Giancarlo Valdetaro, Author at Transportation For America

Road feels unsafe? DOT says prove it!

In the United States, where and how traffic deaths occur are painfully predictable. But even with historically high levels of funding available, traffic engineering standards and federal policy combine to create a safety catch-22, ensuring that a transportation agency walking the walk on traffic safety is the exception, not the rule.

Photo by Nk Ni via Unsplash

If you’re somebody who walks or rolls to get to work, school, or any of your other daily needs, chances are that you know the most dangerous parts of your local transportation system: the crosswalk that cars don’t stop at because there’s no light, the bike lane that ends abruptly, or the sidewalk ramp pointed to the middle of an intersection instead of the crosswalk. When you go through these areas, you might think that they’re oversights, mistakes made by an inattentive traffic engineer or planner who would make the adjustment needed if they just walked or rolled a mile in your shoes. But in reality, these flaws are part and parcel of a broader system that requires either reckless behavior or deaths to make the case for safety.

Instead of proactively asserting a right for people to walk and roll safely and conveniently outside of a vehicle, the standards that DOTs use to determine when and where they put safety infrastructure actually require people to either risk their bodies or experience harm before any paint or concrete are poured.

Transportation for America is a program of Smart Growth America, an organization that empowers communities through technical assistance, advocacy, and thought leadership to realize our vision of livable places, healthy people, and shared prosperity. See how Smart Growth America is engaging with National Pedestrian Safety Month here.

The safety infrastructure catch-22

One hot summer morning in 2021, I went to an unsignalized intersection in Northern Virginia and watched people wait for a break in traffic to cross a road that was 60-feet wide, dividing homes and a bus stop from a food bank. Though state law makes it legal for people to cross on foot at unsignalized intersections, it’s obviously a risky, unsafe thing to do.

Google Maps screenshot of Fordson Road, Alexandria, VA at 7558 Fordson Road, showing three lanes of traffic and no marked crosswalk

Unsignalized intersection on Fordson Road in Alexandria, VA

But this is the catch-22: For the state DOT (VDOT) to paint a crosswalk there, they require that at least 20 people choose to cross that dangerous street each hour.¹ Put another way, if enough people engage in risky, unsafe behaviors, the state might decide to make it safer. But when it’s unsafe to walk and roll, fewer people are going to do so. And with fewer people walking and rolling, DOTs like VDOT think that there’s little demand for safe infrastructure.

This unproductive cycle is the product of street design standards and manuals that your local traffic engineer relies on and navigates in order to make their decisions. In some cases, as NACTO says about the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), it can actually “require multiple people to die at an intersection before a pedestrian signal is ‘warranted’.”

Why did the pedestrian cross the road?

The people who pay the price for this nonsense approach to safety are people like Filadelfo Ramos Marquez. Filadelfo was killed in December 2021 while crossing an eight-lane road in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Those responsible for the street’s design can choose to blame the victim for not using a crosswalk as a way of abdicating their responsibility, or they can ask: why did he cross where he did, and how do we make it safer?

Google Maps screenshot of VA-123, showing the pedestrian bridge in the background connecting to the metro station on the right. A car enters the roadway through a slip lane. There are at least six lanes of traffic shown.

Road conditions where Filadelfo was hit and killed.

Although this intersection has traffic lights, the only way to cross it on foot is via a pedestrian bridge. However, when the metro station that the bridge connects to closes, so does the bridge itself. If Filadelfo thought that the station was already closed at 9 p.m., or that he had to pay a metro fare in order to use the bridge, then he had two choices: cross where he did, or add a third of a mile to his trip in order to use a painted crosswalk.

This leads us to the broader point: We do not currently measure OR care about the travel time of people who walk and roll. Pedestrians’ time isn’t just worth less than that of drivers, it’s not measured at all. In VDOT’s standards for an unmarked crosswalk at an unsignalized intersection, like the one I went to in summer 2021, the agency effectively says (starting on page A4) that saving pedestrians time is fine, so long as it doesn’t affect too many drivers.

The intersection where Filadelfo was hit, with signals for cars but no accommodations at all for pedestrians, illustrates this biased tradeoff just the same. When this metro station was built, planners and engineers could’ve viewed it as an opportunity to improve the pedestrian experience, both around this one stop and along this entire corridor where crosswalks are routinely over 130 feet long. Seeing as Tysons Corner has two huge shopping malls, is one of the largest job centers in Virginia, and aims to be home to 100,000 residents by 2050, some might say this would’ve been prudent. But that would have required deprioritizing the 46,000 vehicles per day that drove here pre-pandemic. So instead of building the much shorter, much less expensive straight-line street-level crossing, they built the longer, more expensive pedestrian bridge. And now, instead of asking why pedestrians like Filadelfo still choose to cross roads like this, DOTs like VDOT simply pray they don’t.

A Google Maps aerial screenshot showing Filadelfo's route on the day of the crash. An orange line routes along the sidewalk and crosswalk, showing the loop he would've had to make to be as safe as possible if the pedestrian bridge was closed. A green line shows the route using the pedestrian bridge. A red line shows the route Filadelfo took, cutting through several lanes of high-speed traffic, just to the west of bridge.

Potential pedestrian routes in the area where Filadelfo was hit and killed. The green line shows the path using the pedestrian bridge that connects to the metro station. The orange line shows the route to the only marked crosswalk nearby. The red line and white arrow show Filadelfo’s route and the general area where he was hit.

The safety funding catch-22

One reason agencies seem to prefer the thoughts and prayers approach to traffic safety is that federal policy encourages them to. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) poured over $400 billion into roads and streets across the United States, but with few requirements for anyone to measurably improve safety. Although all of that money could be used to ensure the safety of all road users, most of it won’t be.

Instead, in exchange for billions in largely flexible formula grants they control, states are required to set safety performance targets each year. But the reality is almost laughable: states can literally set targets for more people to die without penalty, and there is almost no penalty for failing to meet even the most unambitious targets. Failing to meet targets just requires those states to spend their Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) dollars on highway safety improvement projects. And if vulnerable road users (VRUs) make up more than fifteen percent of all fatalities in a state, that state has to spend fifteen percent of their HSIP funds the next year on safety projects for VRUs. (However, most states aren’t even obligating all the safety funds they need to.)

In contrast, if local governments want to access funds specifically earmarked for safety, they usually have to spend time and money applying for competitive discretionary grants, like the Safe Streets and Roads for All program. Although this is better than nothing, and there’s additional marginal progress being made, the IIJA has the same double standard for safety that it does for climate: projects that improve safety are the exception, whereas projects that don’t are the rule.

And so long as making streets safer comes with tangible costs but traffic deaths do not, people will pay with their lives. The day before Filadelfo was struck, Matthew Jaeger was killed while riding a bike a few miles down that very same road.

To get to the other side

Changes need to come from the top down and the bottom up. Congress needs to stop creating small new programs for improving safety. After giving them billions to spend, Congress should hold states accountable for reducing fatalities. For states that fail to do so, this could mean requiring them to transfer money out of block grant programs (like the the National Highway Performance Program and Surface Transportation Block Grants) and move it to HSIP for every year that they don’t meet their targets.

USDOT can finish updating the MUTCD and improving the Green Book. In the meantime, if states can prove these documents interfere with achieving safety targets due to their erroneous assumption that speed is safety, USDOT should waive these design standards. The agency can also ensure regulations like the New Car Assessment Program look at how the weight, size, visibility, and marketing of vehicles keeps all road users safe.

States control the most dangerous streets, and they stay dangerous because states continue to prioritize speed and vehicle throughput over safety—as with the corridor that killed Matthew and Filadelfo. States actually addressing this danger would see immediate results in pedestrian safety.

And while cities press their states for action on the deadly state-owned arterial roads within their borders, they are free to make the streets they do control safer. They can pass Complete Streets policies, discarding their state’s speed-first design guidelines, and adopt modern street design guidance that prioritizes moving people and creating safe streets for everyone. (The IIJA made a vital change to allow cities to adopt NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide, even if their state prohibits it.)

Anything less than these changes isn’t prioritizing safety. It’s just a catch-22.

Find more recommendations to make our roadways safer in Dangerous by Design.

Inverting the IIJA’s double standard

Aerial image of a complicated highway interchange in Phoenix Arizona.

The IIJA and IRA are hailed as landmark pieces of climate legislation. Unfortunately, by prioritizing the status quo of flexibility and formula status for highway projects, the IIJA is set to see the gains of any individual emissions-reducing projects go up in smoke.

When the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was passed two years ago, it was hailed as the biggest investment in our nation’s infrastructure in decades and included flexible funding that states and metro areas could use toward climate initiatives. When followed by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) last year, the first two years of the Biden presidency were described as making monumental gains on climate policy.

Unfortunately, as illuminated by an article this summer in the Washington Post, it’s clear that—on the transportation front at least— rhetoric is falling short of reality. The laws, frequently touted by legislators and administration officials as important means to reduce greenhouse gasses and slow climate change, while also providing funding for resiliency efforts, are set to do neither. Projects for private cars are getting the most money with the fewest strings—while transit, traffic safety, ADA accessibility, and other projects that could actually reduce emissions compete to share less money with more strings.

These laws are not a newfound paragon of sustainability and resilience. It’s the same double standard that got us into a climate crisis in the first place.

Some good money after a lot of bad money

The transportation sector accounts for a plurality of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States (28%), and every single attempt to add capacity to a highway—or increase the number of cars it can carry by widening it—increases these emissions. This is because of a concept known as induced demand, which is essentially the “if you build it, they will come” of transportation. As demonstrated by Transportation for America’s jointly-produced SHIFT Calculator, even adding a single lane mile of principal arterial roadway can lead to tens of thousands of additional gallons of gas being burned per year.

Unfortunately, these are exactly the types of projects that the IIJA allows states to spend money on. Out of over $600 billion dollars set aside for surface transportation, two-thirds is reserved for traditional highway programs. This includes over $200 billion combined for the National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) and the Surface Transportation Block Grant Program (STBG). Even if the $14 billion in two climate programs cited by the Washington Post weren’t being raided by states across the country (for projects that should be funded with NHPP and STBG dollars), it would still be dwarfed several times over by funding reserved for capacity expansion projects.

Putting the cart(e Blanche) before the horse

This discrepancy between how projects for cars and projects for all other transportation modes get treated extends beyond how much funding these programs receive to how those funds are distributed. The NHPP and STBG are formula programs which means that the amount line on these checks may already be filled in, but the memo line is effectively empty. States can use these pots of money to build new roads, make resiliency improvements, and build intercity bus terminals, among a long list of potential projects that include undergrounding utilities and controlling invasive plant life. Based on what they’ve done with the money that was specifically supposed to go to reducing emissions and increasing climate resiliency, I’ll let you guess what they continue to choose to spend this money on. (Hint: most of the arterial roads I grew up driving on are lined by above-ground power lines and kudzu-covered trees.)

In contrast, localities and states aren’t given the same carte blanche to reduce emissions. With the exception of emergency COVID relief funding, transit agencies receive effectively no funding for their operations. To build streets safe enough to walk or roll on, renovate transit stations so they’re accessible to people with disabilities, or improve the infrastructure of their transit systems so they can carry more people, many local and regional governments have to go through competitive grant application processes. And even when emission reductions get money through formula programs they often contain the exact loopholes discussed in the Washington Post, allowing their money to be moved to projects that increase emissions.

Flexibility is not a climate solution

This doesn’t mean that making infrastructure funding flexible or having competitive grant programs are inherently bad policy choices. Alaska and Florida are drastically different places with drastically different transportation needs, and it’s good to verify that projects are set up to succeed before spending significant amounts of money on them.

But transportation policy that provides endless flexibility and ensures that most transit, active transportation, and accessibility projects have to compete with other proposed projects to access federal funds is incompatible with climate goals. For decades, state DOTs have been focused on building more and more infrastructure for private cars at the expense of every other possible mode of transportation—if we give them a choose-your-own-adventure program like the NHPP and STBG, the adventure they’re going to choose is more lane miles and more emissions. That’s exactly what Transportation for America feared would take place with the IIJA—despite the significant progress in areas like passenger rail—and what the Washington Post confirmed has happened to just a small portion of the money that’s made its way from USDOT to the states.

To reduce emissions from the transportation sector, we have to recognize that flexibility alone is not a climate solution. When it comes to climate, the goal of good transportation policy must be to make it easier to complete projects that reduce emissions and more difficult to complete projects that increase emissions. That means inverting how much we fund different modes of transportation, so that transit, active transportation, and passenger rail projects get the majority of funds, instead of highways. That also means inverting how these funds are accessed, so transit, active transportation, and passenger rail projects are funded by formula dollars, and highway projects are forced to apply to competitive grant programs.

AVs aren’t solving our transportation problems. They’re automating them.

A car rests just before a crosswalk on a wide roadway

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been dangled as a transportation “silver bullet” for decades. Now, they’re finally operating as robo-taxis in San Francisco. However, the Bay Area’s experience with these vehicles so far shows that it’s our reliance on cars—not who’s behind the wheel—that’s our most pressing problem.

On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted to allow two autonomous vehicle (AV) companies to operate robo-taxis in San Francisco 24 hours a day and charge for the rides. This decision came despite significant, wide-ranging opposition, brought up before the hearing and highlighted during. As part of limited, fare-free pilots conducted by these companies, San Franciscans have experienced exactly the chaos that replacing imperfect humans with impartial computers was supposed to solve.

This decision by the CPUC is a continuation of the mistakes we’ve made with our transportation systems for the past century. AVs are assumed to be the solution to dangerous streets, traffic congestion, and transportation emissions. Unfortunately, as they’re set up right now, AVs are nothing more than a distraction from the policy changes that would make our transportation system safer, more equitable, and more sustainable.

The unmet promise of automating transportation

Automating transportation isn’t a bad idea. In fact, automated transportation has existed for decades, in the form of public transit. Automated metros in places like Tokyo, Vancouver, and now even Montreal and Honolulu move millions of people every day around the globe. At airports across the U.S. you can also find automated “people movers” helping people move between terminals and access local transportation options. These technologies are highly regulated and implemented with a clear purpose: they reduce operating costs while increasing the capacity of public transit, allowing more people to travel.

For nearly a century now, car-makers have been arguing that automation could similarly revolutionize car travel. As historian Peter Norton has described, the automobile industry has depicted self-driving cars as a generation away for the past several decades. For people who can’t drive due to a disability, people too old to drive, people too young to drive, and people who simply don’t want to drive, this technology would be transformative.

Unfortunately, even if this future were as close as it seems, it may not live up to its promise. According to an advertisement by Cruise—one of the two companies now operating robo-taxis in San Francisco—if their technology was behind the wheel instead of humans, we would have far fewer deaths on our roadways because their products are “designed to save lives.”

This contrasts with reporting and data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) highlighting that AVs are certainly still involved in crashes, many of which result in serious injuries and fatalities. San Francisco’s experience as an AV-guinea pig provides some data on crashes and some insight into AVs’ current flaws. There are documented cases of AVs driving away from police, cruising down sidewalks, and coming to a dead halt when cell service is bad. While AV makers say these are anomalies, without data from the companies to disprove this we can only believe what we see plainly before us.

Beyond safety, AV proponents also promise less wasted time. With our cars driving themselves, we will be able to travel everywhere we need to go while still being able to work, catch up with friends and loved ones, or just relax from inside a car. However, this argument assumes that the amount we drive stays the same, an unlikely scenario when driving no longer requires anybody actually driving. In fact, research replicating an AV future and an analysis of data from existing partially automated driving technology show that AVs will lead people to spend significantly more time on car travel.

This additional time spent in a car also threatens to torpedo any hopes of a more sustainable transportation system. No matter whether AVs are electric or not, a future with more driving would still involve more extraction of natural resources and more pollution from tires and brakes. We will never reach ambitious climate targets with a transportation system that requires people to drive more, not less.

Promising a technological solution to a political problem—and then using political will to force their solution on society—is a consistent behavior of the auto-industry. In the 1920s, the industry knew that their products were killing children and congesting city streets. But instead of changing their products, they changed our communities. They created and supported the policies that have destroyed vibrant neighborhoods and displaced their residents, emitted huge amounts of carbon, and killed tens of thousands of us every year. That’s not innovation, it’s exploitation.

Selling us a bill of hoods

If AVs were being pursued because they were the most effective way to help people who will never be able to drive, maintain mobility for aging members of our communities, and save lives, we would all welcome them with open arms. That’s why the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety have released a list of tenets, which Transportation for America has signed on to, to guide an introduction of AVs into our vehicle fleet.

These guardrails aren’t an attempt to stop us from getting to a self-driving future. These policies are what’s required to ensure that the future includes everybody, including those outside of a car. That’s why individuals and advocacy organizations who exist to make transportation safer have made it clear: without changes to transportation policy, AVs aren’t set up to solve our problems, just automate them.

Right now, AV-makers would have us believe that all of our transportation concerns will go away if we simply replace human drivers with computers. But we know this is not true. Automation that leads to more driving will not reduce congestion or emissions. It will not free people from increasingly long trips to reach their essential destinations. It will not relieve people of the financial burden of car ownership. And it will not change the dangerous design of our roadways, which encourages high vehicle speeds at the cost of pedestrian safety. If we continue to give AV-makers free reign, without government regulation and data collection to understand their impact on our roadways, we will not get any closer to solving the problems AVs are supposedly ready to solve.

AV-makers—including the robo taxi companies in San Francisco —aren’t trying to solve these problems. They’re just trying to sell us cars.

Mining public funds for (minimal) private gain

A line of electric trucks wait to be charged in a wide, half-empty parking lot

Lawmakers in Nevada have recently introduced legislation to set aside Carbon Reduction Program funds—about $3.9 million per year—for medium- and heavy-duty vehicle (MHDV) electrification. Although MHDV electrification is essential, assembly bill AB184’s method for doing so is inefficient, ineffective, and unnecessarily generous to private actors at the expense of taxpayers.

When the 2021 infrastructure law was passed, it included a number of new formula and competitive transportation programs. The focus of these funds ranged from culverts and wildlife crossings to set-asides for state and regional level Complete Streets planning. Among them was the Carbon Reduction Program (CRP), which was authorized to disperse $6.4 billion on projects that—as the program’s name would suggest—reduce carbon emissions. It is the first federal program created within the national highway program explicitly focused on reducing carbon emissions and most of the eligible uses for the funds are focused on getting more efficiency out of the transportation system by moving trips to less polluting modes.

Unfortunately, even this small amount of funding dedicated to shifting travel to emissions-free modes is under threat. As we wrote last summer, this formula program has a significant loophole in it that could allow up to half of its funds to be spent on projects that actually increase emissions. And now, a group of Nevada state legislators want to require over one-third of the funding to be reserved for truck electrification only.

Nevada lawmakers set a low floor

Introduced last month, Nevada assembly bill AB184 would stipulate that 35 percent of CRP funds—or approximately $3.9 million dollars per year—that Nevada receives would go into a newly created funding pot called the Account for Clean Trucks and Buses. With money in this account, medium- and heavy-duty vehicle (MHDV) purchasers could receive a subsidy for buying electric versions of these vehicles, so long as they meet minimum criteria for how they’re operated.

Electrifying MHDVs does not violate the CRP. Deployment of alternative fuel vehicles is indeed one of the thirteen types of projects that these funds can be used for, and it is an important use: over one-fifth of transportation emissions come from MHDV emissions. In addition, electrifying MHDVs would have significant public health benefits for communities across the country (especially those living near ports, both inland and waterway). It is for these reasons that the Coalition Helping America Rebuild and Go Electric (CHARGE)—which Transportation for America co-leads—outlined MHDV electrification as one of three principles that should guide the electrification of our automobile fleet. However, AB184 has flaws in its execution and its decarbonization logic that ensures it would be no more than mining public funds for (minimal) private gain.

Click here to read CHARGE’s recent report on how electrification investments (including electrification of MHDVs) can advance climate goals.

As it is written, AB184 has three requirements for contractors to receive a rebate for their purchase. First, they must agree to operate or store their electric MHDV in Nevada for at least five years. Second, they must agree to operate said vehicle for at least 5,000 miles or 1,000 hours per year. Third, at least 75 percent of the time the vehicle is in operation must be in Nevada. This means that, in order to receive a rebate, purchasers would only have to operate an MHDV for 18,750 miles or 3,750 hours in Nevada. According to Department of Energy (DOE) data, this is less than one-third of the amount that an average Class 8 truck travels. If the taxpayer is going to help pay for these trucks to displace gas-powered emissions then these trucks should be used to the maximum extent possible throughout their useful lives.

Robbing driving reduction to pay for driving electrification

Electrifying the vehicle fleet across the country is absolutely essential. It must be done. But it is just not sufficient to meet our climate goals (much less our equity, public health and economic goals). Just like we couldn’t make HVAC systems maximally efficient while keeping the windows in buildings open and still meet our emissions goals, we can’t electrify the fleet and force people to drive more, farther every year, and meet our climate goals. The CRP is an important element in allowing people to move in more efficient modes.

The CRP has thirteen eligible use categories—including public transportation capital projects and building active transportation infrastructure—but there are multiple other programs specifically intended to electrify MHDVs. These include the Bus and Bus Facilities Grant, the Clean School Bus Program, and the National Highway Freight Program. Importantly, many of these provide for the construction of public infrastructure, such as recharging facilities, that will induce private actors to purchase electric MHDVs on their own. More effective than incentives are efforts like in California to simply require newly-purchased drayage trucks to be electric starting in 2025, with all registered trucks being zero-emission by 2035. In addition, the infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provide further investments in port electrification, as well as a tax credit explicitly for qualified commercial vehicles that simply hasn’t been implemented yet.

AB184 doesn’t address reducing how far people need to drive or giving their constituents access to more low-emissions travel options. As CHARGE, Transportation for America, and the Climate and Community Project have all noted, any proposal to electrify existing transportation infrastructure without significant reductions in how far people need to drive is fundamentally insufficient. If Nevada already has a strong plan to ensure that the state isn’t cutting into the gains made by electrification with investments that cause more vehicle travel overall, then it might be time to dip into CRP funds as they have proposed. If not, the state DOT and legislators need to consider whether the emissions benefits of this diversion is sufficient to justify it.

Considering that the rebate program as currently formulated would provide at least $175,000 (with potential increases for purchasers who meet additional criteria, such as being a minority- or veteran-owned business, AB184 could only be used for buying about twenty-two electric Class 8 vehicles. When combined with the DOE data, this means that the standards for this rebate are so low that they might only replace eight Class 8 trucks. The question for Nevada lawmakers is whether that benefit is enough to justify taking this funding from other needs that might be hard to fund any other way.

The bottom line

The central flaw of AB184 is simple: there is no consideration of whether there are better uses for CRP funds today or in the future. There is no consideration of other needs such as improving transit or active transportation and whether the state has access to sufficient funding elsewhere to address these needs before a portion of this funding is diverted. Additionally, Nevada lawmakers are creating a program that could be exploited by those who want to expand their MHDV fleets on the taxpayer’s dime without having to demonstrate sufficient use of those vehicles or emissions reductions.

TRB: Transportation’s Really Broken

The Transportation Research Board’s Annual Meeting was held earlier this January in Washington, D.C. Despite claiming to be at the forefront of innovation, most of the conference avoided the truth: any system based primarily on moving cars as quickly as possible will leave many people behind.

Earlier this month, I attended portions of the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Across all the conversations, committee sessions, and social events, there was significant discussion of using technologies like modeling, automated vehicles, and intelligent transportation systems to solve the most pressing problems in transportation. The overriding ethos of many panels was that through technological innovation and computational analysis, we could address the increasing congestion, worsening traffic safety, and drop in transit ridership that all persist as we get farther from the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is how much of the transportation ecosystem—from engineers and planners to many private companies and public policymakers—has disconnected innovation from progress. Although many of the new technologies presented in and around D.C.’s convention center may be considered “advancements” by those who worked on them, they do not meaningfully advance one simple goal: to move people and goods where they need to go as quickly, efficiently, and safely as possible, with a variety of mobility options.

The many innovations discussed at TRB seemed far better ways to avoid confronting the truth—that a system that requires 90 percent of the population to own a private vehicle will never be an efficient system—than serious attempts to ensure our transportation system works better for all.

This did not apply to all of the conference’s participants. Students like Evan Taylor presented posters looking not just at vehicular traffic, but bicycle and pedestrian traffic as well. Organizations like the Parking Reform Network hosted happy hours where they discussed local efforts to improve affordability and efficiency through tweeks to transportation policy. I personally was able to have a great conversation with two planners from Montréal’s commuter railroad, one of whom was presenting on on-demand transit efforts they were undertaking. Perhaps most importantly, even federal government officials didn’t kowtow to automobile autocracy. In the conference’s keynote, panel on roadway safety, and the release of a national transportation decarbonization blueprint by DOT, HUD, EPA, and the Department of Energy, prioritizing cars above all else was described as the obstacle to addressing crises of safety and sustainability.

*A panel discussion by state DOT leaders on implementation of the 2021 infrastructure law at the TRB Annual Meeting.*

Part of the reason these points of view are exceptions to the rule are policy choices, many of which administration officials have limited wiggle room in implementing. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act did increase funding for passenger rail and complete streets to historic levels. But at the same time, it allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to worsen the same sprawl, pollution, and safety problems that rail and active transportation investments are supposed to fix.

Policy isn’t created in a vacuum, though. If there’s any field where that’s true, it’s transportation, where a century of greed-oriented campaigning by the automobile industry and its allies has pushed protecting pedestrians from cars to the background. It has pushed transportation as a field to treat congestion writ large as an enemy, even though many industry professionals experienced the opposite at TRB. Congestion may not be pleasant coming home from the grocery store in a car, but in person it allows for the mingling in bars, impromptu run-ins in hallways and on street corners, and memorable nights at restaurants that give conferences, and cities more broadly, their value. In short, congestion can be a sign of inefficiency, but also of community. Whether it’s a crowded conference or a busy street, congestion can be a clear sign that we’ve created places where people want to be.

See a T4A comic showing why our solutions for congestion are worse than the problem.

TRB and many of its participants have gotten used to instinctively adding vehicle capacity onto every individual problem the transportation system has—and destroying countless communities in the process—instead of asking what tools can move more people, more safely without simultaneously decimating destinations where they gather.

That also means that this status quo isn’t predetermined. During a TransportationCamp session on fighting freeway expansions, one employee at a west coast transportation consultancy described how there are efforts at their firm to make reconnecting communities projects an established team in their organization. The Complete Streets policy passed by Howard County, Maryland, in 2019—which will be reviewed in Smart Growth America’s upcoming Best Complete Streets Policy Report—explicitly described slowing down car traffic as a net positive for the community at large.

At Transportation for America, our three principles are based on the idea that we already have all the tools we need to make sure our transportation system doesn’t divide communities, heat our planet, and kill our friends, family, and neighbors. We don’t need new technology, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we just need the will to better use the tools we have.

Doing justice to Justice40

USDOT has finally added more substance to their plan to implement the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative. Despite some questions about how many programs can meet Biden’s goal of spending 40 percent on disadvantaged communities, the projects and programs they’ve moved toward Justice40 suggest a real effort to improve equity.

Back in May, we wrote about Executive Order 14008, signed by President Biden a week after his inauguration to establish an initiative known as Justice40. This is the administration’s effort to fulfill Biden’s campaign promise to direct “at least 40 percent of the overall benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities.”

At the time, we identified two main concerns with Justice40’s upcoming implementation. First, because over two-thirds of the money that USDOT distributes is through formula funds, we were worried that USDOT didn’t actually have the ability to direct 40 percent of its investments to disadvantaged communities. Second, we were concerned whether the concentration would actually help those communities, especially given what happened the last time the federal government concentrated transportation spending within marginalized communities.

Now, based on information that USDOT has released shedding light on their plan to implement this policy, as well as a webinar the agency conducted on November 17, 2022, we have a much clearer picture of how much money will be subject to Justice40 and what projects it may be used to fund.

One word worth tens of billions of dollars

USDOT stated in its webinar that it plans to apply Justice40 to approximately $204 billion of funding, which is slightly more than the sum total of its discretionary funding as authorized in the 2021 infrastructure law (the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act or IIJA). However, based on the list of covered programs, over one-fifth of that is formula funds over which the agency has questionable control.

For example, the Carbon Reduction Program and National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program together have just over $11 billion authorized by the IIJA. Both of these programs require states to detail how they plan to spend these funds before receiving them. If USDOT wants Justice40 to apply to these programs in more than name only, it could threaten to withhold funds from states with inadequate plans. However, this muscular implementation strategy would result in substantial political backlash and possible legal challenge.

Similarly, the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) Improvement Program has some statutorily-required set-asides that the IIJA also mandates benefit “disadvantaged communities or low-income communities.” However, this set-aside is significantly less than 40 percent of the program’s total funds. This calls into question whether the department will actually be able to apply Justice40 to this and other less-prescriptive formula programs.

These discrepancies extend to the whole Justice40 umbrella. The 39 programs seem to be authorized at $20 billion less than the agency claimed in its webinar. By either estimate—ours or USDOT’s—the department’s Justice40 targets are tens of billions of dollars below 40 percent of surface transportation spending. This may explain why the department’s language defining Justice40 in its webinar changed to “that at least 40 percent of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities” (emphasis ours).

Some of the right funds in most of the right places

Thankfully, how the money going to Justice40 communities is being spent is much more promising. This starts with defining the disadvantages a community must face to identify as a Justice40 community. The agency focuses on six criteria—transportation, health, environment, economic, resilience, and equity—to inform these decisions.

Within transportation, the focus will be on addressing transportation access, health, environmental, economic, resilience, and equity disadvantages. Overall, this is an excellent set of priorities. The one thing worth watching is how one criterion within transportation access disadvantage is interpreted: percent of total population with a drive time to employment greater than or equal to 30 minutes.

First of all, a 30-45 minute commute is pretty standard and not generally seen as a disadvantage. Second, the only mode with a time focus is driving, while transit trips tend to be much longer creating a much bigger disadvantage to those impacted. And finally, this kind of measure has typically been used to justify the same old highway expansions that are at least as likely to create problems for disadvantaged populations. It is just one factor of many, but this is one area where the administration could improve and lead the way in modernization by using a multimodal access measure.

Thankfully, the other five criteria of disadvantage more than make up for this. Access to jobs and services, as opposed to travel time, is mentioned in both the health and economic categories. The environment criterion focuses on “pollutants and poisons,” and equity criterion highlights shared communal discrimination and oppression, much of which can be tied directly to highway infrastructure. Together, these criteria imply that Justice40 funds will go to the right places.

USDOT also considers benefits and burdens beyond just dollars and cents in its five impact areas: safety, jobs and economic competitiveness, resilience, access, and emissions. In both safety and emissions, increased speeds and traffic volumes are identified as burdens. Reducing congestion and improving traffic flow are even listed as ways to introduce these burdens. In at least one part of USDOT, it seems that the 1970s-induced fear of idling’s impact is finally in the rearview mirror.

The jobs and economic competitiveness category speaks to the focus on increasing the vitality of communities, even linking air quality to economic competitiveness. By even mentioning access, but expressly describing division of a community as a burden, the agency’s entire effort to implement Justice40 is imbued with the spirit of the new Reconnecting Communities Program.

Still, there are places to improve. Construction impacts are described as a burden without discussing different types of construction impacts. Building improvements for transit or active transportation is disruptive, but they are temporary compared to the permanent disruption of many highway projects. In addition, the resilience category rightly mentions judging a project’s ability to withstand an accelerating climate crisis. But, adjudicating whether an individual project would help speed up said climate crisis—such as by entrenching emissions-intensive modes of transportation—could ensure that Justice40 doesn’t fund projects that sow the seeds of other projects’ destruction. Furthermore, these drawbacks don’t change that USDOT conceives of benefits to communities as more than lines in their local and state DOTs’ balance sheets.

But the agency also seems set to ensure that they are actually able to deliver said benefits. Whether or not they control all of the funds they claim to, the programs they apply to Justice40 are overwhelmingly climate-friendly and community-connecting. Nearly one-fourth of the funds the agency will apply the initiative to are for rail programs. The covered Federal Highway Administration programs aren’t ones that easily allow for building more lanes: CMAQ is explicitly dedicated to VMT reduction and the Congestion Relief Program has many eligible applications that will be looked upon favorably given the agency’s definition of benefits and burdens. Especially important is the $30 billion under the purview of the Federal Transit Administration, given the disproportionate reliance of historically underinvested-in communities on transit. Choosing programs like these means the investments being made in Justice40 communities will be good for equitable access to economic opportunity, public health, the climate, and quality of life.

Infrastructure Week becomes implementation years

According to the agency’s website, these targeted infusions of resources are “not a one-time investment.” Making information about grant programs more accessible and creating tools developed to help communities bolster their applications to these programs are two efforts that reflect this desire to lower administrative burdens far beyond the end of a Biden administration.

Justice40’s long-term impact will be most greatly influenced by state capacity. For decades, planning capacity in the United States has slowly atrophied, like soil during a drought, with significant repercussions. This means that when Congress rains new resources down as it has with the IIJA, DOTs are unable to take full advantage of it. This can be seen even at the federal level: methodical steps taken by staff since the very week the initiative was announced still haven’t covered new formula programs like the Carbon Reduction Program, about a fifth of authorizations.

Fully implementing this initiative was always going to take years, and USDOT’s webinar acknowledged that transportation policy will continue past the IIJA, detailing ways that states and MPOs can include Justice40 principles in their longer-term plans. When combined with the types of projects that will likely be delivered, this has the potential to make the initiative transformational for U.S. transportation policy. However, whether it is a one-time investment, whether resources make it from the balance sheets to the streets—whether Justice40 becomes runoff or soaks deep enough to change how communities across the country move through their day-to-day lives—depends on each state’s capacity and commitment to the goals of the initiative.

SMART grants could make transportation smarter, or not

The Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) competitive grant program offers communities funds to apply new technologies to solve their transportation challenges. How smart this program ends up being depends on whether it treats the application of new technology as a tactic, or as a goal in and of itself.

In the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), Congress authorized $1 billion over five years for the Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) grant program. This program seeks to fund pilot projects where smart technologies and systems are innovatively used to solve transportation problems by guiding applicants through a two-stage process. In the grant’s first stage, selected applicants will receive funds to do planning and build the partnerships necessary to create a “scaled-up demonstration of the concept” with funds from the grant’s second stage.

The SMART grant is another chapter in an age-old story: looking to technology to solve our transportation challenges. However, in the materials introducing the grant, we can see that there are two perspectives to tell this story from: one from the driver’s seat of a personal vehicle, the other from the sidewalk, bike lane, bus stop, and train station. The first perspective can be found in the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), and the second in the illustrative use cases listed on the grant’s website.

From the first point of view, the SMART grant will improve transportation by advancing unproven technologies that ignore the root causes of our safety, state of repair, and emissions difficulties. From the second, this grant can use well-tested solutions that complement efforts to redesign streets and invest in modes of transportation besides cars to improve how we all get around.

Eligible projects vs. illustrative use cases

The eligible projects listed in the NOFO center around technological advancements for automobiles. Based on section titles like “Coordinated Automation,” “Connected Vehicles,” and “Smart Technology Traffic Signals,” you might be forgiven for thinking that the only projects DOT would entertain are those that intend to pave the way for fleets of self-driving vehicles. Thankfully, you would be mistaken.

The illustrative use cases harness technology to improve the experience of pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users. They are broken up by benefits, such as improving safety and reliability, lowering emissions and improving resiliency, and integrating data and sensors into signaling and decision making systems.

*On-demand right-of-way conversions could give pedestrians and cyclists more opportunities to safely cross the street. Flickr photo by James Schwartz.*

For a safer, more reliable transportation system, USDOT suggests giving transit and emergency vehicles priority signals at traffic lights, automating street sweeping vehicles for sidewalks, and implementing active detection technology for railroad crossings. Technology can reduce emissions and enhance resiliency by making room for modes of travel beyond personal vehicles, through actions like improving last-mile delivery and sidewalk accessibility. USDOT also proposes ways technology can help make streets safer and more accessible for all road users. On-demand right-of-way conversions could give pedestrians and cyclists more opportunities to cross the street, and sensors can monitor the quality of signage and crosswalks to help transportation planners make needed changes.

When combined with possible projects to improve equity and access—such as more efficiently delivering reduced-fare transit to those who qualify and adding automated wheelchair securement systems to transit vehicles—these illustrative cases would increase the reliability, frequency, and accessibility of transit trips. Efforts like these could also improve the safety of everybody walking and rolling, by changing both the physical infrastructure of our streets and sidewalks, as well as the signals that guide how we walk, roll, and drive through them.

What could be

These are also by no means a constrictive list of potential applications. By applying the spirit of the illustrative use cases, the categories of eligible projects have a bounty of opportunities for bettering the everyday experiences of pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders.

*Retractable bollards in Cambridge, England. Photo by Clarence Eckerson.*

People walking and rolling to their destinations could especially benefit from what the USDOT calls “Intelligent, Sensor-Based Infrastructure.” By looking at examples from across the country and the world, we can see how this technology can be used to improve the safety of vulnerable users instead of reasserting the dominance of cars. This type of eligible project could include retractable bollards that support shared streets (check out this Streetsblog article for examples of retractable and moveable bollards in New Orleans, LA and Cambridge, England).

That same category of eligible project might also cover speed governors, a technology that has been available for over a century to limit the speed of cars and will soon be mandatory in some way, shape, or form in all vehicles on the road in the European Union. Furthermore, the requirement that vehicles retrofitted as part of the SMART grant be publicly owned or controlled sets up perfectly those who control public fleets to install such technology in their vehicles. New York City is soon to implement this strategy on thousands of non-emergency vehicles under its control. Combined, these applications of the grant would make walking and biking safer through design of both streets themselves and the vehicles on them.

Transit and rail could also see significant benefits from SMART technologies. “Coordinated Automation” could cover the type of fully automated subway systems—both built from scratch and renovated lines over a century old—that are in operation and under construction around the globe. In addition, this automation requires upgrading signals and sensor systems to ensure that individual trains are more closely connected to one another, a potential application of the “Connected Vehicles” and “Intelligent, Sensor-Based Infrastructure” sections. The “Smart Grid” category could apply to the electrification of rail lines, and given that freight trains carry a significant portion of goods in the United States, their electrification would reduce emissions and the length of the supply chain.

The bottom line: It’s not the tech, it’s how we use it

All of these potential applications are no less innovative technologies than the auto-oriented ones described as eligible activities in the NOFO. In fact, their effective implementation in a wide variety of settings might point to them being more groundbreaking. As reflected in the NOFO’s selection criteria, “revolutionizing transportation” is about not just novelty. It is about proof of concept, scalability, and being appropriately aimed at the particular problem. By these measures, adequately-funded incremental solutions like the signal improvements being installed to more than double speeds on parts of New York City’s subway are exactly the kind of projects applicants should be submitting and USDOT should be encouraging. (For the system’s millions of users per day, speeds are more than doubling in some cases, all at a fraction of the cost it would take to do so for any segment of road.)

And yet, the NOFO’s listed eligible activities reflect the last century’s status quo of transportation policy in the United States. Instead of centering communities’ transportation goals and asking what technologies and other policies could help achieve them, these “technological areas” presuppose that hypothetical fleets of connected, autonomous, battery-electric cars will solve all potential problems.

The effectiveness of the SMART grant will depend on whether or not DOT continues to view cars as the unimpeachable mobility solution without actually asking what problem it is trying to solve. Per the eligible activities listed in the grant’s NOFO, DOT is still not asking this question. But based on the illustrative use cases, DOT knows that achieving tangible benefits from the SMART program won’t come from trying to move more personal vehicles, but using technology to improve the mobility of all road users, especially people outside of a car.

Because this is the first year that the grant is being administered, and USDOT will require Stage 2 applicants to be recipients of Stage 1 grants, only Stage 1 grants will be accepted this year. Applications for these planning, prototyping, and partnership-building grants are due by 5 p.m. on November 18, 2022. Their tentative maximum size is $2,000,000, depending on the number and quality of applications submitted, with up to $100,000,000 and no less than $98,000,000 available to distribute.

Transportation for America members have access to exclusive resources that provide further detail on this topic. To view memos and other members-only resources, visit the Member Hub located at t4america.org/members. (Search “Member Hub” in your inbox for the password, or new members can reach out to chris.rall@t4america.org for login details.) Learn more about membership at t4america.org/membership.

We’re living in an arterial world

a child stands in front of a long crosswalk

The 99% Invisible podcast discussed the Netflix show Old Enough, where Japanese children run their first errands, explaining how street design lets the show’s participants be both safe and independent from a young age. We explore the flip side of this coin in the United States, where convenience for cars becomes a major inconvenience for anybody who can’t drive one.

For most of my childhood, I lived along a minor arterial road, right next to the outer loop of the Beltway in Washington, D.C.’s suburbs. Although the speed limit was, and still is, technically 35 mph, the road was wide and unobstructed enough that drivers routinely felt comfortable driving 50 mph, and so they frequently did. Combined with the lack of any shoulder, much less a sidewalk, this meant that the only way for me to access the outside world was through the back of my parent’s station wagon. To go to school, get to soccer practice, have a playdate with a friend, or pick up the jacket I frequently forgot at any of the above locations, one of my parents had to stop whatever they were doing to drive me there and back. When they weren’t available to drive me, I was stuck.

That’s why a recent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast hit so close to home. In the podcast episode, host Roman Mars and reporter Henry Grabar discuss the recently-popularized Netflix show Old Enough—in which elementary school-aged Japanese children run their first errands—and why the children on the show as young as two-and-a-half have so much more independence than their American counterparts.

Despite a shopkeeper helping kids get products from shelves they can’t reach and the existence of social routines like the walking school bus, the real difference-maker is the built environment—the design of the sidewalks and streets, and the layout and shape of the buildings and how they relate to the streets and public spaces—and the kind of lifestyle that these choices make possible. Whereas my elementary school, friends’ houses, and nearest grocery stores were miles away, those destinations are a short walk away for most Japanese children. Whereas all of my destinations were only connected by wide arterial roads filled by people driving at high speeds, the tiny, young participants in Old Enough navigate pedestrian-friendly neighborhood streets. And whereas my life to this day involves looking around parked cars to check for oncoming traffic, this show makes clear that in Japan these obstacles are less frequent. It turns out that everything which allowed my parents to drive me everywhere—high speed roads connecting all of our destinations and ample parking when we got there—is exactly what made it impossible for me to safely get anywhere without them.

This is because safety and speed are irreconcilable when cars and more vulnerable road users (like cyclists and pedestrians) are involved. The elements that make it easier to drive at a high speed—many wide lanes, fewer conflict points, sweeping corners, and less road furniture—simultaneously make walking more dangerous. These design choices present pedestrians with lengthened crossing distances, a reduced number of places to cross, and an experience that’s simply uncomfortable as cars zip by at high speed. That discomfort isn’t unfounded either; should a driver hit a pedestrian, the chance of that person dying increases exponentially with the faster the vehicle is going. As any kid, but especially one who’s just dodged a speeding car on the way to school, can tell you, road design is pretty elementary.

*A child crosses a short intersection in Japan in the cold open of* Old Enough season one.

This means that the cost of this tradeoff—safety for speed, vehicular convenience for pedestrian exclusion—is not simply the lack of U.S.-based Netflix shows where five-year-olds go to grocery stores. Pedestrian fatalities have ballooned more than 50 percent over the last decade—in direct contrast to trends in nations like Japan, where they’ve decreased more than 40 percent—with the more than 75 percent increase in these traffic fatalities since 2009 disproportionately impacting Black and Native Americans. Furthermore, this bloodshed is highly concentrated; urban arterials make up just 15 percent of the road network, but are the site of nearly 70 percent of deaths from traffic violence. This makes it clear that an American version of Old Enough doesn’t exist not just because of parenting choices, as some commentary focused on, but because there’s really no age where our communities are safe enough for pedestrians.

Recognizing that design is a leading contributor to traffic deaths gives us the opportunity to reduce the level of danger on our streets. We have simple yet effective tools to make everybody beyond the four doors of a car safer. These include:

narrowing vehicle lanes and turning radii to slow down drivers;
banning parking near intersections (at least) to improve visibility for all;
bumping out intersections and placing pedestrian islands in crosswalks so that crossing distances are shorter;
building a network of separated and protected bike lanes so that people on bikes aren’t mixed with those driving vehicles weighing multiple tons;
and even just ensuring sidewalks exist and are well-maintained, so that pedestrians have safe places to walk.

Making these improvements wouldn’t only mean allowing more three-year-olds to take trips to the grocery store. The design of our built environment currently limits everyone’s mobility, especially those who can’t or don’t drive, such as the elderly, visually and physically impaired, economically disadvantaged, and survivors of car crashes. Loved ones, grocery stores, social services, and economic advancement should be just as attainable without a car as they are with a car. By making our roads and streets safer for vulnerable road users—as opposed to relegating pedestrians and cyclists to solely recreational paths and trails—all of the people mentioned above are significantly freer to participate in society. Street design is more than the top vehicle speed for a given corridor; it’s a reflection of who and what activity our society prioritizes.

When I was in middle school, my family moved to a house where I could safely use my bike as transportation, at least to some of the places I wanted to go. Grocery stores and my middle school were still too far to reach, but I was suddenly able to visit friends, go to tennis courts near my house, and just ride my bike for fun. The millions of people across the country who can’t drive (or simply choose not to) can and should experience that same transformation.