petition Archives - Transportation For America

2,100 letters delivered to FHWA in support of easing restrictive street design regulations

Earlier this week, with our partners at the National Complete Streets Coalition, we delivered nearly 2,100 letters to FHWA supporting their proposal to ease the onerous federal design standards that make it needlessly difficult for local communities to build safer, more complete streets.

Complete Streets director Emiko Atherton

National Complete Streets Coalition director Emiko Atherton on her way to FHWA in Washington, DC earlier this week.

It was an incredibly encouraging move by FHWA, and thanks to many of you who sent in one of the nearly 2,100 letters, FHWA will hear the message loud and clear that this move has broad support.

In case you missed the news back in November, FHWA made an encouraging proposal to scrap 11 outdated provisions in the current design criteria that local communities and states must adhere to when building or reconstructing certain roads with speed limits under 50 mph — adhere to, or go through an arduous process of requesting an exception from FHWA to do things like line a downtown street with street trees, reduce the width of lanes to add a bike lane, or curve a street slightly to slow traffic and make it safer for people in cars and on foot.

Communities of all sizes are eager to capitalize on their streets as economic assets and boost the bottom line by making them safe and attractive for everyone to use them. Under these current design guidelines for federal-aid roads, communities might adhere to out-of-date FHWA regs rather than fight for exceptions that can delay a project or even increase the cost.

Along with Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, we rallied our networks to show support for this welcome change. And earlier this week, National Complete Streets Director Emiko Atherton personally delivered all of your letters to the U.S. Department of Transportation — trying not to fall over while balancing the 15-pound stack along the way.

The overwhelming support for the proposed rule demonstrates the groundswell of bottom-up, grassroots support for designing safer, more complete streets. We hope FHWA will take note by moving ahead with adopting the rule as it stands and making no modifications.

Thank you to all who submitted a letter of support, we look forward to keeping you updated in early 2016 with the latest developments.

fhwa design guidlines thank you

Proposed budget would gut transit spending, passenger rail funding

Sound Transit underground Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

A Seattle Sound transit light rail car moves through a tunnel south of downtown. Sound Transit’s new line was funded in part by the federal New Starts transit program.

The budget proposal from the Republican Study Committee, which consists of 165 of the 242 GOP House members, released a week or so ago, calls for completely eliminating the main federal transit program, zeroes out Amtrak, cuts all funding for the metro system in the nation’s capital and slashes $2.5 billion in high-speed rail grants.

This shortsighted proposal would derail with uncanny precision exactly the kind of investments that are most critical for creating jobs and developing a 21st Century transportation infrastructure. And as far as transportation spending goes, these are some of the investments that create the most jobs per dollar spent.

The proposal eliminates New Starts, the transportation program that funds all new transit projects in the country, and slashes high-speed rail funding — the same program touted by President Obama to great fanfare in last week’s State of the Union.

It even chops all federal funding for Washington DC’s transit authority, the very transit system that these legislators’ staff and neighbors rely on every day to get to and from work.

This budget is a trial-balloon for the budget fight to come. We need to waste no time making it clear that these kinds of cuts are short-sighted and unacceptable.

Sign our petition objecting to this assault on public transportation funding. We’ll deliver the petition with your signature along with a letter from us and our partners to lawmakers. (Are you a T4 America partner who wants to sign your org onto the letter? Contact Heather Brutz for more info.)

The lawmakers who crafted this budget clearly aren’t aware that millions of Americans — including their own constituents — rely on passenger rail and the types of transit projects these programs fund.

These are also the very projects that pay some of the most far-reaching economic dividends. Study after study has shown that every dollar spent on public transportation generates more jobs than any other form of transportation spending. This proposed budget cuts the investments that create the most jobs – an especially poor decision in the face of a recovering economy.

We can keep this proposal from becoming law if we speak up now and make it clear that Americans aren’t going to sit by as federal investments in transit are gutted.

Sign our petition to protect federal support for transportation and jobs!

U.S. Transportation Department makes good on promise to ensure our streets are made safer

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood issued a exciting new directive yesterday that officially shows DOT’s support for improving safety for walking and bicycling and the importance of integrating them into transportation systems — treating them as equal modes of transportation.

Last fall we released a report chronicling the tragedy of 76,000 preventable pedestrian deaths over the last 15 years. “Dangerous by Design” took a hard look at our often unsafe streets that are engineered for speeding traffic with little or no provision for people on foot, in wheelchairs or on a bicycle.

DSC_0376 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

When that report was released, we asked supporters like you across the country to sign a petition to Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood asking him to support Complete Streets at DOT, and more than 4,100 of you responded. We took that petition directly to Secretary Lahood back in November of 2008, and afterward, he told T4 America, “the right of way “belongs to pedestrians and bicyclists as well. The DOT Safety Council is going to look at this report and work with advocacy groups to ensure our streets are as safe as possible.”

Yesterday, Secretary Lahood and DOT responded by turning his words to us from November into official DOT policy with the release of a DOT “policy statement.”

The DOT policy is to incorporate safe and convenient walking and bicycling facilities into transportation projects. Every transportation agency, including DOT, has the responsibility to improve conditions and opportunities for walking and bicycling and to integrate walking and bicycling into their transportation systems. Because of the numerous individual and community benefits that walking and bicycling provide — including health, safety, environmental, transportation, and quality of life — transportation agencies are encouraged to go beyond minimum standards to provide safe and convenient facilities for these modes.

Or as he described it more simply on his Fastlane blog yesterday, “This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

We applaud the Secretary’s work on this issue and are especially thankful for the thousands of you who wrote a letter to Congress or signed our petition to Sec. Lahood urging him to use all the powers at DOT’s disposal to make safe, complete streets the norm all across America. Your voices were heard, and policy has changed.

“This is an issue that has been ignored far too long, even as thousands have died or been injured unnecessarily just by doing something as simple as trying to cross the street,” said T4 America director James Corless.

“We thank Secretary Lahood for his leadership at DOT and for elevating this urgent issue to the level of prominence that it deserves. Americans deserve have a safe route for walking to the store, walking their kids to school, or walking to the bus stop at the end of their block to get to work. Taking these simple steps to consider the needs of everyone who uses a street — bicyclist, pedestrian, or wheelchair user — is exactly what we were hoping for when we took our message into Secretary Lahood’s office last November. It can help us stay healthier by giving us one more option for travel, and Secretary Lahood is spot-on when he says that it’s a key part of making livable neighborhoods.”

This certainly doesn’t mean that the issue is over. As Barbara McCann with the National Complete Streets Coalition reminds us, there is still no official federal requirement for complete streets on projects the feds spend money on. And only a fraction of states, cities, and towns have rules on the books requiring them to ensure the safety of all users when they build or retrofit a street or road.

DOT is saying all the right things in this statement, but they need the legislative authority and money from Congress to line up with their excellent intentions.

So we’ve taken a first step. A big, important leap into a safer world for everyone who uses our streets. But there is more left to do.

Secretary LaHood receives your message loud and clear, responds in kind

DSC_0348 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

Secretary Ray LaHood holds the petition from Transportation for America and thousands of supporters while flanked by T4 America campaign director James Corless, left, and Barbara McCann of the National Complete Streets Coalition Monday afternoon at USDOT

Just a week after the release of Dangerous by Design, our report on the epidemic of pedestrian deaths, Transportation for America and six of our key partners had the opportunity to meet with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. During the meeting yesterday, we delivered a petition with thousands of signatures urging him to make pedestrian safety and complete streets a USDOT priority.

He responded with resounding support, telling T4 America, “the right of way doesn’t just belong to cars — it belongs to pedestrians and bicyclists as well.”

He added, “the DOT Safety Council is going to look at this report and work with advocacy groups to ensure our streets are as safe as possible.”

After Dangerous by Design was released last Monday, we asked for your help sending a strong message to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that safer, complete streets must be a priority at USDOT. The response was fantastic. In just five days, we received more than 4,100 signatures from people in 47 U.S. states on a petition to Secretary LaHood.

Due in part to the massive media coverage that Dangerous by Design received last week from coast to coast, we were able to set up this meeting with the Secretary and three of his top deputies to present him with the petition, talk about the report and discuss the urgency of pedestrian and bicycle safety. With the petition and a copy of Dangerous by Design in front of him, LaHood listened intently as T4 America’s James Corless and others talked about the epidemic of preventable deaths — and what we can do to turn the tide and keep pedestrians safe.

DSC_0334_2 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

Secretary LaHood was hopeful that federal transportation policy can better accommodate all users and keep them safe, and that now is the right time to make that change.

“I think this Congress gets it now,” Secretary LaHood told us. “Certainly in part because of advocates like you.” He acknowledged that making the streets in our communities safe and accommodating for everyone dovetails well with the Obama administration’s focus on livability.

He stressed that safety is the top consideration for everything they do at USDOT and urged T4 America to take the report directly to Congress as they continue discussions on the full six-year transportation bill. He also asked for more copies of Dangerous by Design (on their way, Mr. Secretary!)

Transportation for America was joined in the meeting by partners from America Bikes, the American Public Health Association, AARP, the National Complete Streets Coalition, the Safe Routes to School National Partnership and Smart Growth America.

View the entire set of photos from the meeting in our Flickr stream, and check back here later today for some more comments on the meeting.

DSC_0376 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

Barbara McCann of the National Complete Streets Coalition, right, tells Secretary LaHood a story from Cary, Illinois about Nate Oglesby, a young man who was killed in 2000 on his bicycle because he was crossing the only bridge over the Fox River — one that had no safe lanes for pedestrians. (Two other teens had died there previously.) Lanes were eventually added to the bridge at significant cost, but as McCann noted, “it would have saved money and lives to have just done it right in the first place.” Complete Streets policies would ensure that the needs of all users are considered during the planning phase of a project.