Skip to main content

 About Steve Davis

Stephen Lee Davis is the AVP for Transportation Strategy at Smart Growth America.

How cities can reduce traffic instead of just ensuring more of it

A developer paying the cost to install a new bike share station could be a way to gain credits toward a building permit under the plan outlined in Modern Mitigation. (Image: Euan Fisk, Flickr)

A new approach to addressing the potential transportation impacts of new development in urban areas, outlined in a new report by the State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI), another program of Smart Growth America, could be a powerful recipe for reducing the demand for driving, while helping create more prosperous transit- and pedestrian-friendly cities.

For decades, most local, regional, and state governments have had a myopic approach to handling the transportation needs related to infill development: they require developers to add more street/road capacity. And this single-minded approach has produced exactly what one might expect: Lots of new, expensive roads that actually increase driving, and with it pollution, emissions, roadway deaths, and impediments for people trying to get around without cars.

A more productive approach seeks to minimize traffic from development before resorting to just building expensive, bigger and wider roads. This new report from SSTI outlines a modern method for cities and the private sector to partner together in reducing the demand for driving as cities build, grow, and thrive.

On October 29 at 2:00 p.m. ET, join Eric Sundquist, SSTI Director; Ramses Madou, Transportation Planner with San Jose Department of Transportation; and moderator Beth Osborne, Senior Policy Advisor at Smart Growth America for a lively discussion of the opportunities and challenges of moving from LOS to VMT and what steps are needed to make this shift work.

Register for the webinar

Cities conventionally manage the impacts of development by adding capacity for automobiles, often providing no support for anyone outside of a vehicle. But this strategy only encourages more driving, and the roads and city in general become much less pedestrian-, bicyclist-, and transit-friendly. It also creates more emissions at a time when many cities are trying to reach ambitious climate goals.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: If we think of accommodating more driving as the only solution, it will inevitably get harder for people to walk or take transit, and more trips will be taken in cars.

Cities thrive with a concentrated mix of people and uses—the more jobs, people, and activities within reach of each other, the greater the economic benefit from being able to easily access all of this opportunity. Asking developers to provide services and amenities that allow people to move around with fewer car trips will reduce the traffic impacts of new development, benefit all, and will help cities avoid super-sizing our roads and intersections.

This report offers a way to do this within the city development process.

What would a better approach look like?

This new report—Modernizing Mitigation—suggests a system that rewards developers for a range of transportation improvements they can provide, making them partners in an effort to produce people-friendly neighborhoods. Actions developers can take include improving the infrastructure for walking, biking, or transit; providing complementary land uses that minimize the need for new trips; subsidizing other forms of mobility like bike sharing or car sharing; or providing first- and last-mile connections to high-capacity transit (like a regular shuttle).

Changes to the pedestrian network and the improvement of crosswalks to add connectivity (left) and accessibility improvements from these connections (right) can be quantified in order to provide mitigation credits.

The contributions would be scaled to the amount of parking provided. The more parking a developer provides, the more they’d have to do to reduce demand (or through in lieu fees for non-auto services and facilities.) Or a project with no parking could be exempt from the other measures.

This helps produce a city where development can be seen as a positive contributor to a more prosperous place, rich with opportunities for all, as opposed to just the culprit to blame for more traffic.

This new approach can help put cities and developers on the same team, rather than working against one another to produce all the wrong outcomes. The report includes an examination of different cities’ policies along these lines, as well as a detailed look at precisely how this system could work with a real scale of points and incentives.

Much of the report was the product of SSTI’s practical work with the City of Los Angeles to develop a system for LA, but the suggested point system and requirements could be easily adapted by any other city to their local environment, priorities, or goals.

Download the full report and join us for the webinar on October 29.

With the 2018 fiscal year over, how much money has USDOT obligated to transit projects?

The 2018 fiscal year closed yesterday, wrapping up a year in which USDOT received more than $1.4 billion from Congress to invest in new transit construction and improvement projects across the country. With another infusion of cash for FY 2019 coming (eventually), it’s time for a look at how much USDOT still has on hand from 2018—as well as the unspent funds from FY 2017.

With fiscal 2018 now in the books and 2017 more than a year behind us, USDOT still has nearly $1.8 billion in unspent funds at their disposal from these two years for new transit. They’ve obligated a total of $532 million in 2017-2018 dollars to just eight transit projects, with just $100 million of that from FY 2018.

Perhaps one reason why USDOT has awarded so little of the funding from this year is because they still have almost half of the $925 million that Congress gave them back in May 2017. That fiscal year now closed more than a year ago.

USDOT’s bank account is actually about to get even bigger.

While the 2019 budget is still awaiting final action by Congress, the relevant committees from both chambers have already approved their 2019 budgets for transportation (and housing) programs. And as it stands now, both the House and Senate would infuse the transit capital program with more than $2.5 billion. While about half of that money would be for advancing ongoing multi-year transit projects that USDOT already approved, approximately $1.5 billion would be intended to advance new projects in the pipeline that are expecting to sign agreements with USDOT sometime in 2019 or beyond.

Before the end of the calendar year, without advancing any big-ticket transit projects, USDOT could have more than $3 billion on hand to obligate to transit projects.

If this budget is approved by Congress, it will mark the third straight time that they’ve rejected USDOT’s preference to receive zero dollars to advance new transit projects. Remember, this was their request for the 2019 budget (emphasis ours):

The FY 2019 [budget] proposal limits funding for the CIG Program to projects with existing full funding grant agreements. For the remaining projects in the CIG program, FTA is not requesting or recommending funding. Future investments in new transit projects would be funded by the localities that use and benefit from these localized projects.

To hear FTA tell it, they’re wondering what the big fuss is all about. Last week the FTA’s Acting Administrator Jane Williams spoke to the American Public Transportation Association at their annual conference. During her remarks, she expressed surprise at all the hand-wringing about FTA’s signature transit program:

Unfortunately, the administration’s efforts to support our nation’s infrastructure are many times overlooked by the focus on the Capital Investment Grants (CIG) Program. I know a lot of you in the room have very strong opinions about this administration’s approach toward the CIG program. Even though this program represents less than 20 percent of FTA’s budget, it seems to occupy 80 percent of the attention.

A huge share of FTA’s funds are distributed via formulas—FTA has no discretion to turn off that faucet even if they wanted to. So yes, the public is very interested in the single biggest available federal funding stream to pair with billions raised by local taxpayers to advance new transit projects across the country. Leaders in places like Atlanta might understandably be wondering about the future of their ambitious $2.5 billion transit plan that hinges on receiving funding from a program that USDOT would prefer Congress wind down.

Further on in her remarks, Acting Administrator Williams claims credit for projects that they actually haven’t funded yet:

In fact, in just the last six weeks…

  • Allocated $100 million in funding toward our planned multi-year FFGA for the Seattle Lynnwood Link Extension light rail line, and
  • Allocated $99 million in funding toward our planned FFGA for the Santa Ana, California streetcar project.

USDOT has not yet signed funding agreements nor obligated any funds to the Lynnwood (WA) Link light rail project and the Orange County (CA) Streetcar. Claiming credit for “allocating” funding to them is like telling your kids that they need to write thank-you notes for the presents they might get for Christmas, if they’re good.

Congress isn’t likely to act on the 2019 budget before the November elections—the president signed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government through December 7—but when they do, they’ll be filling up the USDOT purse with yet more funding for transit. Stay tuned.

T4America joins a parade of letters to USDOT urging them to do their job and get transit projects moving

Following a parade of official letters from elected representatives, T4America sent a letter urging USDOT to do the job required of them by law and award funds to expeditiously advance transit projects, communicate more clearly with local communities about the status of their projects, and recognize that a bipartisan majority in Congress has twice rejected their wishes to eliminate the transit capital construction program. (Updated below.)

As chronicled in our Stuck in the Station resource, the Trump administration’s USDOT has stated their clear preference to wind down the federal program that pairs federal grants with state/local dollars to invest in much-needed public transportation projects in cities of nearly all size across the country.

USDOT has (begrudgingly) continued to award dollars mostly to smaller transit projects that receive their funding all at once in one single year—$50 million here, $50 million there—while largely neglecting to advance and sign any funding agreements for multi-year transit projects with higher price tags that require them to provide a larger amount of funding over multiple years. To date, they’ve awarded just $532 million of the $2.3 billion that Congress has given them since May 2017, a fact that’s impossible to reconcile with President Trump and Secretary Chao’s complaints about the long, arduous, red-tape-filled road to getting transportation projects approved and their promises to expedite that process.

(Update: 9/24/2018: Streetsblog LA reported last week that Los Angeles received what’s known as a Letter of No Prejudice from USDOT to proceed on their Purple Line subway extension. While this is indeed a “big deal,” as described by Metro CEO Phil Washington, it does not provide funding from FTA nor does it guarantee that Metro will receive funding in the future. We’ll have more on what this means later this week.)

Last week, we sent a letter to the Federal Transit Administration urging them to get these projects moving and also bring a degree of clarity and transparency that’s been sorely lacking:

To date, the administration has failed to obligate the overwhelming majority of funding appropriated since FY17. This undermines the administration’s stated goal of cutting red tape and building infrastructure. We therefore urge you to expeditiously advance projects, working cooperatively with project sponsors.

We further suggest that you review your method of communicating the status of projects by providing regular, detailed updates to public and project sponsors. This should include specific information about what remains to advance a project, an expected timeline, and what fiscal year funding will be used for a project.

Congress has rejected the administration’s plan to end the CIG program and, instead, provided the FTA with about $2.3 billion to build new and expand existing transit. Based on the limited information publicly available from your agency, there are 16 projects in 13 communities expecting this funding. While some grants have been awarded, USDOT appears to be delaying many projects while not providing project sponsors with the information they need to address the issues USDOT cites as cause for delay. Congress has been clear: USDOT’s mission is to advance projects through the pipeline and award grants.

Read our full letter here (pdf).

We are not the only ones who have been writing letters to USDOT, however.

With several transit projects already in the pipeline (and more on the way thanks to several recent ballot measures), Washington State’s two Senators and scores of representatives sent a letter to Secretary Chao back in February. In this letter, they outlined the recent timeline for three specific transit projects, pointing to months where projects sponsors were left waiting with no communication or action from FTA, noting that this “emerging pattern of missed execution dates, delays, and seemingly deliberate slowdowns in executing CIG grant agreements that have received Congressional appropriations is extremely concerning.”

“In addition, we note it is in direct contradiction to your commitment to distribute the funding Congress provides the Department,” they continued.

A couple months later, in April 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein (CA) sent a letter to Secretary Chao with a similar thrust. “Congress has now twice rejected proposals from the Trump Administration to terminate the Capital Investment Grant program and instead has strongly reaffirmed its bipartisan commitment to not only continuing, but actually expanding, the program,” the letter states.

For an administration that wants states and localities to pick up a greater share of the funding burden for infrastructure, Senator Feinstein notes that these transit projects should be a pretty attractive deal.

The federal commitment of funding for these [transit] projects averages only 45 percent of the total costs, far less than the federal share of up to 80 percent on comparable highway projects. These projects deserve the fair and timely administration they are owed by a program that has been duly authorized and appropriated.

Jane Williams, the acting administrator of FTA, responded via a letter to all of Congress this summer, in which she seemed to assert that FTA has a lot more latitude to choose projects than the law would suggest (pdf):

The FTA bases its discretionary funding allocation decisions for the CIG program on a variety of factors including the extent of the local financial commitment, project readiness, and geographic diversity. The FTA also considers the extent value capture, private contributions, and other innovative approaches to project development and delivery are used, including public-private partnerships.

Except that the transit capital program isn’t truly “discretionary,” like the TIGER (now BUILD) grant program is, as an example. And “geographic diversity” as a consideration is not actually anywhere in the current law. Rep. Peter DeFazio and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, two members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, addressed both of these issues in a reply to the acting administrator (pdf):

As you know, the [transit capital grant] program’s statutory language is not like a typical discretionary grant program like INFRA, bus, or ferry discretionary grants. It is a pipeline program where eligible projects that meet the statutory criteria under section 5309 are funding subject only to continued appropriations. …FTA’s letter also attempts to add a new criterion to the [transit capital] program, referred to as geographic diversity. We are concerned that FTA is adding another layer of bureaucracy to discourage multiple transit projects from entering the pipeline from within the same growing urban area or state.

What they’re saying is that if transit projects are entered into the pipeline and meet the criteria in the law and are scored in a satisfactory manner (FTA does have some latitude here), the law dictates that those projects should be approved and funded. Put another way, FTA doesn’t actually get to “choose” which transit projects they want to fund—it is not a truly competitive program.

Rep. DeFazio and Del. Holmes Norton also note the massive cognitive dissonance between an administration that has publicly and loudly committed itself to cutting red tape, and USDOT’s plan to add a whole lot more red tape to a process that’s already far more complicated than it should be.

When you testified before the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, you spoke of an intent to ‘streamline permitting to speed up project delivery and reduce unnecessary and overly burdensome regulations.’ Given this testimony, we are confused as to why USDOT appears to be intent on creating new regulatory burdens designed to thwart transit infrastructure investment, in overt disregard of clear Congressional intent.

The message that USDOT is receiving is crystal clear. As our letter says, “we intend to continue to draw attention to these delays until these funds are obligated. Local communities have waited long enough.”

“Deciding what kind of city we want to be” with the Smart Cities Collaborative

While fighting to stay ahead of a transportation and mobility landscape that changes by the day, 70+ people representing 23 cities gathered in Pittsburgh last week for the third meeting of our Smart Cities Collaborative to band together to solve problems and learn from each other.

While we were in Pittsburgh, Seattle Department of Transportation’s Benjamin de la Peña gave an interview to Seattle Business Magazine about automated vehicles that nails what the Collaborative is all about: “We do not want the technology to decide what kind of city we want to have. We need to decide what kind of city we want and have the technology adapt to that city,” he said.

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto

This is the core mission of the Smart Cities Collaborative, and why we gathered again for three days in Pittsburgh last week. We were incredibly fortunate to have Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto kick things off for us with a stirring reminder of the aim for all of this work, which was embedded in the motto for their application to USDOT’s Smart Cities Challenge from 2016: “If it’s not for all, it’s not for us.”

Thanks to support from AARP’s Public Policy Institute and Jana Lynott, we started trying to put that maxim into practice right out of the gate with a tour of two particular intersections in Pittsburgh that could stand to have some major improvements made to better serve everyone who needs to use them.

As biking rates continue to go up and eventually shared bikes or scooters from companies like JUMP or Lime roll out, the city will continue having to carefully navigate the tension between allowing a market to develop and thrive, while also ensuring that new options also help the city accomplish their very ambitious goals. Goals like eliminating all traffic fatalities (Vision Zero), giving everyone access to fresh food within 20 minutes without having to use a car, and making every trip under a mile most enjoyably achieved by walking or biking, to name just three.

As the rain poured down, Karina Ricks, the director of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, described some of the challenges with a particular intersection in Pittsburgh to the Collaborative members.

So we toured these two intersections above (during a crazy week of floods in metro Pittsburgh) and then spent some time in a charrette discussing practical design changes for them, the endless tradeoffs that have to be made, and how to prioritize the city’s stated goals and values. How can cities make value-based decisions about what to prioritize? And how do you engage the public when making those difficult decisions?

All too often these days, city transportation departments are just like the surfer desperately fighting just to stay ahead of the break of a mammoth wave. As we heard during one session about e-scooters, they’re here, the cities didn’t ask for them, and it often feels like the challenge is best stated as “they’re here and we have to find a way to deal with them.”

But instead of merely “dealing” with these new services, how can cities work to harness their potential—whether ridesourcing, automated vehicles, bikes and scooters—to accomplish something good and advance their city’s overall values, rather than just avoiding the bad outcomes? And how can cities create flexible regulatory frameworks that can be applied broadly across new mobility models as they develop?

The pace of change is perhaps the biggest part of the challenge. The best way to describe the process when cities roll out a new transit service, for better or for worse, is pretty slow and methodical. Years can pass between the day when someone first drew a new line on a map and the day that a new bus or train starts picking up passengers. But with new mobility options, it feels like the time between ideation and rollout is measured in days, not years.

To better prepare for these new services and this pace of change, we spent the better part of half a day working in groups trying to craft an ideal, holistic policy for shared active transportation—the docked or dockless bikes and scooters that are popping up rapidly in cities from coast to coast.

We were glad to be supported by Emily Warren and the team from Lime, one of the biggest companies in the U.S. providing shared bikes and scooters, to kick things off with a look at some of the hot button issues like fleet size, requirements for locking technology, and how to proactively ensure that their services are available to everyone in a community.

Broken up into small groups, Collaborative members chose two policy topics they wanted to develop, like equipment and safety, operations, data standards, and equity, to name just a few. Over the space of half a day, Collaborative members explored the core components of a comprehensive policy and identified key policy areas to consider, set a recommended policy floor (a fundamental basic level of policy that all cities can and should adopt), and highlighted a few options for differing levels of action in each policy area.

The exercise illustrated the power of cities coming together to solve problems, learn what’s working (or not working), and learn from each other. This is the true strength of the Collaborative and the reason we’ve continued this work for nearly two years now.

With the help of our colleagues at Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, we closed out the three-day meeting with a look at each city’s equity guiding policy and examined how they translate those policies into action in their projects.

Each participant shared their department’s or agency’s equity policy—or their lack of one—what that policy meant to them and how they’ve tangibly incorporated it into their projects. Participants worked to identify gaps and areas for improvement as they move forward with their projects to ensure equity and access for everyone. It was a refreshing discussion that illuminated the ongoing difficulty in applying ambitious principles to policies and then to actual projects on the ground.

Participants getting a tour of some of the experiments going on in downtown Pittsburgh, including a painted bus lane through the incredibly busy corridor, parklets along the curb lane, artistic interventions, and a raised bus bump-out to make bus boarding easier.

The Collaborative reconvenes this December in Atlanta, just before Transportation for America’s Capital Ideas conference, which will also tackle this issue of new mobility. At Capital Ideas (open for registration now!), we will be focusing on the states’ role and how they can lead the way while also working in partnership with the providers and cities to create a transportation system that works for everyone.

Join us in Atlanta for Capital Ideas this December! Psst, find out what’s on the agenda here.

USDOT has become the biggest obstacle in the way of delivering transit projects on time and on budget

Our updated Stuck in the Station resource shows how USDOT was already slow-rolling transit funding well before Congress gave them another $1.4 billion 157+ days ago to build or expand transit systems across the country.

Since March 23, 2018, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has awarded just $25 million of the $1,400,000,000 that Congress made available to them this year for advancing transit capital projects in more than a dozen cities. 

The full picture for funding is even worse. 

In addition to sitting on $1.4 billion, USDOT has distributed less than half of the $925 million Congress appropriated for new transit projects all the way back in May 2017—more than 480 days ago.

Collectively, that now means that Congress has given USDOT more than $2.3 billion over the last two years to help build or expand transit in scores of local communities. Though they have awarded about $457 million since early 2017, that’s less than 20 percent of all the dollars that Congress has given them for transit capital investments over this two-year period. Put another way, nearly a full year after the close of FY17, USDOT has committed less than half of what Congress gave them for that period.

Congress is concerned about this slowdown: In a report commissioned by Congress, USDOT was warned by the Government Accountability Office back in May that they “run the risk of violating federal law” by failing to administer FTA’s transit capital investment program, as we noted last Friday.


See the full dataset and most current numbers in Stuck in the Station

When USDOT responded to the initial release of Stuck in the Station, they asserted in a response to some reporters that they had in fact advanced ten transit projects since 2017 with funding agreements. But is that the right number? As we wrote in last week’s post:

FTA suggested in their response to reporters that ten projects have received “new” full funding grant agreements (FFGAs) since 2017. But only two of those are actual big ticket New Starts or Core Capacity transit projects [that even require these types of multi-year grant agreements]: The CalTrain electrification project and the Maryland Purple Line project were both holdovers from the Obama administration that moved forward because of intense political pressure or the resolution of a pending legal dispute, respectively. The other eight projects FTA shared with one reporter were all Small Starts projects.

Two of these eight particular projects actually received FY16 dollars (The Link extension in Tacoma, WA and the SMART commuter rail in San Rafael, CA.) That arguably leaves just six transit projects that this administration has truly advanced through the pipeline on their own with 2017 or 2018 dollars.

This also means that, when the administration turned over at USDOT with the inauguration of President Trump, the previous regime had successfully obligated nearly all of the FY16 transit capital funds, save for about $200 million intended for just three projects. $100 million of that funding was for one project held up by a legal dispute (the Purple Line in Maryland). More than two years into the current administration, USDOT has awarded less than a fifth of the $2.3 billion they’ve been directed to obligate by Congress.

Wasn’t this administration supposed to be all about delivering projects more quickly and cutting the red tape?

Gov. Accountability Office: The FTA “runs the risk of violating federal law”

With the release last week of Stuck in the Station, we detailed how the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has been delaying the distribution of $1.4 billion to help build and expand transit systems across the country. 153 days (and counting) after Congress handed billions to USDOT and the FTA, they finally spoke up last week.

After the release of Stuck in the Station last week, FTA responded through a spokesperson, disputing our claim that any of the 17 projects on the list are “ready-to-go,” stating that “none of the projects listed have met the requirements in law for receipt of Capital Investment Grants funding.”

Putting aside the obvious point that FTA’s reason for existence is to help shepherd communities through the process and meet the requirements, it’s incredibly unclear—even to the locals trying to build these projects, in many cases—where these projects stand in the process.

“The public and project sponsors have had very little information about what additional steps are required by USDOT to move their projects forward,” said T4America senior policy advisor Beth Osborne, in response to FTA’s comments. “FTA saying only ‘we are reviewing these projects’ does virtually nothing to illuminate their procedure. In the past, the administration would provide information in the budgetary process about which projects are expected to move forward. In a break with that common practice, this administration hasn’t done that, so we pulled from the information available on FTA’s website. If that information is not sufficient to understand where projects stand, it further demonstrates how opaque this process has become.”

To this point, we’ve already heard that several project sponsors are in the dark about the status of their projects or exactly what FTA is waiting to receive from them to move forward.

FTA suggested in their response to reporters that ten projects have received “new” full funding grant agreements (FFGAs) since 2017. But only two of those are actual big ticket New Starts or Core Capacity transit projects: The CalTrain electrification project and the Maryland Purple Line project were both holdovers from the Obama administration that moved forward because of intense political pressure or the resolution of a pending legal dispute, respectively. The other eight projects FTA shared with one reporter were all Small Starts projects, but only one of those received any funding from FY18. All of the rest were funded through money still unobligated from one of the last two fiscal years (FY16-17).

Why isn’t there a clear list published by USDOT with the dates these agreements were signed? And how much money from the previous year (FY17) has USDOT still not obligated at this point? Why is it so hard to find this information?

FTA suggests in their statement that they’re working to advance the rest of these transit projects in the pipeline, but their true position is in fact the opposite, which they’ve made crystal clear elsewhere: transit is not a federal priority and only projects with current grant agreements should receive federal dollars.

Here’s what FTA says in their FY19 Annual Report of Funding Recommendations: (emphasis ours; CIG stands for the transit Capital Investment Grant program.)

The FY 2019 [budget] proposal limits funding for the CIG Program to projects with existing full funding grant agreements. For the remaining projects in the CIG program, FTA is not requesting or recommending funding. Future investments in new transit projects would be funded by the localities that use and benefit from these localized projects.

There it is in black and white: USDOT and FTA’s position for next year’s budget is that the pipeline of transit projects should grind to a halt completely, leaving cities and communities on their own to raise yet more local funding than they already have to complete their projects.

In sad attempt at a fig leaf, the FTA also tossed this red herring into their response:

In addition, FTA has made available almost $10 billion in FY18 formula funding and $534 million in funding for other competitive programs.

That’s nice, but those funds have nothing to do with the transit program they are tasked with administering. They are formula dollars, which are awarded by Congress automatically from the Highway Trust Fund. USDOT is merely a pass-through for those funds with some oversight responsibilities.

Lastly, Congress is also concerned that USDOT is slowing down the pipeline and dragging their heels on advancing projects. Two things Congress has done recently suggest this.

1) There’s language in this year’s final approved omnibus budget that says that FTA has to obligate 85 percent of the transit capital program funds by the end of 2019. No one at T4America can remember any language like this from Congress to FTA, probably because FTA has never slow-rolled the process down like this before. And 2) for next year’s funding, in the Senate FY19 transportation and housing bill, the Senate also expressed their concerns about unnecessary delays from FTA with this report language on page 74:

“Project Pipeline.–The (Appropriations) Committee is concerned with unnecessary delays for projects seeking advancement into engineering or a grant agreement. These delays are costly for local project sponsors and create uncertainty for transit planners and providers across the country. The Committee directs the Secretary to continue to advance eligible projects into project development and engineering in the capital investment grant evaluation, rating, and approval process pursuant to 49 U.S.C. 5309 and section 3005(b) of the FAST Act in all cases when projects meet the statutory criteria.”

As that same Senate report says later on, FTA is trying to use the President’s budget request (which has no legal authority and is largely a statement of principles and priorities) to keep from doing what Congress has already mandated that they do — move the pipeline of new projects forward and tell the public what projects will receive funding:

The Committee is particularly concerned that FTA has no immediate plans to address outstanding statutory provisions because the Administration’s budget request does not include any new CIG projects. The Committee is dismayed that FTA is ignoring statutory mandates in order to reflect a budget request that has been consistently rejected by Congress and directs the Department to implement the GAO recommendations within 60 days of the date of enactment of this act.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (pdf) referenced by the Senate committee in the last sentence above is a flaming arrow directed at FTA. (Laura Bliss at CityLab also covered this report today in this superb piece.)

Commissioned by Congress, this report from May reaches some damning conclusions about FTA’s process with the pipeline of transit projects, and intimates that they’re coming dangerously close to failing to follow the law. Most shockingly, the FTA has told the GAO directly that they aren’t planning to do what Congress has directed them to do because the president is trying (and repeatedly failing) to end all transit funding anyway, so why bother. That’s not how the law works, however:

However, as also mentioned earlier, in March 2018 the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, provided the [transit capital] program with more than $2.6 billion, and also directed FTA to continue to administer the Capital Investment Grants program in accordance with the program’s procedural and substantive requirements. Following the enactment of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2018, FTA officials told us that they are reviewing the law and determining next steps. However, they did not indicate that they have any immediate plans to address those provisions. Moving forward, if FTA does not take steps to address the outstanding provisions, FTA runs the risk of violating federal law.

An administration that has been so publicly focused on speeding up project delivery, cutting red tape, and moving transportation projects along as fast as humanly possible has become the biggest obstacle for the timely delivery of transit projects that scores of local communities are depending on.

Every day that they delay, materials get more expensive, workers and equipment sit idle, and local taxpayers will end up having to pay more than they should have.

It seems that everyone other than our country’s Federal Transit Administration is interested in moving these transit projects forward in a way that’s clear, transparent, and expeditious.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Fundamentally flawed bill to govern automated vehicles springs back to life

A Senate bill that would leave cities, states, and the public in the dark while handing the keys to the self-driving auto industry has returned in the 11th hour, with the Senate considering a move to expedite its passage by attaching it to a huge must-pass aviation bill. (Updated: 9/18/2018)

NTSB investigators in Arizona examining the automated Volvo operated by Uber that killed a pedestrian. Photo by the NTSB.

Update (9/18/2018): Bloomberg reported today that the AV Start Act would NOT be attached to the FAA authorization bill, after a decision made by committee chairman Sen. John Thune. While the bill is still not dead, that likely ends the chance of passage anytime soon. Thanks to all of you who called or wrote your Senators.

After being shelved earlier this year in response to widespread concerns about its hands-off approach to regulating automated vehicles, the AV START Act appears to have only been “mostly dead,” and as we all know, mostly dead is also partly alive.

In response to rumblings that the Senate is considering attaching the AV START Act to the Federal Aviation Administration’s multi-year reauthorization that must pass before the end of September, T4America today resent a letter from May to Senators reminding them that the AV START Act is still “a fundamentally flawed bill that will put hundreds of thousands of automated vehicles (AVs) on the roads, keep local governments and the public from knowing much about where and how they are operating, while preempting cities and states from overseeing how and where these vehicles operate in their communities.”

We originally sent this letter to the leadership of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation back in May, after which time the bill appeared to be put on the backburner due to the concerns of T4America and numerous other groups — as well as the lack of a clear champion on the Hill. One of our biggest concerns with Congress’ approach at the time was that the final product was not the result of methodical policymaking, gathering robust feedback from everyone with a stake, and forging a true bipartisan consensus.

The process was instead largely influenced by the tech and auto industry and the final bill was the product of an unfortunate lack of interest from Congress on a critical issue that could reshape our towns and cities.

The most concerning issue is that the bill would essentially codify into federal law the same statewide approach that allowed self-driving vehicles to operate in Arizona with few regulations, almost no oversight, and no ability for local communities to even learn basic details about where and how these vehicles are operating.

As we all remember, that approach resulted in tragedy. From our letter:

Americans were deeply troubled after an AV operated by Uber struck and killed a woman in Tempe, AZ. Videos of the incident show the vehicle made no attempt to slow down before the crash and the safety driver failed to take control of the vehicle. It is clear that both the technology and the human safety driver failed, resulting in a tragic fatality. Reports after the fatality suggest that Uber had data indicating its vehicles were underperforming. Unfortunately, Arizona and many other states do not require AV operators to disclose any data regarding their performance. This leaves everyone in the dark about whether it is safe to move about our communities and creates a climate of secrecy around AV testing and deployment.

If you create a system that 1) allows mistakes to happen, and 2) intentionally keeps the public in the dark, there’s no way to be sure that anyone is going to learn a thing, much less feel confident that the public will be protected first and foremost.

As currently written, there is nothing in the AV START Act that would help cities, states, law enforcement, or even the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) learn from these incidents or develop policies and safety regulations to prevent similar crashes in the future.

The Senate might be making a decision about whether or not to include this bill in the FAA authorization as soon as this afternoon, but the FAA authorization is unlikely to pass before its September 30 deadline, so get your calls in whenever you can.

Call your Senator’s office today and share this simple message with them:

  • Hi, my name is ___ and I’m calling from ___
  • I’m calling to let Senator ___ know that the Senate should NOT expedite the passage of the AV START Act by including it in the aviation bill.
  • The AV START Act will put hundreds of thousands of automated vehicles (AVs) on the roads, keep local governments and the public from knowing much about where and how these vehicles are operating, and preempt cities and states from any oversight.
  • This bill was produced too quickly, with too little input from local leaders or the people who will be most affected by this hands-off approach to letting the industry operate with almost no oversight. It
  • Please return it to committee and urge them to produce something thoughtful by working closely with the local and state transportation leaders who stand ready to address these problems.

Trump administration has effectively halted the pipeline of new transit projects

How long will the Trump administration sit on transit funding? Click to view Stuck in the Station, a new resource tracking the unnecessary and costly delays in transit funding.

Last March, Congress provided the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) with about $1.4 billion to help build and expand transit systems across the country. 142 days later and counting, FTA has obligated almost none of these funds to new transit projects. A new Transportation for America resource—Stuck in the Station—will continue tracking exactly how long FTA has been declining to do their job, how much money has been committed, and which communities are paying a hefty price in avoidable delays.

For 142 days and counting, Trump’s FTA has declined to distribute virtually all of the $1.4 billion appropriated by Congress in 2018 for 17 transit projects in 14 communities that were expecting to receive it sometime this year. Other than one small grant to Indianapolis for their Red Line all-electric bus rapid transit project, the pipeline of new transit projects has effectively ground to a halt.

As a result, bulldozers and heavy machinery are sitting idle. Steel and other materials are getting more expensive by the day. Potential construction workers are waiting to hear about a job that should have materialized yesterday. And everyday travelers counting on improved transit service are left wondering when FTA will do their job and get these projects moving.

“When it comes to funding for infrastructure, this administration has repeatedly made it clear they expect states and cities to pick up part of the tab,” said Beth Osborne, Transportation for America senior policy advisor. “Yet these communities are doing exactly what the administration has asked for by committing their own dollars to fund these transit projects—in some cases, going to the ballot box to raise their own taxes—and yet still the administration does nothing.”

Fourteen communities in total are waiting on this funding appropriated by Congress—and approved by the president—earlier in 2018.

Dallas is waiting on more than $74 million to lengthen platforms at 28 DART stations in order to accommodate longer trains and increase the system capacity. In Reno, NV, the transit provider is waiting on $40 million to extend their bus rapid transit system from downtown to the university and provide upgrades to the existing line. Minneapolis/St. Paul is waiting on three different grants totaling an estimated $274 million to help extend two existing light rail lines (including new park & ride stations and additional trains) to reach surrounding towns and build a new bus rapid transit line. Twelve other projects, most of them brand new rail and bus lines, are also waiting for grants ranging from $23 million to $177 million.

President Trump’s stated ambitions to make a big investment in infrastructure have largely been thwarted by his and Congress’ inability to find or approve any new sources of funding. Yet right now, the administration has $1.4 billion for infrastructure sitting idle in the bank for transit, money that could be used to buy materials that are getting more expensive by the day, fire up the heavy equipment, and fill new jobs with construction workers helping to bring new bus or rail service to everyday commuters who are counting on it.

So how much money did Congress put in the Trump administration’s hands, and how much has the FTA actually distributed to these ready-to-go transit projects? Which communities are paying the price in expensive but entirely avoidable delays?

Browse Stuck in the Station, Transportation for America’s new resource for tracking how much money has been obligated to transit projects in the pipeline.

View Stuck in the Station and take action

In this case “obligating” means simply having the FTA (acting) administrator sign a grant contract for a project that’s already been in the federal pipeline for years. To be clear, FTA has already identified the projects that will receive grants, Congress has approved overall funding levels, and local projects have accounted for this federal money in their budgets. Local communities are just waiting on Secretary Elaine Chao and the acting administrator of the FTA to put pen to paper and actually deliver the money they’ve been promised.

It’s time for FTA to fulfill its promises and get these projects moving.

On National Walking Day, too many Americans are still having to endure unsafe streets

Since we missed recognizing National Walking Day last week while the Complete Streets conference was happening in Nashville, we wanted to come back this week and revisit a T4America post from 2012 looking at what’s actually keeping more people from walking in many of our metro areas.

Originally posted on April, 4 2012.

You may not have known it — its not the most publicized special day on the books — but today is National Walking Day. Some of you may have traded part or all of your drive or transit trip today for a walk to work. But for many, every day is walking day, and it happens on streets with dangerous or inconvenient conditions that no one should have to endure just to walk to school, their job, or the grocery store.

Last Friday, I spent some time driving around the sprawling Atlanta, Georgia metroplex photographing some well-known trouble spots for pedestrian safety. Though some improvements have been made in places, there are still so many unsafe streets, corridors and intersections for pedestrians, finding streets that are dangerous by design is about as easy as blindly putting your finger down on a map.

The Atlanta Regional Commission has helped address some of these problems through their popular and oversubscribed Livable Centers Initiative that gives metro communities small grants to help make a dangerous street safer, improve MARTA access, add new crosswalks or streetscaping, or other small improvements to the built environment that help improve quality of life for residents. And the local group PEDS has had their boots on the ground for years now, working hard to make metro Atlanta more walkable. But we need far more of these kinds of efforts — and similar efforts from others in cities across the country — to make the kinds of improvements we need to save lives and end the 4,000-plus deaths that happen to people walking each year.

Many of these deaths occur simply because the design of a road just hasn’t adapted to the changing needs of all the people who use it.

Consider: at one point, Old National Highway in South Fulton County was probably a sleepy state highway through a relatively unpopulated area on ones way south out of Atlanta. Now, its teeming with retail on both sides of the street just south of Interstate 85. Add in the fact that its a relatively low-income area (read: people more likely to walk or take transit) with apartment complexes on both sides of the main highway and you’ve got a street that no longer meets the needs of everyone who uses it, and certainly not for the people who live there.

Metro ATL Pedestrians15

Though the first few miles away from Interstate 85 have sidewalks and there are a handful of signalized intersections with crosswalks, sidewalks soon end completely and there are many stretches where there are no safe places to cross for hundreds or thousands of feet — all in an area with MARTA bus stops on both sides of the highway. The sidewalks may end, but the walking doesn’t, as the desire paths through the grass indicate.

Metro ATL Pedestrians06

Of course, the most well-known road in Atlanta thats dangerous for walking and biking is certainly Buford Highway. This stretch near Clairmont Road is a whopping seven lanes across, with crosswalks often so far apart as to be merely dots on the horizon.

Metro ATL Pedestrians36

This corridor is lined with more affordable apartments and has also been a popular landing place for Latino and Asian immigrants for years, and many portions of the street are filled with small ethnic shops catering to the local clientele — many of whom are likely to be walking. According to the data in our map, in just the few miles from I-285 south down to 400, 20 pedestrians were killed from 1999-2009. There are stretches with no sidewalks on either side of the street and no safe crosswalks almost as far as the eye can see.

Metro ATL Pedestrians41

In this picture alone, not only are there no sidewalks but there are nine separate curb cuts where this man could be easily struck by a right-turning car before reaching the next safe crosswalk at the intersection.

Some key improvements have been made on Buford Highway in recent years, though, which have helped to increase safety. Thanks to recent efforts by Dekalb County and the Georgia Department of Transportation, a busy stretch of Buford Highway south of Doraville with high density of retail on both sides of the street received several new signalized intersections as well as new pedestrian-only mid-block crossings that use a special light called a HAWK signal. This is a light that stays dark until a pedestrian pushes a button, activating a light that flashes before turning red for cars. These crossings also include a refuge to shorten crossing distances and give people a safe place to wait while crossing.


And then there’s southern Cobb County, the northern Atlanta suburb where Raquel Nelson was walking when her son was killed and she found herself prosecuted after the fact. Some busy corridors have sidewalks and some don’t — though walking isn’t very pleasant next to seven lanes of traffic — and crosswalks can be interminably far apart.

Metro ATL Pedestrians24

This photo below bears some similarities to the conditions on the street where Raquel Nelson’s son A.J. was killed, which isn’t too far from here.

Metro ATL Pedestrians21

Note the bus stop on the other side of the street with a Cobb County bus approaching. See a marked crosswalk anywhere? Perhaps this man is trying to catch the bus? What happens when the bus drops you off and you need to reach a destination across the street? Should we really expect people to walk half a mile out of the frame to find a safer place to cross, and then walk half a mile back?

And some streets around here just have zero accommodation for pedestrians, including a busy street that serves two major universities and the county’s biggest employer (Dobbins AFB/Lockheed) right in the center of the county.

Metro ATL Pedestrians26

Keep in mind that these pictures represent just one busy American metropolis — there are hundreds more cities and thousands of places with similar conditions that need urgent attention. We have a long way to go to retrofit these streets to help make them safer for everyone that needs to use them. The complete streets provision in the Senates MAP-21 bill would be a step in the right direction, as would be the flexible funding that local governments can use to help address some of these dangerous areas under the Senate bill. (These provisions are a little out of date now. -Ed.)

With 67 percent of all pedestrian fatalities happening on federal-aid roads — many of which that were designed in this unsafe way because of federal design guidelines and standards — theres a clear role for the federal government to play in improving them.

So what would happen in our communities if we started by looking at our map of pedestrian fatalities to see where the worst trouble areas are and devoted a small slice of transportation money into small, tangible improvements like new sidewalks, new crosswalks, and new signals for making walking safer and more convenient? What if we made it a clear priority to make every day National Safe Walking Day?

Wouldn’t we be saving lives immediately? And for a small price?

Three communities selected to receive training to help improve transportation projects through arts & culture

Transportation for America is pleased to announce that Bozeman, Montana; Buffalo, New York; and Mariposa County, California have been selected to receive State of the Art Transportation Trainings. These three communities will each receive tailored technical assistance to equip them to utilize arts, culture and other creative approaches for solving specific transportation problems.

T4America’s State of the Art Transportation Trainings are made possible through funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace America, in collaboration with Americans for the Arts.

Why arts and culture? T4America deeply believes that artistic involvement can help solve entrenched transportation problems by thinking outside the manual and bringing in fresh approaches to the process. It can help heal communities divided by destructive infrastructure, generate more local buy-in for transportation projects, bring diverse constituents to the table, and create a sense of place that reflects local values of the communities transportation systems serve.

“With more than 40 communities applying for these workshops, we were struck by the range of inspiring ideas that communities have for incorporating arts and culture into the transportation planning process. These three places rose to the top of a very competitive pool, and we’re eager to help equip them to effectively collaborate,” said Ben Stone, director of arts and culture for Transportation for America.

“As T4America has gained more real-world experience over the last few years, we’ve seen how artistic and cultural practice can spark the kind of meaningful public engagement required to create transportation projects that more fully serve a community’s needs and celebrate its unique culture. One of the best ways for T4America to have a tangible impact is to find communities that have money to invest in infrastructure and are eager to bring arts into the process, but perhaps lack the expertise to make it happen. We hope these trainings can be a key ingredient to help these three communities produce better transportation projects through more inclusive processes.”

Read more about each of the projects below (adapted partially from their original applications):

Bozeman, Montana

A team from this booming region wants to creatively engage citizens and the arts community in the once-in-a-generation opportunity to imagine the future of a more robust regional transit system. Core to their strategy is harnessing and expanding the expertise of the arts community to build political and public will.

Bozeman is one of the fastest growing micropolitan areas in the country, rapidly evolving into a metropolitan area with a population that is predicted to double again from 100,000 to 200,000 in the next 25 years. They’re on the cusp of creating a metropolitan planning organization to coordinate regional planning efforts across a three county-area. As Bozeman starts trying to think and plan regionally, many of their leaders and advocates want to proactively start developing the relatively small Streamline regional transit system to provide more mobility options, take cars off the road, and reduce the need for expensive new lane miles as the region grows.

With the three main county jurisdictions in the Gallatin Valley all beginning updates of their comprehensive plans this spring, Bozeman’s leadership has an opportunity to engage their citizens and the expertise of the arts community to build political and public will to adequately fund a truly first-class regional transit system.

“The City of Bozeman is thrilled to be selected from among 40 applications across the country to receive one of three State of the Art workshops from Transportation for America,” said Bozeman Mayor Cyndy Andrus. “These workshops will integrate our lively and growing arts community with transit planning and engage citizens from across the Gallatin Valley to support creative and sustainable transportation solutions. Many thanks to Transportation for America for providing us with this opportunity.”

Buffalo, New York

With an existing city ordinance requiring public art to be integrated into all infrastructure investments, the city wants to improve the process by which those projects are developed, helping city engineers and planners more successfully collaborate with artists to create public art that empowers residents to take ownership of their neighborhoods.

In a city that was once an industrial powerhouse but has suffered from years of economic decline, the arts and culture community is still alive and active, and residents are taking ownership of their community once again thanks to the empowerment of neighborhoods, investments in the local economy, and development of infrastructure.

Buffalo is embarking on infrastructure improvements to a 2.5-mile corridor along Main Street that will improve pedestrian crossings, coordinate signals and build a new cycle track to make bicycling safer and more convenient. To ensure that the public art implemented with this specific project is representative of the people of the neighborhoods, aesthetically cohesive, and a functional long-term asset to the community, the city will use the workshop to creatively engage with the Department of Public Works, Buffalo Art Commission, and local community members.

Buffalo’s team hopes that this training will help them learn how to integrate public art in ways that are not only representative of the community, but also improves the quality of life for residents.

“As we continue to re-imagine and grow Buffalo into a city where opportunity is abundant for all people, I am pleased that our community has been given another tool to continue the work that we have been doing to integrate artistic expression into our transportation projects,” stated Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown, noting that today’s good news comes as Buffalo’s significant economic development revitalization continues. “I thank Transportation for America and Americans for the Arts for selecting Buffalo as a location to provide hands-on training workshops that will help further our efforts to use arts and culture to build local capacity, expand transportation opportunities and create projects that more fully serve the needs of our residents.”

Mariposa County, California

In this small northern California mountain town that serves as a popular gateway to Yosemite National Park, the workshop will bring a wide range of people in the community together to redesign a public space and help incorporate art into the development of a multimodal trail that will link community destinations and encourage healthy living while celebrating local culture and the environment.

Mariposa County occupies 1,463 square miles of the Sierra Nevada foothills at the western gateway to Yosemite National Park and hosts over one million annual visitors. The residents of Mariposa County are older and more likely to be obese than the rest of the state, and have far less access to physical activity than nearly all other California counties. Though the town of Mariposa features pockets of dense, walkable fabric, the bulk of the county is defined by conventional auto-centric land use patterns which, when coupled with extraordinary congestion from park visitors, severely limits mobility and detracts from the sense of place.

The community has long supported building a multi-use path along Mariposa Creek, a 40-mile tributary of the San Joaquin River running through the county, and Mariposa County currently has funding from Caltrans to support the development of portions of this path. With a generational opportunity to build an important piece of infrastructure, the team from Mariposa wants to fully explore the role of art and design in shaping the Parkway, learn more about how to leverage art and artists to influence outreach and engagement during its design and planning, and how to use art to compellingly celebrate the stories and experiences of our community.

“The residents of our community need vibrant, attractive spaces to move through and in which to come together,” said Kevin Cann, Mariposa County Supervisor. “Not only that, but over one million visitors a year experience the town of Mariposa on their way to Yosemite National Park. The Mariposa Creek Parkway can be a tremendous resource for folks of all different backgrounds, and we are excited for this opportunity to expand our community’s capacity to maximize the facility’s value.”

TIGER grants focus on rural areas, recognize the value of complete streets, and ignore transit

Just a month after the Trump administration proposed a budget that would eliminate the competitive TIGER grant program entirely next year, the US Department of Transportation announced the winners of this year’s awards. This year’s winners show a clear shift in priorities — this round is decidedly rural or small town in nature and nearly devoid of transit projects. However, the winners also show that this administration recognizes how smaller-scale complete streets projects bring tremendous value to local communities.

The fiercely competitive but notably small TIGER grant program is one of the few ways that local communities of almost any size can directly receive federal dollars for their priority transportation projects. The federal government has found a smart way to use a small amount of money to incentivize the best projects possible and encourage local investment: TIGER projects brought 3.5 other dollars to the table for each federal dollar awarded through the first five rounds. They’re overwhelmingly multimodal and multi-jurisdictional projects—like rail connections to ports, complete streets, passenger rail, and freight improvements—that are often challenging to fund through the traditional, narrow transportation formula programs.

This intense competition for funds stands in stark contrast to the majority of all federal transportation dollars that are awarded via formulas to ensure that all states or metro areas get a share, regardless of how they’re going to spend those dollars. And unlike the old system of congressional earmarks, the projects vying for funding compete against each other on their merits to ensure that each dollar is spent in the most effective way possible.

As we look through this year’s list of awardees—the ninth group of winners since the program was created in the stimulus package of 2009—five clear themes rise to the top. Here’s what you need to know about this year’s TIGER winners and the status of this valuable program.

#1 Reminder: this could be the last of the TIGER program

Though it’s one of the most fiscally responsible transportation programs administered by USDOT and incredibly small when compared to the overall transportation program, the administration’s budget request for next year completely eliminates TIGER. While the Senate has stepped in to save this program numerous times, they’ll only continue to act if the local leaders who depend on it continue to speak up.

Whatever the pros and cons of the winners, as outlined below, local officials across the country depend on this program to invest in ways that traditional state or federal programs either don’t allow or make too difficult. Once again, this round is full of projects that would have been unlikely to receive funding under the traditional program either due to the project type or project sponsor.

#2 The administration rewards the growing local support for complete streets and main street revitalization

If there’s a clear winner in this round of awardees, it’s for projects that are focused on revitalizing main streets, improving pedestrian safety and access to transportation options, and building a better street framework for creating and capturing value. Projects in Carson City, NV; Immokalee, FL (pictured in graphic above); Burlington, IA, Akron, OH; Frankfort, KY; and Mill City, OR, among a few others, all have a strong complete streets or bicycle and pedestrian component. The administration is to be commended for seeing the connection between investing in traditional, people-focused streets and downtowns as not only a viable economic development strategy, but a vital one.

But the administration can’t choose these projects if they’re not in the applicant pool. And the proliferation of these projects is a testament to the growing movement of local officials who understand that improving safety through low-cost interventions, building a sense of place, investing (or reinvesting) in downtown, and focusing on moving people rather than just vehicles brings a strong economic payoff to their communities. Because of that, they’re investing their own dollars heavily in these projects and the administration is making a wise investment by partnering with them.

#3 More funding for rural projects, but with a loose definition of “rural”

While USDOT says that over 60 percent of the awards go toward rural projects—a stated goal of the Trump administration—it’s probably more accurate to say that most of this funding goes to midsized cities. (They count places like Lincoln, NE—pop. 280,000—as rural.) There was also a clear bias in favor of awarding funds to projects in states that are in the middle of the pack in population, and the most populated states that produce an outsize share of the country’s GDP mostly received very low dollar awards—states like California, New York, Texas, and Illinois.

While funding more “rural” projects is a stated goal of the administration, it’s hard to square with the administration’s current plans to make towns and cities and states pick up more of the funding burden. Rural projects usually bring less local or state money to the table, by DOT’s own admission“Since 2009, the TIGER program has awarded nearly $1.4 billion in federal funding to 171 rural projects across the nation, leveraging an estimated $2.5 billion in non-TIGER funding,” lower than the 3.5 non-federal dollars per TIGER dollar for all projects through the first five rounds. In an ironic twist, these smaller places (and midsized cities, as noted) will be the ones most intensely feeling the squeeze if the administration gets their way on federal transportation funding.

#4 Awards for transit projects were few, keeping with the administration’s overall views on transit

The underlying law’s language (found in the 2017 appropriations bill) requires some level of parity between various modes of transportation:

“…the Secretary shall take such measures so as to ensure an equitable geographic distribution of funds, an appropriate balance in addressing the needs of urban and rural areas, and the investment in a variety of transportation modes”

Contrary to that language in the law, this batch of TIGER grants only includes a few smaller transit projects, leaving out both the quantity and size of larger transit investments we’ve seen in many past rounds. Though it’s not in step with the intention of the program as crafted by lawmakers, it’s certainly hand-in-glove with the administration’s stated belief that localities should fund transit investments all by themselves. The administration has already pledged to end the capital program for building new transit lines or stations, and these awardees largely reflect that view.

#5 The tradeoff for a project in almost every state is the lack of nationally significant projects

It’s nearly impossible to make an award in almost every state while also funding a handful of larger, transformative, nationally significant projects—projects like the CREATE program (rounds I and IV) to address huge national freight rail bottlenecks in Chicago or the Crenshaw/LAX Light Rail project. This has been a struggle for the TIGER program dating back well into the Obama administration, but this is the tradeoff that comes with trying to get an award for nearly everyone: more smaller awards, and less capacity to invest in big nationally significant projects that have benefits for people far outside of a single city, region or state.


TIGER should represent a way forward

The majority of all federal transportation dollars today are awarded to states and metro areas in a way to ensure everyone gets a share, regardless of how they’re going to spend those dollars or how well-conceived their projects are. TIGER operates differently, forcing projects to compete against each other on the merits. Rather than being slated for elimination, this should be a model for the future of transportation funding: formula dollars awarded for repair and maintenance, and then money for any new capacity (of any type) awarded competitively.

Will Congress acquiesce to the administration’s demands to eliminate TIGER? In spite of the administration’s stated opposition to this program, they just funded 41 important projects that would have been difficult to build under the regular program. As stated above, Congress will only continue defending this program as long as local leaders and advocates continue pressing for its survival. Get in touch with your representatives today and urge them to continue supporting this small but vital program.

Eight things to know about the president’s budget and infrastructure plan

After promising the release of an infrastructure plan since the early days of his administration over a year ago, President Trump finally released his long-awaited plan for infrastructure investment. Since he did it on the same day he released his budget request for the next fiscal year, it’s worth considering them together and asking: what do these proposals mean for infrastructure?

Here are eight things worth knowing about both the president’s infrastructure plan and his budget for 2019. Read T4America’s full statement on both proposals here.

1) “One cannot claim to be investing in infrastructure on the one hand while cutting it with the other.”

By only including a modest $200 billion in federal investment over ten years, the president’s so-called $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan isn’t a real plan—it’s a hopeful call for local communities, states, and the private sector to invest $1.3 trillion of their own money in infrastructure while the federal government largely sits on the sidelines. Look even deeper and you’ll discover that the $200 billion in federal investment isn’t actually new money overall—it’s mostly sourced from cuts to other programs, including key transportation programs. The president calls for large investments in infrastructure on the one hand while proposing to cut infrastructure programs in the budget with the other hand. Considered together, the infrastructure plan is like getting a bonus from the boss after their new budget just slashed your salary.

2) If the goal is to repair “crumbling” infrastructure, why not require it?

If our infrastructure is “crumbling,” why advance an infrastructure plan that doesn’t do anything to require that states or cities prioritize repair and maintenance with the new funding? Why give out new money that states can spend on costly new infrastructure with decades of built-in maintenance costs when we can’t afford to maintain what we’ve already built? A proposal meant to address America’s crumbling infrastructure almost never mentions maintenance or repair anywhere within it.

“One of the reasons there’s a break in trust between the taxpayer and the federal government is that there’s only so many times you can come before the taxpayer and say, ‘our nation’s roads and bridges are crumbling, please give us more money to fix it,’ and then not dedicate it to fixing it,” noted T4A senior policy advisor Beth Osborne on CBC News on Monday evening. We’ve made this point routinely over the years: Why do we keep spending hefty sums on new roads and new lanes while repair backlogs get ignored?

Little accountability, no performance measures: In addition, though this proposal claims to be outcomes-based, there is almost no mention of actual goals. It proposes to invest new money, but to accomplish what exactly? It includes no requirements to measure how these billions will lead to improved roads, bridges or transit systems, better connect people to jobs and opportunity, or move people and goods more efficiently. There are no requirements to measure performance or hold anyone accountable for accomplishing specific goals with the money.

3) Ends federal support for building or improving public transportation

Just like the president’s first budget proposal released a year ago, this one also calls for an immediate halt to federally supported transit projects by eliminating 100 percent of funding for transit projects in development that don’t already have signed funding agreements with the federal government. This pulls the rug out from under at least 41 cities—many of whom have already raised new transportation revenues from voters at the ballot box—that were fully expecting the federal government to share around 50 percent of the cost. While transit projects could still theoretically compete for funding from the plan’s “incentives” program, they would have to compete against transportation, water, waste, power, and broadband projects for a smaller pool of funding.

Seattle is one of many cities that have raised new transportation revenues for transit at the ballot box with the full expectation of a federal contribution to help complete their projects.

4) Roadway projects will be free of new requirements to create value that would be imposed on transit projects

Value capture is a creative way to finance transit projects by “capturing” some of the increased land value that transit provides and using those anticipated revenues on the front end to pay a share of the costs. It can help fund transit improvements, but it’s not a solution that works everywhere, in part because many states don’t allow it and/or most transit agencies have zero control over land use. This infrastructure proposal treats transit projects differently than all other modes by requiring the use of this financing mechanism. New roads? They won’t even need to create a dime of new value to win funding from new incentive or grant programs, much less capture any of that value to pay for their costs. Like Alabama’s $5.3 billion, 52-mile bypass, known as the Northern Beltline, to be constructed north of Birmingham. At $102 million per mile, the project will be one of the country’s most expensive roadway projects, yet it and projects like it would be exempt from these requirements to create any value to pay a share of the costs.

This top-down requirement would put a burden on new transit projects that is not placed on any other new transportation investment and would essentially halt the development of dozens of smart transit projects across the country. It would also jeopardize funding for capital improvements for more than 400 rural transit providers where value capture is rarely feasible.

5) Cities and states already raising new transportation funding will have to do even more

The federal government hasn’t raised the gas tax since 1993. Since just 2012, 31 states have raised new transportation revenues — mostly by raising or otherwise modifying their fuel taxes. Yet the largest program ($100 billion) in this proposal flips the script and puts the onus on these same local and state taxpayers by changing the federal match on new projects from 80 percent to 20 percent. Asking localities to simply kick in more money would do little to guarantee better projects or even less reliance on federal funding—it’ll just occupy more of the local funding that states or cities could invest elsewhere or spend on long-term maintenance, and could just incentivize huge tolling projects, others with some sort of repayment mechanism, or the sale of public assets.

It either devalues or ignores outright local dollars already raised: This proposal penalizes cities like Indianapolis, Seattle, Raleigh, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Atlanta and scores of others that have already done the hard work of securing new local funding for transportation. How? Though localities are required to come up with 80 percent of a project’s cost, the plan ignores any funds raised more than three years ago—even if it’s a tax producing new revenue today. And for new funds raised within the last three years, there’s a sliding scale for how much those dollars are worth. The specific percentages aren’t detailed in the plan, but for example, $1.00 raised at the ballot box two years ago might only be worth 0.50¢ toward the 80 percent local share required by this plan. Many of those cities (and the 31 states) would have to raise yet more new funding to qualify.

6) It eliminates TIGER, one of the few competitive programs that exist today

The proposal completely eliminates the fiercely competitive TIGER program. This $500 million grant program is one of the few ways that local communities of almost any size can directly receive federal dollars for their priority transportation projects and one of the most fiscally responsible transportation programs. TIGER projects brought 3.5 other dollars to the table for each federal dollar awarded through the first five rounds. And the competition for funds is in stark contrast to the majority of all federal transportation dollars that are awarded via formulas to ensure that all states or metro areas get a share, regardless of how they’re going to spend those dollars. Unlike the old system of congressional earmarks, the projects vying for funding compete against each other on their merits to ensure that each dollar is spent in the most effective way possible. There’s a reason that TIGER remains so popular with local communities even though around 95 percent of applicants lose in every round—it’s one of the only ways to fund the multimodal projects that are difficult to advance through conventional, narrowly-focused federal programs.

7) Money is set aside for rural areas, but governors will still control it

The plan sets aside $50 billion for rural areas, allocated directly to governors and awarded at their discretion to the projects that they choose. Each governor’s share will be determined via a formula that considers only lane miles and population while purporting to build transportation, water, waste, power, and broadband infrastructure. Is lane-miles an adequate metric for the full range of needs that our rural areas have? Block-granting money to states does not guarantee that local communities will get funding to invest in their highest priority infrastructure projects. Incentivizing cities and towns through competition is proven to be more effective in producing long-term results.

Without this money set aside, rural areas (and smaller cities) would have few chances to successfully win funding from the plan’s $100 billion incentives program. As Aarian Marshall wrote in Wired today, it “would favor applicants that can ‘secure and commit’ continuing funds for their project, including future money for operation, maintenance, and rehab. The ventures, in other words, that can pick up most of the tab. That’s a problem for cities that don’t have steady funding streams, or that find themselves in any of the 42 states that restrict locales’ rights to tax their citizens.” And these smaller areas will never be attractive places for the private investment that this plan assumes will materialize to make up that $1.3 trillion funding gap.

8) Makes long-term cuts to overall transportation funding

Buried in the document is a tiny yet significant detail about scaling down overall transportation spending by as much as $21 billion each year by the end of the decade due to the declining value of the gas tax. So in addition to making cuts to core transportation programs and providing no new revenue for transportation in the infrastructure proposal, the budget actually proposes to reduce transportation investment overall year by year, putting the screws to the cities, towns, and transit properties that depend upon formula funding to operate and maintain existing transportation programs or to make critical capital improvements.


Considered with the president’s FY19 budget request, this infrastructure plan will result in a net reduction in transportation spending and investment. It does not require that we first repair the myriad of assets already in a state of disrepair. It punishes communities that have already stepped up to address their own infrastructure challenges. It leaves rural areas without any guarantees and it hollows out the core funding for transportation that has carried the program for more than a generation. We strongly urge Congress to start over and craft a plan that provides real funding, fixes our current infrastructure inventory, funds smart, locally-driven and supported projects, and requires performance measures that enable taxpayers to understand what benefits they will receive for their investments.

Eight questions to ask about infrastructure during tonight’s State of the Union

President Trump has been telling us that infrastructure is a top priority since his campaign. Tonight, in his State of the Union address, all signs point toward the president providing a preview of his infrastructure plan followed shortly by a public release. If enacted, this plan could reshape our communities. As we listen tonight, how should we evaluate what we hear from the president on infrastructure?

Update: Few details were shared during the president’s State of the Union speech (here’s the full text on infrastructure.) But until we hear answers, these eight key questions are just as relevant and remain in the front of our minds as we await a more detailed version of the president’s infrastructure plan. -Ed.

As we watch the president’s speech tonight, here are eight key questions, derived in part from our own set of four simple guiding principles for infrastructure investment, to help analyze what we hear tonight when it comes to transportation funding and policy.

1) Does this plan actually propose real funding? Or will they gut transit and Amtrak to pay for it? 11 minutes after promising the U.S. Conference of Mayors last week that the president’s plan would not cut existing funding to pay the tab for their proposal, White House advisor DJ Gribbin reversed himself and said the administration is in fact planning to eliminate funding for Amtrak, new transit construction, and passenger rail to pay for part of it. To be clear, neither cutting funding that cities and states rely on nor simply shifting existing money around within federal transportation programs represent real new funding.

2) Other than slashing its funding, did you hear anything else about transit? In a dramatic shift, young people, empty nesters, and major corporations are voting with their feet and choosing to live and work in locations with access to transit. Is this administration serious about supporting the cities of all sizes that are investing their own dollars in transit to move people and connect them to opportunity? Amazon’s clear preference for a robust transit network in any potential host city for their second headquarters was a wake-up call for cities small and large, and like these state lawmakers in Indiana once opposed to transit, others have awoken to the reality that it’s a vital part of any metro area with a strong economy that’s competitive for talent. Whatever the president proposes for transit tonight, remember that this administration’s 2018 budget already proposed eliminating all funding to build or expand transit.

3) Will this plan shift the cost burden to states and localities? The federal government hasn’t raised the gas tax since 1994, so states and localities have been taking the hard votes to make up at least some of that difference between mounting needs and a stagnating federal gas tax.  Whether the 31 states that have raised new transportation revenues since 2012 or the $2 billion in new local revenues for transportation raised in November 2016 alone at the ballot box, locals are already bearing the burden. Will this infrastructure plan meet them in the middle as a partner, or just further undermine local efforts to reinvest? And while some cities can go to the ballot or easily raise new revenues, many cities and smaller areas may not have the capacity to raise their own new transportation revenues to fill the gap.

 

4) Did you hear any recognition of the difference between financing and funding? We don’t lack financing for infrastructure projects, we lack the cold hard cash required to pay for them. Our highways and transit systems were built with real money, not financing gimmicks. Public-private partnerships and other financing tools can help, but they don’t replace real funding.  The White House has consistently talked about unleashing private financing in infrastructure, but private financiers don’t invest in infrastructure as a charity, they expect to make money. If they’re financing a project with money up front, it’s because they expect to make more of it in the long-term through repayments of some kind, such as regular bond payments or a dedicated funding stream like toll revenues. We don’t lack for financing opportunities, we lack the money to pay that financing back. Incentivizing more private financing won’t fix that.

5) Where do rural areas, towns, and cities fit into this plan? The status quo prioritizes state DOTs over local governments. While larger metro areas receive some funds directly, cities themselves have no direct control of those federal transportation dollars. And though metropolitan areas drive our economy, will this plan recognize that fact by giving them greater access to federal transportation dollars? There are rumors that the plan could require 25 percent of the proposed funding be set aside for rural areas, which includes a lot of smaller cities. But even with such a requirement, that money would be directly controlled by the governor or their state DOT—not local communities. Will money for rural communities be spent on them, or by them? There’s a big difference between money being spent in their area according to someone else’s priorities, and controlling that money themselves.

6) Did you hear any focus on boring ol’ repair and maintenance? Any proposal that doesn’t prioritize repairing our existing infrastructure is not a proposal worth taking seriously. It makes little sense to build costly new infrastructure (which is equally expensive to maintain) without any accountability for maintaining what we’ve got. If the rhetoric is accurate and our infrastructure truly is “crumbling,” then simply building something new and shiny doesn’t solve the underlying problem. If your house has a leaky roof, are you going to take out a loan for an expensive new addition, or are you going to fix your roof first? 

7) Will the plan prioritize building the smartest new projects, or just more of the same? If this plan produces any new money to invest in infrastructure, it should be awarded by the merits on a competitive basis to only the best projects. We know both that competition helps the best projects rise to the top, and that spending new money through outdated formulas will just lead to the same old projects. Will the president model his plan on successful competitive programs like TIGER, or will he just pour more money into the status quo and go ahead with his budgetary plan to eliminate TIGER?

8) Did you hear a call for accountability and measuring what we get for our billions in spending? Or just the same tired infrastructure rhetoric. Why spend more money on infrastructure if we don’t know that we’re going to be better off afterward? Why spend more if we don’t know that we’re going to create lasting prosperity or build a resilient framework for creating and capturing value? Spending more money on infrastructure without measuring success and considering the value of our investments is not only short-sighted, but wasteful and irresponsible. We need a transparent system of measuring performance and holding states and metro areas accountable for hitting those targets.


Our four principles place a new emphasis on measuring progress and success, rather than just focusing on how much it all costs. We want real funding for infrastructure, not just ways to borrow money or sell off public assets as a means to pay for projects. We want a real commitment to prioritize fixing our aging infrastructure before building expensive new liabilities. We want new projects to be selected competitively with more local control, spurred by innovation and creativity. And yes, we want to ensure greater accountability so taxpayers understand the benefits they are actually receiving for their billions of dollars.

So as you listen tonight (and when a specific plan is released), keep these eight simple questions in mind and ask yourself: did you hear the answers to these questions?

One thing is certain: this has definitely been the longest “infrastructure week” of all time. And it’s apparently not over yet.

Reflecting on all we learned during the first year of our Smart Cities Collaborative

After wrapping up the first year of our inaugural Smart Cities Collaborative at the end of 2017, we look back on all the progress cities made and reflect upon how they’re all collectively shaping the future of transportation by working together.

The day after the presidential election in November 2016, a roomful of strangers who collectively guide transportation decisions in cities small and large gathered in Minneapolis to begin unpacking one fundamental question together: “How can we proactively shape our cities through transportation and technology?”

We started that meeting in Minneapolis with a simple goal: help participants build relationships with others from their peer cities, establish the core problem or problems that they’re trying to solve and then start developing an action plan for a specific pilot project. For two days, we heard lively discussions as the participants described their inspiring views on what kind of cities they want be in the future, exactly what they want to accomplish during this yearlong Collaborative, and how technology can help them achieve their goals.

With the answers to those big picture questions firmly in mind and a spirit of collaboration already bearing fruit, we gathered in Washington, DC in early 2017 and spent two days going deep with notable experts on key issues like using technology to improve equity, accessibility and access to economic opportunity; performance measurement; data-sharing between cities and transportation network companies (TNCs like Uber and Lyft); modular contracting and flexible procurement, to name a few.

Gabe Klein with CityFi and formerly director of Chicago and DC’s transportation departments, walked a group through his experience with procurement.

During the summer meeting in Miami, we turned the focus back on the cities and devoted a full day to each city sharing presentations on their particular pilot project, the specific outcomes they’re driving towards, and the challenges they’re facing as they design and implement their projects. These challenges included the ongoing struggle to develop productive partnerships with the private sector. In an effort to bridge this gap and serve both sides’ needs, we organized an “industry day” with representatives from leading mobility and data companies like Sidewalk Labs, Uber, Urban Insights, Ford, Via and more to discuss how they could work together to achieve shared outcomes and collaboratively shape the future of transportation.

For our final meeting in Los Angeles a year after gathering in Minneapolis, we kicked things off with a discussion of the core principles of a smart city. What makes as city “smart?” How does one define it? We started with the basic premise that “smart” cities are those that guide themselves by a set of core values that inform the foundation of their work and how they approach challenges and opportunities as they come along. We’re putting the final touches on a final set of these values to be shared publicly, so stay tuned here on the blog.

In many cases, cities are also going to need help from their states to make some of their experiments or pilot projects possible, so in preparation for legislative sessions ramping up in the beginning of 2018, we also discussed a specific set of policy proposals that could or should be developed at the state level to enable these cities to harness new and emerging technologies in service of their residents.

Reflecting on the first year

We capped off the last day in L.A. with a small panel discussion where members spent some time reflecting back on all they’d learned since that November day in Minneapolis. And the biggest takeaway across the board, from nearly every participant, was realizing the collective power they have to shape the future — if they work together.

“The biggest a-ha moment was discovering that cities want to collaborate,” said Karla Taylor with the City of Austin. “The USDOT Smart City Challenge felt like warfare and zero sum. But here, we’ve been able to share our knowledge and it has really opened up a whole new realm for our cities.”

“We are all facing the same challenges and we are all in the same boat,” said Adiam Emery, an engineer with the City of Seattle. “The fact that we’re all trying the same thing and leveraging the others expertise is really a good thing.”

When cities cooperate and collaborate with one another, they’re able to learn and fail and iterate faster than they could ever do on their own.

“This is going to change everything about how we live and work. And no one quite knows what that impact will be,” said San Jose’s Shireen Santosham during the D.C. meeting. “It’s a pretty big revolution and having this brain trust of cities get together with experts really adds a tremendous amount of value as we embark on this. And frankly, we’re all going to be stronger together and benefit from the thinking if we work together — rather than all trying the same things and not sharing.”

Hear more from our initial cohort in this short wrap-up video.

“They want so much more from our streets”

Over the last year, we’ve been struck by watching how these local leaders have begun to crystalize a vision of the kind of city they want to be, determine how best technology can get them there and begin to implement their vision. And we’ve seen projects unfold in some of the cities, like the projects in Centennial and Lone Tree, Colorado that we’ve profiled here, and LA’s microtransit pilot that’s coming soon, for example.

As technology changes rapidly and affects how so many people get around in our cities, it’s truly a decisive moment.

As Seleta Reynolds, the LADOT director, told all of us at the close of the LA meeting, “we have to get people excited and inspired about a new vision. They want so much more from our streets than just moving cars back and forth. This moment allows us to be creative and reach other people who don’t normally care about transportation.”

The inaugural Collaborative helped make a tangible difference in the future of these 16 cities, and we’re eager to help others do the same in 2018.

The inaugural Smart Cities Collaborative was funded by Sidewalk Labs. 

Applications are open for the second year of our Smart Cities Collaborative

Last year, Transportation for America launched the Smart Cities Collaborative to build a forum for collaboration and provide direct technical assistance to cities advancing smart mobility policies and projects. Today we’re announcing the launch of a second year of the Collaborative and calling interested cities to apply.

The Collaborative was launched in an effort to capture the momentum created by the US Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge and help cities test concepts, understand market potential, assess regulatory and political hurdles, address environmental and equity issues and refine their approach to implementing smart mobility concepts.

This past year was a tremendous success and the Collaborative evolved into a close-knit network of 32 agencies from 16 cities that enabled participants to learn from their peers, develop policies, help launch pilot projects and form partnerships across cities and agencies.

To build on the lessons we’ve learned and expand to include other leading-edge cities, we’re excited to launch the second year of the Smart Cities Collaborative and open the application process today.

Learn more & apply

 

Over the past year, the Collaborative focused on the core topics of automated vehicles, shared mobility and data analytics. During this work an overall theme emerged: how emerging technologies and new mobility are Reshaping the Right-of-Way. This will be the theme and focus of the Collaborative for the coming year.

Our content and curriculum will be separated into four sub-topics; design, measure, manage and price. We’ll cover how the right-of-way and curb space are evolving; measuring and analyzing project, modal and system performance; managing public and private mobility providers in tandem; and pricing road and curb space in service of long-term outcomes. Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish more in-depth posts on each of these topics and how we’ll approach them over the coming year.

If you and your city are interested in participating in the second year of the Smart City Collaborative, please read and fill out the online application.

Learn more & apply

Beautiful animations help illuminate the power of creative placemaking

Creative placemaking in transportation is an emerging, powerful way to integrate artists to deliver transportation projects more smoothly, improve safety, and build community support. But the practice can also be difficult to describe with words alone, so we commissioned an artist to illustrate the concepts visually.

Earlier this year we released a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in the transportation planning process, in partnership with ArtPlace America. This Creative Placemaking Field Scan identifies seven of the most pressing challenges facing the transportation sector today, and identifies how arts and culture contribute to solutions.

Words are always good, but visuals are better. To make creative placemaking just a bit easier to understand — and put our money where our mouth is when it comes to the power of arts and culture — we tapped a talented visual artist to create a handful of illustrations. Check out these beautiful animations, and please feel free to share them with others. (You can find the first one to share on Facebook here.)

Seven challenges and seven solutions

The field scan explores seven of the most pressing challenges facing the transportation sector today, and identifies how arts and culture contribute to solutions.

1. Generating creative solutions for entrenched transportation problems.

Arts and culture can help develop better projects that attract greater community support by imagining bold transportation solutions that are unconstrained by traditional processes.

More on solution #1: Read the El Paso, TX case study from the field scan, published on the blog as a preview during Arts & Culture month. 

2. Making streets safer for all users.

Arts and culture can make streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists by using creative methods to help transportation professionals empathize with all users.

3. Organizing transportation advocates.

Arts and culture can help equip communities to organize and advocate for more equitably distributed transportation investments.

4. Engaging multiple stakeholders for an inclusive process.

Arts and culture can help shepherd transportation projects through the community input process more quickly and smoothly by facilitating meaningful participation early and often in the planning process.

More on solution #4: Read the Jade/Midway case study from the field scan, published on the blog as a preview during Arts & Culture month.

5. Fostering local ownership.

Arts and culture can help accomplish local goals including improving health, encouraging walking and biking, or increasing transit ridership by incorporating community-sourced artistic and design elements into transportation projects to foster local stewardship and use.

6. Alleviating the disruptive effects of construction.

Arts and culture can help overcome the disruption of construction and mitigate the impact on businesses, residents, and visitors by using artistic interventions to create a more accessible and inviting environment.

More on solution #6: Read the Irrigate case study from the field scan, published on the blog as a preview during Arts & Culture month.

7. Healing wounds and divisions.

Arts and culture can help remedy the divisions created by urban highways and other detrimental transportation infrastructure by physically and culturally reconnecting communities.


READ THE FIELD SCAN

 

All illustrations by Noah Macmillan. http://noahmacmillan.com/

Helping 16 cities navigate the tech-driven transportation revolution

In 2016, T4America launched the Smart Cities Collaborative, a learning and support network to help leaders from 16 cities proactively use technology to make their cities safer, more accessible, equitable and prosperous for all.

Seventy-seven cities applied to the US Department of Transportation’s Smart Cities Challenge, but 76 of them walked away empty-handed when Columbus, OH nabbed the winner-take-all $40 million prize. It became clear to us: cities across the country want help dealing with the explosion of new tech-driven transportation services like microtransit, ride-hailing and automated vehicles; and help harnessing all of them to create better places to live. Over the last year, our Smart Cities Collaborative has done just that.

Will you help us continue working with more cities in 2018? Donate to T4America

Listen to what five of the participants from our initial cohort of 16 cities had to say about their experience. Watch the short video.

“This is going to change everything about how we live and work. And no one quite knows what that impact will be. It’s a pretty big revolution and having this brain trust of cities get together with experts really adds a tremendous amount of value as we embark on this. And frankly, we’re all going to be stronger together and benefit from the thinking if we work together — rather than all trying the same things and not sharing.”

– Shireen Santosham, City of San Jose

These new technologies could make it easier to get around, make jobs more accessible, and ensure that low-income residents benefit from increasingly prosperous cities. But cities have to be intentional and proactive to make sure the technologies work for the people and not the other way around.

Our Smart Cities Collaborative made a tangible difference — help us do more in 2018 by donating today.

 

DONATE TO T4AMERICA

Helping Des Moines get more from its transportation money

Through the support of the Kresge Foundation, T4America is helping the Des Moines Area MPO better measure and assess their transportation spending to bring the greatest return possible for citizens.

When it comes to decisions about what transportation projects to build and where, the general public’s perception is that those decisions are made in a murky, mysterious, political process that has little to do with tangible, measurable benefits. Performance measurement is a way to start to change this perception and make spending more focused on and accountable to accomplishing tangible goals.

As the survey we released earlier this year shows, the vast majority of MPOs want to find ways to do more with performance measurement, but they’re eager for some help — which the Kresge Foundation has enabled T4America to provide for six regions across the country. And in our first day-long workshop with staff from the Des Moines Area MPO in Iowa, stakeholders from member communities, and elected officials — including Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie — our team keyed in on helping everyone agree on what’s working and what’s not working as the MPO decides how to select and fund transportation projects in the future. 

What did we learn? These stakeholders in Des Moines want to put more of an emphasis on maintaining the transportation system that’s already moving people within and through the region. The group is also interested in finding ways to emphasize improving equity and access for people of different means and needs as they make decisions about what to build and where.

Ultimately, Des Moines would like to put more tools in their toolbox to build and maintain a transportation system that’s transparent, accessible, and cost-effective. T4America is excited to continue working with Des Moines and we look forward to reporting on their progress throughout the year. 

Are you interested in similar technical assistance on performance measures? Inquire here.

Wrapping up an amazing year with the 16 cities in our Smart Cities Collaborative

A few weeks ago, leaders from 16 cities met in Los Angeles for the last of four meetings in our inaugural yearlong Smart Cities Collaborative.

Automated vehicles are testing without drivers as we speak on the streets in several cities. Five separate bikesharing companies that don’t require docks launched in Seattle and Washington, DC (and several other cities) this summer. New toll roads have started dynamically pricing their rates to ensure free flowing traffic. Transit ridership is down slightly in many major metro areas as they’re struggling to adapt their services to a world where anyone can hail a ride with their smartphone. But all of those cars are also adding up — clogging curb spaces and making traffic even worse, according to recent research from UC Davis.

We’re in the midst of the most dramatic shift in urban transportation since the advent of the interstate system. And for more than a year now, transportation leaders from 16 cities — ranging in size from small suburban communities all the way up to Los Angeles — have been gathering together to find ways to collaboratively tackle these challenges and harness all of these changing technologies to enable better, safer, more equitable cities.

At it’s core, that’s what the “Smart Cities” moniker is really about.

But that term is tricky. It’s a clever marketing term that means little, or worse, means something different to everyone. In this meeting (and our last meeting in Miami), we started discussing what makes a city “smart.” Inspired in part by how smart growth was codified and defined by the movement, but also more recently by cities like Seattle who released their groundbreaking New Mobility Playbook earlier this year.

Like Seattle, we started with the premise that “smart” cities are those that guide themselves by a set of core values. These values inform the foundation of their work and how they approach challenges and opportunities as they come along. People-Oriented. Entrepreneurial. Connected. Equitable. Those were some of the values we started with and through these long conversations we developed a much better sense of what each of these values meant to our participants, which values are the most important, and some of the actions cities can take to illustrate their commitment to them.

One of the other realities facing cities is that they don’t always control all of the policy levers required to take those actions and shape this technological transportation revolution.

With many state legislative sessions ramping up in the beginning of 2018, we talked about the specific policies that could or should be developed at the state level so these cities can harness new and emerging technologies in service of their residents. What authorities do cities need to test out new pricing or tolling projects on roads controlled by their states? How can procurement processes be changed to be more flexible and adaptive? How do motor vehicle codes need to be updated or adapted to test and deploy automated vehicles?

Much of that conversation centered on how cities can drive the discussion and lead at the state level on those policies that will have the largest impact on our cities. Keynote speaker Seleta Reynolds, the head of the LA Department of Transportation, reminded the participants that, no matter what policy levers are controlled by the state, cities still have an enormous amount of leverage — if they’re willing to work together and think outside of the box.

“We’re cities — we move markets,” Reynolds said. “If we’re all together and we’re pushing together, we can get the change we seek. But we can’t get it in the ways we’ve normally been accustomed to doing business. …It’s not enough for us to say it or to state our principles. We have to find ways to nudge the markets in the ways we have at our disposal.”

After the last day of the convening, we gathered up the whole crew and headed over the LA Arts District where the LACoMotion event was taking place later that week.

Transdev invited our participants to take a ride in their new autonomous EasyMile EZ10 shuttle. While the route was fairly simple — traveling back and forth in a straight line — it was a stirring reminder of how quickly these new technologies will be on our roads and how much there is to do to prepare.

Throughout the course of this year, it has been powerful to see the collaborative spirit that started on a cold morning in Minneapolis on the day after last November’s election continue to grow. These cities have realized that, unlike USDOT’s Smart City Challenge where they were all hiding their applications from one another in the quest for the winner-take-all prize of $50 million, working together with other cities is actually the most powerful recipe for success.

We’ll have more to share about that as we conclude the year with a few reflections before the end of 2017, so stay tuned.

The rapidly disappearing infrastructure promises of 2017

The House-approved tax reform legislation is the most recent evidence that neither the administration nor Congress seems to be very serious about supporting and encouraging infrastructure investment.

On the campaign trail, in his inaugural address and in numerous press conferences and events throughout 2017, President Trump and members of his administration have been promising a much-needed investment in infrastructure. “Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and railways gleaming across our very, very beautiful land,” the President recently said in a statement. After nearly a year of waiting for an infrastructure plan that was always just right around the corner, as we were frequently told, the Trump administration has only managed to release a few broad principles. Numerous congressional leaders have joined the chorus, yet nothing has been accomplished.

In the total absence of a specific infrastructure plan from the administration, we can only look for clues. The most obvious is the President’s budget proposal for 2018 — the priorities of which stand in stark contrast to his stated commitment to rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, luring more private sector involvement into infrastructure planning and spending, or the early promises to make a $1 trillion investment in infrastructure.

Under the president’s budget for next year:

Overall infrastructure spending would go down. The President’s budget proposal for next year recommends funding the highway and transit formula programs at levels prescribed by the 2015 FAST Act, but capping the Highway Trust Fund in 2019 and 2020 at FY2018 levels, effectively cutting about $2.4 billion in transportation funding already authorized by Congress.

Funding for new transit construction would be slashed…and eventually eliminated. The President’s budget reduces and eventually eliminates another $2.4 billion in annual funding that helps states and cities of all sizes build or expand public transportation systems. Some of these projects already have signed funding agreements from the federal government, matched by local and state dollars committed by voters at ballot boxes.

The only funding that communities can currently tap directly would disappear. The budget also eliminates the $500 million competitive TIGER (Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery) program — the only multimodal transportation investment program directly available to local governments. At a time when we should be awarding more dollars to the best possible projects, this budget dumps one of the only programs intended to do so.

Promises have already been scaled back, and are shrinking as we speak. The President’s budget suggests that his infrastructure initiative will have $200 billion in direct federal spending over ten years, far less than the $1 trillion program previously promised by the administration. And after nearly a year, the administration has only offered vague principles for such a package.

The administration has suggested that the massive gap between their original $1 trillion figure and the $200 billion, ten-year plan be filled by increasing and encouraging more private investment in our infrastructure. Yet the House Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — the House’s tax reform proposal, which passed last week with the President’s thumbs up —eliminated private activity bonds, a specific financing mechanism that encourages greater private investment in infrastructure.

Private activity bonds are tax-exempt bonds that fund infrastructure projects with a “private” use of at least 10 percent, and they’ve been used on a wide range of infrastructure projects around the country, including roads, highways, housing, hospitals and airports. Most notably, these bonds have also been instrumental in several public-private partnerships (P3s), including the Purple Line light rail project in Maryland and the Rapid Bridge Replacement Project in Pennsylvania. Encouraging more P3s has been one of the core pillars of the administration’s approach to supporting infrastructure investment.

But to save just $39 billion over ten years, the House did away with these tax-exempt bonds, hindering the ability of state and local governments and private entities to obtain financing and build more complicated infrastructure projects like toll roads and transit and rail stations. This is after the administration’s 2018 budget proposal — harmful in so many other ways — proposed expanding the number of infrastructure projects that could tap private activity bonds as one of their few infrastructure investment proposals. The administration even stated that they “support the expansion of PAB eligibility.”

As we wait for a substantial infrastructure plan from the administration, which will almost certainly not be released until 2018, if at all, last week Transportation for America released its own set of guiding principles to help inform or evaluate any standalone infrastructure bill.

Our four principles place a new emphasis on measuring progress and success, rather than just focusing on how much it all costs. We want real funding for infrastructure, not just ways to borrow money or sell off public assets as a means to pay for projects. We want a real commitment to prioritize fixing our aging infrastructure before building expensive new liabilities. We want new projects to be selected competitively with more local control, spurred by innovation and creativity. And yes, we want to ensure greater accountability so taxpayers understand the benefits they are actually receiving for their billions of dollars.

As Congress works on a tax plan and a 2018 budget, let’s keep infrastructure funding in the forefront and stop advancing short-sighted plans that undermine or circumvent our ability to connect communities, create jobs and secure our economic future.

Download the full one page principles document here.