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Author Archives: Chris Rall

Passing Oregon’s transportation package was just the beginning of the hard work

Governor Kate Brown is conducting signing ceremonies in communities throughout Oregon this week to celebrate the passage of Oregon’s transportation package. While the governor, legislature, and stakeholders are enjoying this victory lap on a big legislative effort, the hard work of implementing the bill is yet to come.

“The transportation package is truly a roadmap to Oregon’s future. Let’s keep Oregon moving forward.” Gov. Kate Brown speaking at a signing ceremony earlier this week.

HB 2017 represents a big investment in transportation for Oregon – $5.3 billion over 10 years, with over $1 billion in state dollars dedicated to transit. But there are many questions remaining about how that funding will be spent.

Over the 10-year timeframe the package dedicates almost $800 million for a variety of earmarks; however, most earmarks are not cost-specific, shifting numerous critical decisions to later dates. Instead, each region receives a determined amount of funding for multiple projects.

This lack of specificity could be a curse or a blessing. Oregon’s DOT and the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) could interpret the lack of specificity as flexibility to spend designated dollars more effectively, like scoping projects to maximize return on investment. But to do so, they’ll need to apply “practical solutions” effectively.

The bill more than triples state funding for public transit. This will require the OTC to develop and finalize rules in less than a year for rationally distributing over $100 million each year in new funding to a wide variety of transit agencies — urban and rural, large and small. How will the OTC and local transit agencies quickly develop a process to demonstrate accountability and transparency in distributing and using that funding effectively?

A big challenge for implementers of this bill is that it’s not big enough to address everything. While the bill includes substantial new funding for repair, many roads and bridges in the state will continue to deteriorate. The freeway bottlenecks addressed in the bill are only a small subset of those in the Portland region, and may become clogged again due to induced demand in a few years. Will the public understand the limits of the package the legislature passed, even as they see their taxes increase?

The bill requires study and possible implementation of congestion pricing on major freeways in Portland. ODOT is already hiring for new positions to tackle this challenge. Congestion pricing (also called value pricing) has the potential to address many of Oregon’s congestion challenges in a fundamental way, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier. While shown to be highly effective in several cases, value pricing is politically difficult and a new technical challenge for Oregon.

Passing the bill was a huge success, but that was just part of what’s needed.

If Oregon’s leaders don’t construct a strong framework for accountability and measuring performance, it’ll be like making a great pass but then kicking the ball back into their own goal. Oregon’s work on this transportation bill is far from done, and those involved in passing the bill have much work to do to deliver on its promise to Oregonians.

Transit projects threatened in the Pacific Northwest by cuts to the federal New Starts program

Various planned bus rapid transit and light rail projects in Oregon and Washington would be eliminated if Congress heeds President Trump’s budget request to entirely eliminate the federal funding for new transit construction projects, profoundly impacting these communities’ futures.

Whether planned to accommodate new growth, attract talent, provide alternatives to soul-crushing congestion or access to jobs, these projects are essential to the vitality of these communities. Here’s a rundown of the transit projects in the Pacific Northwest that would be affected.

Spokane’s Central City Line

Spokane is a mid-sized city of over 200,000. Although it boasts seven college campuses, many students choose to move elsewhere after graduation, draining the city’s potential talent pool. Spokane understands the new paradigm: College graduates want to live in vibrant places with transit options, and attracting that talent is critical for economic success.

Part of Spokane’s plan to stem the emigration of talent includes building the Central City Line (CCL), an all-electric bus rapid transit line from Brown’s Addition through downtown to the University District. The project improves connections across the bus system and provides a better option to cross downtown. The region passed a ballot measure in November 2016 to cover operations costs for the CCL. But for the project to proceed with construction, it will need to win a federal Small Starts transit grant of $53.43 million to complete the $72 million project. Spokane’s ability to attract and retain a talented workforce and build its competitive edge hangs in the balance.

Eugene’s EmX Network

Expanding upon the Eugene-Springfield region’s successful EmX bus rapid transit network is key to their plans to accommodate growth without having to sprawl onto some of the world’s best farmland. The region already has two EmX bus rapid transit lines with a third under construction and several more lines planned. Lane Transit District (LTD) was awarded $131 million in Small Starts grants to build its first three lines. The agency won’t be able to proceed with lines in northwest Eugene, or on East Main Street in Springfield without continued federal support to augment their local contributions.

“With the fact that this area is growing so rapidly, there’s going to be a need and a want from the community to expand our transportation network,” said LTD spokesperson Theresa Lang in a recent article in the Eugene Register Guard. “If this budget goes into effect, that would be devastating for those future plans.”

Greater Portland’s Southwest Corridor and Division Transit Project

Greater Portland has plans to go big and small using transit to help accommodate more people in its fast-growing region. The big plan is the SW Corridor, a proposed light rail line from Portland to Tigard and Tualatin through Southwest Portland paralleling the frequently congested I-5 corridor. The planning for this corridor integrates land use and active transportation, but light rail is central. Currently in environmental review, the project’s sponsors are counting on receiving a full funding grant agreement (FFGA) in 2021 to begin construction and be completed in 2025.

“From a city standpoint, it has to do with traffic congestion and housing density,” says Tigard Mayor John Cook. “Without light rail, things will happen but it will take 50 years instead of 25 years.” With about a half-million more people expected in the region by 2040, they don’t have 50 years.

On the east side of Portland, planners endeavor to make a faster, less expensive investment. The Division Transit Project is a 14-mile express bus that will enhance speed, reliability and capacity on Portland’s busiest bus line from downtown Portland to Gresham through the most diverse neighborhoods in Oregon.

This smaller project is now eligible to apply for the $100 million Small Starts grant it needs in 2018 to open in 2021. The new line will reduce travel times by up to 20 percent and add articulated buses to address crush-load conditions that often force drivers to pass waiting riders with today’s inadequate service.

“Residents and businesses have been clear with us: Keep investing in transit,” says Metro Councilor Bob Stacey. “It’s critical, particularly as Portland grows and we all need more options to get places reliably and safely.”

Local access to jobs and a regional vision in Puget Sound

The Puget Sound region’s transit ambitions are supported by ballot measures passed by voters in the City of Seattle and Snohomish County in 2015, and in the entire region when voters passed Sound Transit 3 (ST3) in 2016. The local measures fund plans for a seven-line BRT network in Seattle and additional BRT lines in Snohomish County. Expansion of Sound Transit’s regional Link light rail network and freeway-running BRT are major components of the regional plan funded by ST3. While local voters have committed billions of their own dollars to these projects over the next few decades, these plans all rely on federal support to varying degrees.

Community Transit’s Swift Green Line from Bothell to Paine Field connects a great portion of Snohomish County with the massive employment center at Paine Field, where much of Boeing’s operations are based. . In the meantime Community Transit is proceeding to construction based on a “Letter of No Prejudice” (LONP) from FTA. That LONP is not a guarantee of federal funds but allows the agency to seek reimbursement once funds are committed through the single-year grant agreement. The agency is planning several other bus rapid transit lines in the future including the Swift Orange Line connecting with light rail when it reaches Lynnwood in 2023. Along with nearly all other similar transit projects, those projects will depend on future federal transit construction grants.

Move Seattle passed in the core city of the region in 2015, and provides much of the funding for seven BRT lines crisscrossing Seattle. Madison Street BRT (also called the RapidRide G line) is already in planning. The $120 million project was originally planned with the expectation of a $60 million Small Starts grant. Without federal funding, the fate of the project, which would enhance access to the dense downtown Seattle core, may have to be delayed from its 2019 completion date. This pushes back construction of the other six BRT lines in this fast-growing city with major traffic congestion; lines that Seattleites already committed to paying their share for.

The amount of federal funding sought for the full 25-year Sound Transit 3 plan is small in proportion to the amount locals voted to pay in local taxes and fees — just $4.7 billion in New Starts funding vs. $54 billion total cost. But without federal support the plan cannot be completed within the 25-year timeframe, leaving communities on the edge of the region like Issaquah without the light rail connections they were promised.

Puget Sound residents have stepped up and voted to tax themselves to build these systems with the expectation they’d be joined by a reliable federal funding partner.

“The ballot measures adopted by our voters assumed a reasonable level of federal matching funds to deliver our most challenging transit solutions through the continued funding of the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Grant program,” said Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff in a joint statement with the LA Metro CEO. “But the administration’s budget proposes to terminate that federal partnership for challenging projects at a time when ever-worsening road congestion threatens to choke off our and other regions’ economic growth.”

If the federal government disregards its historical role and commitment as a funding partner on transit projects, it will absolutely hamper this economic powerhouse’s job growth, harming the national economy in turn.

With so many critical projects on the chopping block if the relatively small federal transit capital program is eliminated, it’s no wonder that many in the Pacific Northwest are eager to weigh in with the administration and Congress as they choose what to do with this vital program in the 2018 budget that is due to begin in October.

Oregon’s legislature just approved a transportation package that goes big for transit

The Oregon Legislature just passed a transportation package that makes historic investments in transit while also advancing congestion pricing and putting funding toward safe routes to school infrastructure, electric vehicle purchase incentives and fixing roads and bridges.

As local stakeholders, the governor, and legislators worked over the last year and a half to develop legislation to invest in Oregon’s transportation system, a common refrain emerged: “Go big, or go home!” The idea being that if legislators were going to take a tough vote to increase taxes, they might was well make it a significant enough increase to make a substantial difference for the state’s commuters, traveling public and shippers. The Oregon House passed HB 2017 yesterday (Wednesday), and the Senate approved the legislation late today, which the governor is expected to sign. If Governor Kate Brown signs the bill, Oregon will become the sixth state to raise new transportation funds in 2017, and the 30th since 2012.

Oregon puts some skin in the transit operations game

Now virtually at the finish line, the overall package isn’t as big as initially proposed, but it has gone big for transit. The legislation introduces a new statewide transit-dedicated 0.1% employee payroll tax expected to generate $103 million annually. This represents over a 200 percent increase in state funding for transit — truly a game-changer that will increase transit service in rural and urban areas across the state.

Change from 2014 state funding per capita for transit, compared to potential funding with new transit funding. Via bettertransitoregon.org

A committee created by the legislative leadership to develop the initial funding package toured the state last year and heard about the importance of transit from every community they visited, large and small, rural and urban. However, like many other states, Oregon has a very strict constitutional restriction on motor-vehicle user-fees like gas taxes, registration fees and title fees. Funds from these sources can only go to infrastructure within the road right-of-way, and definitely not to transit operations.

This wasn’t Oregon’s first recent attempt to raise new funds for transportation. An employee payroll tax to fund transit had originally been proposed in the failed 2015 “Gang-of-8” package. While there were concerns about the regressiveness of this funding source, and a more progressive income tax was floated as an alternative, ultimately, the payroll tax stuck. To mitigate the regressive payroll tax, transit agencies will be required to submit public transportation improvement plans explaining how they will improve service and/or reduce fares for low-income riders.

As part of the effort to win this component of the package, the Oregon Transit Association compiled stories about the value of transit and how additional funding could effectively be spent to improve the lives of Oregonians. The Better Transit Oregon website outlines, for example, improvements like seven new bus lines and increased service on 20 other transit lines in the Portland region, and enhancing service that Kayak Public Transit provides between Pendleton, Hermiston, La Grande and Walla Walla in eastern Oregon. Overall, the funding could provide a 37 percent increase in service hours statewide.

Many ways to skin a cat

The joint legislative committee tasked with producing the package recognized from the start that this package had to be multimodal. While there was a focus on freeway projects that would address three bottlenecks in the Portland region, many committee members quickly recognized that these freeway projects were certainly not silver bullets and possibly wouldn’t help much at all in the long term.

Senator Brian Boquist from a rural part of the Willamette Valley regularly told his colleagues and the media that, “We cannot build our way out of congestion,” and “We cannot tax our way out of congestion,” to advance tolling and congestion pricing as critical strategies to address Oregon’s congestion challenges. The legislation directs ODOT to study, and, if feasible, implement congestion pricing on the two major north-south freeways in the Portland region, I-5 and I-205.

Ironically, as the size of the package shrank due to pressure from trucking and automotive stakeholders, the funding available for the freeway projects shrank, but congestion pricing stayed in the bill along with smaller investments like $10-15 million annually for safe routes to school infrastructure, a $12 million annual program for electric vehicle purchase incentives and the aforementioned transit funding. Overall the package shrank from $8 billion over 10 years to $5.3 billion.

Recognizing the need for accountability and transparency – but coming up short

Legislators recognized the need for improved transparency and accountability but lacked the political will to fully address the issue in any meaningful way.

While the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is known for its emphasis on state of repair, and certain data-driven programs like All Roads Transportation Safety and Connect Oregon, it has stumbled significantly, particularly with more expensive projects like the failed Columbia River Crossing and the over-budget Pioneer Mountain Eddyville highway project.

A working group was specifically charged with developing policies to address accountability and transparency. T4A had worked with Representative Reardon to put forward HB 2532 modeled on Virginia’s “Smart Scale” concept as way to identify projects that maximize return on investment. It proposed to do this by giving each project a return-on-investment (ROI) score and only selecting for funding those that scored the best. In the end, the workgroup opted for “the Nevada model” which involves cost-benefit analysis of projects, a different tool aimed at the same task of evaluating project ROI.

Unfortunately, the committee didn’t make a strong commitment to this new approach, exempting all the earmarked projects in the bill, and only including modernization projects that cost more than $15 million. To put this in perspective, the draft 2018-22 State Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP) includes no projects that that clearly would be subject to the new analysis.

This means Oregon won’t be able to use this system to meaningfully compare proposed projects — including nearly $800 million in earmarks in the package — to report on, let alone prioritize, those that maximize return on investment. To make matters worse, the Connect Oregon program — renowned for its data-driven merit-based project selection process similar to the federal TIGER program — is now completely consumed by earmarks for the next two biennia.

The bill does give the governor-appointed and legislatively-confirmed members of the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) greater capacity and authority to oversee ODOT. OTC will be granted independent staff and the power to hire and fire the ODOT director in consultation with the governor. These changes create the some hope for administrative change to improve ODOT’s accountability, transparency and ability to make data-driven decisions that maximize return on investment toward achieving Oregon’s goals.

Oregon’s attempt to raise new state funding for transportation is coming down to the wire

The Oregon legislature has just two weeks left to vote on a transportation package that — in addition to funding highway maintenance and expansion — takes steps to significantly fund transit, safe routes to school and implements forward thinking strategies like congestion pricing and active transportation management.

Flickr photo by Oregon DOT. https://www.flickr.com/photos/oregondot/15035881385

Update: 7/6/17: A deal was struck by legislators and approved in the Oregon House and Senate this week. More details here in this newer post.

The Co-Chairs and Co-Vice Chairs of Oregon’s Joint Committee on Transportation Preservation and Modernization Committee (JTPM) have been negotiating the details of HB 2017 while a constitutionally mandated end-of-session ‘sine die’ on July 10 looms. This committee was formed last year to develop a transportation package for the 2017 legislative session, and has conducted a tour of state to gather input and convened many meetings to develop and flesh out the details of the package over the course of this past year.

The package has too many moving parts to describe in this post, but here are five notable elements to Oregon’s proposal:

1) Five diverse sources of revenue

To raise new transportation funds, the proposal includes traditional mechanisms like gas tax and registration fee increases, and not-so-traditional ones like an excise tax on bicycle sales, employee payroll taxes and congestion pricing. These sources are so diverse in part because of a strong interest from legislators in seeing different user groups have ‘skin in the game,’ and because Oregon’s constitution prohibits any motor vehicle-related user fees from being used on transit, off-road paths, or non-highway freight infrastructure. Add in new tolls and there are actually six sources of revenue contained in the legislation.

2) It includes significant funding for transit operations

The state of Oregon pays only about 3 percent of the cost of operating the numerous transit systems in the state while nationally, states cover about 24 percent of transit operations. A new 0.1 percent statewide payroll tax on employees would significantly change that, dedicating 85 percent of the projected $107 million it would raise toward transit operations annually. This would bolster transit service in small towns and large cities across the state, improving access to jobs and other services, and making the state a valuable partner in running the multimodal transportation networks that are vital to the state’s prosperity.

3) Freeway widening is not the only congestion solution offered

Like other recent state transportation funding packages, Oregon’s includes funding for freeway expansion — including freeway projects intended to address three specific bottlenecks in the Portland region. But an earlier presentation outlining the proposal also acknowledges the limitations of this approach, noting that we “cannot tax our way out of congestion” and “cannot build our way out of congestion relief.” The bill calls upon the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) to implement — where possible — pre-construction tolling, congestion pricing, “zip lanes” (we take this to mean high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes) and active traffic management. While the benefits of freeway widening are often lost to induced demand, congestion pricing can more effectively address congestion if coupled with investments in other traffic-reducing travel options like transit.

4) A “Regional Increment”

The biggest congestion challenges in Oregon are in the Portland metropolitan region. While business interests around the state are concerned about congestion in Portland since they move their goods through this port city and economic hub, it’s still a tough sell for the rest of the state to pay for big freeway projects in Portland. To solve this politically and financially, the package levies an additional “regional increment” on the Portland region with higher gas taxes, registration fees and title fees, and dedicates that funding to projects in the Portland region. This helps Portland fund its big projects and holds together political support from rural, more tax-averse parts of the state.

5) Significant discussion on accountability

We’ve written before about Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) effort to regain public trust.

“While the agency is respected for innovative programs like ConnectOregon’s competitive grants and a strong commitment to fix-it-first principles, it has stumbled occasionally as well, including the failure to win support for the problematic Columbia River Crossing mega-project, massive cost overruns on a rural highway project in the landslide-prone coastal mountains, and ill-timed miscalculation of carbon emissions estimates related to failed 2015 transportation investment legislation.”

Legislators are anxious to show the public that they can improve transparency and accountability in this bill. The proposal calls for giving the Oregon Transportation Commission greater power and capacity to oversee the Oregon Department of Transportation. It also calls for cost/benefit analysis of future projects and communicating construction progress on an improved website.

We expect new amendments to be released this week as the legislature races to complete its work before the deadline.

We All Have a Role To Play in Winning More Transportation Funding

Last week, I attended the Center for Transportation Excellence’s (CFTE) bi-annual Transit Initiatives and Communities (TIC) Conference in Seattle. The conference focused on how to win local ballot measures to fund transit, but many of the lessons can be applied to different transportation ballot measures. The big take home message was this: everyone has a different role to play.

The reason for holding the conference in Seattle is pretty obvious to those familiar with the recent ballot measure victories for the county, city and region. Speakers were on hand to tell those stories, including T4A members like Tacoma, Seattle, King County, Transportation Choices Coalition, Move LA, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber. We also heard lessons learned from places big and small, including: Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Spokane, and Ellensburg.

So, what do I mean by “Everyone has a role to play”? Agency staff, local politicians, business leaders, labor leaders, and advocates all have very specific roles in bringing a ballot measure across the finish line. As we heard T4A Advisory Board member Denny Zane say at Capital Ideas last fall and again here at TIC, you need to pull together this broad coalition early to ensure everyone is bought into winning. Assuming you’ve already done that, here is what each player can do in their role:

Agency Staff often feel disempowered because the law tends to prohibit advocating for a measure that will benefit the agency on agency time. We learned from Steven Jones at AC Transit that many agencies could do a lot more. With the caveat that agency staff should check with their legal council, Steven told the story of being very aggressive in sharing information about their ballot measure, reminding transit riders about the registration deadline and election dates, and even registering new voters while making sure they never told anyone to vote a particular way. “The bus is your friend. Use it!” said Steve. They used bus marquis, and pamphlets on buses to communicate about election dates and voter information. They even dedicated a bus to voter registration, bringing it to events and festivals. Another key role for agency staff: delivering on the promises of the campaign. “The way to change perception is to be effective every day,” said Rob Gannon, general manager of King County Metro, a T4A member.

Local Politicians tend to step a bit farther forward than is optimal in many campaigns. Yet, can be a very powerful source of support if they are restrained about elbowing their way into the limelight, according to Jay Schenirer, a Sacramento City Council member. Jay informed us that politicians are better off leaving the campaign organizing to community groups as stakeholders have reason to not be honest about their positions with politicians while lobbying other issues. Politicians can do a number of critical things to lay the groundwork for a successful campaign. These include: polling, education, raising money and providing infrastructure like mailing lists and campaign volunteers. Local elected officials can also sometimes be helpful in bringing certain groups on board like the business community. Perhaps most important, politicians can “rig the election” by adjusting the geography and timing of a ballot measure to maximize the prospects of success.

Business leaders typically get less engaged in the exact contents of a measure. They can provide funding for the campaign, and can bring effective spokespeople in the right context, especially from the healthcare industry. “The business community doesn’t knock on doors, but they do raise money for campaigns,” said Hilary Norton of Fixing Angelenos Stuck in Traffic (FAST).

Labor has some capability to raise funds, but their biggest strength is boots on the ground. “Labor is good at knocking on doors and making phone calls,” said Rusty Hicks from the LA County Federation of Labor. Labor groups have big memberships that represent a voter and volunteer base. They have the organizing infrastructure like call centers and newsletters to members. Rusty cautioned organizers to acknowledge diversity of labor membership and tailor the message and approach accordingly to recruit support from service sector, building trades and government worker unions. “Thirty percent of union members are Republican so you need some labor spokespeople to reach those voters,” he said.

Advocates by contrast care a lot about what’s in a package. This type of group can bring legitimacy of the measure from a particular perspective such as transit or biking and walking, and expertise in building coalitions and running campaigns. Shefali Ranganathan of Transportation Choices Coalition, a T4A member, who led the successful ST3 campaign for $54 billion-worth of transit investments in the Puget Sound region, talked about using polling data and modeling to identify a group of persuadable voters on which they could focus messaging and outreach efforts.

There were several overarching messages that participants took from the conference. Denny Zane admonished participants to make big plans, telling us, “Fortune favors the bold.” Furthermore, the work does not end when the campaign ends. In reference to the successful passage of “ST3” in the Puget Sound region last November, Tacoma mayor Marilyn Strickland said, “The campaign didn’t end in November. It began in November. Sound Transit needs to deliver because someday there will be an ST4.”

Oregon’s Transportation Package – 5 Things to Know

The Oregon legislature has just introduced a transportation package that – in addition to funding highway maintenance and expansion – takes steps to significantly fund transit, safe routes to school and implements forward thinking strategies like congestion pricing and active transportation management.

Oregon’s Joint Committee on Transportation Preservation and Modernization Committee (JTPM) held an informational hearing on HB 2017 on Wednesday evening. The JTPM was formed last year with the expressed purpose of developing a transportation package for the 2017 legislative session, and has conducted a tour of state to gather input and convened many meetings to develop and flesh out the details of the package over the course of this past year.

The package has too many moving parts to describe in this post, but here are five notable elements to Oregon’s proposal:

1) Five sources of revenue
The proposal includes traditional sources like gas tax and registration fee increases, and not-so-traditional sources like a bike excise tax, employee payroll tax and congestion pricing. These sources are so diverse in part because of a strong interest from legislators in seeing different user groups have ‘skin in the game,’ and because Oregon’s constitutional restriction prevents motor-vehicle user fees from being used on transit, off-road paths, or non-highway freight infrastructure. Add in tolls and you get to six sources of revenue!

2) Significant funding for transit operations
The state of Oregon only supports 3% of transit operations in the state while nationally, states cover about 24% of transit operations funding. The 0.1% statewide payroll tax on employees would significantly change that, dedicating 85% of about $107 million to transit operations annually. This would bolster transit service in small towns and large cities across the state improving access to jobs and other services.

3) Freeway widening is not the only congestion solution offered
Like other recent state transportation funding packages, Oregon’s includes funding for freeway expansion – namely freeway projects addressing 3 bottlenecks in the Portland region. But an earlier presentation outlining the proposal acknowledges that we “cannot tax our way out of congestion” and “cannot build our way out of congestion relief.” The bill calls upon the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) to implement – where possible – pre-construction tolling, congestion pricing, “zip lanes” (we take this to mean high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes) and active traffic management. While the benefits of freeway widening are often lost to induced demand, congestion pricing can more effectively address congestion if coupled with investments in other traffic-reducing travel options like transit.

4) A “Regional Increment”
The main congestion challenges in Oregon are in the Portland metropolitan region. While business interests around the state are concerned about congestion in Portland since they move their goods through this port city and economic hub, it’s still a tough sell for the rest of the state to pay for big freeway projects in Portland. To solve this politically and financially, the package levies an additional “regional increment” on the Portland region with higher gas taxes, registration fees and title fees, and dedicates that funding to projects in the Portland region. This helps Portland fund its big projects and holds together political support from rural, more tax-averse parts of the state.

5) Significant discussion on accountability
Because of recent, expensive boondoggle transportation projects, legislators are anxious to show the public they can improve transparency and accountability in this bill. The proposal calls for giving the Oregon Transportation Commission greater power and capacity to oversee the Oregon Department of Transportation. It also calls for cost benefit analysis of future projects and communicating construction progress on an improved website.

We’ll be tracking this legislation as it develops, but this is already certainly a package that other state legislatures may want to keep an eye on.

Will Oregon’s DOT change how they do business?

Buttressed by public opinion, a new oversight effort and legislative action, momentum is building in Oregon for increasing transparency and accountability in how the state’s transportation agency does its business.

I-5 over the Columbia River in Oregon. Flickr photo by Doug Kerr. httpswww.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/7459949082

Governor Kate Brown and the Oregon legislature have been working for well over a year to restart efforts to raise new state revenues for transportation after a failed attempt in 2015. Two separate special committees have toured the state for listening sessions, and have developed or are in the process of developing proposals for a transportation investment package.

These efforts to raise new funding have put a spotlight on the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). A growing number of legislators, local leaders and members of the public are asking whether or not ODOT’s investment choices are maximizing return on investment, and whether those decisions are made with adequate accountability and transparency.

While the agency is respected for innovative programs like ConnectOregon’s competitive grants and a strong commitment to fix-it-first principles, it has stumbled occasionally as well, including the failure to win support for the problematic Columbia River Crossing mega-project, massive cost overruns on a rural highway project in the landslide-prone coastal mountains, and ill-timed miscalculation of carbon emissions estimates related to failed 2015 transportation investment legislation.

In late 2015 members of the legislature demanded, and the governor commissioned, an audit of ODOT to review the agency’s management structure and oversight.

Just this last week, the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC), a body of five volunteers appointed by the governor to oversee ODOT, has jumped into the fray. OTC Chair Tammy Baney took the unusual step of sending a formal letter to Governor Brown requesting dedicated independent staff and participation in the agency director’s performance review — to help the OTC fulfill its oversight duties.

This latest move by the OTC coincides with similar efforts in the legislature.

Representative Jeff Reardon (D) has introduced a bill (HB 2532) directing the “Oregon Transportation Commission to adopt rules establishing quantitative system for scoring and ranking transportation projects that are being considered by commission for inclusion in Statewide Transportation Improvement Program.”

Transportation for America has assisted in developing this bill, which draws on programs in Virginia, Massachusetts, Washington State, and others. The legislative session starts this week, and the bill already enjoys support from five other legislators, including top Senate transportation committee Republican Brian Boquist.

With all these efforts to reform ODOT now in motion, this Thursday’s meeting of the new oversight group should be lively. OTC members and meeting attendees will learn about the draft findings from the ODOT audit for the first time — a topic that will almost certainly touch on the accountability and transparency of ODOT’s business decisions.

Trickle-up performance measures

While working to enhance its performance-based planning framework, Metro, the metropolitan planning organization for the Portland, Oregon region, can draw from the experience of local jurisdictions within its own region — bringing unanticipated benefits through “trickle-up” learning.

This is the second of a series of posts on the issues and challenges of performance-based planning in the Portland region.

When Metro kicked off the process of developing its long-range transportation plan governing the next ten years of spending it was clear that performance measures would be a focus, both because of the new requirements created by the 2012 federal transportation law (MAP-21) and a growing public interest in making smarter choices about transportation investments.

Metro convened a workgroup of stakeholders to provide guidance on performance measures. To get things started, Metro hosted a workshop in January of 2016, which included presentations on the performance measure work of two local jurisdictions: City of Portland and Washington County.

The experience of each of these jurisdictions offered up lessons that have informed the workgroup’s efforts to identify performance measures and develop a framework to inform Metro’s next long-range plan.

As part of its transportation plan, Portland has used performance-based criteria as a way to prioritize investment, and has been careful to ensure that those criteria reflect the city’s values. Criteria were derived from numerous sources that incorporate citizen input. The seven criteria are “cross-modal”; they evaluate various concerns and support a balance among modes.

Portland’s evaluation criteria

In 2014, Washington County published Multimodal Performance Measures and Standards, prepared by Kittleson & Associates. The report strives to identify performance measures that are relevant to non-automobile modes of travel. While the suite of performance measures identified in this study are useful fodder for Metro’s workgroup, some of the greatest value is the lessons learned in the process, and the opportunity to adapt some of the study’s approaches to evaluating the performance measures themselves.

While the study lists five lessons learned, the first two are most of interest:

  • Different measures are best for different planning applications.
  • Different measures may be needed to assess the same goal.

These two lessons, along with the use of matrices to visually compare proposed measures, are playing the biggest role in informing the work of Metro’s performance measures workgroup.

Performance Measures, Graphic, Transportation Planning, Grid, Chart, Corridor Planning, Development, Crash, Pedestrian, Mode Share, Travel Time, Portland, Oregon

Washington County, Oregon developed matrices to identify how proposed performance measures could be applied.

Taken together, these lessons led the workgroup to ask for matrices to illustrate the role of performance measures under consideration for Metro’s long-range plan. Metro is using two types of matrices to answer two questions. First, what is the relationship between the proposed performance measures and the region’s goals. Second, at what stage of planning can each performance measure be applied?

For example, Metro is using vehicle miles traveled as a performance measure in several stages of planning. It’s important to understand how this measure relates to several of the regions’ goals including efficiency of the transportation system, reducing household transportation costs, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving safety. A matrix comparing proposed measures with the region’s goals helps workgroup members to visualize those relationships and identify redundant measures.

RTP, Evaluation System, Matrix, Graphic, Chart, Portland, Oregon, Measures, Evaluation, Travel, Region, Efficient, RTP Goals

Metro staff developed a matrix that communicates how each proposed performance measure addresses the region’s goals.

Likewise developing a matrix to look at how measures can be applied is also helpful. For example, crash rate is something that cannot be predicted in Metro’s travel model. So while safety is a major goal for most transportation agencies, a proxy may be needed to inform selection of a preferred scenario or project prioritization. Metro is considering a measure they are calling “VMT exposure” which is the amount of traffic on surface streets. While this isn’t an exact measure of safety by any means, it is strongly correlated and can be easily forecast in a transportation model. Crash rate will be used as a monitoring measure to determine if the region’s investment strategy is working to reduce crashes in hindsight.

Besides the ideas on how to evaluate performance measures, there is an additional benefit to learning from local jurisdictions: consistency between local measures and regional measures. Getting everyone on the same page to coordinate regional investments helps ensure that all dollars are going to accomplish goals that are shared across the region. Regional performance measures that reflect those bubbling up from local jurisdictions will help local jurisdictions like Portland and Washington County that are already ahead of the game develop local plans that reflect their own local values while still being consistent with the regional plan.

Politics of performance-based project prioritization in Portland

Leaders and advocates in the state of Oregon and in the Portland metropolitan region have been discussing how to use performance measures to inform smarter investment decisions and build public trust in how transportation dollars are spent. As the Portland-based representative for Transportation for America, I’ve been deeply engaged in these discussions, including serving on a work group for Metro, Portland’s metropolitan planning organization, providing guidance on performance measures in the next long range transportation plan, and working with state leaders on legislation to integrate performance-based decision making into the Oregon DOT’s programs.

This is the first of a series of posts on the issues and challenges of performance-based planning in the Portland region.

Many staffers working on Metro’s long-range transportation plan — referred to locally as the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) — had the opportunity to attend a two-day symposium at Portland State University focused largely on performance-based project prioritization. Robert Liberty, director of the Urban Sustainability Accelerator at Portland State University, organized the symposium entitled New Thinking for a New Era: A Symposium on Transportation Investment Decision-making. Attendees included staff from MPOs around the country and experts at the cutting edge of performance-based planning.

Participating with T4A director James Corless and SGA senior policy advisor Lynn Peterson, we heard about a range of new policy developments and technical tools from:

  • Chris Ganson, California Governor Edmund G. Brown’s office, on the implementation of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as a primary measure of environmental impact (instead of level of service (LOS)).
  • Eric Sundquist, Managing Director of State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI), on accessibility performance measures and the Sugar Access tool developed by Citilabs, and the implementation of Virginia DOT’s ‘Smart Scale’ project prioritization.
  • Sam Seskin, recently retired from CH2M HILL, on the development of Oregon’s MOSAIC
  • Steve Heminger, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (the MPO for the San Francisco Bay Area) on their approach to performance-based project prioritization.

Of particular interest were the lessons learned on the politics of integrating performance-based project prioritization into the MPO planning process. A recurring theme was the need to give decision-makers the space and time to get comfortable with a new approach. It can be a challenge to sell elected officials or skeptical board members on a performance-based project prioritization that allows a process imbued with the region’s values to elevate the best projects — rather than a process where the most influential or persuasive voice gets their project funded.

There were a few recommendations for putting elected officials at ease in the early stages of developing a prioritization process:

  • Develop a prioritization system in a way that does not initially put projects at risk of being removed from funding consideration. Local projects are precious to local officials, and they will initially do everything to protect them — even at the expense of the long-term regional gains and smarter investments.
  • Limit the array of projects that will be subject to prioritization. For example, if a project is close to construction, consider it a done deal. Expend effort on analyzing more expensive projects rather than cheaper ones, and focus on capacity expansion projects as opposed to maintenance and operations.
  • Consider if projects need numerical rankings. MTC categorizes projects as high priority, medium and underperforming and uses those categorizations to inform subsequent decision-making.

While these are all ideas to consider, it became clear at the symposium that local context matters. In the Puget Sound region, Councilmember Balducci shared the story of opposition to a specific proposed road through pristine land that helped initiate Puget Sound Regional Council’s (PSRC) project prioritization process. In addition, PSRC developed its process in a time of plentiful funding, and so it was ready to apply when scarcity arose and the MPO needed to cut projects from its constrained list.

MTC has gone through an iterative process that has added rigor over the course of 15 years. At a time when there was controversy over some particular measures, support for the overall approach was strong, and so they continue to expand the program. Originally applied only to projects that expand the system, they have begun evaluating state-of-good-repair projects for prioritization as well.

As Metro considers using performance-based prioritization in its investment decisions, these stories could help inform how to bring skeptical decision-makers on board. It’s challenging for local leaders to switch from the political wrangling they’re accustomed to, to a rational approach that elevates the best projects based on their merits. However, when they emerge on the other side with smarter investment decisions, the ability to communicate decisions more transparently, and as a result, greater public trust and greater ability to raise more transportation revenue, there is no compelling reason to go back.

Fulfilling transit’s need for speed in King County

Improving bus travel times and overall reliability can not only lower the cost of providing service and potentially attract new riders, but every dollar saved is a dollar that can be spent on more transit service elsewhere. Attracting new riders and stretching every dollar as far as possible are critical for regions striving to meet the demand for housing, jobs and retail near effective transit. T4A member King County has a novel approach to improving transit speed and reliability.

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Transit agencies traditionally improve transit speed and reliability by investing in big light rail and bus rapid transit (BRT) projects that give transit vehicles dedicated right-of-way unimpeded by traffic. But how can transit agencies improve reliability and speed of their existing transit service when dedicated right-of-way isn’t possible or affordable?

King County Metro, the transit agency for a county that contains 39 cities including Seattle and Bellevue — while still investing in many RapidRide BRT corridors — has a department that develops lean, flexible solutions that can be applied more broadly over its bus network to make service more convenient and reliable.

True to its name, King County Metro’s Transit Speed and Reliability (S&R) group works to sustain and improve the speed and reliability of the system, which carries 120 million riders per year. To accomplish this, S&R employs a toolbox of engineering solutions that range from large corridor-wide projects to smaller spot improvements that can improve speed and reliability anywhere on the network, regardless of whether the line is a designated BRT corridor or just a typical bus line.

These spot improvements are small- to medium-scale solutions to maintain or improve bus performance, like bus lanes, on-street parking management, intersection channelization, traffic signal retiming, traffic signs, roadway channelization and transit signal queue jumps to eliminate delay and improve travel times and reliability.

Two recent examples of spot improvements help illustrate how cost effective this approach can be, and just how critical partnerships and collaboration are to the process, because streets are often owned by cities.

In the northern neighborhoods of Seattle, four separate bus routes carrying 1,950 total riders per day were experiencing significant delay at Wallingford Avenue N and 80th Street due to a traffic signal prioritizing east-west traffic in the evening hours when the dominant bus traffic pattern is actually north-south. Speed and Reliability worked with the Seattle Department of Transportation (another T4A member) to change the signal timing from 9 p.m.- 12 p.m. creating a 12 second reduction in bus delay. That may not sound like much but multiplied over the 27 buses that pass through the intersection over those 3 hours, it’s over 5 minutes of paid bus driver time and even more passenger time every day — all from a very simple fix.

In Bellevue, Route 249 carrying 1,210 passengers per day was getting hung up at a left turn due to a short green signal. S&R worked with the Bellevue DOT to extend the green phase allowing buses to complete the left turn, reducing delay by 77 seconds. Again, very big time savings with a small, inexpensive fix.

The work of the four-member S&R group helps Puget Sound’s transit system collectively operate more efficiently with faster, more reliable service for riders — which is overall one of the most important qualities in transit service for most riders, according to TransitCenter’s new national survey out just a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many funding streams dedicated to improving system performance with strong but incremental returns on investment. For example, the major source of federal capital funds that agencies can receive, New Starts/Small Starts/Core Capacity, is used to build new lines entirely or make comprehensive improvements to entire corridors. The other capital funds that agencies receive are entirely for new equipment, so you can get money to buy a new bus, but it’s hard to get any money intended specifically to operate that bus more efficiently,

Although Metro has had success in securing federal capital funds for speed & reliability projects on RapidRide and other large corridor projects, the agency relies on locally-generated revenues as well as cooperation and support from local traffic agencies for spot improvements . Operations and maintenance of S&R treatments are even tougher to fund, which can result in degradation of the effectiveness of S&R treatments over time.

We’re glad to have King County on board as a new T4A member. As the T4A network grows, we can continue addressing the policy and funding gaps that inhibit these types of innovative, and cost-effective strategies exemplified by King County Metro’s Transit Speed and Reliability group.

Seattle finds a way to communicate effectively about parking prices

The City of Seattle (a T4America member) is one of relatively few cities that price on-street parking responsively and dynamically to most effectively manage demand.

This maximizes the use of available parking space while generating turnover so that it’s possible to find a parking spot on any block at any given time (cutting down on the congestion generated by drivers circling blocks while searching for on-street parking.). Seattle DOT recently put together this impressively clear video to explain how and why they adjust parking prices and regulation to manage parking supply and demand.

In this day and age of scarce transportation funding, communicating clearly about your city’s policies can make a big difference in building the trust you’ll need when it’s time to ask for more funding — Seattle just won a $930 million funding measure in November at the ballot — or increase your parking meter rates.

Walking the talk with Mark Fenton in the Portland region

Back in December, two T4America members in the Pacific Northwest (Portland Metro and the City of Portland) and other allies organized events to bring in Mark Fenton, a leader in clear thinking on transportation, health and walkable communities.

The Portland region was Mark’s first stop on a speaking tour of Oregon supported by the state Department of Land Conservation and Development. I attended both events, and I was most impressed by Mark’s persuasive arguments for charting the smartest course for making our communities the best places they can be, even if it cuts against the pervasive conventional thinking about moving cars.

SGA Local Leaders Council member Mayor Denny Doyle kicked off the morning event at the Beaverton Public Library by sharing the work this light rail suburb on the west side of the Portland metropolitan region has been doing to boost its downtown vibrancy and walkability.

Then Mark took the stage, and after having us close our eyes and recall our first memories of being physically active, led the audience through a few points of agreement:

  • Generation Xers and Baby Boomers (the vast majority of those in attendance) grew up “free range” and experienced physical activity that way – with their friends and typically without adult supervision.
  • Most kids do not have the same opportunities for free range physical activity today.
  • Everyone in the audience agreed kids would benefit from being more free range today.

So, “What are you doing about it?” Mark asked.

He then put forward a compelling argument that right land uses, complete active transportation networks and welcoming community design are the key issues to to make walking, biking and transit safe, convenient and intrinsic to daily life. Doing so can act as a foundational component of getting people physically active again so that we can address the public health crisis and escalating costs to taxpayers — America spends 30 percent of its GDP on health costs.

Along the way Mark invited participants to air concerns and addressed them.

  • Stranger danger is the same today as it was in the 1970’s.
  • Legal pressures against free-range parenting are overblown. In Bethesda, Maryland, where two kids were scooped up by the police for being a half-mile from home, the city has since adopted a resolution supporting free-range parenting.
  • Cultural norms around active transportation aren’t going to shift if the infrastructure doesn’t change. Cultural norms around tobacco use shifted because public policy compelled changes in bars, restaurants, planes, and workplaces.

Mark also met with community leaders and city staff in East Portland’s Jade District, where T4A has been working with Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) on creative placemaking around the proposed Powell Division bus rapid transit line.

The proposed BRT improvements have raised local hopes of improved transportation in their neighborhoods, but also heightened fear of displacement as property values and rent costs increase when the neighborhood becomes more desirable. This conflict can lead disadvantaged communities to resist necessary improvements they would otherwise want because they’re scared that if the neighborhood becomes too desirable, they’ll be priced out.

Mark’s take: gentrification is already happening, so arguing for the “B-version” won’t prevent displacement, but will certainly result in a neighborhood that is less than it could be. Instead, Mark argued, leaders should push for both: the best anti-displacement strategies and the best possible project. (Something that a creative placemaking approach can help achieve.)

I’ll be watching to see how these ideas resonate and impact the conversation amongst members and allies in the Portland region.

Seattle making smart decisions today to continue their city’s renaissance tomorrow

Downtown Seattle has become the hot place in the region for companies to locate as employment and growth has accelerated to new highs over the last decade, but limited space downtown could stymie job growth and economic potential if Seattle doesn’t continue thinking differently about transportation.

Seattle Panorama

The Seattle regional economy is perhaps best known for big suburban employers Microsoft and Boeing, but over the last decade, the region’s recent economic growth has been driven by many companies choosing to locate in downtown and investing in new and old properties alike. For example, Amazon has rapidly expanded in South Lake Union (with more investment in the pipeline) and forest products giant Weyerhaueser is relocating into downtown from the suburbs south of Seattle and building a new headquarters in Pioneer Square. And travel giant Expedia Inc. announced that they’ll be moving to a new campus in Seattle in 2018.

Sponsored streetcar stopYet if the region doesn’t continue making smart transportation investments and developing the kind of policies that have already reduced the share of people commuting alone by car into downtown, that prosperity could be threatened — killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Culture of collaboration

Luckily, the Seattle region is tapping their strong culture of collaboration to ensure that they come together to protect that golden goose. That collaboration is exemplified by the ORCA transit fare card. Developed over 15 years ago, the “One Regional Card For All” enables transit riders to seamlessly use one card to pay fares with 7 different agencies. “The ORCA regional fare card project paved the way for all kinds of interagency collaboration,” says Josh Kavanagh, Director of Transportation Services at University of Washington.

About 10 years ago, Downtown Seattle Association’s then-President Kate Joncas saw great economic potential if decision-makers could come together and free up transportation capacity into and within downtown Seattle and encourage more employers to set up shop there. She convened leaders at Seattle DOT, Downtown Seattle Association and King County Metro. They formed the Downtown Transportation Alliance and in turn created Commute Seattle, an entity focused on reducing drive-alone trips into downtown.

Transit as a growth strategy

They implemented two key strategies that helped make it easier to access jobs (and future jobs) located downtown.

The first was bus passes. Washington State’s Commute Trip Reduction (CTR) Program requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide employees with transit passes and other strategies to reduce drive-alone trips. Smaller employers face no such requirement, so Commute Seattle focused its efforts on bringing these smaller employers voluntarily into the fold.

Boarding 594 to Seattle at Tacoma Dome Station

Transit passes aren’t enough to get folks on board if transit service is lousy, and Seattle’s high-density downtown environment makes transit/traffic conflicts challenging. Metro needed a way to bring buses through downtown and load and unload them more efficiently. The transit tunnel underneath the downtown core, built in 1984, did not have enough capacity for all the bus lines — a problem that was magnified when new LINK light rail service began in 2009 and also required use of the tunnel.

Ready to rollTo address this Seattle worked with the business community and Metro to incrementally improve 3rd Avenue and set aside space for use as a transit mall. If you visit 3rd Avenue at 5 p.m., you’ll be struck by the volume of buses and the crowds of passengers boarding them.

These thousands of people are some of the workers filling tens of thousands of new jobs downtown. Through all of these efforts, Seattle was able to reduce the proportion of drive-alone trips into downtown Seattle from 50% to 31% over the course of 14 years, which made it possible to add tens of thousands of jobs downtown while keeping car trips into downtown more or less the same. 27,857 jobs were created in downtown Seattle just from 2010 to 2013. Expanding and making transit work for more people has been critical in facilitating and encouraging this expansion.

Progress hasn’t been limited to downtown. The region’s light rail system LINK, run by Sound Transit, serves Sea-Tac Airport to the south and is opening a new northward extension to the University of Washington in 2016 from downtown. Which is a good thing since Seattle’s population is also growing and transit ridership is bumping up against capacity in places like the University District. In fact, population growth in the city has outpaced growth in the King County suburbs since 2010, with more than 70,000 new residents added since 2010 in the city.

Investing for the future

The last few years have been successful, but with the city continuing to add jobs and people, the question remains: How can Seattle accommodate its population growth and sustain its economic growth and still maintain a good quality of life?

SDOT Director Scott Kubly speaks to the press at a Microsurfacing Event

SDOT Director Scott Kubly speaks to the press. Flickr image from Seattle DOT.

Coming into office in 2014, Mayor Edward Murray viewed addressing this challenge as a one of the most important parts of his job. He brought in new expertise at the Seattle Department of Transportation by luring Scott Kubly, a star staffer from Gabe Klein’s transportation team in Chicago, to serve as SDOT director. Kubly cut to the heart of Seattle’s geometric transportation challenge, pointing out that “if all the people moving to our city — 60,000 new people by 2025, according to the mayor — have to drive their cars everywhere, we’ll descend into an awful hellscape of traffic jams even worse than what we have now.”

Under Kubly’s leadership, Seattle developed a plan called “Let’s Move Seattle” that focuses on accommodating new growth while preserving the quality of life that Seattle is known for and existing residents value.

Some exciting elements include seven new Rapid Ride bus rapid transit (BRT) corridors, and three new light rail access points: one new station, one pedestrian bridge, and realignment of another station to improve access. Safety improvements include 150 miles of new sidewalks and other projects to make the walk to and from school safer for Seattle children. The city will also be able to invest in 16 bridge retrofits to make sure they’re more resilient in the face of earthquakes, and in repaving 180 miles of arterial streets.

Cyclists on Dexter Avenue

Looking to the ballot in 2015 and 2016

The plan to pay for all of this involves extending and expanding the “Bridging the Gap” property tax levy that expires this year. City homeowners will pay about $12 per month, which is relatively affordable considering that Seattleites who are able to switch even some of their trips from driving to transit as a result of these investments could save money, and those who could make a more permanent change could save as much as $1,101 dollars per month. Seattle voters will decide on this plan at the ballot next week on November 3rd.

That measure is just the first of two important steps for Seattle voters in deciding whether or not to pay for the investments needed to help keep their booming economy humming.

With the Washington legislature’s passage of a $16.1 billion statewide transportation package earlier this year, the three-county regional transit agency, Sound Transit, received the authority ask voters to approve up to $15 billion in transit investments. They’re developing plans for placing a measure on the November 2016 ballot, Sound Transit 3, which could extend LINK light rail to important residential and employment centers in Tacoma, Redmond, and Everett — connecting yet more jobs to the region’s transit system — and lead to construction of new light rail lines to Seattle neighborhoods such as Ballard and West Seattle.

Seattle is unique amongst American cities in that transportation ranks as the top priority in public polling. We will see if the importance of transportation and a collaborative approach help the city and region to continue investing in transportation options to keep that goose laying golden eggs.

How Can a State Department of Transportation Do Right by the Locals?

A key theme in a recent Washington State DOT conference was a recognition that the state DOT needs to do more to engage with local constituents and agencies and meet local needs, particularly in cities. Those cities are the engines of economic growth, and where the default approach of the past half-century — road widening to speed driving at the expense of other goals — did not, does not, and will not work.

WSDOT multimodal summit

A sizable crowd at the WSDOT Innovations & Partnerships in Transportation summit

I attended the conference on September 22, entitled Innovations & Partnerships in Transportation, which strived to train WSDOT staff and local agencies in Washington State on partnership and innovation.

With Secretary of Transportation Lynn Peterson at the helm since early 2013, WSDOT is one state DOT that is working hard to be more innovative and responsive to evolving transportation needs. T4A member Transportation Choices Coalition worked with T4A and Smart Growth America to organize a training for WSDOT leadership staff in Olympia in November, 2014 on performance-based planning. In some ways, the 2014 training helped seed interest in this most recent symposium of WSDOT and local agency staff from across the state.

Roger Millar WSDOT multimodal summit

Roger Millar, recently departed from SGA, is starting work as Deputy Secretary at WSDOT in October.

Many of the same speakers we brought in 2014 came back to discuss many of the same issues in this bigger forum. Jeffrey Tumlin of Nelson Nygard returned to speak about new approaches to practical design. SGA’s Roger Millar, also featured prominently in the 2014 workshop, was incidentally just hired as WSDOT’s Deputy Secretary starting in October.

State DOTs typically concern themselves with longer distance or inter-city travel, and not necessarily with the local needs that drive local economies, but this conference pointed to a different direction for WSDOT. Multiple speakers discussed the changes leading the agency to a more multimodal approach to transportation that does a better job of meeting the needs of cities and their residents. Households are shrinking, Millennials especially are driving less, buying fewer cars and getting their drivers licenses later if at all. More people are moving to downtowns and walkable neighborhoods, and companies are moving to these places to attract and retain talent.

The economy is shifting from an emphasis on ownership to an emphasis on sharing, experiences, and more efficient use of resources.

To illustrate the pace of change we could expect to see because of new mobility options like Lyft, Uber, bike share and autonomous cars, speaker Gabe Klein, a former director of both Chicago’s and D.C.’s DOT, asked the audience how many of them owned a smart phone 10 years ago. No one raised their hands — smartphones weren’t even available just ten short years ago, but today nearly every participant owned one. “That’s how fast change can take place.”

Several speakers, Jeffrey Tumlin in particular, talked openly about the problem of induced demand — the phenomenon where increased roadway capacity induces more driving resulting in a failure to solve congestion problems. This topic is not one typically broached at state DOT functions.

Can a state DOT re-orient toward the new realities of multi-modalism, urban economic development, and unknowns like autonomous vehicles? WSDOT, with Lynn Peterson at the helm, is one of the state DOTs that has a shot. In closing the conference, Lynn called on the several hundred of her staff in attendance to work through these issues in partnership with local agencies and constituencies.

Effectively linking transportation with economic development: Beth Osborne visits the Pacific Northwest

On September 10 and 11, T4A brought Senior Policy Advisor Beth Osborne to the Pacific Northwest to speak with audiences in Seattle, Portland and Eugene about the links between transportation investment and economic development. There are countless examples of these links in each city, and local speakers shared those stories at all three events.

Portland policy breakfast

A good crowd gathered at Metro’s policy breakfast with Beth Osborne in Portland.

This November, Seattle voters will decide whether to support the Move Seattle levy, an ambitious plan to invest in five bus rapid transit (BRT) lines and a range of complete streets projects to improve Seattleites’ mobility and safety by updating the design of city streets to better match the demands being placed on them by a greater range of users. Mayor Murray’s transportation policy director Andrew Glass-Hastings was there to share details on that effort. (The City of Seattle is a T4A member.)

The Portland event was hosted by Metro, another T4A member. Years of hard work have come to fruition with both the Portland Milwaukie Light Rail (PMLR) line and Tilikum Crossing over the Willamette River opening immediately after the event on September 12, and the region is hard at work planning a Bus Rapid Transit line from Portland to Gresham. (Both cities are members of T4A as is TriMet, the region’s transit district.) Brian Newman from Oregon Health & Science University shared the story of the hundreds of millions of dollars of current and planned economic development in the South Waterfront spurred by the new light rail line, streetcar, the aerial tram and TIGER-funded improvements to S.W. Moody Avenue. Duncan Hwang from the Jade business district spoke about their efforts to minimize or prevent displacement of disadvantaged communities when the Powell Division BRT line is built in the next 5 years.

Beth Osborne speaking in PNW

Beth Osborne sharing with the crowd in Eugene

The third event was in Eugene, where the neighboring city of Springfield (another T4A member) has a TIGER application in for streetscape improvements on Franklin Boulevard that could spark substantial infill development — including new hotels to serve the visitors at the 2021 World Track Championships hosted by the region. Springfield Mayor Christine Lundberg shared those aspirations, and Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy, Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce president Dave Hauser and PIVOT Architecture principal Kari Turner all testified to how Eugene-Springfield’s growing regional BRT network is part of their economic development strategy. In fact, T4A member Lane Transit District received federal Small Starts funding for its West EmX BRT project on the same day as our event in Eugene.

The local stories at all three events helped provide context for Beth’s Ms. Osborne’s message: if your region wants to get the best economic development results from transportation investments, it’s imperative to carefully measure the outcomes against your region’s values. Measure outcomes like congestion the wrong way, and you could be inhibiting economic development in favor of moving cars around quickly for no economic gain.

Referencing a series of recent T4America and Smart Growth America reports – Measuring What We Value, Core Values, The Innovative MPO – Ms. Osborne pointed to new approaches yielding better results.

These recent events are sparking productive conversations in each region. Interested in organizing an event like these in your area for members and non-members? Get in touch with us and feel free to share ideas for topics and speakers.

performance-measures-members-featuredRelatedly to the topic of measuring outcomes, don’t miss Beth’s ongoing series on performance measures, available only for members.

Feel a little lost when it comes to the concept of transportation performance measures? In this short series expressly for T4A members, our resident expert and USDOT veteran will help bring you up to speed on an issue that’s complicated but represents a smart way forward on transportation planning and spending. Read more. 

“How Do We Become the Department of Yes?”

A new T4America member is hoping to successfully leverage the exploding landscape of new mobility options to meet more of their goals for encouraging smart development, reduce the amount of required single-occupant car trips and create a better city for tomorrow along the way.

This is a post originally published last week on our member portal especially for T4America members. Would you like to find out more about joining as a member? 

Tell Me More

Scott Kubly, Seattle DOT

Scott Kubly, Seattle DOT

At the Intelligent Transportation Society of America Symposium at University of Washington in Seattle back in July, I had the privilege of hearing Seattle DOT Director Scott Kubly speak to the challenges local governments are facing as they attempt to adapt to new forms of mobility exploding all over the country — ride-for-hire services like Lyft and Uber, carshare services like Zipcar and Car2Go, and bikeshare. (Seattle is a new T4America member.)

I was impressed by Scott’s ability to step back and look at the whole picture in the context of the City of Seattle’s goals.

Seattle is growing quickly. There simply isn’t enough physical space for business as usual, and the city is adjusting accordingly. In the last 4 years, downtown Seattle added 40,000 employees, made possible in part because they planned for, and achieved, a drop in single occupant vehicle mode-share from 35 percent to 31 percent.

New mobility options are often sprouting so fast that it’s difficult for local governments (and regulations) to keep up, but they present a great opportunity for Seattle given the geometric constraints on physical space. “As we keep growing, we need to keep setting that mode-share target lower and lower and get people to use different types of modes, and we need to look at new options,” he said.

Scott suggests re-imagining departments of transportation less as infrastructure providers, and more as systems integrators whose actions are driven by the idea of improving the user’s experience.

As some examples of where that sort of integration to improve overall mobility for users, Scott pointed out the big return on investment for bike-share, and the potential for Uber and Lyft to provide more affordable late-night service than transit can accomplish.

The advent of Uber and Lyft certainly raises questions about drivers’ wages, equitable access, and the risks of congestion caused by oversupply of rides-for-hire that must all be addressed, but in a call to move the ball forward, Scott asks this:

“How do we become the department of yes? How do the public and private sectors work together and say ‘this is what our shared goal is’, so when there is a new service with no regulatory framework, how do we say ‘yeah that’s a cool idea and let’s figure it out.’”

Seattle seems to be figuring out a lot, and we’re excited to have them on board as a new T4A member.

It’s also worth reading this Scott Kubly interview with startup incubator 1776 from earlier this year. -Ed.

“How Do We Become the Department of Yes?”

A new T4America member is hoping to successfully leverage the exploding landscape of new mobility options to meet more of their goals for encouraging smart development, reduce the amount of required single-occupant car trips and create a better city for tomorrow along the way.

Scott Kubly, Seattle DOT

Scott Kubly, Seattle DOT

At the Intelligent Transportation Society of America Symposium at University of Washington in Seattle, July 16-17, I had the privilege of hearing Seattle DOT Director Scott Kubly speak to the challenges local governments are facing as they attempt to adapt to new forms of mobility exploding all over the country — ride-for-hire services like Lyft and Uber, car share services like Zipcar and Car2Go, and bikeshare. (Seattle is a new T4America member.)

I was impressed by Scott’s ability to step back and look at the whole picture in the context of the City of Seattle’s goals.

Seattle is growing quickly. There simply isn’t enough physical space for business as usual, and the city is adjusting accordingly. In the last 4 years, downtown Seattle added 40,000 employees, made possible in part because they planned for, and achieved, a drop in single occupant vehicle mode-share from 35 percent to 31 percent.

New mobility options are often sprouting so fast that it’s difficult for local governments (and regulations) to keep up, but they present a great opportunity for Seattle given the geometric constraints on physical space. “As we keep growing, we need to keep setting that mode-share target lower and lower and get people to use different types of modes, and we need to look at new options,” he said.

Scott suggests re-imagining departments of transportation less as infrastructure providers, and more as systems integrators whose actions are driven by the idea of improving the user’s experience.

As some examples of where that sort of integration to improve overall mobility for users, Scott pointed out the big return on investment for bike-share, and the potential for Uber and Lyft to provide more affordable late-night service than transit can accomplish.

The advent of Uber and Lyft certainly raises questions about drivers’ wages, equitable access, and the risks of congestion caused by oversupply of rides-for-hire that must all be addressed, but in a call to move the ball forward, Scott asks this:

“How do we become the department of yes? How do the public and private sectors work together and say ‘this is what our shared goal is’, so when there is a new service with no regulatory framework, how do we say ‘yeah that’s a cool idea and let’s figure it out.’”

Seattle seems to be figuring out a lot, and we’re excited to have them on board as a new T4A member.

Compromise in Washington State clears the way for a transportation funding package

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee and state legislative leaders indicated yesterday that they have reached agreement on a $15 billion transportation package that also provides $15 billion in local funding authority for Sound Transit, the regional transit agency for the Puget Sound (Seattle) region.

The deal looked almost dead last week, but a last-ditch compromise could give Seattle-area residents a little more control over their transportation future.

Seattle LINK light rail tunnel

From the Seattle Times piece:

The major obstacle to reaching agreement on a statewide transportation package disappeared Sunday morning, as Gov. Jay Inslee announced he would accept “poison pill” language in the measure intended to hinder one of his environmental priorities. And Sunday afternoon, Rep. Judy Clibborn, D-Mercer Island, chair of the House Transportation Committee, announced that Democrats and Republicans had reached a deal on the package itself. In addition to the approximately $15 billion in funding, the package includes the authorization sought for the full $15 billion in Sound Transit’s rail-extension ballot measure, according to Clibborn. “The deal is done,” said Clibborn. “It’s just now, do we have the votes and are people happy with the deal we struck?”

This local funding authority for Sound Transit — which would still have to be approved by Puget Sound voters in November 2016 — would fund LINK light rail extensions to Everett, Issaquah and Tacoma, Ballard and West Seattle while enhancing the region’s bus service.

This isn’t a done deal just yet.

The legislature still must approve the leadership’s deal, which includes a “poison pill” preventing future adoption of a low carbon fuel standard, a compromise that several environmental groups oppose. The low carbon fuel provision has been an important priority for Gov. Inslee, but House Republicans had made it clear that they wouldn’t vote for a funding package unless the clean fuel provision was precluded:

Inslee had sought the [low carbon fuel] standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but Republicans have argued that it would raise gas prices. “I oppose that and have worked hard to find a better alternative,” Inslee said in a statement. “But legislators tell me it is essential to passing the $15 billion multimodal transportation package and authorizing an additional $15 billion for Sound Transit light rail expansion.”

While the package does raise new state revenues for transportation writ large, a majority of Puget Sound voters will have to support a Sound Transit III ballot measure in November 2016 to approve the additional revenues to support the substantial transit investment that includes the expansion of the LINK light rail system.

“It’s not just a highway bill. It has to be a transportation bill.”

Those were the words of Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (OR, 1) during a transportation roundtable on May 5th that T4America participated in with local members and other partners while House members were back home in their districts

At the roundtable with key local leaders and advocates in Hillsboro, Rep. Bonamici explained her concerns with transportation funding and the need to convince her colleagues to support new revenues to make the Highway Trust Fund whole.

Transportation for America member Washington County was represented by Commissioner Dick Schouten and Land Use and Transportation Director Andrew Singelakis in the meeting at the Willow Creek Campus of Portland Community College on TriMet’s MAX light rail line in Hillsboro. Smart Growth America Local Leaders Council member Mayor Denny Doyle attended, along with transportation leaders from labor, business, and Oregon DOT.

I shared the tally of how many states have passed transportation revenue packages – 7 states this year, and 19 since 2012 — from T4A’s state transportation funding tracker, demonstrating the growing needs for more reliable transportation funding. I also shared our data on the re-election rate for state legislators who support gas tax increases – 98% in their primaries, 90% in general elections, an indication that supporting increased transportation revenue is a good political choice for lawmakers.

Commissioner Schouten spoke about his experiences in Asia and Western Europe, remarking how we are falling behind our international competitors. He called for bold vision and leadership.

Andrew Singelakis talked about Washington County’s role in funding its own projects using the Major Streets Transportation Improvement Program (MSTIP), general fund, transportation development taxes and other programs. Washington County does its part to raise funding locally but is counting on a reliable federal partner to help them complete larger projects they cannot do on their own.

For her part, Representative Bonamici appears to support a lot of T4America’s platform — investment, transportation options, key programs like New Starts, TIGER, and TIFIA, and the importance of the federal government taking a strong role in funding transportation.

Last week’s event was a good step forward in the long march to build a case for federal support for a robust transportation system.

Chris Rall is T4America’s Pacific Northwest Field Organizer