suit, tie, and a helmet flashes a thumbs up to the photographer while biking on a busy road in San Francisco.

Last month, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Representative. Karen Bass (D-CA), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduced the Build Local, Hire Local Act (S. 2404 and H.R. 4101 ), legislation that would use federal infrastructure funding as a tool to hire people who live near new infrastructure projects for high-quality jobs. 

In the process, the bill creates a new access to jobs and services performance measure, and a technical assistance program, and a construction grant program to improve transportation connections in communities divided by highways. We’ve worked closely with the Senator and Representative in developing this legislation and are thrilled to support the Build Local, Hire Local Act.

The performance measure included in the bill requires states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to assess how well the entire transportation system—roads, public transit, bike lanes and sidewalks—connects people to opportunities, putting a particular emphasis on improving accessibility in low-income communities. States and MPOs must report these assessments to Congress, who will make the data publicly available online. Measuring accessibility would lead us to a transportation system that prioritizes efficient travel and a more equitable transportation system. 

These tools allow states and MPOs to better understand where people are traveling and to design transportation networks to maximize the ability of people to travel. It also allows states and MPOs to optimize their transportation networks to utilize all modes of transportation and even to understand how their investments interact with land use policies.

This connectivity and accessibility performance measure is similar to the COMMUTE Act, a bill that would create a pilot program for states and MPOs to use travel data collected by the U.S. Department of Transportation to measure and improve access to jobs and services by all modes. We’ve been advocating for this legislation for awhile, and a version of the COMMUTE Act is included in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s recently passed long-term transportation policy bill. 

The Build Local, Hire Local Act’s technical assistance program and grant program take this performance measure a step further. To improve access to jobs and services by all modes, the bill will help communities—especially those bi-furcated by highways—find and build innovative projects that connect divided neighborhoods. 

This is an important step in the right direction. Too often, highway infrastructure tears apart communities, particularly disadvantaged communities, separating people from jobs, services, and connections to other neighborhoods. This not only exacerbates existing inequalities, it worsens air pollution and public health outcomes, turning neighborhoods from places where people want to be into places people want to get away from—via the highway. This bill seeks to fix that.  

“The goal of our transportation system should be to safely and efficiently connect people to jobs and services,” said our director Beth Osborne. “For too long, we have treated vehicle speed as a sufficient measure for this goal. Yet it fails to capture walking, cycling, and transit trips, and inaccurately measures vehicle trips.

“Transportation for America commends Senator Gillibrand and Representative Bass for this innovative legislation to measure and judge performance by what really matters in transportation: access by all modes of travel.”

National transportation policy is a rudderless ship sailing off into oblivion

For well over two decades, we’ve had no big-picture guiding purpose for the federal transportation program. Like a ship with a jammed rudder heading off aimlessly into forever, federal transportation policy has been limping along without an overarching purpose or destination in mind. How does this inertia lead us toward all the wrong things?

Adrift

Is the purpose for the ~$60 billion in federal funds we spend each year merely to increase driving? To add more lane-miles? To ensure that pavement totals increase? To simply build some new stuff and try to keep up with the old stuff? To better connect people with opportunity in a measurable way? Here are six policies embedded in current transportation policy that are not a product of an intentional conversation about what we should accomplish, but rather the result of having zero direction and purpose since we completed the interstate system in 1992.1

1) States are rewarded financially for encouraging more driving and longer trips

It’s no mystery why states spend too much of their money building new lane-miles, new roads, and new bridges at the expense of repair and everything else: The financial payout for states is based on increasing driving as much as possible.

The bulk of all federal transportation money is doled out to states based on a series of formulas tied largely to population, number of lane-miles, and how much everyone drives (vehicle miles traveled, or VMT). If a state encourages more driving or if everyone takes longer trips, that state receives more money the following year. Conversely, if your state finds ways to reduce driving by investing in transit, more logically planning jobs and housing in better proximity to one another, or finding creative ways to manage travel demand, your state loses money.

Put another way, perhaps the most core, embedded philosophy of the federal transportation program is to increase driving—as if more driving itself is an unmitigated economic and societal good.

2) Federal programs originally designed to support and encourage long distance driving are poorly suited to fulfill more complicated modern needs

“Most state departments of transportation were created largely for one reason: to implement a highway-building program,” wrote T4America director Beth Osborne in this series on the Smart Growth America blog, and even the most forward-looking of state DOTs today still have that highway-building DNA embedded deep in their culture. Today’s aimless federal program needs to accomplish far more than the original intended purposes of moving people long distances across states or between metro areas. Yet we still try unsuccessfully to make this old, outdated system serve today’s needs. As Beth wrote in the opener for that series, “the same department that delivered this highway below on the left a few decades ago is the same one tasked with delivering the street on the right, perhaps right in front of your house.”

Our transportation needs have changed, but the federal program has failed to keep up.

3) Transportation emissions are growing because the program is designed that way

Transportation is the #1 sector for emissions and driving represents 83 percent of those emissions. These emissions are rising because people are forced to make more and longer trips. The U.S. has added metro interstate lane miles faster than our metro population has grown, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and obliterating the modest gains made in more efficient vehicles and cleaner fuel. With new roads subsidized by the federal government (covering around 80 percent of the cost), localities struggle to stay ahead of development that spreads further from the center of metro areas, forcing people to travel further to access jobs and services. This leads to a demand for more roads, which induces even more driving and pollution.

We simply can’t continue expanding our roadway network and lower emissions at the same time. The two goals are incompatible, and unfortunately, increasing driving is a purpose embedded deeply in the program. If the main policymakers in Congress can stop talking about money long enough to do so, it’s past time for a conversation about making shorter trips and shared trips a core goal and purpose of the program.

4) We subsidize driving at the expense of providing any other options

Given a transportation challenge to solve, the federal program puts its thumb on the scale in favor of a road “solution” by covering about 80 percent of the cost, while only providing about half of the cost for a transit solution to the same problem. On top of that, not only do we make transit projects jump through more hoops in an arduous development process that no highway projects are subject to, but we actually hold them to a more realistic standard of long-term affordability. As we wrote for Strong Towns last week, “with new federally funded transit projects, agencies have to prove they have sufficient funding to operate and maintain the new line or service, and can do so without shortchanging the rest of their system.”

The federal program encourages costly over-expansion because it doesn’t require states to prove they can afford to maintain what they’ve been encouraged to build in order to get more federal money. Congress is perfectly fine with states building a new road they can’t afford to preserve long-term, even as they are failing to maintain the rest of their system in a good state of repair. And then, as we wrote in Repair Priorities, “those states return to the federal government every few years requesting more funds to address their unmet ‘needs,’ when those needs could have been prevented or delayed with more responsible spending practices.”

That’s why we’re in this goofy situation where every state and every lawmaker seems to thinks the problem is just a lack of money.

5) The program asks the wrong questions and measures the wrong things

The program is obsessed with vehicle speed and you can see it in the few, limited ways that we try to measure whether or not our system succeeds. If you have a 15-minute commute to work in congested urban street traffic, are you better off than if you have a 45-minute commute in traffic that moves quickly? All of the incentives embedded in the program related to how we measure and assess congestion would prefer the second commute. And because free-flowing traffic is considered the gold standard, roads are built to ensure that traffic flows quickly, and this is what leads us to more and wider roads, and more and longer trips. (And streets that are then uninhabitable for anyone walking or biking.) Perhaps, a better measure would be assessing whether or not people can reach jobs and services by any mode of travel, rather than the simplistic measure of whether some of them travel at high speed when driving.

6) We undercut all our other priorities with a strategy to reduce congestion that fails every single time

The federal program is obsessed with reducing congestion, yet everything we do to reduce congestion just makes it worse.

A new study from Cal State Northridge showed that increasing lane-miles increases driving proportionally: a one percent increase in lane-miles results in a one-percent increase in driving. The best part? Expanding roads also fails to improve traffic: the speed increases from highway widenings disappear in five years because of more traffic. We expanded the country’s road system by about three percent from 2009-2017, guaranteeing at least a three percent increase in driving right there. On top of that, it’s impossible to square the priority of speed with the other things we want to accomplish, like improving safety, increasing reliability, or lowering emissions. From the SGA series:

This assumption of “the cars need to always move fast and never slow down” is at the root of most of the big problems that [state DOTs] face. Engineers have a prerequisite—sometimes explicitly stated but always implicit in the agency’s culture of practice—that makes every other priority a nearly impossible task. In practice, what this turns into is a list of secondary goals states would like to accomplish, that usually get sacrificed for the real top priority of speed. Until we come to grips with the fact that moving cars fast at all times of day without delay is a goal that can’t always be squared with all of the other priorities, until we can admit that perhaps everyone is not going to be able to go fast all the time, we’ll continue building unnecessarily large and expensive roads where speed is the number one priority and most other priorities fall by the wayside.

Make sure the vehicles can always go fast

 AND
  • Prioritize repair first
  • Keep everyone safe, including people walking & biking
  • Create vibrant places worth visiting
  • Keep your costs low
  • Don’t negatively impact nearby communities
  • Help connect everyone to jobs and opportunity, whether they drive or not
  • Promote sustainable and lasting economic development
  • Reduce transportation-related emissions

Wrapping up: It’s past time to make some new goals for what this program is supposed to accomplish

Back in the 1950s we dramatically reshaped our federal transportation policy around accommodating high speed vehicle travel, and our federal program functioned with this unifying purpose for decades. Brand new highways made cross-country and inter-state travel easier than ever before, boosting the national and local economies by connecting places that weren’t well-connected before. But they also started to transform the way we we built homes and destinations by enabling easier travel from cities to their fringes. 2 Today, the challenge is making sure people have access to jobs, services and amenities within easy distance of their homes. To accomplish this, we will need to remove barriers, build bridges (real and metaphorical) and provide safe, affordable convenient alternatives to get around.

Rather than limp along, plowing billions into adding a lane here or a new road there with no equivalent economic return, let’s state a set of clear, explicit goals for the federal program, guaranteeing less driving, more options, healthier communities, and less pollution—all things we should be encouraging as we near the quarter pole of the new century.

Many of the most dangerous states for people walking are planning for more people to die

13 Americans per day were struck and killed while walking from 2008-2017, according to a report released today by our colleagues at the National Complete Streets Coalition. Dangerous by Design 2019 also shows how some of the most dangerous states are, astonishingly, committed to making the problem even worse.

View the rankings and the full report

Over the last decade (2008 through 2017, the most recent year with data available), drivers struck and killed 49,340 people walking in communities large and small across the U.S. To put that into perspective, it’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing—with no survivors—every month. During a period when fatalities for people inside vehicles went down 6 percent, pedestrian fatalities increased by 35 percent. Since the last version of Dangerous by Design was released two years ago, the problem has only gotten worse: 4 out of 5 states and major metro areas have become more dangerous for people walking.

How are states planning to tackle this problem?

More than a third of all states aren’t planning to do anything at all. 18 states—including 10 of the 20 most dangerous for people walking—planned to actually increase the number of people killed while walking or biking from 2017 to 2018.

New requirements from the Federal Highway Administration require state departments of transportation to set performance targets for traffic fatalities and serious injuries and then monitor their progress over time. Back in 2017, states had to update their safety goals for 2018, which included setting target numbers for deaths and serious injuries among people walking, biking, or using other non-motorized forms of travel.

Did states respond by setting ambitious targets and creating accompanying plans for how they’d spend their share of billions in federal transportation dollars to make their streets safer for everyone? Unfortunately, a closer look at these targets reveals just how low the bar is for safety in many states.

18 states established targets for non-motorized deaths and injuries that are higher than the number of people killed or injured in the most recent year of data reported. With billions in 2018 federal transportation dollars available to them to devote to improving safety, more than a third of all states committed to…doing what they did last year—or worse. 10 of these 18 states are among the top 20 most deadly according to Dangerous by Design 2019.

The only “acceptable” number of deaths on our roadways is zero. We can and must raise the bar by requiring states to set safety targets that reduce rather than increase the number of people killed or seriously injured while walking or biking on our streets, ultimately working toward eliminating all traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. However, to make this vision a reality, we need strong federal policy with binding enforceable requirements that hold states to higher safety standards. Dangerous by Design 2019 helps make this case.

For more information on epidemic of people struck and killed while walking and to see the full rankings of the top 20 most dangerous metro areas and states, view the full Dangerous by Design report.

This content, adapted from Dangerous by Design 2019, was co-authored and edited by T4America staff.

Why don’t DOTs pick routes like we do?

Your GPS gives you the choice of two routes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How cities can reduce traffic instead of just ensuring more of it

A developer paying the cost to install a new bike share station could be a way to gain credits toward a building permit under the plan outlined in Modern Mitigation. (Image: Euan Fisk, Flickr)

A new approach to addressing the potential transportation impacts of new development in urban areas, outlined in a new report by the State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI), another program of Smart Growth America, could be a powerful recipe for reducing the demand for driving, while helping create more prosperous transit- and pedestrian-friendly cities.

For decades, most local, regional, and state governments have had a myopic approach to handling the transportation needs related to infill development: they require developers to add more street/road capacity. And this single-minded approach has produced exactly what one might expect: Lots of new, expensive roads that actually increase driving, and with it pollution, emissions, roadway deaths, and impediments for people trying to get around without cars.

A more productive approach seeks to minimize traffic from development before resorting to just building expensive, bigger and wider roads. This new report from SSTI outlines a modern method for cities and the private sector to partner together in reducing the demand for driving as cities build, grow, and thrive.

On October 29 at 2:00 p.m. ET, join Eric Sundquist, SSTI Director; Ramses Madou, Transportation Planner with San Jose Department of Transportation; and moderator Beth Osborne, Senior Policy Advisor at Smart Growth America for a lively discussion of the opportunities and challenges of moving from LOS to VMT and what steps are needed to make this shift work.

Register for the webinar

Cities conventionally manage the impacts of development by adding capacity for automobiles, often providing no support for anyone outside of a vehicle. But this strategy only encourages more driving, and the roads and city in general become much less pedestrian-, bicyclist-, and transit-friendly. It also creates more emissions at a time when many cities are trying to reach ambitious climate goals.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: If we think of accommodating more driving as the only solution, it will inevitably get harder for people to walk or take transit, and more trips will be taken in cars.

Cities thrive with a concentrated mix of people and uses—the more jobs, people, and activities within reach of each other, the greater the economic benefit from being able to easily access all of this opportunity. Asking developers to provide services and amenities that allow people to move around with fewer car trips will reduce the traffic impacts of new development, benefit all, and will help cities avoid super-sizing our roads and intersections.

This report offers a way to do this within the city development process.

What would a better approach look like?

This new report—Modernizing Mitigation—suggests a system that rewards developers for a range of transportation improvements they can provide, making them partners in an effort to produce people-friendly neighborhoods. Actions developers can take include improving the infrastructure for walking, biking, or transit; providing complementary land uses that minimize the need for new trips; subsidizing other forms of mobility like bike sharing or car sharing; or providing first- and last-mile connections to high-capacity transit (like a regular shuttle).

Changes to the pedestrian network and the improvement of crosswalks to add connectivity (left) and accessibility improvements from these connections (right) can be quantified in order to provide mitigation credits.

The contributions would be scaled to the amount of parking provided. The more parking a developer provides, the more they’d have to do to reduce demand (or through in lieu fees for non-auto services and facilities.) Or a project with no parking could be exempt from the other measures.

This helps produce a city where development can be seen as a positive contributor to a more prosperous place, rich with opportunities for all, as opposed to just the culprit to blame for more traffic.

This new approach can help put cities and developers on the same team, rather than working against one another to produce all the wrong outcomes. The report includes an examination of different cities’ policies along these lines, as well as a detailed look at precisely how this system could work with a real scale of points and incentives.

Much of the report was the product of SSTI’s practical work with the City of Los Angeles to develop a system for LA, but the suggested point system and requirements could be easily adapted by any other city to their local environment, priorities, or goals.

Download the full report and join us for the webinar on October 29.

Changing the transportation paradigm, one project selection at a time.

Ringling Bridge in Sarasota, FL. (Image: Rich Schwartz, Flickr)

Thanks to support from the Kresge Foundation, Transportation for America helped several regions around the country take tangible steps toward aligning their spending with their policy goals using performance measures. We asked them about it…here’s what they said.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

If that mantra ever needed to be applied anywhere, it’s in the world of transportation investment decision making. The state and regional transportation agencies that make funding decisions often say they want to fund the projects that best align with their community’s goals—such as increasing access to jobs and opportunity, improving health, making more equitable investments, and ensuring a good state of repair, to name a few. But too often, their practices don’t line up with intent. That’s why it is noteworthy that some regions around the country are making real headway to better align their spending with their stated priorities.

In a previous post, we explored this idea of choosing transportation projects that actually match our priorities. But what does it look like in practice to match funding decisions to a goal like economic competitiveness? And how is this process changing the transportation funding paradigm?

From the horse’s mouth

Rather than speak for them, we asked some of the professionals we worked with about how this assistance helped them address the specific transportation goals that their community is focused on. Each community has different goals, and the focus of our work shifted accordingly with each community, but the principle is the same: measure what you want to manage.

Reevaluating the status quo:

Typically, regions prioritize projects using factors like political priorities and geographic distribution, but this approach rarely produces the best set of investments to accomplish a long-term vision with limited funding. By contrast, some of the regions we worked with have established measurable goals and scoring systems to rank potential projects based on those goals. Many common policy priorities like equity and quality of life have traditionally been difficult to measure, so this systematic approach is a game-changer.

“In reviewing our past planning efforts we realized that there was not always a great connection between the projects selected for funding and our long-range plan’s goals. We also had more project requests than funding. Identifying performance measures and targets allowed us to prioritize the projects that would best help achieve our plan’s goals and make the best use of limited resources. T4America helped us refine our scoring process to ensure it was meaningful and performance-based, understood by non-technical stakeholders, and easily implementable by MPO staff.”

– Dylan Mullenix, Assistant Director of the Des Moines Area MPO

“The Lake Charles region is currently updating its long-range metropolitan transportation plan and will soon be selecting priority projects to fund. The Transportation for America team gave us ideas to simplify the measures used in project selection, eliminate duplication, consider the cost-effectiveness of projects, and make our scoring criteria publicly available. These suggestions and examples from other MPOs will allow the region to better prioritize projects based on a clear vision moving forward.”

– Cheri L. Soileau, AICP, Lake Charles MPO Director

Creating equitable and affordable transportation:

Equity was a common thread throughout this work. Many regions consider equity a priority, but have trouble effectively applying it to funding decisions. We helped these regions elevate needed investments in disadvantaged communities to improve access to economic opportunities and essential services. Some regions also wanted to prioritize investments that address community affordability. For example, the Sarasota/Manatee MPO hopes to raise the priority of projects that make it easier to walk, bike, and take transit to food, medical, or education facilities to help reduce the costs associated with accessing those necessities.

“Our partnership with T4A changed the transportation planning conversation in our region by bringing new voices to the table, from health and social service providers to environmental scientists. Using the FHWA performance measures framework, we have gone beyond traffic management and turn lanes to consider affordable housing, access to services for disadvantaged neighborhoods, and advancing best practices. We are confident this will lead to project priorities that consider all modes and that better serve all users.”

– Leigh Holt, Strategic Planning Manager, Sarasota/Manatee MPO

Supporting people who want to walk and bike safely:

Projects that make it easier to walk and bike not only improve the health of residents by providing options for exercise, they also support local economies by contributing to a quality of life that attracts residents and tourists. We helped several regions determine how to use performance measures to elevate the investments that make it easier to walk and bike safely.

“During Transportation for America’s workshop, the team encouraged us to renew our initiatives in active transportation for healthier communities. Our agency had developed a metropolitan bike and pedestrian master plan; however, as a result of the push, we began the process of actually producing every project in that plan. These 57 miles of active transportation improvements will be in place within the next six years! Furthermore, we are now replicating the same award-winning process in a neighboring urban area to further the goal of healthier communities through active transportation across our region.”

– Matt Johns, Executive Director, Rapides Area Planning Commission

Ensuring economic competitiveness:

Many regions measure their economic success by looking at how projects would reduce traffic congestion. But traffic congestion goes up with good economies and down with bad; so while it may be an important transportation priority, congestion reduction is not a good proxy for economic strength. We helped several of the regions determine how to use performance measures to invest in the right projects for the long-term economic vitality of their regions—projects that will help draw a talented workforce, retain residents, and grow a tourist economy.

“The Roanoke Valley Transportation Planning Organization is working to make the region more economically competitive by identifying places where growth is desirable and sustainable because plans for future development enable multimodal connectivity and mobility. The technical assistance provided by T4A helped us better understand performance measures and how we can more directly achieve our transportation and economic development goals through targeted investments.”

– Cristina Finch, Director of Transportation, Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission.

These regions are able to make real change:

The six regions we worked with are already leading the way by seeking new ways of doing business. And thanks to Kresge’s support, we were able to introduce them to tools, approaches, and ways of thinking to help them do so. We are excited to see more innovative practices from these regions moving forward.

“The technical assistance provided by the Transportation for America team was more than a typical workshop—it opened the eyes of our local technical experts to a revolutionary way of thinking about transportation planning. We were taught how to better identify what problem we actually wanted to solve in order to avoid jumping to the usual prescribed solutions of cookie-cutter type thinking. In a way, the team provided a deeper validity and appreciation for REAL planning working in concert with engineering, and this is a necessity for better planning in an era when we truly cannot afford to “build our way out” of our problems.”

– Matt Johns, Executive Director, Rapides Area Planning Commission

Rep. Bill Shuster’s infrastructure proposal scores 50 percent

On Monday, July 23, the Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Bill Shuster, released his proposal to reform transportation investment. While there are some novel ideas in the proposal, it ultimately scores a 50 percent based on our four guiding principles for infrastructure investment.

Local governments and millions of Americans are counting on the federal government to be a partner in rebuilding our transportation infrastructure. In November 2017, Transportation for America released a set of four simple principles to inform and evaluate any potential plans for federal infrastructure investment. The Chairman’s proposal is a serious one, and should be commended for being the first proposal with real funding in more than a decade, advancing the national conversation about our infrastructure. However, on the policy, it fails to meet our four principles.

How the proposal measures up to our principles

Provide real funding 
We need real federal funding, not just new ways to borrow money or sell off public assets to support transportation investments.

The Chairman’s proposal addresses our infrastructure funding deficit through new short term revenue sources and a Highway Trust Fund Commission. While the proposal ultimately eliminates the gas tax, the proposed short-term fixes would include new/steeper taxes on bikes and transit (which we have concerns about). The gas tax would be replaced by a new revenue source (such as a mileage-based fee/road user charge) identified by the Commission. While we believe this proposal generally holds the promise of providing real funding. and we look forward to working together to advance this shared goal.

Fix the existing system first  
We must immediately fix the system we have and fund needed repairs to aging infrastructure.

The Chairman’s proposal does not prioritize maintenance over other investment. The proposal creates a vehicle miles traveled tax pilot with a goal to “steadily reduce the state of good repair backlog in surface transportation.” This is a commendable goal, however it cannot be achieved by a funding source. Addressing the state of good repair backlog requires policy makers to set this as a priority and to dedicate available funding for this purpose. This proposal, like the current program, fails to do that.

Build smart new projects  
Our current approach, largely driven by formula funding, is necessary to ensure baseline investments, but funding that flows automatically for specified purposes does not encourage innovation or flexible action.

The Chairman’s proposal holds the promise of meeting this principle. Through three proposed programs—national infrastructure investments grants, incentive grants, and projects of national significance—the proposal increases the amount of funding distributed through competition. Competition is an effective way to identify the projects that bring the greatest benefits for the investment.

Measure success  
Infrastructure investments are a means to foster economic development and improve access to jobs and opportunity for all Americans.

Unfortunately, the Chairman’s proposal fails to ensure that communities measure the success of their investments or connects what they measure to their investment decisions. Congress started a performance measures framework in MAP-21; however, those measures miss major community priorities (like improving access to work) and fail to connect results to funding and thus lack real accountability.

Our four principles cannot be considered independently of each other. Well crafted programs that are underfunded miss the mark. More money spent ineffectively is certainly not the point. Bringing our infrastructure up to a state of good repair requires both real funding and refocusing the program on maintenance (as opposed to expanding out the highway system).

While Chairman Shuster is the first to propose real funding in quite some time and we thank him for providing real leadership, we can not just spend our way to our goals without other reforms. The proposal therefore scores only a 50 percent, far from a passing grade in the classroom or for something as long-lasting as infrastructure.

We appreciate the chairman’s thoughtfulness and determination and we look forward to working together to ensure that future proposals ultimately spend taxpayer money wisely.

Choosing transportation projects that actually match our priorities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helping cities use data to measure progress and outcomes

The second year of our Smart Cities Collaborative will tackle how new technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space via four key topics. Our second post in a series on these topics examines the concept of using data to measure progress and outcomes.

Reminder: Applications for year two of the Collaborative are open until Friday, February 16. Find out more information about eligibility and apply to participate here.

As we continue building a forum for collaboration and providing direct technical assistance to a new cohort of cities, the second year of the Collaborative will explore how new technologies and new mobility are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. The content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage and price. (Read the first post on design here.) This second topic will examine the importance of utilizing data to measure project and system performance to ensure that new technologies and mobility options are implemented in ways that help cities make progress on their long-term outcomes.

Measure

A heat map of biking trips logged in Seattle using the Strava app. Via https://labs.strava.com/heatmap/

Automated vehicles, shared mobility options, and innovations in transit have tremendous power to transform both the way we move around our cities and how our cities are designed. Yet, as these technologies become increasingly available, the possibilities for both positive and negative impacts for our communities grow in parallel.

And, although the tools are new and perpetually changing, cities must remain steadfast in pursuing their community’s vision.

These advances in technology are providing a wealth of detailed, real-time data that cities can and should use to measure their daily operations and inform their decision-making. Many cities recognize the value of this data and the impact it can have, but have struggled to find the right way to gather and utilize it effectively. As a result, even though they have access to more raw data than ever before, they are struggling to quantify how particular projects or initiatives are helping—or hurting—as they develop and test new solutions to their major challenges.

By using a robust set of performance metrics, cities can evaluate the impacts of pilot projects and better calibrate them to drive the outcomes they’re seeking. This data-driven approach ensures that cities implement new technologies in ways that tackle regional priorities, are anchored to long-term community goals and mitigate potential negative impacts of new technologies.

This focus on data tied to outcomes helps cities stay rooted and grounded in a climate where technologies are changing every single day.

This year, the Collaborative will continue to refine existing metrics that best indicate success across numerous priorities, such as equity, access to employment, safety, user experience and system performance, while working to develop new metrics and indicators for things such as curb utilization or street redesigns.

We’ll also endeavor to develop shared standards, allowing cities to compare the success of projects across jurisdictions, discover the best applications of innovative technologies and better determine how to affect positive change in their own community.

With these metrics firmly in mind, the Collaborative will introduce participants to the fundamentals of data science and cover best practices in data collection and analysis. We’ll focus on how internal governance can change to reflect a data-driven approach and ensure that resulting analyses are fed back into planning and real-time dynamic operations. We’ll also explore efforts across the country to create third-party repositories of mobility data—like Seattle’s, for example—that include both public and private transportation providers, and how cities are aggregating, anonymizing and utilizing these data.

Stay tuned for our next post on our third Collaborative topic this coming year—manage—and how cities can develop public-private partnerships and use curb management strategies as tools to drive long-term outcomes.

Helping Des Moines get more from its transportation money

Through the support of the Kresge Foundation, T4America is helping the Des Moines Area MPO better measure and assess their transportation spending to bring the greatest return possible for citizens.

When it comes to decisions about what transportation projects to build and where, the general public’s perception is that those decisions are made in a murky, mysterious, political process that has little to do with tangible, measurable benefits. Performance measurement is a way to start to change this perception and make spending more focused on and accountable to accomplishing tangible goals.

As the survey we released earlier this year shows, the vast majority of MPOs want to find ways to do more with performance measurement, but they’re eager for some help — which the Kresge Foundation has enabled T4America to provide for six regions across the country. And in our first day-long workshop with staff from the Des Moines Area MPO in Iowa, stakeholders from member communities, and elected officials — including Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie — our team keyed in on helping everyone agree on what’s working and what’s not working as the MPO decides how to select and fund transportation projects in the future. 

What did we learn? These stakeholders in Des Moines want to put more of an emphasis on maintaining the transportation system that’s already moving people within and through the region. The group is also interested in finding ways to emphasize improving equity and access for people of different means and needs as they make decisions about what to build and where.

Ultimately, Des Moines would like to put more tools in their toolbox to build and maintain a transportation system that’s transparent, accessible, and cost-effective. T4America is excited to continue working with Des Moines and we look forward to reporting on their progress throughout the year. 

Are you interested in similar technical assistance on performance measures? Inquire here.

A bipartisan move to give states and metro areas access to better data to shape their transportation planning decisions

Congress took a bipartisan step today to provide states and metro areas with powerful data and accessibility tools that will help them better measure the destinations that their residents can easily reach, equipping transportation agencies to plan smarter transportation investments to address those gaps.

Congresswoman Esty (D-CT) — along with cosponsors Congresswoman Comstock (R-VA), Congressman Davis (R-IL), and Congressman Lipinski (D-IL) — introduced a bill this morning (Friday) to provide communities with valuable tools that can help them understand how well their transportation networks provide access to jobs and daily needs.

The Transportation Access & System Connection (TASC) Act would create a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) pilot program to purchase new, precise data tools for 15 states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to calculate how many jobs and services (such as schools, medical facilities, banks and groceries) are accessible by all modes of travel. The bill ensures that at least six small communities are included in this pilot via their MPO.

Connecting people to work is arguably the most important goal for our transportation system, yet we generally do a pretty poor job of measuring how successfully our local roads and transit systems performs this base function. But as important as measuring jobs access is, only 20 percent of all trips and only 30 percent of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are to and from work. This means that 80 percent of trips (70 percent of VMT) are for our other daily essentials — going to the store, shopping, or dropping the kids off at school, etc.

Until recently, transportation agencies could only monitor incredibly blunt metrics, like overall traffic congestion and on-time performance for transit, and while important, these paint a grossly two-dimensional picture of the challenges people face while trying to reach their needs within a reasonable period of time. And these limited measures certainly don’t provide enough information to help these agencies make the hard decisions about what to build to best connect people to the places they need to go.

Too often, the use of simple metrics results in the consideration of simple “solutions,” like adding expensive additional lanes to existing highways and road networks —costly solutions that often don’t solve the problem, or make it worse.

But today, there are precise new tools available that allow communities to more accurately calculate accessibility to employment opportunities, daily errands, public services, and much more. (Similar tools were used to run this analysis of Baltimore’s new bus overhaul, for example.) They allow states and MPOs to analyze a metro area and produce detailed data to help them optimize their transportation networks and utilize all modes of transportation as well as understand the interaction between transportation investments and economic development.

States like Utah, Delaware and Virginia and the cities of Sacramento and Los Angeles are already utilizing this data and seeing results. But unfortunately, states and MPOs must pay for this more helpful accessibility data while the more limited congestion data is made readily available to them. This bill will start to change that by creating a pilot program that will 15 states and MPOs free access to the data, helping them make better use of their limited taxpayer dollars to bring the greatest benefits.

We recognize Representative Esty and her cosponsoring Reps. Barbara Comstock, Rodney Davis, and Dan Lipinski. Let your representatives know that you support this bill – urge them to cosponor the Transportation Access & System Connection (TASC) Act (HR 4241)

USDOT is trying to eliminate a new requirement to track carbon emissions from transportation

USDOT is attempting to rescind a federal requirement for states and metro areas to measure their carbon emissions as part of a larger system of accountability for federal transportation spending.

This is from last year’s campaign about the measure for congestion, but the principle holds here: If buses are prioritized because of emissions targets, for example, a road can move more people more efficiently and with fewer emissions.

Update: The comment period has closed and we submitted a large batch of letters to USDOT. Check the blog for updates.

The 2012 transportation law (MAP-21) required transportation agencies to begin using a new system of performance measures to govern how federal dollars are spent and hold them accountable for making progress on important goals, like congestion, traffic fatalities, reliability, road/bridge condition, mode share and carbon emissions. For two years, USDOT worked to establish this new system, soliciting reams of public feedback, and finalizing the measures in January of this year.

Climate impacts aside, tracking carbon emissions is one of the best ways to judge how efficiently we’re moving people and goods. More on that in a minute.

The Trump Administration is attempting to repeal this carbon emissions measure. Take action and provide an official comment to USDOT in support of keeping it intact. (Official notice here)

TAKE ACTION

You may have been one of the thousands of folks who joined our coalition to successfully push USDOT to revise their measure for congestion and put value on providing transit, shared rides and safe walking or biking — rather than just incentivizing the construction of more expensive road capacity in every case in a vain attempt to “solve” congestion. During that process, we also succeeded in pushing USDOT to consider and include a carbon emissions measure to track the percent change in CO2 emissions generated by on-road mobile sources on most of our bigger roadways.

After first attempting to rescind the rule directly by fiat, USDOT was sued by environmental groups, and rightly so — once federal rules are implemented, they can only be undone by Congress or by a new rulemaking process that allows public feedback. So USDOT backed down and is going through the official channels, which means opening up a new comment period where interested groups and citizens can weigh in and urge them to preserve this CO2 rule as part of the new performance measure system.

But we’ll have to act fast — we need to have your letters by Monday, November 6, at noon, so we can deliver them before the deadline.

Measuring carbon emissions is a good yardstick for how efficiently a state or metro area is moving people and goods. Emissions will almost certainly go up if you’re only building new highways and not providing a wide range of transportation options in a congested corridor or region. Agencies should be encouraged — or at least rewarded — for finding ways to invest their transportation dollars so that trips can be taken on transit, on foot or by bike, or coordinated with land use so that trips can be shorter altogether. Measuring carbon emissions doesn’t give you the entire picture, but it is another valuable piece of the puzzle for evaluating the effectiveness of the spending decisions made by states and metro areas.

If USDOT manages to dump this measure, we will lose an important metric for determining who is using their funding to most efficiently connect people with destinations and move goods to market. Shouldn’t states and cities be aiming to move people more efficiently, emitting less carbon per trip? Or, if they decide that less efficiency is the way to go, shouldn’t taxpayers at least have a mechanism for tracking that and holding them accountable?

This administration is attempting to let transportation agencies make decisions while hiding the emission impacts from the public, removing a valuable metric for assessing how they’re spending your dollars. Let them know that we, the people who are paying for the transportation system, deserve to know what we are getting.

Comments are due by the end of the day on November 6. Click here to sign a letter that we’ll produce and deliver on your behalf.

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For those of you who prefer to submit comments on your own, you can do so through the official rulemaking on Regulations.gov here and you can grab the letter text from our page here to paste in.

New Massachusetts academy will focus on performance measures

Following the success of last year’s academy sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration, the Barr Foundation is sponsoring a new Transportation Leadership Academy for regional planning agencies in Massachusetts focused on using performance measures to better assess the impacts and benefits of transportation investments. 

Beginning this October, leaders from regional planning agencies in Massachusetts — along with civic and business leaders from across the state — will participate in a new training academy focused on performance measures. Performance measurement is the practice of more carefully measuring and quantifying the multiple benefits of transportation spending decisions to ensure that every dollar is aligned with the public’s goals and brings the greatest return possible for residents.

This academy will educate teams made up of local business, civic, elected leaders, and transportation professionals, prepare them to act on opportunities within their regions, and plug them into a dynamic national network of leaders throughout the country.

We are still recruiting leaders from Massachusetts to apply and join the yearlong academy.

Learn more & apply

 

The academy will consist of in-person workshops, ongoing technical assistance throughout the year, regular online training sessions, and expert analysis of their plans and progress on deploying performance measures. During the academy participants will:

  • Develop performance measures that fit and match their agency’s size and capabilities.
  • Discover how performance measures can be applied at different stages of the planning, project development, or construction process.
  • Explores how RPAs promote future-ready transportation, and interact with federal and state agencies and transit operators to define their critical role in shaping local transportation decisions.
  • Design metrics for community goals that address topics such as health, access, and equity.
  • Improve their public engagement process and how to talk to skeptics about performance measures.
  • Discover ways in which social equity and access to opportunity can be incorporated into their work.
  • Focus on green house gas emissions and the environment.

The Massachusetts Transportation Leadership Academy is presented by Transportation for America, Transportation for Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Association of Regional Planning Agencies, with support from the Barr Foundation.

To apply, please complete this brief form.

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of July 28th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

  • The Senate Appropriations full committee approved the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development “THUD” bill last week. The bill maintains the TIGER program which President Trump and the House Appropriations Committee proposed to eliminate. (Bloomberg BNA, T4America)
  • Last week, the House Energy and Commerce passed comprehensive legislation related to automated vehicles (AV’s). The legislation creates a federal-state framework for regulation of AV’s, that pre-empts state regulation in certain areas and increases the amount of safety exemptions to 100,000 over three years that manufacturers can obtain in order to test AV’s. (Recode)
  • The House of Representatives has delayed consideration of their FY 18 budget resolution until September (The House is in recess in August. Republicans have still not reached an internal caucus agreement on non-defense spending levels. (The Hill)
  • S. DOT’s “Federal Transit Administration (FTA) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking on Monday that would allow public transit projects to streamline some steps in the regulatory or permit approval process if they prove that it will attract more private investors.” (The Hill)
  • The Trump Administration’s first proposed effort on privatizing infrastructure, spinning off the air-traffic control system to a non-profit corporation, is struggling to find support in Congress. (The Hill)
  • Our partners on the Federal Highways Administration system performance measures rule, the National Resources Defense Council and U.S. Public Research Interest Group, are suing the Trump Administration over their delay on the greenhouse gas measuring requirement. (NRDC)
  • Biking is becoming mainstream in New York City. (NY Times)

Six metro areas selected to receive in-depth, hands-on assistance with performance measures

T4America is proud to announce the six recipients of a new technical assistance program aimed at helping metro areas better measure and quantify the multiple benefits of transportation spending decisions.

Through the support of the Kresge Foundation, T4America will be working with six metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) over the coming year to help them better measure and assess their transportation spending to bring the greatest return possible for citizens. After a competitive process conducted last month, T4America is awarding assistance on performance measures to these six MPOs across the country:

  • The Des Moines Area Metropolitan Planning Organization in Des Moines, IA
  • The Michiana Area Council of Governments in South Bend-Elkhart, IN
  • The Sarasota/Manatee Metropolitan Planning Organization in Southwest Florida
  • The Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission in Roanoke Valley, VA
  • The Imperial Calcasieu Regional Planning and Development Commission in Lake Charles/Southwest Louisiana
  • The Rapides Area Planning Commission in Alexandria/Pineville, LA

Why performance measures? To the general public, the perception is that the decisions about what to build, where and how are made in a murky, mysterious, political process. And once we do build new transportation projects, there’s little confidence that we ever go back and determine if it brought the benefits that were promised. Performance measurement is a way to start to change this perception and make spending more focused on accomplishing tangible goals.

As the survey we released earlier this year shows, the vast majority of MPOs want to find ways to do more with performance measurement, but they’re eager for some help. This new assistance program is specifically designed to help MPOs successfully respond to federal, state and local requirements — or go beyond them.

Over the next year, these six MPOs will receive hands-on technical support in meeting the new federal requirements and also with developing measures that address other goals for their regions, like increasing access to jobs and other services, supporting community-driven creative placemaking, improving public health, and supporting social equity, among others

“There will never be enough transportation dollars to get to every project idea — everyone has to do a better job of identifying the most beneficial projects. These six MPOs share a commitment to using performance measures to better serve their region’s goals and improve the accountability and effectiveness of their transportation programs,” said Beth Osborne. “They are already looking for ways to integrate these goals more directly into the decisions they make about which transportation investments to prioritize. With the support of the Kresge Foundation, T4America is excited to be able to help them do so.”

Congratulations to these six regions. T4America and our team of experts look forward to working with you over the coming year.

New technical assistance opportunity for MPOs interested in performance measures

Today T4America is launching a new technical assistance program to help metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) go further with measuring and quantifying the multiple benefits of transportation spending decisions to help ensure that every dollar is aligned with the public’s goals and brings the greatest return possible for citizens.

Similar to the Transportation Leadership Academy we did in partnership with FHWA last year, this new technical assistance program is geared toward helping a handful of metro areas implement a data-driven approach to assessing the costs and benefits of transportation spending — a process known as performance measurement.

MAP-21, the federal surface transportation law passed in 2012, created new requirements for metro regions to start using performance measures that are largely focused on the highway network on conventional things like safety, condition of roads & bridges, etc. (Though the included measures for traffic congestion, as we’ve shown, have a huge impact on how we choose to “solve” that particular problem.)

USDOT finalized the requirements for all of the new measures on January 18, 2017 and will require all 400-plus MPOs and 50 state departments of transportation (DOTs) to develop transportation performance measure frameworks.

Our team has designed a suite of tools to help MPOs not only satisfy the modest new federal requirements, but also go beyond them into other areas such as public health, access to opportunity, social equity; and to help them translate their big picture targets and goals into specific criteria for choosing and prioritizing what transportation projects to build and where.

Find out more and apply today.

Apply Here

 

New national survey on performance measures

Some metro areas have already been going far beyond the federal government’s modest new requirements to assess their transportation investments in terms of more ambitious goals like return on investment, public health and access to jobs. To establish a clear state of the practice and answer some key questions, T4America conducted this national survey of 104 MPOs from 42 states in 2016, also being released today.