Steve Davis, Author at Transportation For America

About Steve Davis

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

House making final decisions on cuts to TIGER, transit construction & rail this week

With the current federal transportation budget expiring at the end of this month, this week the House is considering a handful of amendments and taking a final vote on the 2018 fiscal year budget. Up for debate are amendments that could improve — or further damage — the House’s already problematic transportation budget for 2018.

With the September 30th deadline rapidly approaching, appropriations committees in both the House and Senate have been debating and setting funding levels for transportation programs for next year, including the discretionary programs that the Trump administration has targeted for cuts (i.e., those not funded by the Highway Trust Fund.)

While the Senate largely rejected the Trump administration’s request for cuts to programs like TIGER, new transit construction, and passenger rail programs (read our detailed breakdown of the current House/Senate bills here), the House’s version of the 2018 budget eliminated TIGER funding and reduced the transit capital program down near levels that would only fund transit projects that already have signed funding agreements in hand.

This week the House is scheduled to consider their final House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) appropriations bill, and there are crucial amendments that could improve the bill by restoring funding for some of these programs — or make the damage far worse.

We’re asking T4America supporters to take action and send a message to their representatives this week urging them to protect and preserve the TIGER competitive grant program, funding for new transit construction, and passenger rail programs that keep towns and cities of all sizes connected to one another. It’s important that the House pass a bill with robust funding for these programs to set their starting point for negotiations with the Senate on the final product.

TAKE ACTION

Read about the amendments that we’ll be watching closely in the tracker below. Feel free to include information on these amendments as you send emails or make phone calls to your reps, and follow along on Twitter @t4america for updates as the debate begins this week. (Some of these amendments may be rejected by the House Rules Committee before they reach the floor — they are expected to only allow a few amendments for full floor consideration.)

Logged-in T4America members can read our detailed summary of the House THUD appropriations bill and vote below.

[member_content]Members can read T4America’s full members-only memo here.[/member_content]

Number	Sponsor	Description	Outcome
7	Maxine Waters (D-CA)	Provides $7.5 billion for the TIGER program.	Ruled out of order
8	Maxine Waters (D-CA)	Provides $550 million for the TIGER program, includes the current TIGER project eligibility criteria, specifically requires the Secretary to award the funds using the 2016 NOFO criteria, and requires that the Secretary distributes the grants 225 days after the enactment of the bill.	Ruled out of order
13	Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)	Provides $500 million for the TIGER program.	Ruled out of order
66	Rod Blum (R-IA)	Provides $200 million for the TIGER program and reduces HUD tenant rental assistance by $200 million as an offset.	Ruled out of order
46	Mark Amodei (R-NV)	Requires the Secretary of Transportation to continue administering the current transit Capital Investment Grant Program and enter into a grant agreement with any Small Starts project that has satisfied the current eligibility requirements.	Ruled out of order
38	Darren Soto (D-FL)	Increases the amount of funding for Small Starts funding by $48 million and decreases funding for intercity passenger rail projects by the same amount as an offset.	Withdrawn
48	Mo Brooks (R-AL)	Eliminates funding for Amtrak's National Network only.	Failed by a vote of 128-293
50	Mo Brooks (R-AL)	Eliminates both the funding for Amtrak's Northeast corridor and Amtrak's National Network.	Ruled out of order
51	Mo Brooks (R-AL)	Eliminates funding for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor only	Ruled out of order
54	Jim Himes (D-CT)	Increases funding for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor account by $30 million and decreases essential air service funding by $30 million as an offset.	Ruled out of order
83	Ted Budd (R-NC)	Eliminates the $900 million allocation for the Amtrak gateway program, increases funding for national New Starts Projects by $400 million and applies savings from the elimination of the TIGER Grant program to deficit reduction.	Failed by a vote of 159-260
78	Al Green (D-TX)	Restores $250,000 in funding for the Department of Transportation Office of Civil Rights and reduces U.S. DOT salary and expenses by $250,000 as an offset.	Ruled out of order

TIGER amendments

T4America supports efforts to fund TIGER because it is a crucial program that gives local governments direct access to federal dollars for innovative projects. TIGER projects are overwhelmingly multimodal and multi-jurisdictional projects – like rail connections to ports, complete streets, passenger rail, and freight improvements – that are often challenging to fund through the traditional, narrow formula programs. However, T4America opposes paying for a TIGER program by cutting other necessary programs like the HUD tenant rental assistance program. Recent appropriations bills show that there is enough resources to sufficiently fund both of these two important programs.

Transit construction grants

T4America supports legislative language that increases the likelihood that the transit capital program will continue operating as it should and also moves future Small Starts projects forward by ensuring these projects get grant agreements when they are ready. T4America opposes proposals to offset funding for Small Starts by taking money from intercity passenger rail.

Passenger rail

T4America opposes eliminating funding for passenger rail, which is crucial to the economy vitality of our nation and communities across our country. The full national network provides mobility options for and acts as an economic catalyst to small and rural communities across the country. For many residents in these communities, the Amtrak connection is their primary way of traveling around the country, especially in areas that are losing Essential Air Service. Similarly, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor is the primary travel option for millions of people traveling that congested corridor every year. Not only does it take cars off our congested roadways, benefiting train and road users alike, but is a huge economic driver for communities located along the Corridor. Cutting funding for Amtrak’s National Network and Northeast Corridor would decrease our nation’s prosperity, harm the economic vitality of communities that Amtrak serves, and greatly lower the amount of personal mobility and freedom that people that use Amtrak currently have. The House of Representatives rightly voted down these amendments two years ago and should do so again.

T4America opposes cutting funding from the Essential Air Service program to pay for the Northeast Corridor. While rail funding is important to the urban communities along the corridor and our nation’s economy as a whole, we need both and T4America opposes amendments that pit one infrastructure priority against another.

Elected officials and local organizations: Support TIGER & public transit funding

Facing the prospect of severe cuts from the Trump administration and Congress, T4America is looking for elected officials and organizations to show their support for investing in smart projects to move goods, move people and support the local economies that our nation’s prosperity is built on.

Updated 9/6/2017 9:00 a.m. — The letter is closed. We’ll publish the final letter and share the signatories soon. Thanks!

Calling all elected officials, local, civic and business leaders, and local, regional or state organizations! Sign a letter urging those currently assembling the federal transportation budget for the upcoming year (FY 2018) to prioritize funding for TIGER competitive grants, new transit construction, and passenger rail programs.

Read the full letter and sign it today — we’re aiming to deliver it before the end of August. Ed note: This letter is intended for organizations and is not open for individuals, other than elected officials at any level.

(letter is closed)

Where do we stand in the budget process?

For these three programs, this simple chart below shows four things: the current funding levels for this year, what the President proposed in his budget earlier this year, and what was recently approved by appropriations committees in the House and the Senate.

	Enacted 2017 levels	President Trump's request for 2018	House 2018 Appropriations	Senate 2018 Appropriations
TIGER Grants	$500 million	$0	$0	$550 million
Transit Capital Grants	$2.4 billion	$0	$1.75 billion	$2.133 billion
Amtrak & passenger rail	$1.495 billion	$795 million (All cuts come from eliminating federal funding for all long-distance routes)	$1.4 billion	$1.6 billion
TOTAL THUD FUNDING	$57.65 billion	$47.4 billion	$56.5 billion	$60.058 billion

As you can see, while committees in the Senate ignored the president’s call to eliminate TIGER and funding for new transit construction outright, those final decisions will be made by Congress as they debate the budget on the floor and then try to reconcile their different versions. (Worth noting: The House proposed eliminating TIGER funding and a barebones budget for keeping in-progress transit projects moving, which means that’s their starting point on negotiations.)

What we’re asking for is for Congress to approve a budget that fully funds the FAST Act, the current transportation authorization, already agreed to by Congress and approved by a bipartisan vote back in 2015.

More background is below:

TIGER

The majority of all federal transportation dollars are awarded to states and metro areas in a way to ensure everyone gets a share, regardless of how they’re going to spend those dollars or how well-conceived their projects are. TIGER operates differently.

The TIGER program has illustrated a productive way to use a small amount of money (about $500 million annually since 2009) to incentivize smarter projects based on their merits. This fiercely competitive program is one of the few ways that local communities of almost any size can directly receive federal dollars for their priority transportation projects. Projects vying for funding compete against each other on their merits to spend the dollars more effectively. They also bring more private, local, or state dollars to the table. Through the first seven rounds, each TIGER dollar brought in 3.5 non-federal dollars, in contrast to federal money for building new roads, for example, which only bring in about 20 state/local cents for each 80 federal cents.

Transit Capital Investment Grants

The Transit Capital Investment Grants program (often broadly referred to as New Starts) supports metro areas of all sizes that are investing their own money in building or expanding transit service.

While making the case for eliminating the program, the Trump Administration recently stated that “localities should fund these localized projects,” but local voters and leaders are doing that already, putting their own skin in the game to meet the growing demand for well-connected locations served by transit. At the ballot box last November alone, voters approved more than $200 billion dollars in tax increases to invest in these projects. But cities of all sizes are counting on the federal government to continue supporting these bottom-up efforts, as they’ve done for decades. Eliminating this program or even just reducing its funding will threaten their economic prospects and their ability to satisfy the booming demand from residents and employers alike for well-connected locations served by transit.

Passenger rail

President Trump proposed cutting Amtrak’s budget nearly in half, with nearly all cuts coming from eliminating long-distance passenger rail service. Funding for the Northeast Corridor would survive, as would the funding for state-supported routes.

But neither chamber heeded this call from the administration: the House approved slightly less funding compared to last year, while the Senate provided the full amount outlined in the FAST Act, allocating competitive funds for safety, state of good repair for the Northeast Corridor, and operating and capital support for restored or new passenger service throughout the rest of the country.

A Colorado city in the Smart Cities Collaborative partners with Uber for a “quicker way to deploy transit to our residents”

Lone Tree, Colorado, one of the 16 members of our Smart Cities Collaborative, successfully launched a new pilot project last week. The small Denver suburb is evolving their existing fixed-route circulator served by four small buses by adding an on-demand component through a partnership with Uber.

Screenshot from the Lone Tree Link’s “How to Ride” video. http://www.lonetreelink.com/link-on-demand

For nearly three years, the city of Lone Tree southeast of Denver has been operating a fixed-route shuttle line every ten minutes on a loop that connects a Denver RTD light rail station with most of the city’s major employers. The Lone Tree Link has been funded through a unique public-private partnership that includes some of those employers. This helps cover the cost and provide the rides for free to customers, but running four buses on a predictable loop and maintaining ten-minute headways also limits the reach of the service.

In an evolution for the service, last week the city launched Lone Tree Link On Demand, which pairs Uber’s technology with the city’s vehicles and drivers to expand that service to more residents and increase accessibility. Now through the end of December anyone can use the Uber app to hail a Lone Tree Link shuttle for a free ride between any two points within the City of Lone Tree.

Screenshot from the Lone Tree Link’s “How to Ride” video. http://www.lonetreelink.com/link-on-demand

“We wanted to extend the reach of the successful circulator,” Seth Hoffman, the city manager of Lone Tree, told T4America last week. For the fixed-route service, “to get the headways we wanted to achieve, we had to keep the initial route narrow in scope. But that meant that it served employers but didn’t really serve retailers or residents. Putting it on demand makes it available to every address in the city.”

The genesis of Lone Tree’s partnership with Uber came about through the Smart Cities Collaborative.

“Our inclusion in the Smart Cities Collaborative got us in the door with Uber,” said Jeff Holwell, the economic development director of Lone Tree, referring to the ‘Industry Day’ portion of the Collaborative. “That connected us with Uber’s Denver office, which is what made this happen.”

“We were really floundering before that meeting,” Hoffman told us, but the connection with Uber at the Collaborative meeting helped them clear the final hurdle.

“Early on, we thought we’d find someone to help us develop our own app and start from scratch. But what we realized based on others’ experiences in the Collaborative, and through our contacts with T4A, was that smartphone real estate is really hard to compete with. If we could find someone that’s doing it and doing it well, that’s a quick path to our pilot.”

This partnership with Uber — which is as much a pilot for the private company as it is for the city — has simplified some of those tech issues. For example, as Holwell noted, adding one of the city’s extra shuttles to the service is “so easy with Uber’s technology — [the service] is as scalable as Uber is and they have incredible technology that we don’t have to create or update.”

The Denver Post covered the launch last week, and included a story that illustrates how the expanded service allows the city to connect residents and visitors to even more destinations in the city of about 10,000 people:

Divya Sheshathri and her friend Mugdha Maneesh used the service on Tuesday to get from Sheshathri’s home on Park Meadows Drive to her husband’s office on the Charles Schwab campus. They used it again to get from Schwab to Park Meadows mall for afternoon shopping. “It’s a very good service,” said Sheshathri, who does not own a car. “Without this it would be very hard to get around. We’re comfortable walking, but not in this hot sun.”

For the pilot, Holwell said that they removed one of the four buses from the fixed route and reassigned it to the on-demand service, allowing the city to better calibrate their service with the need. And the returns have been positive thus far.

“There was an immediate effect on day one,” Holwell said. “We’re already getting more ridership on that one vehicle than it was providing on the fixed route.”

While operating the fixed-route service is still their “bread and butter,” according to Holwell, with an additional RTD light rail station slated to open in 2019 just to the south that will replicate a portion of the fixed route service, shifting all of their resources to an on-demand service could be the roadmap for the future.

“We only operate during weekdays during office hours because it doesn’t make sense to run on weekends through empty office parks,” Holwell said. And even then, the fixed-route Link shuttles are obviously more heavily used at certain times like the start and end of the workday, leaving excess capacity during the day while they carry fewer passengers. With an entirely on-demand service, the city could better utilize their capacity and reduce empty miles traveled, which is one of their broader goals for the new on-demand service.

Lone Tree’s leaders are proactively using technology to become the kind of place they want to be long-term. And finding ways to better utilize their existing resources to serve residents, visitors and employers — whether transit vehicles or roadway space — is what this project is all about.

“Our big picture goal is to leverage the assets that we already have,” Hoffman said. “We can’t build additional lanes to fit more cars, so we’re going to try to use the lanes we have more efficiently. People are taking it to restaurants and taking it shopping, which helps out the local economy. As a medium dense suburban community, the density isn’t there in a way that would make a [larger] fixed route system work efficiently. This is a quicker way to deploy transit to our residents.”

House & Senate reject president’s request to end all federally supported transit construction

Over the last week, House and Senate committees have both passed transportation budget bills for the upcoming year. While the House made a few cuts, the Senate flatly rejected President Trump’s requests to eliminate the TIGER grant program, halt all new federally supported transit construction, and slash passenger rail service.

After a budget deal was struck in May that avoided most cuts for the rest of this year, negotiations begun on the budget for the 2018 fiscal year which starts this October. This means appropriations committees in both the House and Senate setting funding levels for transportation programs for next year, including the discretionary programs that the Trump administration has targeted for cuts (i.e., those not funded by the Highway Trust Fund.)

In the span of the last week, House and Senate appropriations committees & subcommittees have finalized and voted to approve spending bills for the upcoming year. And while the House did make some cuts, the Senate appropriators unanimously repudiated many of the president’s budget requests for transportation and even made an interesting change when it comes to selecting the best TIGER grant applications.

But first, how does each committee’s bill stack up to what the president requested in his budget outline from earlier this year?

Comparing House & Senate 2018 appropriations

	Enacted 2017 levels	President Trump's request for 2018	House 2018 Appropriations	Senate 2018 Appropriations
TIGER Grants	$500 million	$0	$0	$550 million
Transit Capital Grants	$2.4 billion	$0	$1.75 billion	$2.133 billion
Amtrak & passenger rail	$1.495 billion	$795 million (All cuts come from eliminating federal funding for all long-distance routes)	$1.4 billion	$1.6 billion
TOTAL THUD FUNDING	$57.65 billion	$47.4 billion	$56.5 billion	$60.058 billion

Logged-in T4 members can read our House appropriations summary below.

[member_content]T4A members, you can find the full House appropriations summary here. (pdf)[/member_content]

When it comes to the popular TIGER grant program that the Trump administration had targeted for outright elimination, the Senate actually proposed increasing its funding by $50 million.

And they didn’t stop there.

Senate @USDOT funding bill for FY18 requires Trump Admin to give out $550m in #TIGER grants using Obama Admin FY16 selection criteria.

— Jeff Davis (@JDwithTW) July 27, 2017

While the new administration at USDOT had produced their own criteria for how to choose winners for the competitive TIGER grants, the Senate appropriators apparently didn’t approve of them. This language directs USDOT to continue using criteria developed under the last administration to select the winners, the same used for the last eight rounds of TIGER grants. (The Senate Appropriations bill was approved by a bipartisan 31-0 vote, it’s worth noting.)

Though the House did eliminate all funding for TIGER, this is likely unrelated to the president’s request. This has been the norm for the last several years. The House eliminates the funding, the Senate preserves it, and then the Senate number for TIGER has been taken during conference as the House and Senate hammers out the differences. But this doesn’t happen automatically. When/if the appropriations process moves forward, your representatives will need to hear once again your support for TIGER.

Neither House nor Senate appropriators heeded the president’s call to eliminate the federal funding for building shovel-ready transit projects; funding that always gets paired with local or state dollars to make those projects a reality. While the House’s version did make cuts, the Senate provided exactly what’s required to support all of the projects that currently have full-funding grant agreements and are ready to break ground (or are already underway), though the amount is indeed slightly less than the current year’s funding level ($2.13 billion vs $2.4 billion.)

While the House didn’t follow the president’s request to eliminate the program, under no circumstances should a 27 percent cut to transit funding be received as good news.

This cut would result in a handful of transit projects that have local or state dollars already in hand not receiving the full funding they were promised to proceed. And it would delay every other transit project in line behind them waiting for their turn to get a share of this tiny annual amount of federal funding.

We all need to be prepared to continue fighting these cuts to the transit capital grants program. (Get more info on the threats to transit funding here below)

Building public transit back better

About that infrastructure package

Lastly, the appropriations bill included some interesting language about President Trump’s so-called $200 billion infrastructure package. Does the Senate Appropriations Committee know anything about it, and do they believe the stated goals are the right ones?

To date, no such proposal has been submitted to the Committee. While the Committee fully supports additional spending for our nation’s infrastructure, it strongly disagrees with the administration’s assertion that providing federal dollars for infrastructure has created, “an unhealthy dynamic in which state and local governments delay projects in the hope of receiving federal funds.” Without federal investment in infrastructure, particularly in our nation’s highway network and transit systems, the ability to move freight across the country and the free movement of people between states with vastly differing abilities to fund infrastructure would be compromised.

The budget process will continue moving forward, though as with the last several years, Congress is not expected to complete any of these individual FY 2018 appropriation bills before the fiscal year begins on October 1. In all likelihood, they’ll once again have to resort to an omnibus budget or continuing resolution to just keep things moving forward without any agreement to be had on the individual bills.

Announcing the winners of our three creative placemaking grants

Transportation for America is pleased to announce the selection of three communities to receive $50,000 creative placemaking grants through our Cultural Corridor Consortium program. The three winners, from Dothan, AL, Los Angeles, CA, and Indianapolis, IN, all propose to apply artistic and cultural practice to shape transportation investments — positively transforming these places, building social capital, supporting local businesses, and celebrating communities’ unique characteristics.

“After reviewing more than 130 applications from cities and towns representing nearly every state in the country, the demand for new and creative approaches to transportation planning and design is clearly evident,” said Ben Stone, T4America’s director of Arts and Culture. “I’m encouraged by the level of sophistication with which transportation professionals and artists across the country are proposing to collaborate, and I’m thrilled to work with Dothan, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis over the next year.”

These three new projects are made possible by a generous grant from the Kresge Foundation, which also supported the last two years of similar work with groups from Nashville, TN, San Diego, CA, and Portland, OR.

In those three cities, our partners have integrated an approach known as creative placemaking, incorporating arts and culture into the process of transportation in order to elevate the voices of local community members, enabling and empowering true community-led visions for these transportation projects. We’ve witnessed artistic and cultural practice sparking lasting public engagement, facilitating the difficult — but necessary — conversations required to create better projects that more fully serve the needs of these communities and celebrates what makes them culturally vibrant and distinct. (Read more about those three projects here.)

And the three winners this year are no different, proposing creative solutions to address a diverse range of new transportation investments — a highway project, a bus rapid transit project, and a light rail project. We’re excited to support their efforts as they use arts and culture to produce better end products and processes that not only better serve their communities, but reflect their unique culture and heritage.

Here’s a short summary of the three winners, drawn in part from information in their applications.

City of Dothan / Dothan, AL

Dothan, Alabama is a small southern city in lower Alabama (pop. ~68,000) with a retail and medical services hub-market serving over 600,000 that has fallen victim to the adverse impacts of years of sprawl and auto dependency. The vast majority of the area’s recent transportation funds have been utilized solely for roadway construction and expansion, often out at the fringe of this small city. There is no mass transit service, the sidewalks — where they exist — are generally in poor condition, and there are no designated bicycle lanes within the City of Dothan. Within the historical core of Dothan, there are pockets of “extreme poverty” as defined by census tract data.

Compounded by both struggling communities and auto dependency, those who walk or ride bicycles as a regular means of transportation face challenging and dangerous circumstances.

This winning group from the City of Dothan intends to integrate arts and culture into the development of a four-mile segment of the Highway 84 corridor to address mobility, connectivity and aesthetics to tell a story of their history, people, achievements, and future. As they wrote in their application, “the city will have an opportunity to shape a new and exciting development format which places livability at the forefront of how we utilize the built environment. It’s a format that makes possible the use of transportation corridors for alternative means of transportation, promotes active lifestyles, engages visual poetry in the design of infrastructure, streetscapes, and landscapes, and enables mixed-use developments that in-turn generate vibrant communities within the urban context.”

LA Commons / Los Angeles, CA

Hyde Park, one of the oldest communities in Los Angeles, is a working-class neighborhood (median income: $39,600) with relatively low levels of college education and many single parent households in the heart of African American L.A. While the neighborhood today lacks connections to the city’s growing network of rail lines, that will soon change. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (Metro) is hard at work on the new Crenshaw-LAX (C-LAX) transit corridor that will connect Hyde Park (and Crenshaw Boulevard) to the Los Angeles International Airport, scheduled to open in 2019.

These direct connections to the airport and the rest of the city will provide Hyde Park residents with greater mobility, and employment and education opportunities. But in today’s climate where businesses and residents alike are clamoring to be in places that are well-connected to transit, real estate in close proximity to light rail will also become much more attractive to investors.

The real estate market is bigger than any one neighborhood and it’s hard to address the potential negative effects of gentrification block by block, but it’s crucial for local groups to lead the conversations and engagement around this topic. Through this grant, a group known as LA Commons will implement a process of gathering stories, led by a team of artists and local youth, who will ultimately transform them into an artistic intervention with high local resonance.

With Metro’s vision to create “transit-oriented communities” (TOCs), an approach to development focused on compact, walkable and bikeable places in a community context (rather than focusing on just a single development parcel), integrated with transit, it’s critical to foster a community-based response to such investment during early planning phases that aligns with and highlights the unique assets and identity of the area. Using arts and culture, LA Commons will be a part of crafting these transit oriented communities around the new station (TOCs).

Transit Drives Indy / Indianapolis, IN

Indianapolis is hamstrung by an inadequate transit system that not only poorly serves those who depend on it, but makes talent retention and attraction a challenge for the region’s business community. According to a Brookings Institution report profiling transit in the U.S.’s top 100 metro areas, Indianapolis is the 14th largest city, yet boasts only the 83rd largest bus fleet, and t he majority of riders experience an average 60-minute wait time.

Improving that service has been a top priority for Indianapolis’s business community and many of the city’s elected, civic and faith-based leaders, who recognize that investing in transportation options is vital both for connecting low-income workers to economic opportunity and for the competition for talented workers and new businesses. And their new transit expansion plan, paid for by voters through an income tax increase approved at the ballot last November, will deliver a 70 percent increase in frequency and extend hours of operation s, while also starting the buildout of an impressive bus rapid transit network to connect yet more neighborhoods and people to opportunity.

As a coalition of businesses, organizations, and individuals whose collective-impact mission is to engage and educate around public transit, Transit Drives Indy, the winning applicant, aims to encourage, monitor, and facilitate the implementation of the new transit plan.

Transit Drives Indy sees an enormous opportunity to create a new culture of public transit in Indianapolis. Their primary strategy with this grant is to activate artists, communities, and arts partners through a multi-year creative placemaking program that integrates the arts into the design and implementation of the Marion County Transit Plan, specifically the 2019 opening of the Red Line, the first of the three planned all-electric bus rapid transit corridors.

We’re eager to get to work with these three communities and are looking forward to sharing stories of their progress. Stay tuned here at t4america.org to read more about them as their projects unfold over the coming year.

Our Smart Cities Collaborative rolls on as cities get down to the nuts and bolts

During the third meeting of our Smart Cities Collaborative in Miami-Dade County, FL, earlier in June, our 16 member cities continued working to develop projects that harness innovation and technology to solve their transportation challenges.

We’re just past the halfway mark of the yearlong Smart Cities Collaborative we launched last fall in partnership with Sidewalk Labs. And, thanks to support from the Knight Foundation, The Miami Foundation, and Miami-Dade County, teams from all 16 cities gathered in person for the third time to discuss their pilot projects, meet with new mobility vendors, and continue collaborating with each other as they seek to leverage new technologies to improve mobility and quality of life in their communities.

In Miami, we turned the focus back on the cities and devoted a full day to each city sharing a ten-minute presentation on their particular pilot project and action plan.

With seven months of work under their belts at this point, cities have a wealth of information to share and were eager to interact and learn from each other. Whether designing an automated vehicle pilot, experimenting with mobility hubs or improving first- and last-mile connectivity to transit, every city shared their progress and their upcoming plans. Other cities then asked questions, shared similar experiences and provided constructive criticism to sharpen those pilot projects.

In a world chock-full of conferences focused on passively listening to others discuss emerging trends, the Collaborative creates a venue for cities to actively cooperate and learn from one other in a focused way. And this full day of presentations was a golden opportunity for cities to do so.

Their presentations showed us not just the outcomes they’re driving towards, but also some of the challenges they’re facing as they design and implement their projects.

One of those challenges is an ongoing struggle to develop productive partnerships with the private sector. When it comes to private companies, up to this point in the Collaborative, we’ve tried to create an environment that’s largely been free of vendors and products so cities can talk openly and determine their goals first.

But over the past few months, cities have expressed their desire to better understand the benefits and consequences of specific technologies and transportation models, how vendors operate and what their real operational capacity is and how they can craft agreements that serve their outcomes. We’ve also heard from the private sector that cities often don’t know what they want; and that they [vendors] struggle to understand government structures and processes and are frustrated by often slow and difficult procurement processes.

In an effort to bridge this gap and serve both sides’ needs, we organized an “industry day” with representatives from leading mobility and data companies like Sidewalk Labs, Uber, Cubic, Urban Insights, Ford, Via and more. More than a dozen companies joined us to discuss how they could work together to achieve shared outcomes and collaboratively shape the future of transportation.

Instead of listening to another pitch deck or panel discussion, we were determined to cultivate intimate and productive conversations. To foster strong relationships between participants and vendors, we organized rotating, small groups comprised of a single company meeting with just 3-4 participants, providing a setting for them to speak openly and honestly about their respective struggles and identify where common solutions can be developed.

One city participant shared that they had a “fascinating discussion with a [private] firm about the challenges of innovating within a bureaucracy.” And another participant valued the ability to have a discussion with the vendor at the same time as other cities, describing it as a “great opportunity to engage with a bunch of companies at once and learn about each other’s desires and challenges.“

The vendors also relished the opportunity to “meet in the middle” with these cities. Sidewalk Labs, our partners in the Collaborative, participated in the industry day as well. “We benefit from understanding the real-world challenges and use cases that cities wrestle with on a daily basis, and public agencies can benefit from the technology and development capacity of their private-sector partners,” Rohit Aggarwala, the co-head of labs for Sidewalk Labs, told us after the meeting. “The best outcomes are going to occur when cities and technologists meet in the middle to address tough problems.”

—

Last summer as we launched, calling this yearlong project a “Collaborative” was an aspirational term. Almost seven months after a roomful of strangers gathered in a Minneapolis hotel and worked to break the ice in our first meeting, those same city leaders walked into a meeting room at Florida International University, greeting each other by first names with warm handshakes, catching up on the progress being made across the country and making extracurricular plans to talk further.

While it’s worthwhile to see these former strangers getting along, what really matters is how they’ve begun to treat their peers from other cities as extensions of their own teams, almost like extra staff for their own city — certainly an added benefit in a time of strained local resources. They’ve leveraged others’ knowledge, weighed in on each others’ projects, and learned from the progress (and mistakes!) made by other cities.

With everything moving and changing so fast, the decisions these cities are making will go a long way toward shaping the smart city movement overall, making their individual efforts more valuable as part of a whole to make all of our cities more affordable, connected, enjoyable, and livable places for everyone.

T4America’s creative placemaking work gets another boost from the NEA

T4America is pleased to announce that we’ve received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support our ongoing work to help transportation professionals learn how to engage with artists and design better transportation projects that better reflect and serve local communities.

“The American people are recognized for their innovative spirit and these grants represent the vision, energy, and talent of America’s artists and arts organizations,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “I am proud of the role the National Endowment for the Arts plays in helping advance the creative capacity of the United States.” This grant comes from the NEA’s “Our Town” program:

Our Town is the NEA’s signature creative placemaking program that supports partnerships of artists, arts organizations, and municipal government that work to revitalize neighborhoods. This practice places arts at the table with land-use, transportation, economic development, education, housing, infrastructure, and public safety strategies to address a community’s challenges. Creative placemaking highlights the distinctiveness of a place, encouraging residents to identify and build upon their local creative assets.

Within the transportation sector, creative placemaking is an approach that incorporates arts, culture, and creativity to allow for more genuine public engagement in planning processes. This can be a particularly impactful tool for historically underrepresented communities, providing a platform and process to more directly involve community members in the systems that impact them. This produces transportation projects that better serve the needs of the local community and reflect the local culture and heritage of the populations that these projects serve.

For nearly two years, T4America has been on the leading edge of translating this emerging topic area and explaining its benefits to transportation professionals (planners, engineers, local elected officials and others). This grant will help us continue a transition from defining how this approach works in transportation, into actively equipping and training both transportation professionals and artists to work with each other on transportation projects.

Our arts & culture team is currently wrapping up a field scan — a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in transportation — to better understand how and where artists, designers, and cultural workers are collaborating with local governments and community partners to solve transportation challenges.

Through this grant — and incorporating what we learn from the aforementioned field scan — we’ll be partnering with Americans for the Arts to actively train transportation professionals to engage with artists and arts organizations and vice versa, equipping them with the requisite skills to complete creative placemaking projects. (Stay tuned soon for more on this training opportunity.)

We’ll be holding trainings in three competitively selected cities on specific transportation issues, such as improving pedestrian safety or reducing disruptions caused by road construction, all while working to reflect local culture and bolster local capacity. We’re aiming for the trainings to lead to tangible policy improvements that will facilitate more collaborations between artists and transportation professionals. As a product of these trainings, we will also produce web-based toolkits to help others lead similar efforts in their own communities.

“We have increasingly heard both from transportation professionals who are interested in creative placemaking, and from arts and culture practitioners who are eager to deepen their civically engaged practice,” said Ben Stone, Director of Arts and Culture for Smart Growth America/T4America. “These two fields have a lot to gain from working together to better engage communities in transportation planning processes, and this generous grant from the NEA will allow us to help make that happen.”

Avoiding displacement while making a vital Nashville corridor function better for everyone

As one of the fastest growing regions in the country, Nashville needs to make some intentional decisions about its future. Nolensville Pike, an auto-oriented corridor ripe for infill development running south out of the city, is ideally situated to meet the booming demand for more housing and small business space close to the urban core. But doing so without careful planning could displace the unique immigrant communities and long-time residents that have been living there for years.

Download the full report.

This week, in partnership with Conexión Américas in Nashville, T4America released a new report that provides an analysis of this corridor’s assets, challenges to overcome, and a list of recommendations that Metro Nashville decision-makers could use to make the busy corridor safer for everyone and improve the economic prospects of the area while avoiding displacement of existing residents and businesses.

Nashville is booming

The Middle Tennessee region, anchored by the city of Nashville, is one of the fastest growing in the entire country, and there’s immense pressure to accommodate growth within the city while also preserving existing affordable neighborhoods.

One factor driving up prices is that demand for housing is mismatched with available supply. There’s growing, unmet market demand in Nashville for well-connected neighborhoods in close proximity to jobs, services, and good schools that have safe streets for walking or cycling, and/or public transportation. But there are only a small number of neighborhoods that fit this bill regionally, and they are mostly within Nashville’s urban core.

The result is that some of the neighborhoods that are most attractive to new residents are the same neighborhoods that are currently home to those most in need of affordable housing.

This brings us to Nolensville Pike, one of the many spokes connecting downtown Nashville with suburban areas, a typical arterial state highway funneling traffic in and out of the city while also serving adjacent commercial uses and residential neighborhoods.

The road itself is clearly auto-oriented with wide, straight lanes and intermittent sidewalks immediately adjacent to fast-moving traffic that make walking an unpleasant and often dangerous experience. But it’s also filled with traffic lights and scores of local uses that slow down the thru-traffic. As a result, it’s neither fish nor fowl, neither a street nor a road; it’s a street/road “stroad” hybrid that does a poor job of either efficiently connecting two distant places or serving as a framework for creating lasting value and effectively serving local trips. It’s also the anchor of the most diverse area of the city that’s home to the largest number of immigrant families in the region.

Preventing displacement in the corridor

Rather than attempting to prevent new development along Nolensville Pike, which could bring jobs, increase the tax base, and improve quality of life for existing and new residents alike, the goal should be to ensure that improvements to the corridor include housing and commercial opportunities for immigrants, minorities, low-income households, and long-term residents who have called the neighborhood home or operated businesses there for many years.

The corridor possesses numerous assets, like its unmatched cultural diversity, relative affordability, close-in location and available space.

But there are numerous challenges to overcome to improve life on the Pike, including a lack of transportation options, auto-oriented design and land uses, the fact that the existing infrastructure doesn’t serve any of the necessary functions particularly well, and a looming potential for greater displacement.

Redevelopment pressures can already be felt along Nolensville Pike, though not yet to the extent of other parts of the city. As the region continues drawing new residents, Nashvillians new and old will be looking for affordable homes, access to jobs, health care, and strong schools, walkable shopping and entertainment districts, and more alternatives to sitting in traffic. Nolensville Pike could be an important part of meeting that coming demand.

Our detailed analysis offers specific recommendations to help decision-makers in the city and region make the corridor safer for everyone, improve the economic prospects (and equity) of the area, and provide new opportunities for adding housing and jobs — all while avoiding displacement of the vital communities of residents and businesses that call the Pike home.

Now is the time to take proactive measures to prevent displacement and preserve the unique identity of the area, while simultaneously making Nolensville Pike safer for everyone, improving the economic prospects (and equity) of the area, and providing new opportunities to add housing and jobs. By tackling these issues now, before development pressures have driven large-scale business closures or widespread displacement of current residents, the region will have the best chance of seeing its future growth occur in an equitable way, shared by all.

Download the full report (pdf). Our thanks to the Convergence Partnership for their support of this project.

Trump admin’s full budget proposal makes clear their intent to end federal support for transit construction

The Trump administration released their full budget proposal for 2018, ending any possible uncertainty about their belief that highway projects are always inherently in the national interest, transit of any type is explicitly a local concern, and leveraging greater local and state investment in transportation is not a trend to be encouraged.

Flickr photo by Michael Vadon – https://www.flickr.com/photos/80038275@N00/32744150430/

Update (5/24/17): Comments from Seattle added. In the full budget proposal from the White House, released this morning, the administration fleshed out the specifics of their “skinny budget” proposal from back in March. In this longer document that now includes line-item amounts for individual programs, the administration calls to end the TIGER grant program, cut all funding for new transit construction (other than projects that already have federal funding agreements in hand), and terminate the funding for long-distance passenger rail.

[member_content]Logged-in T4America members can view and download our more detailed members-only summary here.[/member_content]

The administration reiterates their belief that transit is just a minor, local concern.

“Future investments in new transit projects would be funded by the localities that use and benefit from these localized projects,” they write, making it clear that they see no benefit in providing grants to cities of all sizes to build new bus rapid transit or rail lines, or expand existing, well-used lines so they can carry more passengers.

Unfortunately, they provide an extremely misguided justification for eliminating this funding.

Several major metropolitan regions have recently passed multi-billion dollar revenue measures to fund transit projects, and the Administration believes that is the most appropriate way to fund transit expansion and maintenance efforts. Localities are better equipped to scale and design infrastructure investments needed for their communities. Several major metropolitan areas, including Denver, Los Angeles, and Seattle, have already begun to move in this direction by asking residents to approve multi-billion dollar bond measures to speed the delivery of highway and transit investments. These regions realize waiting for Federal grant funding is not the most efficient way to meet their local transportation needs.

They’ve taken note of the positive trend of voters approving scores of ballot measures to raise taxes or fees to invest in transit, but have sorely mistaken that trend to mean that federal funding is no longer necessary and that these metro regions can make these ambitious projects happen all on their own.

We were wondering how the local leaders from Seattle, Los Angeles or Denver felt about being used as examples for why federal transit funding is no longer needed, so we reached out and asked a few for their thoughts.

Here’s Denny Zane with Move LA, the organization that led the grassroots effort to pass last year’s successful ballot measure in Los Angeles. (Mr. Zane is also a member of T4America’s Advisory Board.)

It is shocking that the Trump administration would play so fast and loose with such a longstanding and effective local-federal partnership to build transportation infrastructure — and to call out for abuse cities in western states simply because we took that partnership seriously. Yes, we have each gained the support of our local voters — Americans all — for investment in our transportation infrastructure. We were successful in part because we could assure them that our larger, more significant projects like the Wilshire subway, or the Sepulveda pass light rail, or the West Santa Ana light rail would all be good candidates for federal partnerships. Suddenly, without notice, the federal partner wants to pack it in. This is no way to unite the nation.

In Seattle, voters approved over $27 billion for transit at the ballot box last November. Seattle Department of Transportation director Scott Kubly made it clear that those voters were counting on using those dollars to leverage federal transit grants:

We are incredibly disappointed that President Trump’s budget proposal cuts infrastructure funding and is totally out of step with his administration’s rhetoric promising to increase infrastructure investments. He needs to put his money where his mouth is. Seattle voters have done their part. They have stepped up to provide local dollars to leverage federal resources. Our local funds are meant to complement federal investments, not replace them. His proposal slashes important city initiatives. We will work closely with our coalition, community partners and congressional leadership to ensure continued support for the Seattle’s transportation priorities.

In their justification for eliminating all funding for the extremely popular TIGER program, the administration describes all of the benefits as local, and direct the towns, cities or states seeking TIGER grants to other ill-suited federal programs. As we wrote back in March:

The administration blithely suggested in their proposal that local communities instead turn to other programs that are explicitly designed not to meet same needs as TIGER. ‘DOT’s Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Projects grant program, authorized by the FAST Act of 2015, supports larger highway and multimodal freight projects with demonstrable national or regional benefits. This grant program is authorized at an annual average of $900 million through 2020’ Well, sure, but only $100 million of that $900 million in any year can be used on projects that aren’t on the national freight highway network, so if your project is multimodal or otherwise not on a key national highway, you’re probably out of luck.

What about that “big” infrastructure package?

People from across the political spectrum were energized by candidate Trump’s promises to invest in infrastructure; excitement that ramped up after inauguration as Trump continued talking about a $1 trillion infrastructure package. Aside from the dissonant and jarring promises to invest in infrastructure while proposing to take an axe to vital transportation programs that support smart investments today, these promises have been slowly downgraded.

After starting with the mind-bending $1 trillion number, it was soon revealed to be an anticipated $1 trillion in total economic benefit (or combined investment/financing, including private dollars, depending on who was being quoted) with a total direct investment of around $200 billion. That’s nothing to sneeze at though — $200 billion would be a little over four times current federal surface transportation spending in any given year.

Today, those promises are further laid bare by this budget, as the $200 billion is revealed to be the total amount invested over ten years, with just a paltry $5 billion extra included in 2018. (The amounts are reported to be higher in later years.)

$5 billion is just 0.5 percent of 1 trillion dollars. Though if you want to be as charitable as possible and go with $200 billion as the number for the total direct federal investment, then 2.5 percent of the administration’s promised infrastructure investment is included in their budget for this upcoming year.

“Our nation’s infrastructure serves as the backbone for economic growth and prosperity,” We said back in March when the preliminary budget outline was released. Few details have changed since, and just like the outline did, this full budget “falls short of prioritizing investment in the local communities that are the basic building block of the national economy.”

UPDATE: Geoff Anderson, President and CEO of Smart Growth America, issued a statement on the budget. (T4America is a program of Smart Growth America.)

This budget ignores why communities need federal community development and transportation programs. It’s not just that they need money or innovative tools — which, for the record, they do. They also need a reliable partner who can support their work, not austerity measures that punish them for taking action.

If the federal government quits being that partner — which this budget absolutely implies — it’s going to cause lasting damage to American communities at a time when they need greater security and opportunity, not less. Trump promised these very things, but this budget is a reversal on that promise. We urge Congress to reject this austerity budget and create a budget that reinvest and rebuilds America for the future.

Read the full statement here.

Avoiding a government shutdown, Congress moves to preserve TIGER and transit funding — for now

In a budget deal to fund the government through the end of September, Congress partially accommodated the President’s requests for more defense and security spending, but ignored his requests to eliminate funding for TIGER, new transit construction, and other programs vital for building strong local communities.

Congress agreed on a budget to fund the government through the rest of the current fiscal year, but they did so by increasing spending nearly across the board, avoiding any hard questions about what to cut to make room for the President’s desired defense increases (or tax cuts), performing some fiscal wizardry to keep the bill from scoring as if it won’t exceed the budget caps previously agreed to by Congress several years ago.

Though the President had urged Congress to make deep cuts to crucial transportation programs immediately this year, Congress responded to what they heard from state and local leaders of all stripes (and many of you!) and did not eliminate the competitive TIGER grant program or the funding that’s paired with local or state dollars to build or expand new public transit service.

“We applaud the appropriators in Congress for listening to the business leaders, local elected officials and advocates from across the country and protecting funding for these programs that are vital to the health and prosperity of their communities,” said T4America Interim Director Beth Osborne. “But we also know that this budget deal was underway before last November’s election and there will be real pressure in the coming months to make these same cuts when Congress considers the 2018 budget later this year.”

[member_content]T4America members, you can read our full summary of the 2017 appropriations bill, which includes the list of transit projects Congress recommends to FTA for funding this year.

USDOT 2017 Appropriations bill summary[/member_content]

Overall, transportation programs are mostly funded at levels consistent with what’s in the FAST Act, though Congress actually appropriated more ($2.4b) for transit capital construction than was proposed by the FAST Act for this year ($2.3b). They allocated the full $500 million for a ninth round of TIGER grants, though it’s unclear if USDOT will be able to move the process along fast enough to make grant awards this calendar year.

Despite the President’s previous request to completely halt the pipeline of transit construction projects immediately, the bill urges the Federal Transit Administration to keep it moving forward by writing checks for the transit projects that already have grant agreements, and — most importantly — to set aside funding this year for the scores of projects expected to sign grant agreements this year, like planned bus rapid transit projects in Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Everett (WA), and Kansas City, among many others.

This does not mean that the pipeline of transit projects is safe and back to normal — far from it. For the projects without signed grant agreements, they must still obtain them before any funds can be received, and there have been rumors that the Trump Administration would simply stop signing them — whether Congress allocates money for them or not.

Secondly, this budget only covers the rest of the year through September 30. President Trump’s blueprint for the 2018 budget is what made all the headlines a few weeks ago, in which he proposed zeroing out these vital programs. Congress largely avoided the tough questions by making Trump’s requested defense increases but not making other equivalent cuts to pair with them. How will Congress respond during negotiations on the 2018 budget?

We’ll call on you again to hold their feet to the fire then, but for now, we urge you to send all of your representatives a message of thanks for rallying on a bipartisan agreement to protect the transportation funding that local communities depend on.

Congress is expected to pass the bill before the current continuing budget resolution (CR) expires on Friday (May 5.)

California prioritizing repair, transit investments, and walking & biking with new gas tax increase

California could be the next state to raise new revenues to invest in transportation, and unlike most states doing so since 2012, CA lawmakers are prioritizing repair and pledging billions toward transit, safe streets for walking and biking, and an overall multimodal approach to solving the state’s transportation challenges.

Updated (4/7/16): The Senate voted 27-11 and the Assembly voted 54-26 to approve the measure on Thursday night. It is expected to be signed soon by Gov. Brown.

A bill (SB 1) currently before the California legislature would raise $52 billion in new transportation revenue by raising the gasoline tax — unchanged in 23 years — by 12 cents (to 30 cents per gallon), increasing diesel taxes by 20 cents (to 36 cents per gallon) and creating a new annual fee on almost all vehicles based on value. The bill has the strong backing of Gov. Jerry Brown (D). It is being considered by the Senate on Thursday and could be approved in a matter of days. The bill requires a two-thirds supermajority to pass and, though Republicans have uniformly opposed the bill, Democrats hold this majority in both chambers, but only barely.

The bill is projected to raise $52 billion in total over the next decade, directing $7.5 billion to transit capital and operations, putting $1 billion into the state’s Active Transportation Fund and reserving $4 billion expressly for bridge repair. (Interesting fact: if you sort a list of the entire country’s 60,000-plus deficient bridges by traffic volume carried, California claims more than the first 100 spots.)

The multimodal approach to solving the state’s mobility challenges, a heavy focus on prioritizing repair and maintenance, the commitment to supporting public transit and local priority projects, and dedicating about two percent of all new revenues to making it safer and more convenient to walk or bike set California’s approach apart from other states that have advanced legislative packages over the last few years.

It’s worth noting that numerous environmental groups are opposing the bill because of a provision, added late in the process with little debate, which would make it difficult for air quality regulators to create stiffer rules down the road to require cleaner trucks. Others support the overall package while urgently pressing legislators to remove this truck-related provision. (This Streetsblog CA piece fleshes out more of the details about the opposition.)

On the flip side of this equation, part of the tax increase on diesel trucks would be directed into a multimodal freight program, creating a mechanism to tax a negative externality (diesel emissions) and steer a portion of those revenues into cleaner, multimodal projects to move freight.

The bill is currently before the state Senate, and could be considered by the full Assembly in the days ahead. Read about other states that have raised new transportation revenues in the past few years, and find out more about our network for state advocates and elected leaders interested in doing the same.

162 organizations and local business and elected leaders from 30 states urge Congress to support TIGER & public transit funding

162 organizations, including elected state/local officials and chambers of commerce, sent a letter to House and Senate appropriators today urging Congress to continue investing in smart projects to move goods, move people and support the local economies that our nation’s prosperity is built on.

The letter, signed by 19 local elected officials, 9 state legislators, 9 chambers of commerce and over 120 other organizations, urges those currently assembling the federal transportation budget for the rest of 2017 and 2018 to prioritize funding for both TIGER competitive grants and Transit Capital Investment Grants — programs that have been targeted for outright elimination in President Trump’s budget requests for 2017 and beyond.

The majority of all federal transportation dollars are awarded to states and metro areas by relatively simple formulas that ensure everyone gets a share, regardless of how they’re going to spend those dollars or how well-conceived their projects are. Yet, through the TIGER grant program, the federal government has found a smart way to use a small amount of money (about $500 million annually since 2009) to incentivize the best projects possible. This fiercely competitive program is one of the few ways that local communities of almost any size can directly receive federal dollars for their priority transportation projects. Projects vying for funding compete against each other on their merits to ensure that each dollar is spent in the most effective way possible and through the first seven rounds, each TIGER dollar has brought 3.5 non-federal dollars to the table.

The Transit Capital Investment Grants program supports metro areas of all sizes investing their own money in building or expanding transit service. While making the case for eliminating the program, the Trump Administration recently stated that “localities should fund these localized projects,” but local voters and leaders are doing that already, putting their own skin in the game to meet the growing demand for well-connected locations served by transit. At the ballot box last November alone, voters approved more than $200 billion dollars in tax increases to invest in these projects. But they’re counting on the federal government to continue supporting these bottom-up efforts, as they’ve done for decades.

Indianapolis, Albuquerque, Atlanta, Seattle, Kansas City, Minneapolis and a plethora of other towns and cities have already raised their own money to invest in building new transit service. Eliminating this program will threaten their economic prospects and their ability to satisfy the booming demand from residents and employers alike for well-connected locations served by transit.

Here’s the full text of the letter:

Dear Chairmen Cochran, Frelinghuysen, Collins, and Diaz-Balart and Ranking Members Leahy, Lowey, Reed, and Price:

As you prepare the omnibus Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 appropriations bill and the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill for FY2018, we write to respectfully request that you fund the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program at or above FY16 level of $500 million and that you fully fund the Transit Capital Investment Grants program at the FAST Act authorization level of $2.3 billion.

Local and regional governments generate nearly three quarters of U.S. gross domestic product, represent two- thirds of the nation’s population, and account for 95 percent of all public transportation passenger miles traveled. Yet, our local jurisdictions receive less than 10% of the federal highway program’s funding.

The incredibly popular TIGER grant program is one of the only ways that local communities can apply for and secure funds from the federal government for priority transportation projects. The TIGER competition spurs innovation, leverages federal funding far greater than what’s available through formula programs, and awards funding to projects that provide a high-return on investment.

Year after year, the demand for TIGER far exceeds the amount of funding available. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) received 627 applications requesting more than $10.1 billion in funding, which was 20 times the amount available. Since its creation in 2009, TIGER has made critical investments in multimodal projects in every state in the nation, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

Likewise, the transit Capital Investment Grants program (i.e. New Starts, Small Starts, Core Capacity) is the federal government’s primary resource for supporting locally-planned, major transit capital investments. The program has facilitated the creation of new or extended public transportation systems across the country.

Under this program, FTA awards grants on a competitive basis for large projects that cannot traditionally be funded from a transit agency’s annual formula funds, such as new fixed guideway systems, including heavy rail (subway), light rail, streetcars, or bus rapid transit. Projects are encouraged to leverage public-private-partnerships (P3) to participate in a streamlined grant process. Recognizing the importance of this program, Congress increased its authorization by $400 million in the FAST Act.

Both the TIGER and Capital Investment Grants programs complement DOT’s traditional formula-based programs. Both programs provide unique, cost-effective, and innovative solutions that leverage private, state, and local investment to solve complex transportation opportunities and spur economic development.

While we are writing today about the TIGER and CIG programs in particular, we also want to make clear that these programs should not be paid for by significant cuts in other essential discretionary domestic programs. The Trump administration’s budget proposal falls short in prioritizing investment in the local communities that are the basic building block of our national economy. We urge Congress to uphold its promise to the American people and reinvest in our nation’s communities.

Thank you for considering these critical programs, which invest in our nation’s infrastructure, create jobs for American workers, and boost our regional economies.

Sincerely,

See the full letter (pdf) for the full list of organizations and officials that signed the letter.

Trump admin moving to end transit construction program and TIGER immediately

New documents released this week by the Trump administration make it clear that 2018 won’t be soon enough to eliminate funding for future transit construction and TIGER competitive grants — they want them gone now, in 2017.

After months of promises to invest a trillion dollars in infrastructure, President Trump’s 2018 budget request proposed eliminating the popular TIGER competitive grant program and ending the support for helping cities of all sizes build new transit lines, among other cuts.

This week, it’s become clear that the 2018 fiscal year (which begins this October) isn’t soon enough for the administration — they are now asking Congress to make most of the same cuts and changes in (the rest of) this year’s budget for 2017.

“The Administration proposes to suspend additional projects from entering the [transit capital grants] program, and believes localities should fund these localized projects.”

That’s what the Office of Management and Budget is requesting for the federal transit capital construction program, according to Jeff Davis’ Eno Transportation Weekly. That’s paired with a request to cut funding for transit construction by about $400 million for the rest of this fiscal year. Unlike the President’s recent proposal for the next fiscal year (2018), these cuts are proposed for the budget that Congress is negotiating now to keep the government operating through October.

You can help save these vital programs
We’re looking for national, state and local organizations to demonstrate their support for fully funded TIGER and transit Capital Investment Programs. Sign onto T4America’s nationwide support letter by Friday, March 31st.

Budget background: The government is operating under a continuing budget resolution (CR) because Congress failed to pass individual spending bills in late 2016 for this fiscal year. They instead passed a single bill to keep the government functioning at 2016 funding levels for most programs. Congress must produce budgetary legislation of some kind before the current CR expires on April 28, or run the risk of once again shutting down the government.

What does this mean for transit?

For one, it means $400 million less available this year to distribute to the ready-to-go transit projects that the federal government has already promised to fund by signing a full-funding grant agreement (FFGA). That means some unknown number of transit projects that were initially recommended to receive funding from FTA this year would be left out.

Secondly, suspending the pipeline means that transit projects in cities like Indianapolis, Tempe, Albuquerque, Ft. Lauderdale and dozens of others would be at the front of a line that would not move again under President Trump. Some of these cities expected to move ahead this year and were even recommended for funding by the Federal Transit Administration. Many have already pledged millions of their own dollars or have started development, engineering or construction work on projects that are on the cusp of receiving a federal grant to help complete it. And despite the administration’s belief that “localities should fund these localized projects,” the federal government funds interstate interchanges, highway widenings and road construction projects that are inherently local in nature almost every single day. There’s nothing more “local” about a transit project at all.

The administration is not satisfied to see the pipeline of transit projects shut down in 2018 — they want it shut down as soon as possible, in whatever budget Congress produces to carry us through the rest of this year.

What’s the news for TIGER?

It could mean the end of TIGER grants this year, with no grants awarded in 2017 at all.

CQ Roll Call reports that congressional housing/transportation appropriators are being asked to cut $2.7 billion from their budget for the rest of this year and eliminate $500 million from the TIGER program for this year — the entirety of this year’s funding. In years past, spring had been the time of year when USDOT would typically open the application period for this year’s batch of awards, with the aim to award TIGER grants sometime this fall. Though TIGER is technically funded for this year, with no certainty about a budget for the second half of the year from April to October, USDOT won’t make funding available that could be rescinded by Congress. And this is exactly why.

If you represent an organization of some kind, sign onto T4America’s nationwide support letter for these programs by Friday, March 31st.

New Amtrak president supports the return of Gulf Coast passenger rail

Though overshadowed by the President’s budget proposal to make deep cuts to passenger rail, there’s encouraging momentum for the opposite, including a commitment by Amtrak to restore long-distance service to the Gulf Coast, and the broader freight-dominated rail industry speaking out for the expansion of passenger rail service.

All aboard? The future of federal passenger rail funding. Between the President’s budget proposal & Congress’ appropriations process, what possibilities are on the table, and what do local advocates need to know and do in the days ahead? Join us Tuesday, March 28 at 2 p.m. Eastern as T4America experts and guests discuss the scenarios, the potential impacts for passenger rail and steps you can take to support the important projects in your community.

Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on all aspects of the Gulf Coast’s transportation network in 20o5. After months and years of rebuilding, including a five-month rebuilding effort of the CSX-owned freight rail line (also previously used by passenger trains) to reconnect the region, every one of the region’s transportation modes was eventually restored, except for the passenger rail service from New Orleans to Florida along those same CSX tracks.

There’s been an incredible grassroots movement afoot to bring this service back, which we got to see firsthand on a special inspection train about a year ago, where we were greeted by thousands of residents eager to bring passenger rail back as a viable transportation option. It’s due in part to the work of the Southern Rail Commission, a Congressionally established tri-state rail compact with members appointed by the governors of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

Amtrak’s new president has taken notice:

New @Amtrak CEO letting Gulf Coast states know he’s on board w/relaunching NOLA-Florida route. https://t.co/NtahOlcK8m

— Lauren Gardner (@Gardner_LM) March 3, 2017

In this letter sent to the Southern Rail Commission a few weeks ago, Amtrak President Wick Moorman — a freight rail veteran as the former CEO of Norfolk Southern — outlined the railroad’s commitment to restoring passenger rail service to the Gulf Coast corridor, connecting New Orleans to Orlando.

It is thanks to the Southern Rail Commission that the Gulf Coast project is now approaching realization. Amtrak has supported the project throughout, and will continue to do so as we move through the process to inaugurate the service together. We are committed to operating both the long-distance and corridor services on the Gulf Coast route as soon as the necessary funding can be arranged, and the necessary agreements are in place to implement the service.

While the President’s budget proposed to chip away at the idea of a national system by terminating funding for long-distance passenger rail service and preserving funding for the Northeast Corridor — bifurcating rail funding — there’s a lot of momentum for making new investments in rail overall, including passenger rail.

Just a few days after the above Amtrak letter, the CEO of the Association of American Railroads, an industry group largely dominated by freight railroads, sent a letter to President Trump about their big-picture priorities when it comes to any big infrastructure package, and what’s one of their priorities?

A key focus of any infrastructure package will include adequate support for underfunded commuter and passenger railroads. Freight railroads back this, particularly if done correctly, infusing direct and indirect support, including streamlined permitting and public-private partnerships where the project provides significant public benefits or meets public needs. With the population steadily increasing, there is a unique opportunity to realize the power of intercity passenger service and moving people via train generally. As Amtrak CEO Wick Moorman stated on Capitol Hill in February, this means upgrading assets such as cars, locomotives, bridges and tunnels. Boosted support for Amtrak and other passenger services means greater economic opportunities for workers, including professional service personnel that use these rail networks to conduct business, as well as those that construct and manufacture related equipment and infrastructure.

The Southern Rail Commission agreed:

Thank you @AAR_FreightRail Infrastructure should include support for underfunded commuter & passenger railroads https://t.co/Wm9NHxLcOd pic.twitter.com/0xVOFRg0DZ

— Southern Rail Cmsn (@SouthernRailCms) March 6, 2017

Seven things to know about President Trump’s budget proposal

There is no good news for transportation in President Trump’s first budget request to Congress. We take a look beyond the headlines and unpack seven things you need to know about this first salvo in the annual budget-making process.

[member_content]T4A MEMBERS: You can read and download your full members-only analysis of the budget here.[/member_content]

The short version is that President Trump’s first budget request for Congress is a direct assault on smart infrastructure investment that will do damage to cities and towns of all sizes. After months of promises to invest a trillion dollars in infrastructure, the first official action taken by the Trump administration on the issue is a proposal to eliminate the popular TIGER competitive grant program, cut the funding that helps cities of all sizes build new transit lines, and terminate funding for the long-distance passenger rail lines that rural areas depend on.

Tell your representatives that this proposal is a non-starter and appropriators in Congress should start from scratch.

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That’s the short version. Here’s a longer one with seven things worth knowing more about:

1) It ends the program for building new transit lines or service, putting the screws to local communities that have raised their own dollars to build vital projects.

Indianapolis would be facing the loss of more than $70 million in anticipated federal grants for their Red Line bus rapid transit project under this budget. Graphic courtesy of Indy Connect

This budget eliminates future funding for building new public transportation lines and service, threatening the ability of local communities of all sizes to satisfy the booming demand for well-connected locations served by transit. While the handful of projects with full federal funding grant agreements (FFGAs) already in hand would (theoretically) be allowed to proceed, all other future transit projects would be out of luck. The budget proposes to phase out future funding for what’s called the transit capital investment grants program — more informally referred to as New Starts, Small Starts and Core Capacity grants. As we said in our statement, it’s a “slap in face to the millions of local residents who have raised their own taxes, with the full expectation that [their funds] would be combined with the limited pool of federal grants, to complete their priority transportation projects.”

For example, here’s a list of eight transit projects we quickly identified that have already raised or set aside a share of the local dollars required and were recommended by the Federal Transit Administration for funding in 2017 — though they were just short of the last step of receiving a federal grant agreement.

Sacramento, CA — Streetcar extension
Expecting $74.9 million Small Starts grant to match $65 million in various city and county funding.
Kansas City, MO — Bus rapid transit
Expecting $30 million Small Starts grant to match to match $12 million in city and $3 million in regional sales tax funds.
Tempe, AZ — Streetcar
Expecting $74.9 million Small Starts grant in FY17 which would match $76 million in local sales tax funds approved by Maricopa voters in 2004. (Local voters have been paying local sales tax for 13 years in expectation of federal funding to build this project.)
Ft. Lauderdale, FL — Streetcar extension
Expecting $61 million Small Starts grant in FY17. Would match $48 million in combined city and county financing, including local gas tax, special district property assessment, and county general funds.
Indianapolis, IN — Red Line bus rapid transit project
Expecting $74.9 million Small Starts grant to pair with the income tax increase that voters just approved in November 2016 at the ballot box
Minneapolis, MN — SW Light Rail Line
Expecting $887 million New Starts grant in FY17 to cover 50 percent of the project. The other 50 percent would be covered locally. Local and regional entities (Counties Transit Improvement Board and Met Council) already stepped up in September 2016 and increased their commitment after the state backed out of their funding commitment to the project.
Albuquerque, NM — Bus rapid transit
Expecting $69 million Small Starts grant to match $25 million in various local (city and county) funds
Lynwood, WA — Sound Transit light rail extension
Expecting $1.172 billion New Starts grant, matched by the same amount of voter-approved, local sales and motor vehicle taxes. Local funds were approved by the Sound Transit 2 referendum in Nov 2008; voters just expressed their continued commitment by approving additional transit funding in the successful Sound Transit 3 referendum in Nov 2016.

Aside from these eight, there are at least 40 other transit projects in other various stages of development — engineering, planning, etc. — that will be left completely on their own with no future federal dollars for transit construction. (Yonah Freemark has a good list of them in this post from The Transport Politic.)

Practically speaking, it’s unclear how the administration would even go about phasing out the program. It would require several years of keeping spending level just to honor the federal government’s current obligations. Right now, there’s about $6 billion committed to the projects that have federal grant agreements. With over $2 billion budgeted annually for this program over the last few years, it would take almost three years of continuing current funding for the program just to clear those projects and end the program.

2) It eliminates the TIGER program, and then recommends unsuitable alternatives to fund those sorts of local projects

The proposal completely eliminates the fiercely competitive TIGER program, which is one of the few ways that local communities of almost any size can directly receive federal dollars for their priority transportation projects and one of the most fiscally responsible transportation programs administered by USDOT.

View our interactive map of winners through all rounds of TIGER

The federal government has found a smart way to use a small amount of money to incentivize the best projects possible through TIGER, as well as encourage local investment —TIGER projects brought 3.5 other dollars to the table for each federal dollar awarded through the first five rounds. And the competition for funds is in stark contrast to the majority of all federal transportation dollars that are awarded via formulas to ensure that all states or metro areas get a share, regardless of how they’re going to spend those dollars. Unlike the old system of congressional earmarks, the projects vying for funding compete against each other on their merits to ensure that each dollar is spent in the most effective way possible.

In response to the elimination of the TIGER program, the administration blithely suggested in their proposal that local communities instead turn to other programs…that are explicitly designed not to meet same needs as TIGER. “DOT’s Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Projects grant program, authorized by the FAST Act of 2015, supports larger highway and multimodal freight projects with demonstrable national or regional benefits. This grant program is authorized at an annual average of $900 million through 2020.”

Well, sure, but only $100 million of that $900 million in any year can be used on projects that aren’t on the national freight highway network, so if your project is multimodal or otherwise not on a key national highway, you’re probably out of luck. And the FASTLANE competitive grant program is wholly limited to freight projects.

There’s a reason that TIGER remains so popular with local communities even though around 95 percent of applicants lose out on funding — it’s one of the only ways to fund the multimodal projects that are difficult to fund through conventional, narrowly-focused federal programs. The replacements suggested by the administration aren’t appropriate and don’t come close to funding the same sort of projects or meeting the needs as TIGER.

3) It terminates the funding for long-distance passenger rail that keeps rural communities connected.

While preserving funds for the northeast rail corridor, it ‘terminates’ funding for long-distance passenger rail service. One of the things we were nervous about in the FAST Act was the way it started to separate out the northeast passenger rail corridor from the rest of the system. Bifurcating the funding for our rail network starts to chip away at the idea of a national system and will hit rural communities especially hard.

It’s jarring to read in the administration proposal that the intent of reducing Amtrak funding is to “focus resources on the parts of the passenger rail system that provide meaningful transportation options within regions,” especially when you consider that “providing meaningful transportation options” is precisely what the Gulf Coast communities trying to restore passenger rail service wiped out by Hurricane Katrina are trying to do.

Combined with the proposal to end the Essential Air Service program, rural communities could be more disconnected than ever before.

During last year’s Gulf Coast Inspection Train, hundreds of Gulfport, MS residents came out to voice their support for bringing passenger rail service back to the coast to provide them with “meaningful transportation options.”

4) This budget indicates that the much-discussed infrastructure package — if it ever even materializes — would be hostile to the approach taken by the above programs.

Are you one of the people who are still optimistic that a big infrastructure package from the President would provide robust funding for the types of projects that were just slashed in the budget? Let Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, disabuse you of that notion. When asked about the transportation programs that were cut or eliminated, Mulvaney said, “we believe those programs to be less effective than the package we’re currently working on.”

I.e., they don’t think that the approach taken by TIGER, New Starts, etc. is an effective one, and they’re going to go in a different direction in any big infrastructure package, and these cuts reflect the transportation priorities of the administration.

5) It suggests a performance-based approach while delaying the rules on new performance measures

This is a smaller point, but the administration’s rhetoric on better-performing federal agencies doesn’t sync up with their actions thus far. From the proposal:

The Administration will take an evidence-based approach to improving programs and services—using real, hard data to identify poorly performing organizations and programs. We will hold program managers accountable for improving performance and delivering high-quality and timely services to the American people and businesses.

Meanwhile, new performance measures (like the new congestion rule) that could actually improve the effectiveness of federal transportation spending were put on hold as the new administration took office, to say nothing of the fact that competitive programs like TIGER are far more performance-driven than the simple formula grants that are handed out like blank checks to states regardless of how they’ve spent that money in the past.

6) It cuts scores of other programs that help support strong local economies.

As our parent org Smart Growth America said last week, the transportation-related cuts are just one aspect of a budget that is “a broadside against the things that make communities work.” It takes the axe to HUD’s Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), stormwater grant programs, USDA’s Rural Development Program, and scores of other programs that support redevelopment and strong local economies.

7) It’s important, but this is only the starting point for the budget process

Presidents make their request, but appropriators in Congress determine the budget and House appropriators will soon go to work on producing their own. From a Capitol Hill transportation reporter:

General Congressional GOP reaction to Trump’s budget: Thanks big guy but we’ll take it from here. Congress makes the budget.

— Tanya Snyder (@TSnyderDC) March 16, 2017

That said, appropriators in the House or Senate could propose some of the same cuts. After all, it was Congress in 2012 that tried to eliminate all federal mass transit funding, so it’s crucial to let them know what your priorities are.

Our nation’s infrastructure serves as the backbone for economic growth and prosperity, and we need a budget that prioritizes investment in the local communities that are the basic building block of the national economy.

Stand up and send that message loud and clear to Congress.

TAKE ACTION

Talking about transportation in the Trump administration with the “CodCast”

Beth Osborne, senior policy advisor for T4America, sat for an interview last week on one of the best-named podcasts around — The CodCast — to talk about the uncertainty of just what transportation means in the Trump administration.

As you may have seen on Twitter last week, a contingent of T4America staffers were in Boston last week to discuss transportation needs with state officials and policy advocates. While there, Beth sat down with Transit Matters board members Josh Fairchild and James Aloisi on Commonwealth Magazine’s Codcast (yes, the CodCast!) to talk about Trump’s ongoing promises for a $1 trillion infrastructure program, how his now-released budget reflects his true priorities and what advocates need to know going forward in an era with great uncertainty about federal transportation funding.

Listen to the full show below.

President Trump’s federal infrastructure priorities likely to be revealed this week

There’s no need to wait months for President Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure package to discover the transportation priorities of this president — they’ll be clearly telegraphed with the release of his first annual budget later this week.

For months there’s been endless discussion of the President’s $1 trillion pledge to “build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation.” And while industry groups scramble to divvy up funding or financing from a package that may or may not materialize, President Trump’s first real infrastructure effort should be considered his annual budget request with top-line numbers for transportation spending, which will tell us much about his priorities.

When the first look at that budget comes later this week, we’ll likely face the dissonance of a President rallying support for a $1 trillion investment in infrastructure at the same time he’s proposing billions in cuts to transportation investment to accompany his plan to increase defense spending by $54 billion.

While trade groups, members of Congress and local advocates are discussing what projects they want to include in this dream of a huge infrastructure package that may or may not come up later this year, they could see devastating cuts proposed for crucial transportation programs that fund smart transportation projects all across the country in less than 48 hours.

Melanie Zanona wrote about this inconsistency in The Hill today, noting that “the optics of slashing federal transportation funds in his budget proposal while pushing for a separate financing package underscores Trump’s challenge of balancing his promises of massive infrastructure investment and dramatic cuts in government spending.”

While many people — even staffers or elected reps on Capitol Hill — tend to think transportation spending decisions are determined by the long-term transportation bill that gets passed every few years, the money for new transit and rail projects still has to be appropriated by Congress each year through the budget process.

This is an important point.

To get a big infrastructure package passed by Congress, the president will need the full coalition of transportation stakeholders, from those seeking funds for roads, to transit, rail and ports. But if there are cuts in the budget made to discretionary spending (i.e., programs not paid out of the highway trust fund), those cuts would fall disproportionately on funding for new transit construction (New and Small Starts) and multimodal and local priority projects (TIGER) — amongst other programs. Targeting parts of the infrastructure coalition with this budget now is a good way to make sure you have no coalition when you need it later.

President Trump had a meeting at the White House last week with some key transportation, real estate and infrastructure advisors about his priorities. Real estate developer Richard LeFrak talked to CNBC about what he heard in the meeting:

“One thing [Trump] said while we were in the meeting, he said ‘don’t bring me any projects that you want federal funding for that you can’t start and had completed the state approval processes,'” LeFrak said.

That’s because “‘most of these projects come from the state, in 90 to 100 days. If they’re not ready in 120 days, tell them to go back, get finished, and bring it back,’ [Trump said]. In other words, he’s not going to … devote the resources to things that he can’t implement immediately,” he added.

Of course, we’ve seen plenty of evidence that “shovel-ready” isn’t always the best qualifier to identify the best projects. Following 2009’s stimulus effort, we learned that many shovel-ready projects weren’t under construction for a reason, and many were just mothballed projects that had been sitting on a shelf for the last 20 years because they simply never merited moving forward.

Ed Mortimer from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce echoed that point while testifying alongside our Beth Osborne before a Senate Committee last week. Any new infrastructure package, he said, “should not be a replication of the Recovery Act [which focused entirely on shovel-ready projects.] Projects need to be selected to deliver long-term economic growth, not the speed at which they can be constructed.”

But not all shovel-ready projects are created equal, either.

Scores of local communities with well-conceived ready-to-go multimodal projects are eager to apply to the incredibly competitive TIGER grant program, and on average, winning TIGER projects brought at least three state or local dollars to the table for each federal dollar sought. There are transit projects all across the country that have already raised local or state funding and are literally just waiting on a check for capital dollars from the federal government to proceed, including “projects like Indianapolis’ Red Line bus rapid transit project which has already been promised more than $70 million in federal dollars to pair with nearly $20 million in local funds from an income tax increase that Indianapolis voters approved back in November at the ballot box,” as we noted last week.

USDOT has already promised over $6 billion to these shovel-ready transit construction projects that have local funding in hand and are ready to go. If this week’s budget does indeed cut (or even eliminate funding outright) for the New & Small Starts transit program which exists explicitly to help metro areas of all sizes build new transit systems, the projects in that pipeline could be immediately threatened, as will their promises of supporting economic development & improved mobility.

When any president starts talking about a big new investment in transportation, it’s natural for people to get excited — Congress has been begging, borrowing and dealing to keep federal transportation program solvent for the last decade.

But whether or not President Trump finds a way to successfully advance and pay for a massive investment in infrastructure, come hell or high water, there will be a budget for these crucial transportation programs this year. And it will tell us all we need to know about his priorities.

We’ll be breaking down the budget when it’s released and arm you with the information you’ll need to take action and weigh in with your members of Congress. Do you want to get this sort of information directly to your inbox? Sign up for email today.

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Do our federal transportation priorities match the rhetoric we use to justify more spending?

With the Trump administration readying both an annual budget and discussing a possible large infrastructure package, Transportation for America yesterday urged a key Senate subcommittee to protect the investments in programs that promote innovation, encourage collaboration and maximize benefits for local communities.

Photo via WSDOT/Flickr httpswww.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/8670279118

The President’s first budget will almost certainly propose big cuts to discretionary spending programs. While the bulk of annual federal transportation spending is sourced from the highway trust fund and should be more insulated from these cuts, discretionary cuts would fall disproportionately on funding for new transit construction (New and Small Starts) and multimodal and local priority projects (TIGER).

House and Senate appropriators will have two decisions to make: a) whether to appropriate the amounts prescribed by the current long-term transportation law (the FAST Act) for the core programs, which is uncertain as well, and, b) how much to allocate for these other discretionary transportation programs.

As expected, with the heads of a few national trade groups also testifying yesterday alongside T4America before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, there was the usual rhetoric about America’s “crumbling” infrastructure amidst calls to invest more money overall in the federal transportation program.

And while T4America agrees on the need for greater levels of overall investment, T4A senior policy advisor Beth Osborne (pictured above) differentiated our overall position.

“As everyone testifying today will say,” she noted in her opening remarks, “we have great need to invest in our transportation system, including our roads, bridges, and transit systems. However, Transportation for America also believes that our problems run far deeper than just an overall lack of funding.”

When we have these discussions about the need to invest in infrastructure — especially in Washington — all sorts of ominous numbers are thrown around. Tens of thousands of deficient bridges. Pavement condition that’s worsening by the day. Backlogs of neglected maintenance and repair.

But where does the money go once we increase transportation spending and dole it all out to the states? Beth Osborne explained:

In fact, while we talk about the need for more funding to address our crumbling infrastructure, that is not necessarily where the funding goes. A 2014 report conducted by Smart Growth America called “Repair Priorities” found that between 2009 and 2011 states collectively spent $20.4 billion annually to build new roadways and add lanes. During that same time, states spent just $16.5 billion annually repairing and preserving the existing system, even while roads across the country were deteriorating. As we talk about large infrastructure packages, it’s only fair to ask that the priorities of our transportation program more closely match the rhetoric we use to justify more spending on it.

Why do we keep spending hefty sums on new roads and new lanes while repair backlogs get ignored? One reason is that transportation and development decisions are rarely well coordinated and we end up trying to address bad land use decisions with more transportation spending, and vice versa.

How are metro areas prioritizing health and building more biking and walking projects?

Though there’s booming demand all across the country to build more projects that can help residents get out and bike or walk — whether for exercise or just for getting around safely from A to B — it can be an uphill battle to do so. How are metro areas upending the conventional wisdom and building more projects that help improve their residents’ health?

How we get around each day shapes our quality of life, especially our health. People who walk or bicycle more for transportation are shown to have lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and other conditions that can complicate or shorten lives. And the demand for more opportunities to safely walk and bicycle is at an all-time high in cities and towns of all sizes across the country.

Communities are responding by planning, funding, and fast-tracking projects to make bicycling, walking, and riding transit safer, more convenient, and more realistic as travel options.

Click to download this new paper

But getting these projects planned, designed and built can be a challenge. How can regions bring more of these projects to fruition?

This new paper, produced with the American Public Health Association, outlines four policy levers MPOs have at their disposal to help increase and improve active transportation projects to meet the demand, decrease health disparities, increase access to opportunities, and strengthen local economies — with specific short real-life stories to go with each.

For the launch of the paper, we had an online discussion with a number of the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) featured in this paper to hear how they’re successfully prioritizing bicycling and walking projects.

We spent some time exploring the specific policies these MPOs have adopted, and how they’ve implemented them. Catch up with the recording below.

New national survey examines how metro areas use performance measures to evaluate their spending

Thanks to action taken by Congress, metro areas will be required to use a data-driven process to measure the performance of their transportation spending. But some metro areas already go far beyond the modest new federal requirements. T4America’s new national survey of over 100 metro planning agencies examines the current state of the practice — and where it’s headed.

The federal transportation law enacted in 2012, MAP-21, ushered in a new era by requiring metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to start evaluating the performance of their transportation investments against a handful of federally required measures. (We’ve written about this just a bit over the last few years.)

View and download the full survey results here.

Some metro areas have been doing this for years, going far beyond the federal government’s modest new requirements (such as safety or condition of roads & bridges) to assess their transportation investments in terms of more ambitious goals like return on investment, public health and access to jobs. With the new suite of measures finalized by USDOT in early 2017, it’s no longer an option for MPOs now — it’s a requirement.

To find the answers to some of these key questions and establish a state of the practice, T4America conducted a national survey of 104 MPOs from 42 states in 2016. Our survey tried to assess:

How many MPOs are already using performance measures in some form?
How many are interested in going beyond the new modest federal measures?
What’s keeping them from doing more?
What other key goals and metrics are they interested in measuring?

Among a range of interesting findings, we discovered that the majority of the MPOs surveyed (75 percent) are already using performance measures in some fashion. However, there is significant room for improvement in how they use them — only 30 percent of all MPOs utilize performance measures to evaluate specific projects for inclusion in the fiscally constrained five-year plans that govern all short-term spending.

While most MPOs are focused on meeting the new federal requirements, two-thirds of all agencies surveyed also want to become national leaders in using performance measures — including many MPOs currently doing only the minimum or just getting started. When it comes to additional measures outside of MAP-21’s modest new requirements, nearly half of MPOs surveyed chose equity and/or health as one of the five additional goals they are interested in measuring and assessing.

View the full survey results here.

Apply for technical assistance from T4America

In addition to the survey, T4America is today announcing a new technical assistance program specifically designed to help MPOs successfully respond to federal, state and local requirements. Find out more about applying, including info on an upcoming webinar to explain more about the application process.

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