Steve Davis, Author at Transportation For America

About Steve Davis

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

If we want an infrastructure stimulus, there are valuable lessons to learn from 2009

While there are enormous needs for relief and support all across the economy, the president and many congressional leaders have indicated that they want infrastructure to be a major part of a future stimulus bill. If Congress does intend to use infrastructure spending to create jobs and support recovery, their own effort in 2009 has some clear lessons they should learn from.

As we tried to claw our way out of the Great Recession a decade ago, Congress gave states billions in new funding for transportation capital projects in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or better known as the stimulus. With a COVID-19 recession all but certain, America will need another stimulus. To help Congress and the public learn from our last attempt to create jobs and support economic recovery through infrastructure investments, our short new report provides six lessons and six recommendations from our deep experience evaluating the Recovery Act over 10 years ago.

Read the full report

Because the purpose of the Recovery Act was to create jobs, states were required to report how they spent that money, and how many jobs they created with it. Which means we have good data to use, based on state-reported documentation of how they spent ARRA money, and how many jobs their stimulus-funded projects created.

Did states take advantage of the flexibility given to them by Congress to invest in ways that would create the maximum number of jobs? Did Congress select programs for funding that were well-suited to the primary task of job-creation? The two biggest overall lessons gleaned from our review are:

The Recovery Act was meant to create jobs above all else, but that was not how we targeted or governed the infrastructure spending.
In an attempt to do things quickly, Congress defaulted to existing programs that were poorly tailored to the tasks at hand.

As our Repair Priorities report showed, even with the extra $26 billion for surface transportation kicked in all at once, the country’s roads still got worse, not better. That’s because our federal transportation program gives states billions each year without even the most basic requirement for them to repair what they have before building anything new. The 2009 stimulus was no different. Set free of any obligation to address their repair needs first with stimulus dollars, scores of states failed to prioritize repair with their ARRA funds, choosing new construction instead. Eleven states spent less than half of their money on repair, and nine of those states had worse roads in 2017 than in 2009.

This failure of stewardship was also a missed opportunity to have the greatest impact on creating jobs. A wide variety of other research consistently finds that on average, road repair produces 16 percent more jobs per dollar than new road construction. This makes sense considering the fact that new roadways and roadway expansions usually require right-of-way acquisition, which creates very few jobs (and no construction jobs), as well as more planning and environmental review, which also creates just a few jobs. Repair also takes care of an existing asset, saving money in the long run. Expansion creates a pricey new liability.

If Congress is interested in having the greatest impact, requiring repair with any stimulus dollars first is possibly the single best way to maximize the impact.

The second would be to invest heavily in transit, including repair. In this analysis we found that an ARRA dollar spent on public transportation produced 70 percent more job hours than an ARRA dollar spent on highways. Each mode showed clear differences in jobs produced per dollar: Transit preventive maintenance had by far the highest direct job-per-dollar result for transit, followed by rail car purchase and rehabilitation, infrastructure, and bus purchase and rehabilitation.

The CARES Act addressed enormous, immediate needs across the country by providing emergency support for transit operations. Without that kind of support, transit service might not survive to continue carrying essential workers to their jobs, and certainly won’t be around to help fuel an economic recovery.

As Congress and the nation debate the next phase of stimulus, we can and should benefit from the lessons we learned from the last stimulus. Some kinds of spending create more jobs, faster, than others. Limiting spending to capital only (and leaving out operations as ARRA mostly did) not only eliminates one of the most productive forms of spending, but it also creates future costs and slows the speed of economic recovery.

We should direct federal infrastructure dollars to the types of projects that create what we need. In the face of unprecedented unemployment, that means projects which create the most jobs the fastest, and those that connect people to as much economic opportunity as possible.

This will mean public transit—especially operations and repair—and road repair.

Lessons are of little use if we don’t learn from them. We hope Congress takes note of their own history here with any potential infrastructure recovery package.

Message from the director

For those of you who were involved in implementing Recovery Act programs, engaged in advocacy on the stimulus, or worked to analyze how those billions were spent in some way, we also want to hear what you learned. Hear about the report briefly from Beth Osborne, the director of our Transportation for America program, who also has some questions for those of you who experienced the stimulus firsthand—and then share what you learned.

Connecting people to jobs and services week: How bad metrics lead to even worse decisions

When the top priority of our transportation investments is moving cars as fast as possible, the end product is streets that are wildly unsafe—as chronicled in depth last week. This focus on vehicle speed and throughput is the result of outdated metrics that utterly fail to produce a transportation system that connects people to what they need every day.

A “successful” street, according to the metrics used by most state DOTs and metro areas. But “moving cars fast” as a goal fails to measure whether or not anyone can get where they are going. We need a better standard for success.

For “connecting to jobs and services” week, which focuses on our last of three principles for transportation investment, we’re re-surfacing portions of a post we wrote in 2016 about how one bad metric for evaluating potential transportation investments leads to expensive road projects that fail to get people where they are going every day.

All this week, we’re going to be unpacking our third principle for transportation investment, which is admittedly the most difficult to explain, especially compared to the first two: (1) prioritizing maintenance, and (2) prioritizing safety over speed. Before we can explain “connecting people to jobs and services,” we need to explain how the current federal transportation system is oriented around all the wrong things.

As we chronicled two weeks ago, if there are any existing priorities for the $40+ billion in annual federal transportation investment, it’s that cars should move fast, at all times, on all types of roads, no matter how many people die as a result. But we do almost nothing to measure whether or not any of this federal spending actually helps people get where they need to go each day. One reason why is this wonky metric—created by the federal government—that nearly every state and local transportation agency uses to evaluate the success or failure of their transportation network.

Bad measures for success lead agencies to make bad decisions

As they plan projects and decide which transportation projects to fund, state and local transportation agencies exhaustively measure something called “vehicle level-of-service” for almost every single investment. Here’s a story to illustrate:

Wanting to rejuvenate their local economy, a local community cooks up plans to redesign the local street running through downtown that was perhaps even short-sightedly widened or converted to one-way travel in the 1960s or 70s. They want to make it safer and create a better environment for doing business—to make it a place to travel to, not through.

But because the street is also a state highway, they soon hear from the state department of transportation (DOT) that their proposed changes will slow down traffic and fail to meet “level-of-service” requirements. As a result, the project will fail to make the cut of the state’s short list of projects. Worse yet, the community is told that in order to make this street safer and “solve” congestion, they actually need to widen it and smooth out any curves, making it a virtual speedway, undercutting their plans to build a place with more enjoyable places to walk and visit—a framework for creating economic prosperity.

This terrific cartoon from Andy Singer shows how this rationale leads us to obliterate all the good things about our streets and places in pursuit of improving level of service:

andy singer cartoon rototil congestion city level of service street road design

What is level of service, and how do DOTs come to this conclusion?

Level of service is a system by which road engineers measure how well a road is performing based on the number of cars and the delay that vehicles experience on that roadway. Letters designate each level, from A to F. Just as with our time in school, A is great, and F is terrible.

A, B and C represent free-flowing conditions and F is stop-and-go traffic for vehicles. The score is assessed based on the highest level of congestion on that roadway, even if it only occurs for a few minutes a day. (To be clear, a street that is nearly empty 23.5 hours of the day can get an F if it gets congested during rush hour.) Traditionally, roadway conditions are acceptable if they score a C or higher on non-urban streets and a D or higher on urban streets.

This graphic, created by Jeff Tumlin, the new head of the SFMTA in San Francisco, illustrates how roads can be massively over-engineered to avoid level-of-service “F” with expensive capacity that largely goes wasted during the bulk of the day. Graphic via Strong Towns.

The level-of-service measurement is calculated by first measuring the amount of traffic during the busiest 15 minutes of an evening rush hour. Next, traffic engineers project the amount of traffic on the road in 20 or 30 years to determine if the road has enough capacity to cover the lifespan of the asset. If a road is projected by traffic engineers to lack capacity 20 years in the future—an incredibly fuzzy practice that’s far more art (or more accurately magic) than math—that road still receives a failing LOS grade today, even if the road is adequately suiting capacity needs.

Though there are no formal or federal requirements to do so, most DOTs, metropolitan planning organizations and traffic engineers rely on the level of service (LOS) transportation metric as they plan and design projects, and evaluate which ones will receive funding. I.e., projects that “improve” it get the fast track for funding, and projects that might make it “worse” are shelved or modified.

According to Jason Henderson, professor of geography at San Francisco State University, “Every city I’ve ever come across has some use of [LOS].” Because of the ubiquity of LOS, this largely misunderstood measurement has profound influence on the design of our communities.

This heavy reliance on level of service has dramatically shaped our cities, and it’s why states and metro areas and cities have spent billions to “solve” congestion in a way that has produced dangerous streets, dilapidated downtowns, economic disaster, and long-term maintenance costs that no locality can cover on their own.

Toledo and many other Rust Belt cities have little to no congestion and many of their in-town streets enjoy level of service “A.” Is that a good measure for success?

As Gary Toth from the Project for Public Spaces brilliantly put it in this piece, transportation professionals, “in search of high LOS rankings, have widened streets, added lanes, removed on-street parking, limited crosswalks, and deployed other inappropriate strategies” all because level of service has been the de facto standard over the last 50 years.

Every great street that you can think of in most places you want to visit on vacation probably “fails” level of service.

Congestion and level of service is “bad” because the street is home to numerous places people want or need to visit, the sidewalks are too wide and filled with pedestrians window shopping, there might be bike lanes to allow people to arrive without a car, and it’s almost certainly chock full, not necessarily of vehicles, but of people.

Poor level of service in Annapolis, MD. Tear down those buildings and you could add a couple of lanes in each direction and fix it!

Where did this measure come from?

The 1965 federal Transportation Research Board Highway Capacity Manual introduced this metric and it quickly became accepted as the standard measure of roadway performance. One reason that states adopted level of service so quickly was that it suited our country’s transportation goals in the 1960s of building out a network of interstates and prioritizing automobiles to travel quickly.

But as we explained at length last week, building highways and interstates with speed as the top priority is wildly different from building local and regional streets that create a framework for capturing value and providing for the safe movement of people, whether in a car or not.

Although LOS quickly became the standard, transportation agencies at any level are actually not explicitly required to use it: there are no planning or project design requirements that mandate the use of either LOS or travel modeling. FHWA [in 2016] issued a memo clarifying that level-of-service was never a federal requirement.¹ But states persist, partially because the feds have never proposed a better measure of success or a more holistic overarching goal for what our billions are supposed to accomplish.

California was the first to make a notable shift, but more is needed

California set out to change the way they designed their streets and communities by changing the way they measure their performance. In 2013, California legislature passed a law directing the Office of Planning and Research (OPR) to instead measure vehicle-miles traveled (VMT), making it possible for projects aiming to reduce driving to fare well in the evaluation process. In 2013, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 743, eliminating the use of level of service for projects within designated transit priority areas (i.e, areas with decent transit service.)

As Streetsblog LA reported in 2013, because most urban areas fall within the state-defined parameters of a transit priority area, this means that level of service is largely eliminated as a consideration for urban projects. Additionally, SB 743 authorized Governor Brown to develop a new way of measuring traffic impacts of major projects statewide and based the new way on total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) rather than intersection congestion.

Depending on how California implements this, it would change how development and transportation projects are analyzed and scored in traffic impact studies and thus send the state’s billions in transportation dollars toward projects that will help meet the state’s overall goals—rather than projects that will simply keep the cars moving quickly at all costs.

In short, instead of measuring the success of a proposed project by only the limited measure of whether or not traffic might slow for a few minutes per day at rush hour, CalTrans will now measure whether or not a project contributes to other state goals, like reducing greenhouse gas emissions, developing affordable multimodal transportation options for residents, preserving open spaces, or promoting diverse land uses and infill development. It is expected that this change will make it easier to build transit projects, as well as bicycle and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure—instead of encouraging more development that works against California’s own environmental and other goals.

$40+ billion is spent each year with no clear measures for success other than “move cars fast”

We need better priorities for federal transportation investment than just “move cars fast, all the time.” A fundamental principle has to be that the people who use our transportation system should be able to get where they are going. That’s where we are going with our third principle, which we’ll be unpacking in another post: “Connect people to jobs and services.” This metric would be a far better measure of success than anything on the books today, and some places are already starting to implement it.

Safety over speed week: Slip lanes would never exist if we prioritized safety over speed

A specific design feature on our roadways is the quintessential embodiment of what happens when speed is the #1 priority and safety becomes secondary. Slip lanes, those short turning lanes at intersections that allow vehicles to turn right without slowing down, are incredibly dangerous for people walking. Yet states & cities keep building them. Why?

Slip lanes by Taras Grescoe on Twitter

It’s “safety over speed” week here at T4America, where we are spending the week unpacking our second of three principles for transportation investment. Read more about those principles and if you’re new to T4America, you can sign up for email here.

Any traffic engineer or transportation official would surely tell you that safety, if not the most important consideration, is truly a core priority. But embedded deeply in our federal transportation program is another guiding principle that stands in direct opposition to safety: “Cars need to always move fast and never slow down.” Whatever the stated priorities are, this hidden prerequisite makes every other goal a nearly impossible task—especially safety.

Slip lanes on roads and streets are emblematic of what it looks like in practice to sacrifice safety on the altar of speed, where this underlying goal of “keep cars moving fast at all times” runs counter to the goal of “keep everyone safe while moving from A to B”—even if you say that safety is important. If we truly prioritize safety, as T4America is suggesting in our second principle, we would never build a slip lane on a local street again. ²

What are slip lanes and why do they exist?

It’s important to remember that slip lanes were created to solve one specific set of problems: vehicle speed and delay.

They were borne of the simple realization by traffic engineers that cars turning right—even on a green light—can produce dreaded congestion because slowing down to a safe turning speed can delay traffic traveling straight. So to solve this one problem, they started adding lanes that allow traffic to make right turns without being required to slow or come to a stop, often accompanied with an additional lane on the approach or the exit. Whether you live in a rural, urban or suburban area, this feature isn’t hard to find: they’re a regular feature in most environments that were designed and built with federal money and guidance over the last 50 years.

Safety was always at best a secondary consideration, though it really wasn’t considered much at all for decades as traffic engineers started adding slip lanes to road projects all over the country.

Slip lanes are dangerous because they prioritize vehicle speed over the safety of everyone who needs to use the road

Slip lanes increase the distance that people have to cover to cross a street, put people into spots that are often the hardest for drivers to see, and encourage drivers not to slow down when approaching an intersection and a crosswalk—the precise moment they should be the most careful. This slip lane I saw in N. Fulton County, Georgia earlier this summer is a pretty typical design.

Traveling east on N. Hembree Road (with a speed limit of 40 mph!), if a driver is planning to turn right here and sees the green light ahead, all the design cues are directing the driver to blaze through the right turn onto Alpharetta Highway without slowing down. That driver could be hitting maximum speed right as they reach the crosswalk across the slip lane—exactly the spot where engineers have said that a pedestrian should “safely” cross this street.

I saw a woman crossing here and I was astonished to see that in the time that it took her to take just three steps from the middle of the street towards safety, a minivan goes from entirely out of the frame to just 10 feet away from her.

Because slip lanes were borne of the sole focus on avoiding vehicle delay, all efforts to make them “safer” will be limited. Safety is not why they exist. Even the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) knows they are inherently unsafe—it’s astonishing to read their guidance for making them, in their words, “less problematic”:

Intersections should be designed to accommodate safe pedestrian crossings using tight curb radii, shorter crossing distances, and other tools as described in this document. While right-turn slip lanes are generally a negative facility from the pedestrian perspective due to the emphasis on easy and fast vehicle travel, they can be designed to be less problematic.

How are slip lanes emblematic of safety losing out to the ultimate priority of speed?

Here’s an intersection in Minneapolis with slip lanes on all four sides. These don’t exist primarily to make anyone safe—safety is an add-on consideration to the primary desire to keep cars moving as fast as possible through this intersection. Those crosswalks and pedestrian “islands” that you see aren’t designed to get anyone across this street in the safest way possible, they are a half-hearted attempt to make the best of a road designed explicitly to keep cars moving quickly above all else.

Making the experience for people walking on a “negative facility…to be less problematic,” is a pretty interesting choice of words to describe a deadly design feature at a time when pedestrian fatalities are hitting numbers not seen since 1990. But we keep building them because moving vehicles quickly and without delay is the outcome we care about above all others.

What prioritizing safety over speed would look like

As we say in our second principle, local and arterial roads must be designed to put safety first. Protecting the safety of all people who use the street must be a priority reflected in the decisions we make about how to fund, design, operate, maintain, and measure the success of our roads. The next surface transportation law must make safety a priority and start to undo the damage wrought by decades of federal design guidelines and billions in federal transportation dollars.

So what would this look like in practice? This small change in Arlington, Virginia is a great example.

This is a minor collector road that runs largely through a residential neighborhood—not too far from the future home of Amazon’s second HQ. This slip lane made it possible for drivers to whiz into the neighborhood street without so much as a tap on the brakes. Look down the street and what do you see right after cars have sped through the gentle right turn? A crosswalk. That’s what it looked like back in 2009, but here’s what it looks like today:

The lanes were narrowed, the slip lane was eliminated, the right turn was converted into a sharper turn that requires drivers to slow down before turning, and the crosswalk was moved to the safest and shortest point of the intersection where pedestrians will be the most visible. ³

It’s very possible that because cars now have to slow down to turn right, that traffic occasionally slows down on the main road. There could even be a slight back up if a few people are turning right and have to yield to someone crossing the street. But this change is exactly what it looks like in practice to prioritize safety over vehicle speed or delay.

While this small change is certainly one worth celebrating, this isn’t the standard practice of state DOTs that control the lion’s share of federal transportation funds, and speed remains their number one priority—even if they have a stated commitment to safety. This project was the result of a local county making decisions on their own and with their own funds. Most states will not change their practices unless Congress gives a guiding directive that the lives of the 40,000 people who die as a result of traffic fatalities each year are more important than a few seconds of delay.

Access to safe, convenient transportation is a fundamental right. Today, most Americans are denied this right because their roads—not just their highways—are designed to move vehicles at the highest speeds possible, and roads are not designed for people walking, biking, or taking transit as a priority. Safety may be important, but it’s never the top priority when designing these streets.

Until we come to grips with the fact that moving cars fast at all times of day without delay is a goal that can’t always be squared with our other priorities—especially safety—and until we can admit that perhaps everyone is not going to be able to go fast all the time, we’ll continue building unnecessarily large and expensive roads where thousands of people are killed each year.

No more slip lanes. Because safety should be a primary goal of our transportation investments.

Three things we learned from talking about maintenance this week

Last week was “maintenance week” at T4America, a week spent focusing on our first new principle for transportation investment to prioritize repair and commit to reducing the repair backlog by half. After a Twitter chat on Wednesday, on Thursday we joined a briefing on Capitol Hill for congressional staffers focused on the issue.

The new Future of Transportation Caucus chaired by Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Jesús “Chuy” García, and Mark Takano held a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday to hear firsthand from three state transportation officials about the importance of shifting the federal transportation program to focus on maintenance first. Here are three quick things we learned.

It’s hard to get people to focus on maintenance—much less get excited about it

Although there was a strong turnout of staffers, there were far fewer than our recent briefing on climate and transportation, reminding us yet again that maintenance is never sexy and it’s hard to get people excited about it—much less make it a fundamental organizing principle of the federal transportation program.

Even if you do get people together to talk about maintenance, it’s a struggle to keep the spotlight on the issue. Even in this setting, ostensibly focused 100 percent on discussing the importance and mechanics of prioritizing maintenance, when the floor was opened up to questions, many immediately turned to funding. “Do you think that a vehicle miles traveled tax would be easier to implement than raising the gas tax?” one staffer asked.

Unfortunately, this was not the last question about money. T4America director Beth Osborne tried to remind everyone that this is precisely backwards from how we should be doing business with the federal transportation program.

“Federal transportation policy is unlike anything else because we start things off by talking about money, not what we’ll do with it. States don’t do this. No one wants to talk about outcomes. It’s time to tell voters what we’ll do with their money before we talk about needing more of it,” she said.

Absent useful data, politics will always determine spending, and politicians want to cut ribbons more than anything else

Ed Sniffen with the Hawaii DOT shared a story about how they transformed the agency to focus on maintenance and started a new asset management program, which is just a fancy way to say that they started tracking the conditions of their assets and using data to prioritize funding.

As they started this shift, Sniffen said that the long-time promised projects that had been on the books for years were some of the biggest obstacles to a new approach focused on preserving and stewarding the things they had spent billions over decades investing their state’s wealth into. “We didn’t have an asset management program, so those who complained the most got their roads fixed,” he said. “But we changed that so data controls everything. Costs and benefits now matter.”

Current Mississippi DOT Commissioner Dick Hall shared that when he was once on the legislative side years ago, he also had a hard time fully grasping why the state couldn’t afford to both radically expand and also prioritize maintenance. To this day, when it comes to grasping why maintenance needs to be the top priority, “for some reason I can’t seem to explain it to members of our legislature. But the members of the rotary club get it.” When he explains why the lion’s share of state transportation money is now going to repair, the public gets it. But the elected leaders still want their ribbon cuttings.

Better data and clear priorities can help ensure that funds are better spent.

States won’t do it on their own — the federal government needs to be the one to make repair a priority

The conventional wisdom about state DOTs is that they have two priorities when it comes to transportation funding. More funding, and limitless flexibility to spend it however they want. And that was largely the deal struck by Congress with the influential state DOT lobbyists in MAP-21 in 2012 and the FAST Act in 2015: in exchange for a weak system of performance measures, states got even more flexibility for spending slightly more money however they wish.

So it was striking to hear state transportation officials practically begging the staffers in the room to make maintenance and repair a concrete, binding federal priority. When asked about the difficulty of selling a maintenance-first approach to elected leaders in his state, Commissioner Hall explained how internal political pressure so often leads to states spending money they urgently need for repair on new capacity projects. They’ve finally made some progress in Mississippi on making repair their number one priority, but he had a crystal-clear answer for the attendees at the briefing:

“If you want us to prioritize maintenance, then you’re going to have to tell us ‘you gotta do it!'”

The question remains: will Congress heed this request and render this debate moot in state transportation agencies across the country? Or will they allow states to continue buying things they can’t afford to maintain and then just return to Congress and beg for more money down the road?

That choice is in Congress’ hands.

Stay tuned next week for our “safety over speed” week, starting on Monday, November 4th. We’ll be diving deep into our second principle on why safety has to be the overriding consideration when it comes to street and road design.

Broad coalition takes the offensive on federal automated vehicle policy

Instead of waiting for Congress to release a new bill to regulate autonomous vehicles worse than last year’s notorious AV START Act, T4America joined a diverse coalition of safety, public health, consumer, and transportation groups to urge lawmakers to take a smarter approach than last year’s reckless hands-off approach for the driverless car industry.

We’re living through the first time in a hundred years a truly new transportation mode has hit American streets. While electric scooters, shareable mopeds, and electric bikes are all variations on a theme, automated vehicles (AVs) represent a truly transformational change to the world of mobility.

Yet federal policy hasn’t kept up. Current long-term transportation policy law—The FAST Act— which passed in 2015, didn’t even mention the phrase “automated vehicles.” When Congress did finally attempt to set basic rules for them, the House unanimously passed a bill before anyone knew what was in it and then the Senate attempted to pass the AV START Act. Both bills were a giveaway to the nascent industry which would have allowed hundreds of thousands of AVs on the road while preempting states and localities from not only regulating the vehicles in their jurisdictions, but even from knowing basic information about where and how they are operating.

But this issue isn’t going away. And if advocates fail to engage with Congress on this policy, these vehicles could undermine safety, exacerbate inequities, and worsen land-use policies that promote sprawl and create congestion. Rather than waiting for Congress, T4America and a host of other advocates want to do things differently this time. Instead of fighting to stop dangerous legislation from passing, T4America would rather fight for a bill that the public can support because they know it’s clearly in their best interests and protects their safety above all else.

We teamed up with a variety of stakeholders—including Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, National League of Cities, and the League of American Bicyclists—to send a letter to Congress with specific AV policy recommendations. The final letter was signed by 47 national groups with a range of interests, and it covered seven broad recommendations, all of which were either ignored or handled poorly in last year’s legislation:

Any federal AV legislation must prioritize safety for motorists, pedestrians, motorcyclists, transit riders, and cyclists; ensure access for everyone including people with disabilities; protect local control; and provide appropriate data to consumers and local authorities while also equipping the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) with the resources and authorities it needs to oversee this new technology.

AVs are certainly complicated, but getting the policy right shouldn’t be that difficult. But it does require an open, deliberative process of gathering feedback from everyone with a stake in how they’re rolled out and how they operate.

For a new transportation mode that has the power to dramatically reshape our communities, Congress can’t just ask the industry what they think and then hastily rush a bill through based on their limited feedback. We need our deliberative bodies to do better. By keeping safety at the forefront, we can craft legislation that works for everyone.

We are optimistic we can work together with Congress on a bill that enhances the federal government’s ability to regulate auto safety, protects states and local governments’ authority to promote safety for all road users in their communities, and ensures that this new transportation technology is accessible to everyone.

The full letter with the list of all signatories can be found here.

Federal grant brings Gulf Coast passenger rail ever closer to fruition

Gulf Coast passenger rail is closer than ever to returning. With state and federal funds already secured to make capital investments required to bring new and drastically improved passenger rail service back between New Orleans and Mobile, AL, a second vital federal grant to help operate the new service completes the other biggest part of the funding puzzle.

Just before the end of August, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao announced a $4.36 million grant to fund operating expenses for the first year of passenger rail service along the new line, leveraging $1.4 million already committed by the states of Louisiana and Mississippi.

This award follows a much more significant $33 million federal grant to complete major infrastructure and capital improvements necessary for restoring (and radically improving) the service wiped out by Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. We wrote about that bigger award earlier this summer:

With this week’s announcement of a $33 million federal grant, communities across the coast can make the capital improvements necessary for running passenger trains throughout the corridor owned by CSX. The grant will be matched with commitments from the state of Mississippi, the Mississippi Department of Transportation, Amtrak, and private partners, and is paired with priority investments from the state of Louisiana. When it does start up, this new service will be like an iPhone compared to a 2000s-era flip phone. Cities along the route can expect business friendly service on four trains a day, running in daytime hours and on time, with food, drink and hospitality designed to reflect the unique culture of the region.

Thanks to this historic award, the thousands of residents who turned up in force to show their support for passenger rail could be less than 24 months from being able to finally hear “Y’all Aboard!!”

This project has made it this close to finish line due to the hard work of the Southern Rail Commission, a tri-state compact created by Congress with members appointed by the governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama to support Southeast rail initiatives, with Transportation for America supporting them every step of the way. Just as vital has been the continued vocal support of many of their state and congressional leaders, including Governors John Bel Edwards (LA) and Phil Bryant (MS), and Senators Roger Wicker, Cindy Hyde-Smith, and the late Thad Cochran.

And perhaps most important has been the residents of the Gulf Coast who have let their elected leaders know at every turn that they’re clamoring to see passenger rail return to their cities and region, giving those leaders confidence in expecting strong ridership.

For now, because the project lacks a full financial commitment from Alabama, the new service isn’t fully funded to reach downtown Mobile—the most convenient point for travelers to disembark. As the SRC wrote in their press release, that’s where the last remaining question marks lie, and Alabama still has some work to do:

The SRC hopes the state of Alabama will support passenger rail restoration by providing matching funds for the next grant cycle so service can be extended to downtown Mobile. Wiley Blankenship, SRC Commissioner from Mobile, AL noted, “Alabama’s Southern Rail Commissioners welcome this positive affirmation for the restoration of passenger rail service between New Orleans and my home of Mobile. I look forward to working with my fellow commissioners and Alabama state leadership to provide the necessary support to leverage additional federal operating funds to make Gulf Coast rail a reality.”

They’ve got the funding in hand and they’ve got all of their influential decision-makers on board. Amtrak and the local partners are committed to having trains rolling down America’s beautiful Gulf Coast in the summer of 2021.

It’s been a long road to this point, but the residents of the Gulf Coast who have long been dreaming of once again seeing trains connecting the hearts of their towns and cities to one another will get to see that dream become reality.

A major obstacle cleared for bringing new passenger rail service to the Deep South

Almost 14 years since Hurricane Katrina wiped it out, passenger rail service along the Gulf Coast is closer than ever to returning after a vital federal grant was awarded to help fund the capital investments required to bring new and drastically improved passenger rail service back between New Orleans and Mobile, AL, and Transportation for America played a major role.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) addresses the enormous crowd in Gulfport on the second stop of the Gulf Coast inspection train in 2016. Photo by Steve Davis / T4America

“We’ve got the top brass, we’ve got the local leaders, and we’re gonna make this work for Mississippi and for the taxpayers,” Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker told a crowd of a thousand or more fired-up Gulfport residents over three years ago in front of the city’s historic train depot in the middle of town. And Senator Wicker has kept his promise.

That crowd—and more than a dozen just like it in communities from New Orleans to Jacksonville—turned out in massive numbers in February 2016 to see an Amtrak passenger train roll through for the first time since Katrina darkened those shores in August 2005. They also showed up to send a clear and powerful message to their elected leaders. As I wrote back in 2016 from the train, “Rich people, poor people, black people, white people, young people, old people — all asking their elected leaders for the same thing: We want passenger rail back on the Gulf Coast.”

With this week’s announcement of a $33 million federal grant, communities across the coast can make the capital improvements necessary for running passenger trains throughout the corridor owned by CSX. The grant will be matched with commitments from the state of Mississippi, the Mississippi Department of Transportation, Amtrak, and private partners, and is paired with priority investments from the state of Louisiana. When it does start up, this new service will be like an iPhone compared to a 2000s-era flip phone. Cities along the route can expect business friendly service on four trains a day, running in daytime hours and on time, with food, drink and hospitality designed to reflect the unique culture of the region.

Thanks to this historic award, the thousands of residents who turned up in force to show their support for passenger rail could be less than 24 months from being able to finally hear “Y’all Aboard!!”

A bipartisan coalition of local leaders, mayors, business people, governors, and their representatives in Congress are close to creating what would be the first new long-distance passenger rail service in the U.S. in more than half a century—and it’s in the Deep South. How did this happen, and what should it mean for other similar corridors across the country?

New passenger rail service in the Deep South — how did it happen?

It never would have happened without the day-in, day-out work of the Southern Rail Commission, a Congressionally established tri-state rail compact—the only one of its kind—with members appointed by the governors of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. Essentially inactive and idle a decade ago, the SRC was reconstituted and has been the driving force, bringing together local mayors along the line, building support amongst business leaders in the region, and garnering the support of their governors and elected leaders in Congress.⁴

With the SRC driving the project forward with the public and within the states, they needed a champion in Congress, and they found one in Senator Roger Wicker, who has done everything possible to keep his promise made in Gulfport that day in 2016. With the help of Senator Cory Booker, the Senators drafted a provision (included in the FAST Act) that created the Gulf Coast Working Group to study the restoration of passenger rail service. Later that year, those Senators, with incredible support from the late Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, ensured that the omnibus budget bill provided the funding to start the working group. And Senators Cochran, Richard Shelby (AL), and Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS) were also instrumental in appropriating funding for the new federal programs to make capital and operations grants to help expand passenger rail service.

“Everyone needed to see a train again”

For 11 years after Katrina, even after a mammoth five-month rebuilding effort along the CSX-owned freight rail line to restore freight service, no passenger trains ran east of New Orleans. With even the vague memory of the previous subpar and regularly delayed passenger service receding into distant memory for many residents, everyone needed to see a train again.

So back in 2016, the SRC partnered with Amtrak to run a special inspection train from New Orleans to Jacksonville, Florida. While there were some technical necessities for this trip—Amtrak inspected the tracks and stations to determine what physical needs there were along the line—the most important function was filling that train with elected, civic and other local leaders from the Gulf Coast and providing a visible sign for residents to rally around.

I was on that train, and I will never forget the moment we rolled into Bay St. Louis, MS for the first stop after departing New Orleans. Conversations halted immediately on the train as we were taken aback by the overwhelming sights and sounds of Bay St. Louis. Schools were closed, bands were playing, costumes were donned, and it seemed like the entire city had turned out to see the first passenger train in 11 years.

John Sharp, writing for AL.com, summed things up well, describing the arrival of that train as an incredibly cathartic moment for a city that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and had fought for years to bounce back. Bay St. Louis wasn’t an outlier, though. That scene was repeated in town after town, whether in Mississippi’s second largest city of Gulfport, or tiny little Atmore, AL:

It was an incredible sight to see, and it had a palpable, powerful effect on the elected officials and VIPs from Washington on board. None of them will be able to go back to work in their government offices without thinking of the faces of the people they saw on this trip and how excited they were about the prospect of seeing this vital connection restored.

That’s precisely what happened, and the evidence can be found in the state money that Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (with the full backing and support of the Mississippi DOT and commissioner Dick Hall) committed to the project before they had a dime of federal money in hand.

Watch our short video chronicling the two-day Gulf Coast inspection train in 2016.

What’s the next step to get trains running again?

With this $33 million federal grant from the Consolidated Rail and Infrastructure Safety Improvements program (CRISI) in hand, work should begin quickly on the capital upgrades to rails, ties, stations, and the other infrastructure required to run reliable passenger trains in the corridor. Amtrak and the SRC are committed to bringing back new, reliable, regular, daytime passenger service within 24 months from now—service that will be far better than what was eliminated in 2005.

Amtrak will also begin negotiations with CSX for use of the right-of-way which CSX must allow by federal law. T4America and SRC are anticipating productive negotiations with the private railroad, but a landmark Supreme Court decision just last week upholds last year’s decision to allow the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak to set on-time performance standards, a crucial measure to increase the reliability of passenger rail service; a decision that will also strengthen their position in negotiations.

“This ruling opens the door to fixing one of the main issues with our passenger rail system,” said John Spain, Chairman of the Southern Rail Commission. “Increasing on-time performance will increase the reliability of and trust in the system, and now Amtrak can finally take steps to do this.

This story shouldn’t end on the Gulf Coast

While Transportation for America is delighted to see the progress toward returning passenger rail service to the Gulf Coast, new trains running between beautiful Gulf Coast cities should be the blueprint for other corridors to do the same all across the country.

“All of this should also send a powerful message to Congress and to Amtrak’s board that this country absolutely needs a thriving system of long-distance and shorter-corridor passenger rail service that works together to form a national network,” said T4America chair Mayor John Robert Smith, former board chairman of Amtrak, who was also responsible for building the first new multi-modal station in the south during his long tenure as Mayor of Meridian, MS.

There’s already movement afoot to start new service between the twin economic centers of Baton Rouge and New Orleans in Louisiana, and along the I-20 corridor between Meridian, MS and Shreveport, LA. This comes in addition to longstanding conversations to protect and expand service in the Midwest, the Mountain West, the Pacific Northwest, and across the country.

I spent three days on this train interviewing and chatting with local elected officials from communities all along the coast who explained to me how it was essential to their economic development and quality-of-life efforts to bring passenger rail service back.

One of my favorite characters I met was Mayor Knox Ross, the mayor of Pelahatchie, MS and an SRC Commissioner. A few days after the trip, he came up to Washington to share his story with the Senate Commerce Committee and explain how this passenger rail connection would be a powerful economic development tool for these Gulf Coast cities, small and large:

“We invested in the national interstate system years ago and saw tremendous economic development, but now we’re having to put more money than ever into it with diminishing returns as we add lanes. Every modest investment in passenger trains across this country can create large economic development opportunities in all these cities. …We saw an amazing outpouring of support in every city. …They just want an opportunity. Every city turned out. They’re looking for a hand up and saw Amtrak service as that opportunity.”

We’re proud to celebrate this monumental event for the Gulf Coast and will continue counting down the days until those thousands of people we met there can hop a train and travel the Gulf Coast with a reliable new mode of travel.

“Y’all Aboard!”

All photos by Stephen Lee Davis / Transportation for America

National transportation policy is a rudderless ship sailing off into oblivion

For well over two decades, we’ve had no big-picture guiding purpose for the federal transportation program. Like a ship with a jammed rudder heading off aimlessly into forever, federal transportation policy has been limping along without an overarching purpose or destination in mind. How does this inertia lead us toward all the wrong things?

Is the purpose for the ~$60 billion in federal funds we spend each year merely to increase driving? To add more lane-miles? To ensure that pavement totals increase? To simply build some new stuff and try to keep up with the old stuff? To better connect people with opportunity in a measurable way? Here are six policies embedded in current transportation policy that are not a product of an intentional conversation about what we should accomplish, but rather the result of having zero direction and purpose since we completed the interstate system in 1992.⁵

1) States are rewarded financially for encouraging more driving and longer trips

It’s no mystery why states spend too much of their money building new lane-miles, new roads, and new bridges at the expense of repair and everything else: The financial payout for states is based on increasing driving as much as possible.

The bulk of all federal transportation money is doled out to states based on a series of formulas tied largely to population, number of lane-miles, and how much everyone drives (vehicle miles traveled, or VMT). If a state encourages more driving or if everyone takes longer trips, that state receives more money the following year. Conversely, if your state finds ways to reduce driving by investing in transit, more logically planning jobs and housing in better proximity to one another, or finding creative ways to manage travel demand, your state loses money.

Put another way, perhaps the most core, embedded philosophy of the federal transportation program is to increase driving—as if more driving itself is an unmitigated economic and societal good.

2) Federal programs originally designed to support and encourage long distance driving are poorly suited to fulfill more complicated modern needs

“Most state departments of transportation were created largely for one reason: to implement a highway-building program,” wrote T4America director Beth Osborne in this series on the Smart Growth America blog, and even the most forward-looking of state DOTs today still have that highway-building DNA embedded deep in their culture. Today’s aimless federal program needs to accomplish far more than the original intended purposes of moving people long distances across states or between metro areas. Yet we still try unsuccessfully to make this old, outdated system serve today’s needs. As Beth wrote in the opener for that series, “the same department that delivered this highway below on the left a few decades ago is the same one tasked with delivering the street on the right, perhaps right in front of your house.”

Our transportation needs have changed, but the federal program has failed to keep up.

3) Transportation emissions are growing because the program is designed that way

Transportation is the #1 sector for emissions and driving represents 83 percent of those emissions. These emissions are rising because people are forced to make more and longer trips. The U.S. has added metro interstate lane miles faster than our metro population has grown, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and obliterating the modest gains made in more efficient vehicles and cleaner fuel. With new roads subsidized by the federal government (covering around 80 percent of the cost), localities struggle to stay ahead of development that spreads further from the center of metro areas, forcing people to travel further to access jobs and services. This leads to a demand for more roads, which induces even more driving and pollution.

We simply can’t continue expanding our roadway network and lower emissions at the same time. The two goals are incompatible, and unfortunately, increasing driving is a purpose embedded deeply in the program. If the main policymakers in Congress can stop talking about money long enough to do so, it’s past time for a conversation about making shorter trips and shared trips a core goal and purpose of the program.

4) We subsidize driving at the expense of providing any other options

Given a transportation challenge to solve, the federal program puts its thumb on the scale in favor of a road “solution” by covering about 80 percent of the cost, while only providing about half of the cost for a transit solution to the same problem. On top of that, not only do we make transit projects jump through more hoops in an arduous development process that no highway projects are subject to, but we actually hold them to a more realistic standard of long-term affordability. As we wrote for Strong Towns last week, “with new federally funded transit projects, agencies have to prove they have sufficient funding to operate and maintain the new line or service, and can do so without shortchanging the rest of their system.”

The federal program encourages costly over-expansion because it doesn’t require states to prove they can afford to maintain what they’ve been encouraged to build in order to get more federal money. Congress is perfectly fine with states building a new road they can’t afford to preserve long-term, even as they are failing to maintain the rest of their system in a good state of repair. And then, as we wrote in Repair Priorities, “those states return to the federal government every few years requesting more funds to address their unmet ‘needs,’ when those needs could have been prevented or delayed with more responsible spending practices.”

That’s why we’re in this goofy situation where every state and every lawmaker seems to thinks the problem is just a lack of money.

5) The program asks the wrong questions and measures the wrong things

The program is obsessed with vehicle speed and you can see it in the few, limited ways that we try to measure whether or not our system succeeds. If you have a 15-minute commute to work in congested urban street traffic, are you better off than if you have a 45-minute commute in traffic that moves quickly? All of the incentives embedded in the program related to how we measure and assess congestion would prefer the second commute. And because free-flowing traffic is considered the gold standard, roads are built to ensure that traffic flows quickly, and this is what leads us to more and wider roads, and more and longer trips. (And streets that are then uninhabitable for anyone walking or biking.) Perhaps, a better measure would be assessing whether or not people can reach jobs and services by any mode of travel, rather than the simplistic measure of whether some of them travel at high speed when driving.

6) We undercut all our other priorities with a strategy to reduce congestion that fails every single time

The federal program is obsessed with reducing congestion, yet everything we do to reduce congestion just makes it worse.

A new study from Cal State Northridge showed that increasing lane-miles increases driving proportionally: a one percent increase in lane-miles results in a one-percent increase in driving. The best part? Expanding roads also fails to improve traffic: the speed increases from highway widenings disappear in five years because of more traffic. We expanded the country’s road system by about three percent from 2009-2017, guaranteeing at least a three percent increase in driving right there. On top of that, it’s impossible to square the priority of speed with the other things we want to accomplish, like improving safety, increasing reliability, or lowering emissions. From the SGA series:

This assumption of “the cars need to always move fast and never slow down” is at the root of most of the big problems that [state DOTs] face. Engineers have a prerequisite—sometimes explicitly stated but always implicit in the agency’s culture of practice—that makes every other priority a nearly impossible task. In practice, what this turns into is a list of secondary goals states would like to accomplish, that usually get sacrificed for the real top priority of speed. Until we come to grips with the fact that moving cars fast at all times of day without delay is a goal that can’t always be squared with all of the other priorities, until we can admit that perhaps everyone is not going to be able to go fast all the time, we’ll continue building unnecessarily large and expensive roads where speed is the number one priority and most other priorities fall by the wayside.

Make sure the vehicles can always go fast

AND

Prioritize repair first
Keep everyone safe, including people walking & biking
Create vibrant places worth visiting
Keep your costs low
Don’t negatively impact nearby communities
Help connect everyone to jobs and opportunity, whether they drive or not
Promote sustainable and lasting economic development
Reduce transportation-related emissions

Wrapping up: It’s past time to make some new goals for what this program is supposed to accomplish

Back in the 1950s we dramatically reshaped our federal transportation policy around accommodating high speed vehicle travel, and our federal program functioned with this unifying purpose for decades. Brand new highways made cross-country and inter-state travel easier than ever before, boosting the national and local economies by connecting places that weren’t well-connected before. But they also started to transform the way we we built homes and destinations by enabling easier travel from cities to their fringes. ⁶ Today, the challenge is making sure people have access to jobs, services and amenities within easy distance of their homes. To accomplish this, we will need to remove barriers, build bridges (real and metaphorical) and provide safe, affordable convenient alternatives to get around.

Rather than limp along, plowing billions into adding a lane here or a new road there with no equivalent economic return, let’s state a set of clear, explicit goals for the federal program, guaranteeing less driving, more options, healthier communities, and less pollution—all things we should be encouraging as we near the quarter pole of the new century.

Did you know that it’s Infrastructure Week once again?

After two solid years of everyone in Washington, DC talking nonstop about a standalone infrastructure bill to pump trillions into America’s infrastructure, we’d understand if you weren’t aware that the last Infrastructure Week ever ended.

If you haven’t seen the evidence in your inbox already, the incessant drumbeat for more money is already underway today. All this week, you’ll hear the usual interest groups starting this conversation by talking about nothing but money:

Why are they telling us the price before they’ve told us what we’re buying?

We think that this is backwards, and our Repair Priorities 2019 report, launching tomorrow, will help show why. Even as we gave states more than $300 billion to spend almost however they wanted to—in addition to billions more in the 2009 stimulus—the condition of our nation’s roads actually got worse from 2009-2017. Thirty-seven states saw an increase of roads in “poor” condition.

Our roads got worse not because we lacked money, but because too many states spent that money on building or expanding new roads rather than being good stewards by prioritizing repair. We built enough new lane-miles during that period to criss-cross the country 83 times, roads that will cost us $5 billion more per year just to maintain in good condition.

This is more than a money problem—it’s a priorities problem.

Congress has to stop asking taxpayers for more funding to fix crumbling roads and bridges without providing concrete, measurable assurances that any new money will actually improve things.

The public deserves to know first what more money is going to buy us—not just how much money they “need.” Congress’ decisions over the last two decades has just led to a lack of transportation options, more inequality, and more and bigger roads filled with more traffic and more pollution.

If you think we need to fix our spending priorities before we even think about pouring more money into this broken system, then bypass the Infrastructure Week rhetoric and share our social media message for Monday instead:

Today is the 1st day of #InfrastructureWeek. Why in the world would we give more money to the same people who have been neglecting basic maintenance in order to build more things we can’t afford to maintain? #BuildWHATForTomorrow?”

Repair Priorities 2019 is being released tomorrow. Sign up for Wednesday’s 3:00 p.m. EDT webinar examining the findings now.

Many of the most dangerous states for people walking are planning for more people to die

13 Americans per day were struck and killed while walking from 2008-2017, according to a report released today by our colleagues at the National Complete Streets Coalition. Dangerous by Design 2019 also shows how some of the most dangerous states are, astonishingly, committed to making the problem even worse.

View the rankings and the full report

Download the full report.

Over the last decade (2008 through 2017, the most recent year with data available), drivers struck and killed 49,340 people walking in communities large and small across the U.S. To put that into perspective, it’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing—with no survivors—every month. During a period when fatalities for people inside vehicles went down 6 percent, pedestrian fatalities increased by 35 percent. Since the last version of Dangerous by Design was released two years ago, the problem has only gotten worse: 4 out of 5 states and major metro areas have become more dangerous for people walking.

How are states planning to tackle this problem?

More than a third of all states aren’t planning to do anything at all. 18 states—including 10 of the 20 most dangerous for people walking—planned to actually increase the number of people killed while walking or biking from 2017 to 2018.

New requirements from the Federal Highway Administration require state departments of transportation to set performance targets for traffic fatalities and serious injuries and then monitor their progress over time. Back in 2017, states had to update their safety goals for 2018, which included setting target numbers for deaths and serious injuries among people walking, biking, or using other non-motorized forms of travel.

Did states respond by setting ambitious targets and creating accompanying plans for how they’d spend their share of billions in federal transportation dollars to make their streets safer for everyone? Unfortunately, a closer look at these targets reveals just how low the bar is for safety in many states.

18 states established targets for non-motorized deaths and injuries that are higher than the number of people killed or injured in the most recent year of data reported. With billions in 2018 federal transportation dollars available to them to devote to improving safety, more than a third of all states committed to…doing what they did last year—or worse. 10 of these 18 states are among the top 20 most deadly according to Dangerous by Design 2019.

The only “acceptable” number of deaths on our roadways is zero. We can and must raise the bar by requiring states to set safety targets that reduce rather than increase the number of people killed or seriously injured while walking or biking on our streets, ultimately working toward eliminating all traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. However, to make this vision a reality, we need strong federal policy with binding enforceable requirements that hold states to higher safety standards. Dangerous by Design 2019 helps make this case.

For more information on epidemic of people struck and killed while walking and to see the full rankings of the top 20 most dangerous metro areas and states, view the full Dangerous by Design report.

This content, adapted from Dangerous by Design 2019, was co-authored and edited by T4America staff.

Seven things to know about our last Smart Cities Collaborative meeting of 2018

Last week in Atlanta, Georgia we wrapped up our second cohort of the Smart Cities Collaborative with the fourth meeting of 2018. Once again, staff representing cities, counties, transit agencies and other public sector agencies from 23 cities gathered together to share their experiences and learn how others are using technology and new mobility to become better places to live. Here are seven things we learned or heard last week.

1. Atlanta has a tremendous amount of momentum and potential

As someone said during the week at one point, it’s much harder to affect significant change if you’re not growing, and Atlanta (both the city and the region) have been booming. In fact, after losing population for nearly thirty years, the rate of population growth in the city proper has been near the top of the list within the (massive) region over the last few years. Which also means that the city and region alike are struggling to keep those people moving and well-connected to jobs and opportunity. Atlanta City Councilman Amir Farohki and Planning Director Tim Keane shared a little of the Atlanta story and how they’re working hard to keep people and residents at the center of their city’s efforts to improve mobility and access.

Atlanta Councilman Amir Farokhi, left, and Planning Director Tim Keane speaking to the Collaborative in Atlanta.

One of the best illustrations of that effort is the Atlanta BeltLine, an unprecedented and multi-decade project to add trails, parks and transit to old railroad corridors that form a ring around the core of the city. We were fortunate enough to get out of our meeting space in downtown (provided by the Atlanta Regional Commission) long enough to get a terrific tour of a small portion of the BeltLine, and it’s truly a transformative, people-centered project that will have immense long-term benefits for the city.

Touring the Atlanta BeltLine with staff from Atlanta Beltline near the Ponce City Market on the city’s east side, and on bottom right, touring a just-opened portion of the west side trail with the portion set aside and prepped for transit on the left side of that photo.

2. This was the last meeting of the second cohort of the Collaborative

This meeting wrapped up our second yearlong cohort of the Collaborative, putting a bow on a year that kicked off with 23 cities in Denver way back in the spring, traveled to Seattle over the summer, and then met in Pittsburgh near the beginning of the fall. We’re planning to reflect a little more later on in another post about a year spent learning with these cities, but suffice it to say we covered an immense amount of ground over a net total of only about a full week of time together, and we will miss working together with them every few months.

3. Arcadis sponsored the meeting and made an interesting offer to the cities

Data. Daaaaaaaaata. We all hear about it nonstop.

And it’s true: new technologies and mobility options are providing a wealth of detailed, real-time transportation data to planners and managers across the country. This is creating new opportunities to analyze historical data and better measure operations, understand network conditions and trends, and ultimately help cities make better decisions about how to manage their transportation networks.

But, despite all this wonderful new data, most cities haven’t been able to fully realize its benefits, update their models or turn it into meaningful action. It’s certainly possible to use this data to better understand what’s actually happening on the ground with present and future travel demand, but it’s a tough job for any city—especially the small and mid-sized cities—to do this on their own.

Arcadis, a large global planning and design firm that sponsored this meeting, came with an interesting proposal: They offered a three-month data analytics pilot project of nearly any kind to Collaborative cities for free. But they don’t want to just roll ahead with an idea of their own—they wanted to collaborate and work together with cities to figure out what would be most helpful. So their team, and others from Sam Schwartz Engineering, HR&A and Cityfi, met with the cities in small groups for a half-day to better understand their specific challenges and identify key areas to include in potential data analytics pilots, craft the scope for coordinated pilots across multiple cities, and highlight a few options for differing outcomes in each community.

4. We heard a lot about tangible projects happening on the ground right now

The Collaborative has always intended to be about action and real, tangible efforts to improve mobility and experiment with new technologies and tools. While a lot of our time was taken up with some big picture issues, we also heard short presentations from other cities that are forging ahead about how specific pilot projects are faring, with the hopes of sharing lessons and experience with the other cities that might want follow—or chart their own path.

Dan Hoffman from Gainesville, Florida shared about the automated vehicle shuttle pilot that they’re hoping to get rolling in early 2019. He explained the goals of the pilot, where and how it will operate and all of the hurdles they’ve cleared along the way to try to put a real AV shuttle on the ground connecting downtown and the University of Florida, providing a useful test case for other cities hoping to obtain a NHTSA waiver for AV testing or how to partner effectively with the state.

Robin Aksu from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation also joined us to speak on mobility hubs and how their project is progressing. Robin shared what they’re hoping to accomplish by creating mobility hubs, the focus on primary and satellite hubs and how the design will reflect those differences, and how they’re approaching implementation along with communications, marketing, and their community outreach program.

Mark de la Vergne from Detroit, Michigan joined us to share more about Night Shift and some of their other transit programs. Night Shift is specifically designed for late night and service workers to help connect them to transit and improve access to jobs. Mark shared about the process his team has gone through to conduct engagement and outreach in their local community to not only design the service, but ensure it meets the community’s ongoing needs. Detroit’s pilot is an excellent example of how cities can think about improving access from the ground up with the user’s perspective in mind and without a predetermined solution.

5. Mobility as a Service will definitely be one of 2019’s hottest topics — but it won’t end there

We’ve talked a lot here about Mobility as a Service and that this is where most of the companies like Uber or Lyft or Lime are ultimately headed: not a provider of one specific mode, but a mobility provider allowing multiple options for however you choose to get around. It’s likely part of the reason why Lyft bought Motivate and Uber bought Jump (both are bikesharing companies), and why we’ll continue to see more moves like that in the future.

So what will it mean to roll all these services into a single platform offering multiple modes of travel. Who would control the data? What would the role of the city be in helping to plan for travel demand? How would cities ensure that it improves access for everyone?

We had two representatives from the public side (Warren Logan from San Francisco and Alex Pazuchanics from Pittsburgh) discuss the topic with two reps from the private side (Lilly Shoup from Lyft and Matt Cole from Cubic.) And the back-and-forth that ensued (moderated by Cityfi’s Gabe Klein) was a terrific, open, and honest discussion that pulled no punches.

5. LADOT’s Mobility Data Specification is already shifting the conversation

There have been a lot of conversations over the past year about LA DOT’s Mobility Data Specification (MDS) and how cities can better use data to actively manage their operations. Starting with shared active transportation services operating in Los Angeles, Marcel Porras from LADOT shared more about their short- and long-term goals along with the topic of how cities manage the right-of-way today physically and how they will need to manage it in a digital future.

Apparent from the beginning of the conversation was significant interest from the participants to use MDS in their communities to accomplish similar goals. And, there was also a stated desire to work with Los Angeles to further co-create and build out MDS to help manage the other challenges they’re facing such as managing curb space, carsharing, ridesourcing and eventually automated vehicles.

One of the most poignant parts of the conversation was a deep dive into how MDS is being administered and governed today, how cities might work together to evolve MDS into a national standard, and how a governance structure might take shape that could foster its development long into the future. It was one of the best conversations we’ve had in the Collaborative this year and highlighted the growing need for cities to evolve their structures, capacities and capabilities as data management becomes paramount for mobility management.

6. We turned the tables and tossed the private companies into the Shark Tank

Cities get pitched all day long from private companies and providers. But it’s rarely in a forum where these maxed-out city staff can really engage in a thoughtful way and certainly not one where they can benefit from the expertise of their colleagues from other cities. So we tried to turn the tables a little bit and take a page from TV by creating the Smart Cities Shark Tank where private companies were given ten minutes to pitch a panel of reps from a range of cities about Mobility as a Service and curb space management solutions, and then take some tough questions from the panel as they tried to assess whether it would be a good fit for their cities. And then the panels huddled to evaluate the presentations and pick a “winner” with the best pitch for the cities.

Photos from the Smart Cities Shark Tank, including a picture of the location at Monday Night Garage on the BeltLine in West End.

The night was a lot of fun but it was also a useful exercise that forced the private companies to meet the cities on their terms and also allowed the cities to tap into the expertise of their colleagues from across the country—something they don’t typically get to do when one of these companies shows up in their office with a pitch.

Thanks to the International Parking & Mobility Institute for helping host the Shark Tank.

7. Year two is done, and we’re already looking ahead to year three

It’s hard to believe we’re already wrapping up the second yearlong cohort of the Collaborative, but we’re already looking ahead to another cohort of cities for year three in 2019.

We would never have been able to make the Collaborative happen without the hard work and leadership of Russ Brooks, who has been T4America’s Director of Smart Cities for the past three years (and has been part of T4America in some fashion for seven years in total.) He helped conceive of the program and pull together the initial group of cities that met on a fairly surreal day in Minneapolis after the 2016 presidential election, and he’s contributed his blood, sweat, and tears to build the relationships required to bring almost 150 participants from 27 different cities together throughout the first two years—and the private industry—to the table for such a productive and useful forum.

We’re especially grateful for the representatives from the 23 cities who came to one or more of these meetings this year and contributed their time and their wisdom and made the Collaborative, well, truly collaborative!

We’re actively looking for the next Director of Smart Cities to guide year three, and we’re hoping for someone with some experience on the ground within a city or agency to run the show. Read the job description here.

The second cohort of the Smart Cities Collaborative at our first 2018 meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Kicking off the first year of the Collaborative in Minneapolis on November 7, 2016.

States that take chances get rewarded, and six other things we learned this year at Capital Ideas 2018

We’re fresh back from Capital Ideas 2018 in Atlanta, and as in years past, this year’s conference was an incredible alchemy of passion, knowledge, inspiration, and amazing people from around the country. For those of you who weren’t able to make it to Atlanta, here are seven things that we learned.

Left photo: Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, MO, right, one of Capital Ideas’ keynote speakers, talks to Toks Omishakin of the Tennessee DOT, and T4America chair John Robert Smith. Right: During a keynote on day two, Rusty Roberts, VP for Government Affairs at Brightline, shared his company’s ambitious plans for private passenger rail currently unfolding in Florida.

1) States that innovate, try new things, and take chances, get rewarded

There’s a common thought when it comes to new mobility or improving transit that it’s really only about cities. While we certainly think cities have a major role to play (see our Smart Cities Collaborative!), the role of the state is still vital.

The City of Gainesville, FL is on the cusp of launching a new automated vehicle shuttle pilot project to connect the University of Florida with downtown Gainesville via an automated driverless shuttle. Dan Hoffman, Gainesville’s city manager, shared their progress to date but made one thing clear: They would never be able to make this happen without the state of Florida’s involvement…and money, with the state contributing over $1 million. But it’s also worth noting that the state isn’t trying to run the pilot project—they’re collaborating to help a city run their own pilot. And the lessons that Dan and his city learn will be shared with the state as they collaborate with other cities. That’s a great recipe for success.

Sometimes states try new things and lose before they taste the eventual reward. But the smart ones learn from the experience. In Georgia, Atlanta bounced back from a painful failure to raise new revenue for transportation at the ballot box in 2012. They dusted themselves off, figured out why they failed, rebuilt trust in the transit agency, and then built vital new relationships with the state (and especially with legislators) that paved the way for a successful ballot measure effort in 2016 that raised money for billions in new transit projects in metro Atlanta.

A big difference between the 2012 loss at the polls to fund transportation in the Atlanta region and the successes that followed was confidence in GDOT increased. -Michael Sullivan #T4CapIdeas

— Beth Osborne (@BethOsborneTA) December 5, 2018

Suburban Gwinnett County has rejected ballot measures to join the MARTA regional transit system multiple times over the last few decades. However, this March they will vote on a measure to finally join the MARTA system and dramatically expand transit service in a rapidly changing county where 25 percent of the population was born outside of the United States.

While others may have written off their state legislatures, the Metro Atlanta Chamber and the rest of their coalition did the hard work required between 2012 and 2016 to turn skeptical state legislators into outspoken champions for transit. Michael Sullivan from the American Council of Engineering Companies in Georgia so aptly summarized at the end of this panel discussion: never assume that your opponent today has to be your opponent in the future.

As Commissioner Charlotte Nash from Gwinnett County noted on the panel, their work paid off: action by that same legislature is enabling her county to go to the ballot this March to raise new funds for transit. Never write off your opponent or a skeptic.

States that refuse to take chances might avoid some failure, but they are also likely to avoid great success.

Our sincere thanks to Dave Williams from the Metro Atlanta Chamber for his commitment to transportation in the region and to taking selfies whenever he moderates a panel for T4America. From left, Dave Williams, Michael Sullivan, Georgia State Rep. Kevin Tanner, and Gwinnett County Commissioner Charlotte Nash.

2) “Transit access is the #1 factor in upward economic mobility”

Our opening keynote speaker on the first day summed things up when it comes to the “why” for improving access to transit:

Transit access is the #1 factor in upward economic mobility. Poor transportation access exacerbates #inequality.” – Debra Lam, Managing Director, Center for Smart Cities and Innovation at @GeorgiaTech #T4CapIdeas pic.twitter.com/lmIbQUtv4c

— Calvin Gladney (@SmartGrowthCEO) December 5, 2018

As a different speaker would explain later, exactly how we measure access matters a great deal, but is there anything more that needs to be said? If we want to lift up those on the lower socio-economic rungs of our communities, then improving transit service and expanding access to it should always be a primary goal.

3) We are swimming in data, but very little of it has anything to do with the people who use the system.

A few audible cheers went up in the room when Stephanie Pollack, the Secretary of MassDOT, made that statement during an incredible panel moderated by T4America director Beth Osborne about the role of the state in new mobility services. She was joined by Commissioner Polly Trottenberg of the NYC DOT and Lilly Shoup, the Senior Director of Transportation Policy for Lyft. (More on that in a moment.)

On the second day, we took a deep dive into measuring accessibility and how so many of our metrics and data poorly assess what really matters. Nick Donohue, assistant secretary of the Virginia DOT, shared a story about the oft-cited Travel Time Index that measures congestion, and how it’s so far removed from the experience of real people and what really matters to them.

Nick tells story about his ten-minute, mile-long commute in Richmond with relatively slow travel speed. Boss comes from Fredericksburg in 45 minutes at a high rate of speed. Travel time index would show latter commute as “better!” #T4CapIdeas

— Transport. 4 America (@T4America) December 6, 2018

Congestion measures treat every road the same and have an implicit bias: always moving as fast as possible is the preferred goal. But streets are all about creating a place and a framework to create and capture value—not just a place for vehicles to move fast. This difference is often best illustrated with an image:

Another example from Denver: Street on the left has great congestion measures, low accessibility. Street on the right, probably worse congestion, higher accessibility. #T4CapIdeas pic.twitter.com/PHZGk4uxla

— Transport. 4 America (@T4America) December 6, 2018

4) We don’t always agree with one another, but we have to keep working together

The panel discussion on new mobility definitely got “spirited!” Sec. Pollack is a provocative quote machine, but we also had a representative from Lyft sitting a few feet away from the person charged with keeping America’s biggest city moving. And as Commissioner Polly Trottenberg noted, congestion and VMT are both up in NYC while transit ridership is down since TNCs like Uber and Lyft arrived on the scene.

Though there were some (entertaining!) disagreements on this panel, the most important lesson we learned was that at the end of the day, many of these companies do want to try and accomplish the same things that the cities do, and we have to find a way to work together. As an example, Lyft’s long-term goals are to have fleets of vehicles in cities that are shared, electric, and automated, which certainly dovetail with the goals of a city like New York, as described by Commissioner Polly Trottenberg.

Ultimately it’s more productive for state or local officials to find ways to work together with private industry rather than against one another. And as Sec. Pollack noted, we have a lot of work to do to make more of these trips shared, and we won’t be able to make that happen without the private providers at the table.

5) You have to be ready and willing to listen

If you show up to a meeting about a transportation project or issue, you’ll have to talk about more than just the item at had: everything that came before you will be on the table. For example, in the public sector, you might have to address and resolve your agency’s past sins in a community first, even if the project proposed is an attempt to try and rectify the damage. As Sec. Pollack said, state DOTs might have to do something radical: listen to the people that they serve.

Our first panel on the second day was focused on making development around transit more equitable. Carol Wolfe from the City of Tacoma—which is in the midst of a rail extension through their city—noted that all too often planners and officials forget that there’s already a “place” that needs to be kept at the center of the process.

[Economic & Community Development] is not about creating new spaces. Take the time to honor and embrace the places that are already there. – Carol Wolfe, @CityofTacoma #Truth #T4CapIdeas @T4America #HowWeThrive @ThrivingRegion #ThrivingCommunities

— Bridgett Massengill (@bmassen) December 6, 2018

And it’s a little thing, but when an agency or planning firm makes renderings of future development, do they incorporate existing places and people? Does the community see themselves in the picture, or do the renderings include the same generic details as every other rendering?

Carol Wolfe (City of Tacoma) begins by making the point that if your TOD renderings do not reflect the community&are not culturally competent, you show how you didn’t listen to the community – people can’t imagine themselves in that TOD and feel how they belong. #T4CapIdeas

— Victoria Payne (@VictoriaCSPayne) December 6, 2018

6) People are hungry to exchange information and learn from one another

As we did in 2014 and 2016, we spent the first afternoon in roundtable discussions. Participants got to choose two of 12 topics, sit down with an expert, and then have a completely open-ended discussion with them and a dozen others interested in the same thing. These roundtables are one of the best features of Capital Ideas, and many of them are just a starting point for a longer exchange of information that will continue for weeks or months to come.

This year, our roundtables covered the Smart Scale project funding process in Virginia, the mileage-based user fee pilot in Washington State, the deployment of automated vehicles, strategies to compete for competitive federal transportation grant funds, the Metropolitan Planning Council’s Transit Means Business Report, and the Partnership for Southern Equity’s “Opportunity Deferred” report, among many others.

7) Atlanta is a wonderful city with lots of momentum (including on the soccer front!)

It may have partially been due to the fact that Atlanta United, the city’s Major League Soccer team, was preparing to host MLS Cup last weekend and beat the Portland Timbers in front of 73,000 screaming crazy fans for the city’s first championship since the Braves in 1995, but the energy in the city was palpable.

The capital of the New South has made tremendous progress. It’s a terrific city loaded with momentum and possibility, within a region that is making huge strides to invest in transportation and capitalize on their numerous walkable downtowns. All of this is occurring inside a state that has done a complete about-face on the importance of transit for their economic future.

We wrapped up the conference with two concurrent tours, one of a selection of TOD sites in the city with representatives from MARTA, and the second of the ongoing BeltLine project of trails and transit around the city with representatives from Atlanta BeltLine and the Rails-To-Trails Conservancy. To close things out, here’s a short thread from the BeltLine tour collected in a Twitter moment:

#T4CapIdeas BeltLine tour

Participants: Have a story to share? Learn something new? Reach out to us at info@t4america.org. All photos by Stephen Lee Davis, T4America director of communications.

Our sincere thanks to our sponsors and host committee for making Capital Ideas possible. And to our many participants from around the country who came to Atlanta and hopefully took some helpful information—and inspiration—back home with them.

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Mixed messages on transportation at the ballot box this week

With a range of notable ballot measures for transportation considered by voters Tuesday, how did the issue fare at the ballot box? Did the recent trends for transportation-related measures continue?

Compared with two years ago when there were a number of major, big-ticket ballot measures to raise billions in new local revenue for transit on the ballot, there were relatively few local ballot measures raising new money for ambitious bus or rail transit projects in 2018. We’ll get into what actually happened at the local level, but this year, one of the more interesting trends emerged at the state level.

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T4America members: We’ve produced a more detailed post-election analysis for you. You can download that short document here. Reach out to us if you have any questions.

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Statewide

The biggest question on the ballot was Proposition 6 in California, which would have undone the state’s 2017 legislation that increased fuel taxes to raise more than $50 billion to prioritize repair and pledge billions toward transit, safe streets for walking and biking, and an overall multimodal approach to solving the state’s transportation challenges. The legislation also gave money directly to California localities to spend on their greatest needs, allowing for a strong measure of local control.

Proposition 6 was defeated—preserving 2017’s tax increase—with just 45 percent in favor. Of all the states that have raised new transportation revenues since 2012, California was one of the few that raised new money that could be used on a diverse range of needs. Voters just signaled their approval for this approach a year later.

By contrast, statewide proposals to raise new revenues for transportation—almost all for only roads—failed in Missouri and Colorado, as well as a non-binding advisory measure in Utah that went down by a wide margin. While a portion of Colorado’s gas tax dollars (those directed to localities) can be used on any transportation purpose, both Missouri and Utah have constitutional prohibitions on 100% of their gas tax dollars, preventing them from being spent on any other transportation needs.

What’s the trend to extrapolate from these four measures? The latter three measures were essentially status quo referenda on whether or not voters want to put more money into the existing state system for transportation. The taxpayers resoundingly answered “no.” In Missouri’s case, this was their second run at raising state fuel taxes for only roads, and like in 2014, voters in the state’s metro areas widely rejected the measure, viewing the taxes as regressive and a way to funnel money out of their metro area to pay for needs elsewhere in the state. All three contrast with California’s new system to devote new taxes toward a range of multimodal projects that was reaffirmed by voters.

This will be the most pressing question of 2019 as Congress ramps up to work on reauthorization. Do the American taxpayers believe that the federal transportation system works for them? Will they be supportive of federal legislators raising their taxes or creating new revenues to put into the same old system?

Local

At the local level, there were notable measures approved in Broward County (north of Miami) and Hillsborough County (Tampa). Broward’s penny sales tax increase would raise $15.6 billion over 30 years, largely for transit with about $9 billion earmarked for new light rail lines. In Tampa’s case, after a few failed attempts, they finally passed a measure with money for transit that raises the sales tax by a penny to raise about $275 million annually for transportation. (Revenues are split 45/55 between transit and roads/other projects.)

Federal

Many want to know how the changeover in House leadership will impact transportation, and particularly transit funding. It’s worth noting, however, that it’s been a bipartisan effort in Congress to press on USDOT to keep these transit projects moving. It was a Republican House and Senate that approved an unprecedented provision to the 2018 appropriations bill requiring USDOT to obligate all of their 2018 transit capital grants before the end of 2019. And it was a Republican move in the Senate to require Trump’s USDOT to use President Obama’s TIGER grant qualifications for the last round of TIGER grants.

Will much else change with the House’s leadership transition? The top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee—the committee charged with writing policy for the 2020 reauthorization—went on the record today saying that federal transportation policy is just fine as it is. All we need is more money.

No notable reforms for 2020 fed reauthorization in wake of House flip? “We don’t need much more policy changes. We have pretty good policy in the FAST Act. It’s just inadequate funding,” @RepPeterDeFazio told Bloomberg.

— Transport. 4 America (@T4America) November 7, 2018

We’ll have more on the federal angle in the coming days. View our tracker for 2018 state and local ballot measures for transportation here.

Cities eager to receive transit dollars from USDOT are receiving letters instead

Instead of approving projects and providing the money cities have applied for, USDOT is “allowing” cities to move ahead with construction on transit capital projects and incur costs that might one day be reimbursed by USDOT.

A few weeks ago, Streetsblog LA reported that Metro in Los Angeles had received a letter from USDOT that allows them to proceed with construction on their Purple Line subway westward toward the beach. (Bold type ours):

At this morning’s Metro Construction Committee, CEO Phil Washington announced that Metro had received a federal letter of no prejudice (LONP) for construction to proceed on the third phase of the Westside Purple Line. Washington aptly described this as a “big deal,” as this was the first major transit project that this administration has approved to proceed to the federal New Starts engineering phase. The federal letter of no prejudice covers an initial $491 million, nearly all for tunnel construction. The LONP guarantees that the feds will reimburse the local expenditures under a forthcoming full-funding grant agreement (FFGA).

Guarantees? Not quite. Los Angeles is right to treat this as a positive development, but these types of letters do not guarantee any federal money for transit projects.

Here’s what Obama’s USDOT said about these types of letters in a batch of policy guidance from early 2017, just before the transition:

Pre-award authority is not a legal or implied commitment that the subject project will be approved for FTA assistance or that FTA will obligate Federal funds. Furthermore, it is not a legal or implied commitment that all items undertaken by the applicant will be eligible for inclusion in the project. …Federal funding…is not implied or guaranteed by an [Letter of No Prejudice.] (pp 20, 22.)

By starting construction on this project without the full guarantee of funding, LA Metro is taking a risk, but they are still making a pretty rational decision. Just like the other cities with transit projects in the pipeline, Los Angeles is fully expecting that USDOT will do their job as required by law—something they’ve always done—and approve projects in a timely matter in order to obligate the $2.3 billion Congress provided in 2017 and 2018.

LA has a project with expiring construction bids due to USDOT’s delays up to this point, is on a tight timeline to have service running in time for the 2028 Olympics, and has already raised billions in local funds to pay their share.

Under previous administrations, whenever a city received one of these letters, their project was typically approved. So why should anyone be skeptical when this USDOT provides these letters? Here are two reasons:

This particular administration at USDOT has no established track record of advancing multi-year transit projects. If they were sending out these letters at the same time as they were routinely signing other grant agreements and obligating dollars to other multi-year transit projects, there would certainly be a level of trust established, as has been the case with previous administrations.
This administration has gone on the record multiple times asking Congress to provide them with zero dollars for multi-year transit projects that don’t yet have signed funding agreements — projects just like those in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, a region that is also awaiting final approval.

Cities are only in this difficult position because USDOT has failed to advance transit projects through the process in a clear, transparent, and timely manner.

While USDOT will hopefully approve LA’s project and award them funding, possibly before the end of this year, what about the other cities who are a little further behind in the process?

On the one hand, you can get a letter from USDOT that says you’re free to proceed and spend your own dollars on a big-ticket transit project, and that they won’t “prejudice” the eventual review of your application with the fact that you started building a project that wasn’t yet fully approved.

On the other hand, this administration at FTA and USDOT has twice asked Congress to eliminate all transit capital dollars, save for the money they’re already on the hook to provide for the projects that have pre-existing funding agreements.

Los Angeles is in a position where they can spend their own money to get started, counting on USDOT to (eventually) follow the law and award the money Congress appropriated. But other smaller cities or cities with more tenuous local funding might not be able to spend millions with the non-binding promise that they’ll eventually be reimbursed.

USDOT is creating an unnecessarily risky situation for cities. If you are one of the cities that’s ready or nearly ready but awaiting funding from USDOT, why trust a non-binding letter from an administration that’s already asked Congress to appropriate zero dollars for your project in the budget?

We’re eager to give credit to FTA when it’s due and they get these projects moving, but that time hasn’t yet arrived.

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.

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.

Hmm…have Atlanta transit and elected leaders realized that this USDOT currently wants to wind down the very program they’re counting on to pay for a big share of these projects? https://t.co/2IfixjXgEy pic.twitter.com/qf9lBVayRv

— Transport. 4 America (@T4America) October 1, 2018

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?