Dragging the federal transportation system into the 21st century

We’re more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Yet we still measure and evaluate our transportation program like it’s 1965. The next reauthorization must drag this system into the modern era.

The built environment that most Americans know today is defined by what was considered, at the time, to be the best practices in transportation engineering and design. However, that time was the 1960s, when it was cool to smoke on planes and gasoline was filled with poisonous lead. We’ve had a lot better ideas since then, and we should not feel committed to policies based on tradition. 

In the same way that we didn’t always put seatbelts in cars but do nowadays, we need to update our standards from the 1960s. We need to bring the federal program into the 21st century. Here’s how to incorporate Transportation for America’s modernization principles in federal transportation reauthorization.

Bring the federal program into the 21st century

In our platform for reauthorization, under our final core principle to “modernize the program,” we outline four specific ideas:

• Remove outdated performance measures like value of time and level of service
• Make multimodal access to jobs and essential services a required performance measure
• Evaluate success and progress over the long term
• Develop a new framework for permitting and environmental review that advances a faster, outcomes-based approach to approvals

Before we unpack those, what do we mean when we say bring the federal program into the 21st century? Didn’t Congress address things like electric vehicles in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act? While Congress did, and that was important, we’re not just talking about electrification (plus EVs have been around a while). There’s much more to modernizing the transportation system than swapping gas tanks for batteries. Besides, the IIJA dedicated about $148 billion to the National Highway Performance Program, the US’s largest roads program, and only about $4.1 billion for states’ National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program.

We’re talking about reworking how the federal government interfaces with that policy that determines how we measure and evaluate success, make decisions, and prioritize outcomes we want out of the transportation system. We’re talking about reforming the system itself, the measures and evaluative tools we choose to evaluate the success of potential projects and select them. 

Today, federal transportation policy helps transportation systems deliver diminishing, if not negative, returns on investment in infrastructure. This is an area ripe for reform: our continued efforts on this path have helped build the conditions where transportation and housing costs are now straining the wallets of the average American.

1) Remove outdated performance and selective measures from practice

Here’s an example. Over sixty years after its introduction in the 1965 Highway Capacity Manual, we still use level of service (LOS) as a major factor in selecting and designing projects. LOS works by assigning road segments “grades” based on how much delay there is—congested roads with more vehicles get Fs, and roads where vehicles are flowing freely get As. 

In practice and in project selection, those grades are often presented as justifications for interventions aimed at reducing congestion via road widening. But LOS itself is not always informative of the realities on the ground. It ignores local development, what sort of businesses can be accessed from the road, the presence of pedestrians, and more. After all, a road only gets an A-grade LOS under free-flow, traffic-free conditions– in other words, when it is not being used. All LOS measures is the ability to drive at high speeds without anyone near you. While that might be what a community wants for a limited-access highway or interstate, that’s hardly the preference for in-town streets where you are trying to create a vibrant place, encourage more connected land use and housing development, or serve the needs of a wide range of people, including those opting to take transit, walk, bike, or drive less often. Measures like level of service tend to point decision-makers toward the same “solutions” to congestion, like widening roads, that have been shown to simply not work, and recreate the problems they are built to solve. 

Level of service, among other technical measures and guidance, like “value of time,” should be subordinated to more sophisticated measures that take advantage of modern technology. 

2) Measure access

In surface transportation reauthorization, Congress should add multimodal access to jobs and essential services as a significant performance measure under the federal Transportation Performance Management system. Measuring access prioritizes what matters for users, not for planners. People care about what jobs, amenities, and services they can get to (i.e., access) within a certain amount of time spent traveling. When we prioritize throughput measures like LOS that place a premium on how fast traffic moves, we prioritize going far and fast, but we don’t prioritize the most important point of transportation infrastructure: connecting destinations. 

We don’t plan trips based on how fast we get to move to get there, and our own priorities for access reveal themselves in common parlance. We say, “It takes me about 15 minutes to get to the store,” or “it’s a short 5-minute walk from here.” We don’t say “I was able to travel at 45 mph along this corridor in light traffic relative to off-peak conditions.” Thinking about and selecting projects when considering multimodal access helps uplift this by placing a priority on projects that best work in favor of users’ needs to reach diverse destinations. Right now, the vast majority of destinations are inaccessible by transit, walking, and biking, because our transportation system has spent decades prioritizing investments in speed, rather than access and connectivity. 

However, increasing complexity and sophistication, like with arcane transportation travel demand models, which are used to assess future regional travel patterns and determine investments, does not overcome our need for speed mindset and assumptions. There is nothing wrong with making assumptions and modeling outcomes from investment decisions. But instead of helping to prioritize investments in the areas of greatest need, in practice, transportation models can provide a scientific-looking stamp of approval used to conveniently greenlight new projects that perpetuate status quo, unsafe and disconnected transportation systems. 

This is made worse by the fact that, because of assumptions baked into many models on a structural level, they almost invariably lead to results that show us doing poorly on the performance measures that should matter least, like level of service. In many regions, models and performance measures are directly integrated with the processes that determine which projects are selected for funding (with no specific reason to single them out, here it is in the Ohio Kentucky Indiana Regional Council of Governments’ selection process). If a section of road is projected to have a level of service below an arbitrary standard according to a travel demand model, an expansion project often automatically scores higher and is more likely to be selected. In places that do score projects, some regions and states use a given year’s projected volume of cars (Average Annual Daily Traffic, or AADT) in place of LOS, but it approximates the same thing. Funding tied to model outputs continues to interface with performance measures that prioritize the wrong things,  which in turn directs investment toward building more of the same, rather than allowing for innovative solutions. 

3) Evaluating success and progress

We are heading full-steam toward reauthorization without completing a basic review of the tools used every day to forecast crucial factors like future traffic, congestion, or ridership, justifying hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of public investment. 

Section 11205 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act required USDOT to complete a study that evaluated how and where our traffic and demand models have gone wrong. But, two years after the required completion date of 2023, that study is still not complete. Waste, fraud, and abuse run rampant in unvalidated systems, and Congress needs to ensure public investments are sound. 

To estimate how any given corridor might be used 25 years in the future, travel demand models rely on far-reaching assumptions about entire regions’ economic and population growth trajectories, technology adoption, and land use patterns. Instead, we should opt for making decisions based on the types of benefits we want to see today, rather than respond to anticipated growth with highway megaprojects. Already, in the implementation of CMAQ (Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program), project selection can be based on anticipated project benefits using the CMAQ calculator. Tools, like Georgetown Climate Center’s Transportation Investment Strategy Tool and investment-impact-based models like it, determine the likely outcomes of projects based on project specifications, scope, and funding. MPOs and states, like Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Vermont, have used tools like these to evaluate the aggregate environmental, quality of life, and safety impact of the projects lined up for funding. Using tools, like those above, would allow project sponsors to estimate the full impact of their entire program, rather than how well a project addresses one particular projected need on a given corridor. It also helps to estimate if the entire investment program is steering selection in the right direction. Because what good are multimillion-dollar investments in transit if the benefits are outweighed by billions in highway expansions?

4) Modernizing environmental review

An investment might have incredible projected benefits, but if they can’t be built on reliable timescales, those benefits may never materialize. With increasing uncertainty about the stability of transportation investments thanks to program freezes and unpredictable federal rescissions, it is more important than ever that net-benefit transportation infrastructure investments can move fast. 

Unfortunately, in the case of the Neighborhood Access and Equity grant program, much of the funding that could have gone to projects to repair divisive infrastructure, improve safety, people’s access to essential services, open up smart growth development, and improve environmental outcomes in very obvious ways was rescinded before it ever had a chance to deploy. In the case of Syracuse’s I-81 project, the city never made it out of the National Environmental Policy Act’s (NEPA) environmental review phase. Let that sink in: This project would have removed a pollution-generating highway that throws particulate matter into the air 24 hours a day and replaced it with new, right-sized neighborhood streets, bike infrastructure, green space, and had obvious benefits to the people who lived there and the environment as a whole. However, because laws like NEPA  that guide federal environmental review are focused on process and proofing review documents against litigation, rather than producing good outcomes for people or the environment, projects like these with obvious benefits get stuck in a process that should instead be focused on halting or changing projects that damage the environment.

Environmental review and permitting reform is the hot topic leading up to reauthorization. When Congress looks to reform environmental review, it should not just focus on things like making it easier to build energy infrastructure and highways. Projects with well-defined positive environmental outcomes—like removing a highway and replacing it with green space or people-centered streets—should be able to advance on a consistent and swift basis through environmental review processes with maximum federal support. On the flip side, projects that just guarantee more pollution and more congestion, like highway expansions, should be made to fully mitigate their well-documented impacts and receive lower proportions of federal support.

Looking ahead

Thanks to the proliferation of urban highways and Euclidean zoning, it took just a few decades for the transportation and land-use planning decisions of the 20th century to lead to an unimaginably great transformation of our environment, both built and natural. If we want to build our way out of our problems, we need to scrap outdated policies and modernize the decision-making process at the core of our trillion-dollar transportation system. This article does not get into all the ideas we would want to explore in order to modernize the system, and decision-making is not the only thing that needs to be reformed. Among a million other things, we need to confront the rising costs of transit construction, make changes to parking policy, and amplify the benefits of rail electrification. However, all of those are, in many ways, downstream of project selection and how we evaluate success. Whatever we choose to build and at whatever pace we can, we need to reform decision-making to ensure that we are not selecting for wasteful investments. Billions of dollars in transportation funding are tied up today in projects that are objectively bad for people’s health and incapable of solving the congestion troubles  they were built to address. The system underpinning investment needs to be reformed for funding to effectively flow to projects that deliver benefits. Otherwise, without reform, we’re just due for another do-over of all the expensive, inefficient, and unjust billion-dollar transportation planning mistakes of the 20th century.