A new report from four leading transportation organizations demonstrates how existing and emerging technologies can squeeze more capacity from over-burdened highways, help commuters avoid traffic delays and expand and improve transportation options, all while saving money and creating jobs.

“Smart Mobility for a 21st Century America” shows why improving efficiency through technology is critical as our population grows and ages, budgets tighten and consumer preferences shift. The report was co-authored by Transportation for America, the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America), the Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT) and the University of Michigan SMART Initiative.

With President Obama’s support for a $50 billion down payment for infrastructure and the real prospect that Congress will move forward on a comprehensive, multi-year transportation bill in the upcoming session, the paper makes the case for investing in technology and innovation to help solve our nation’s most critical transportation problems.

The new report was released today in conjunction with the IBM Smarter Transportation Virtual Forum, which brought together experts from across the public sector, private industry and academia to discuss urban mobility and the growing need for technology solutions to the nation’s transportation, economic and environmental challenges.

“We have a unique opportunity to shape the direction of transportation policy for years to come, which is why this report is so important,” said Transportation for America Director James Corless. “We can harness technology and tap America’s creative potential to get a better bang for our buck and ensure the transportation options Americans rely on are available and affordable in the coming decades.”

“As public agencies are being asked to do more with less, investing in smart technology is critical for improving system efficiency, optimizing the public’s return on investment, and creating a more connected transportation network,” said ITS America President and CEO Scott Belcher. “Congress and President Obama have the opportunity next year to put the U.S. back on the road to global competitiveness and economic prosperity by investing in a more intelligent 21st century transportation system.”

Studies have shown that intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and other smart technologies are cost effective and quick to deploy, with solutions like synchronized and adaptive traffic signals yielding a $40 return in time and fuel savings for every $1 invested while also reducing CO2 emissions up to 22 percent and travel delays by 25 percent or more. The Government Accountability Office found the benefit-cost ratio of a nationwide real-time traffic information system to be 25 to 1, with a $1.2 billion investment returning more than $30 billion in safety, mobility and environmental benefits.

In addition, researchers from the London School of Economics and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that investing in ITS creates a network effect throughout the economy and stimulates job creation across multiple sectors, including green jobs, high-tech, automotive, information technology, electronics, and other industries.

While improvements to vehicles and cleaner fuels are the most talked-about technological innovations, many smart technologies are being deployed today to improve system efficiency and reduce travel delays, provide more convenient access to transportation alternatives, and even customize routes based on real-time traffic conditions and individual travel preferences to keep people and businesses moving on schedule. The paper groups these innovations into five categories:

• Making transportation systems more efficient and cost-effective
• Providing more travel options and multimodal connectivity
• Providing travelers with real-time, accurate transportation system information
• Making pricing and payments more convenient and efficient
• Avoiding unnecessary trips and time wasted in traffic

“It is critical for the future of our nation’s transportation policy to foster projects and programs that collect and disseminate information to the public in a timely and easily accessible fashion,” said Brian Shaw, President of ACT. “The result is a transportation system that is safer and provides more options for system users.”

“Investing in next generation transportation infrastructure makes sense. It connects and optimizes new transportation technologies, services, modes, and design, offering Americans more livability, sustainability, and hip factor for less money. It also lays the foundation for leadership, major business opportunity, and green job creation in the emerging global New Mobility industry,” said Sue Zielinski, Managing Director of SMART at the University of Michigan.

The report contains a series of case studies that demonstrate how these technologies have already been applied to real-world transportation challenges. The report also offers policy recommendations as Congress and the Obama Administration consider a comprehensive transportation bill. These include providing incentives and dedicated funding for states and regions to adopt smart technology solutions to make system more efficient, offering competitive grants to stimulate innovation, and having the federal government play a role in disseminating the latest research and best practices.

You can download the full report and read it cover to cover now, but we will be publishing the case studies as a series here on the blog over the next 2 weeks if you’d like to read about these innovations in smaller bite-sized chunks. Look for the first story later today.

The cycle is familiar by now. A study tells us what we all know: our roads are congested. We pour billions into new roads and lanes to “reduce congestion.” Then the study comes out two years later and just as before, our roads are still congested. There’s a call for new roads, new roads open up, we drive further and further, congestion goes up. Rinse and repeat.

Every two years, nearly every major media outlet in the country reports on a “congestion index” study that ranks metro areas and cities by their relative amount of traffic congestion. But a significant new report from CEOs for Cities suggests that there’s a fundamental flaw in that study from the Texas Transportation Institute, and by failing to accurately measure congestion or pinpoint what is producing it in our cities, we’re failing to truly understand the problem.

And when you don’t understand the problem, how can you ever really fix it?

Noah Kazis at Streetsblog most succinctly describes how the TTI study fails to see the whole picture:

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

The reason why we find ourselves in this situation is because our current federal transportation policies virtually guarantee it. There’s no financial incentive for anyone to measure congestion accurately or improve it — states just get a big load of federal transportation money with few strings attached. Congestion doesn’t get better in large part because states and metro areas aren’t required to reduce congestion or try to shorten or reduce trips with their federal money.

If a state wants to spend some of their federal money on a new comprehensive metro transit system to provide drivers some relief by giving them an additional option as well as taking cars off the road, the process takes years longer and is far more complex. What state, given the choice, would choose to invest in projects that take 4 times longer to get approved and require more local money to build? (Transit projects have about 50% of the cost paid by the federal government, highways get around 80%.)

As this new study demonstrates, the lack of proper metrics to measure success (or mostly failure) is emblematic of the need for reform.

If the ultimate point is to make smart transportation policy, we need to look at a lot of different factors that affect people’s lives. Fixating solely on interstate throughput, while failing to offer other travel and living options, has led our state departments of transportation to invest billions to create a result that is choking the lives out of our regions and isn’t making life better for the vast majority of commuters.

The good news is that places that are attempting to reduce trips and congestion by investing in diverse transportation options are actually showing progress. Regions that have been aggressively investing in additional travel options, eliminating trips, reducing trip length, creating more places to live close to jobs or more effectively managing demand have seen their congestion numbers get better, according to the CEOs for Cities report.

All of this is just one more giant sign pointing to the need for a truly reformed transportation program that can more accurately measure the problems we face, prescribe solutions that will work, and get out of the way as we unleash those solutions on the traffic that is killing our productivity and choking our regions while we motor along at 10 mph with no other option.

The Centers for Disease Control deserves credit for prioritizing increased seat-belt use and reductions in impaired driving as paramount to traffic safety. Where CDC and other agencies fall short, as Greater Greater Washington points out, is the role of traffic itself in health outcomes, rather than simply traffic safety. Ken Archer writes:

The flaw in this exclusive focus on traffic safety is that increased safety only matters when vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are kept static or reduced. Instead, safety improvements that reduce fatalities per VMT have been offset by rising VMT.

Ken is exactly right. Under the status quo, vehicle-miles-traveled will continue to rise, offsetting much of the progress we make on safety-related measures. Until we build roads to safely accomodate all users, whether in cars, on foot, bike or transit, Americans will continue to be at risk. Streetsblog asked why traffic reduction isn’t a top public health concern. That’s a question we hope more will start asking.

Perhaps you’ve seen the IBM commercials touting the fact that for the first time in history, the majority of humanity lives in cities — and solving the challenges facing our growing cities will be more urgent than ever before. One of the 21 programs of IBM’s “Smarter Planet” initiative focuses on traffic, congestion and what’s known as Intelligent Transportation Systems. (Others include cities, buildings and infrastructure.)

Last week, a forum sponsored by IBM as part of their Smarter Planet series that focused on improving transportation systems through technology yielded important lessons from some of our European counterparts.

Two speakers – Dr. Leo Kroon of Netherlands Railway and Gunnar Soderholm of Stockholm, Sweden – were among the highlights of “A Smarter Transportation System for the 21st Century,” held on Capitol Hill last Thursday.

Kroon described the importance of rail in his “tiny country,” whose 16 million people make it extremely dense. According to Kroon, rail market share between some Dutch cities reaches 50 percent, an amount that would be unheard of in the United States. And rather than force anyone onto the train, Kroon says the Netherlands Railways “seduces” them instead, through continued technological improvement that makes travel convenient and a commitment to reliability and affordability.

For instance, Netherlands Railway has introduced a SmartCard system and is improving its monitoring systems to pinpoint its flow of passengers and accommodate them as efficiently as possible.

The report out of Stockholm was even more compelling.

Gunnar Soderholm, head of the city’s Environmental and Health division, explained how a congestion charging scheme went from “biggest political suicide ever in Sweden” to embraced by even the most right-wing parties. The policy itself was made easier to implement than other cities because Stockholm proper is composed of several islands, with easy boundaries around the central business district.

After implementing the policy – in which drivers are charged for bringing autos into the business district during peak hours – the conventional wisdom was that people would need to see numbers showing its impact. According to Soderholm, no numbers were needed. Everyone could see the difference. “It was free flow all the time,” he said. Stockholm saw a 20 percent reduction in traffic, a 30-50 percent reduction in travel time and a 10-14 percent reduction in carbon emissions. Many more Stockholm residents are combining auto use with more walking and bicycling. Revenues from the charge are directed toward transportation infrastructure.

Stockholm is aiming to be fossil fuel free by 2050.

Innovations are also underway here at home. Judge Quentin Kopp, a decades-long transit advocate and former chairman of the California High Speed Rail Authority, explained how his home state has pledged to match dollar-for-dollar every piece of stimulus funding for high-speed rail. Kopp has been on the frontlines of the cause from the beginning, battling with former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson over a commission and, just two years ago, helping to shepherd narrow passage of a statewide ballot measure to fund high speed rail in the State.

Congressman Earl Blumenauer, a Portland Democrat, concluded with a window into how innovation and technology can guide efforts on the Hill. The big question: how does Congress pay for the next transportation bill? Blumenauer is an advocate of a vehicle-miles-traveled-tax and has pushed legislation to allow pilot projects across the country.

There remains great potential to both learn from our friends abroad and build upon successes here at home.

(Graphic below from Smarter Planet’s Transportation page.)

Due to the impact of high gas prices, the economic slowdown, and a growing preference for public transportation and other options for getting around, congestion was down in 2008 over 2007, marking the first two-year decrease in congestion since the Texas Transportation Institute began keeping track in 1982. Today, TTI released their bi-annual Urban Mobility Report today on the state of congestion and traffic in the U.S.

Some key findings:

Travelers spent one hour less stuck in traffic in 2007 than they did the year before and wasted one gallon less gasoline than the year before. The differences are small, but they represent a rare break in near-constant growth in traffic over 25 years.

• The overall cost (based on wasted fuel and lost productivity) reached $87.2 billion in 2007 — more than $750 for every U.S. traveler.
• The total amount of wasted fuel topped 2.8 billion gallons — three weeks’ worth of gas for every traveler.
• The amount of wasted time totaled 4.2 billion hours — nearly one full work week (or vacation week) for every traveler.

One cause of the decrease in congestion is the same cause responsible for the lower numbers of highway fatalities — Americans have been driving less and less. Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) growth rates have been in decline since 2005 and in 2007, total VMT and per capita VMT actually decreased for the first time since World War II. High gas prices and the recent economic downturn have contributed to these declines, but VMT was actually in decline well before the shock of increased gas prices and the recession, and has continued to fall even as gas prices plummeted over the last year.

And while total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) went down just slightly, congestion is down much more significantly.

According to Feburary numbers from INRIX, a reputable traffic statistics service, just a 3.7% drop in vehicle miles traveled in 2008 resulted in a 30% drop in congestion in our 100 most congested metro areas. That means each commuter spent 13 less hours stuck in traffic in 2008 over the previous year. And in slight contrast to the TTI report, the report found that overall, “99 of the top 100 most populated cities in the U.S. experienced decreases in traffic congestion levels in 2008 as compared to the prior year.” Small reductions in how much we drive each year have a much larger impact on congestion.

There’s no doubt that the sagging economy had a hand in reducing how much we drive. But regardless of the current economy, most Americans seem to be looking for ways to drive less — not more. So what if we invested more in the positive ways to reduce the amount we have to drive by making other options for getting around accessible, convenient, and available to more people?

With public transportation ridership still going up — even as driving is going down — it’s clear that people who have choices for getting around use them. People are looking for other convenient ways to travel that can get them out of traffic and save them time and money.

And as the INRIX numbers show, if we can make it easier to get around and increase the options for doing so, everyone behind the wheel benefits as congestion decreases. (And despite the decrease overall, the current $87 billion in congestion costs isn’t good news, by any stretch of the imagination.)

It’s unquestionable that the recession has had an impact, giving us some momentary slack in congestion. But what will we do with the breather? When the economy begins to pick back up again and people start driving more, will we head straight back into gridlock? With driving down and public transportation up, will we make more investments in the kinds of transportation options people are clamoring for, the kinds of options that can reduce congestion and make travel more painless for everyone?

Or will congestion simply mount as the economy rebounds?

• …And talks to DOT Secretary Ray LaHood about helping Americans drive less and creating livable communities.

• Domestic and international flights dropped by 9.1 percent from March 2008 to March 2009. (Streetsblog SF)

• Officials in Los Angeles County consider implementing congestion pricing to manage traffic and pay for transportation projects. (Los Angeles Times)

From the T4 America Youtube Channel.

What you might have missed was the fact that Washington, D.C. also managed to quadruple the number of people who travel into the city on a typical day — from 400,000 to 1.8 million — without breaking out into total chaos. And that number was quadrupled at on the same day that they closed all Potomac River bridges and banned private vehicles from a large area around the Mall and parade route.

The star performer of the day? What the Washington Post‘s Dr. Gridlock calls “the Washington region’s biggest transportation asset: The Metrorail system.”

By many accounts, it was the largest public gathering in city’s history. And for certain, it was the highest rail ridership day that Metro has ever had in its history. It wasn’t even close. The previous record, actually set just the day before at 866,681 trips, was completely obliterated with a total of 1,120,000 riders on Inauguration Day. There were problems with stations getting closed at times due to crowding, and definitely some packed platforms, but on the whole, Metro stood up to numbers far higher than anyone had ever seen before.

Even President Obama got there on public transportation

The Post’s Dr. Gridlock wrote a four part post-mortem on “How It Worked,” and his general conclusion? Thousands biked, even more walked, roads and bridges were closed to cars, and embraced the superior carrying capacity of Metro.

Local blog Greater Greater Washington points to last Tuesday’s success as a blueprint for the future of a growing Washington, DC region:

If our region is to grow, we need to help more people reach their jobs. One approach is to add traffic lanes and parking garages at enormous cost, both financial and in lost urban vitality. The other solution is to move people as we did on Tuesday. More people rode the trains. Each vehicle coming into the downtown core carried far more people. Over 2,000 people used WABA’s bike valet. And many more people started their days within walking distance of downtown. Those houseguests raised our population density enormously, enriching our neighborhood businesses besides.

To follow that up, read what Ryan Avent points out about Metro’s ridership these days, especially in light of the city’s population continuing to grow.

And now, of the top 20 ridership days, one was in 2004 (Reagan’s funeral), one in 2007, 16 were last year, and two have already happened this year. And the metropolitan population continues to grow. One might think that WMATA and the District would work to enhance core service, by planning a new core line and by adding streetcar capacity to help with the intracity load.

So what’s the status of expanding and building upon “the region’s greatest transportation asset?” If you’ve seen the transit cuts map, you might already know the answer: Cutting nearly 900 jobs and cutting $73 million in service. That operating assistance sure would have been useful to keeping the economic backbone of the region functioning.

Call your representative today and urge them to support Rep. Nadler’s amendment to increase transit funding in the stimulus. (1/28/09)

Photos by Steve Davis

But thanks to the November 4 approval of Ballot Measure R – a half-cent sales tax increase expected to generate $40 billion for transportation improvements, largely in transit, over the next 30 years – L.A. County’s reputation as the epicenter of sprawling development and automobile culture could be set for a major overhaul.

Denny Zane (right), a longtime community activist and former mayor of Santa Monica, helped lead the fight to win support for Measure R by heading up Move L.A., a coalition of labor, business, and environmental groups that saw a common interest in battling climate change, reducing congestion, and improving transportation options in the region.

In a phone interview this week, Zane spoke to Transportation for America about the process of building a unified front for the effort, the challenges in getting the measure on the November ballot, and the future for Los Angeles County and Move L.A.

What’s your background in local activism, how did it lead you into becoming involved with transportation?

In the late ‘70s, I became active in the rent control battles in Santa Monica, and at one point was the campaign manager for a ballot measure for rent control. We created a little political organization, Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights, and became the progressive environmental coalition that eventually expanded its issues beyond rent control and housing. Thirty years later, it has a majority of the city council and the elected board of Santa Monica.

That organization is what gave Santa Monica its progressive, liberal reputation. Prior to that, the city had a very conservative city government. I was elected to the city council in 1981 – the first year where we gained what we called a progressive majority – and my primary interests at the time were housing, land use and the environment. I got involved very much then in the objective of moving the city to have the greenest possible fleet of alternative fuel and electric vehicle technology, and very much involved in actually leading the effort to create the Third Street Promenade (the city’s landmark smart-growth development project). Those projects were very important because they were my environmental work and economic development, which gave me a lot of credibility with the business community.

I was also the director of the Coalition for Clean Air – which expanded my environmental relations and history and knowledge – and worked very actively in what was the living wage campaign of Santa Monica, which became a sort of entrée into the labor movement. My father had been a steelworker, so that certainly was a helpful source of credibility.

How did the effort for measure R begin?

The process really started with me and Terry O’Day (the executive director of Environment Now) looking for foundation funding to get the environmental community in L.A. involved with transportation.

We decided to try to hook up with the labor community, in part because the labor community is powerfully politically, and it seemed like a natural alliance. At first we started talking about the Subway to the Sea, because that had been the iconic symbol for Mayor (Antonio) Villaraigosa’s election campaign. We were doing this for clean air purposes and greenhouse gas reduction just as much as congestion relief.

We had a hard time finding a foundation that would be interested in this because there was so little optimism about the ability of Los Angeles to deal with these issues, because it has not really done it before. This is still the automobile capital with an immature transit system – lots of buses, but not much in the way to of rail to flesh out the system. So we had to look for other sources, like the private sector, to support the effort.

A questionable future for transit

At some point, the MTA announced that they had six billion dollars for new capital projects over the next 30 years, which is a pittance. Then they announced that they had four billion dollars – Terry and I looked at each other and said, “That ain’t good.”

And within a month they announced that they now had zero. All of the problems were driven by the cost of materials for construction for permitted projects going up, thereby taking down money that was otherwise available.

We were looking at each other thinking, “This is incredible, the largest metropolitan area in the United States, is saying that it has zero money for new transportation capacity of any sort,” They had money for maintenance and operating what they already have in place, but they had zero money for new capacity. There’s about two million new residents expected over 25 years, so how do you fit two million people into this community and move them around without new capacity? That seems like a world of hurt.

Finding a direction

At that point we were no longer talking about the subway as the iconic project driving a transit agenda and we’re talking about finding money.

The only real money we could get would be from the voters, and in most cases that means you have to get a two-thirds vote. That wouldn’t happen if it were just a subway – people in the other outlying parts of the county would be unlikely to give it two thirds vote – so that means our thinking had to shift away from the subway to a comprehensive countywide plan.

It was very clear that November 2008 was a golden opportunity, because there would be substantially higher turnout in that election than most. But nobody would make the preparations because the general assumption was that two-thirds vote was too much, especially, considering the economy. This was all before the banks collapsed, even before gas prices started to rise – this was only the normal depressing economic situation. There were lots of other money things to be on the ballot – college bonds, schools bonds, etcetera – so in general, the political leadership thought “Well, two-thirds vote was too steep a climb, we wouldn’t make it, so sorry gang, but this has to be figured out some other time, some other way.

Uniting for a common interest

We were feeling like 2008 was too much of an important opportunity that we couldn’t simply accept that judgment at face value. We didn’t want the election to come and go and do nothing by default.

The decision was made to try to convene this business labor environmental dialogue, in order for this coalition to have a fighting chance to come together for November 08. We invited 35 organizations for a meeting in October last year, which was composed equally of business, labor, and environmental representatives.

At that meeting I proposed to the group, that we needed to expedite the discussion about…transportation funding, and (we decided to try to) put something on the ballot.

Developing a strategy

We decided we could have this conference, which we had a couple months later in January. Three weeks before it happened, we thought we’d get about 125, but it turned out we got 350, so we were clearly exceeding our expectations.

It was a very interesting group of business leaders, multiple unions, and multiple environmental organizations, and the people who spoke were really starting to get with the program, including the mayor. The mayor had long wanted this to happen, but had felt there wasn’t evidence the constituencies and the voters were ready to make the kind of campaign that needed to happen. People frequently want election officials to do everything, but don’t appreciate the fact that elected officials can’t do everything – they need their constituency leaders to take initiative as well.

This time we had to create the parade ourselves, so the elected leadership would have a constituency to work with. The conference showed there was a parade, there was a constituency coalition ready to get to work, and there was such good energy in the room.

Movement towards November

My organization got funding to do its own poll, and we came in with 69 percent supporting a sales tax for a broad county plan, and that was encouraging. That led Metro to do its own poll a couple weeks later, and they came in at 71 percent, and that was encouraging. And the mayor’s office, being a bit skeptical about some of these polls, decided to do one of its own, so they did one a month later that showed 73 percent supporting the sales tax.

So now we had a group of numbers showing it was reachable.

There were lots of places where this could have just fallen apart completely. The legislature could have sat on the legislation, there was some efforts to pork barrel the legislation, which were resisted. When the bill passed, the governor was trying to veto everything until the legislature passed the budget, which held the whole measure up for a couple months and meant that no one could really be sure if there was going to be a campaign.

Thanks to the extra efforts of the mayor, and thanks to the efforts of the labor movement, we got five million dollars ultimately pulled together which was sufficient to have a decent TV and radio campaign. The key thing was we always knew that there would be a strong turnout and that the Obama factor was in our favor. The new voters going to the polls to support Barack Obama were voters that would give us very strong support and could push us to a higher threshold, and that’s exactly what happened.

Building a Future for Los Angeles County

The program is between two-thirds and 70 percent transit, which is remarkable for Los Angeles County, in the heart of automobile culture. About 15 percent of the money will go to the local governments for use as they see fit for transportation services. Many of them will use the money for transit. A conservative estimate is that if five percent of that local money goes to transit, than we are at 70 percent transit.

That will help keep the system solvent, the fairs low, and the service robust. Otherwise what we would be having is a rise in fares and services cutbacks just because of the economic situation, but now we can avoid that. The really new thing is there are multiple light rail systems in the measure, there are multiple bus rapid transit systems, high capacity bus programs, and of course, the iconic subway to the sea, although Measure R only funds it from Westin to Westwood. With federal help it will be able to make it to the coast?

A lot of this is electric, which I refer to as zero emission transit, which has got to be the direction for anyone serious about reducing greenhouse gas emission.

What do you think really made you successful? Do you think it had a lot to do with the political environment, with rising gas prices, with a growing interest in transit in general, or with traffic problems in the area being particularly acute?

One, the traffic congestion was so acute that everyone knew it was going to get worse. I think that made it believable that people would vote two-thirds, and the fact that there was going to be a presidential election with a high turnout, and the fact that you had a mayor who had campaigned on and was consistently prepared to support such a system.

And then I think there was something about the political maturation of the community. Until now, none of the environmental organizations had staff devoted to transportation. That’s sort of remarkable, that there’s so little about transportation on their agenda.

The idea of the labor movement and the environmental community working together was pretty remarkable in Los Angeles, it hadn’t happened before and here it happened, and that’s a function of political maturation. It sort of feels like L.A. is growing up.

What do you think was the strongest arguments in terms of framing this issue?

Congestion was a universal problem throughout the county, not just in one part of the county, so the argument that we needed a comprehensive countywide plan rang very true. People knew that we had reached the limits of the freeway system and if were going to get new capacity and relief, it would have to come through transit. I think that people also that the argument for clean air was also a compelling argument.

Did you have to shift your message once the financial crisis started wreaking havoc on the economy?

No we didn’t have to shift our argument. When we did polling three weeks out, we had lost ground among some older demographics, but we gained ground among younger, so we started doing a lot of focused messaging to media that reached all their audiences. With the older audience, the message was a lot about clean air, because while they were certainly worried about the economy and whether they could afford the $25 bucks a year, which is the average cost of this sales tax, they were also concerned with the long-term health implications from the air quality.

What was opposition’s central argument?

There was only one argument, which came from certain parts of the county. Certain elected officials would say we weren’t getting their fair share, and it was specious argument. When you looked at the actual projects, and funding commitments, those parts of the county were doing just as well as any other part of the county, but it was reflective of, a history of political rivalry and of mistrust. They didn’t get some things they wanted so they started to argue they didn’t get anything they wanted, when in fact they got as much as anybody else did.

Do you see any broader implications from your victory, any lessons that a larger movement for transportation reform could learn from your campaign?

Well it was certainly was true that here in Los Angeles, the business community, the labor community, the environmental community all saw a common interest. Especially when the concern that might have unsettled them would have been how much highways versus how much transit, but in our case, nobody was really arguing for expanded highway construction. Assuming you need maintenance and repair, and interchange improvements, but significant freeway projects – all that had been done in previous epochs.

So everybody was of accord that the future of transportation had to be dominated by new transit, and this case, fixed guideway transit. It was just a question of how much.

What happens to Move L.A. now that Measure R has passed?

Now we really have to get organized. There is lots of implementation issues that need to be wrestled with, not simply by MTA board but by constituency groups. Measure R doesn’t address all that needs to be addressed, for example it doesn’t address except in a tangible way the good movement issues, and it doesn’t address the opportunity created by the high-speed rail project.

There are other both planning and funding issues – there needs to be a dialogue about the new administration, Obama administration will certainly create some opportunities, so have a constituency coalition that can play a role in that discussion rather than just leaving it to elected officials is one of those things.

And as big as 40 billion is, it’s probably about half of what we need. The subway doesn’t get completed with that, the ground access to our aviation system has got to be remedied.