Transportation for America, Author at Transportation For America

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For general inquiries about the campaign, email info [at] t4america [dot] org.

Safety over speed: Safe streets are climate-friendly streets

Lowering speeds have more benefits besides saving lives: street designs that keep speeds low help reduce carbon emissions, too. In this blog post by our friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Ann Shikany and Carter Rubin discuss how safer roads increase rates of biking, walking, and transit ridership, and enable fewer and shorter car trips.

Slow neighborhood greenways help people get around without getting in their cars. Photo via City of Seattle.

In communities across the county, our transportation system provides key linkages for commuters to jobs, kids to school and all of us to our social, family and recreational opportunities.

But the flip-side is that after decades of prioritizing transportation investments in new highways with a focus on speed above all else, we’re stuck with a transportation system that produces more carbon emissions than any other sector in the United States. Spread-out development facilitated by wide fast roads make cars all but essential for daily travel in many U.S. communities.

When you dive deeper into those carbon emissions—you’ll find that 59 percent of them come from light-duty vehicles—that includes the cars we drive around in for most daily trips. While the majority of daily trips are less than three miles, most of them are made by car.

Even worse, transportation emissions are rising because people are driving more and making longer trips. Even with cleaner fuels (not to mention electric cars) and more efficient vehicles, the uptick in driving more is obliterating any emissions benefits.

Why are people driving more, and using cars for even short trips? Because, with an overarching focus on vehicle speed and avoiding delay, nearly everything we’ve built for 60 years has been designed for high speed vehicle movement, which makes getting around by any other mode—biking, public transportation, or your own two feet—dangerous and unpleasant. Our transportation system—and the federal policy that built it—forces many Americans to drive to get just about anywhere.

The good news is over 40 cities in the United States have adopted Vision Zero policies that seek to eliminate traffic fatalities and major injuries on our roads through safety policies and investment in the kind of infrastructure that will help keep everyone safe—with a priority on those who are most vulnerable.

Some of the key strategies that cities use to meet this goal include:

Providing physical protection for people walking and biking, like bike lanes protected with planters, bollards and curbs.
Reducing vehicle speeds on routes intended for people walking and biking, so that people of all ages and abilities feel safe.

Projects that lower speeds and make it easier to bike, walk, and use transit also compliment land use changes that bring destinations closer together. Slower speeds allow our streets to become places where people want to be, not race through. (As our own Carter Rubin said sarcastically when asked about the economic benefits of lower speeds during yesterday’s #SafetyOverSpeed tweet chat: “Brb, going to go shopping on the side of a freeway.” )

Improving bike and pedestrian networks is also one of the top policy priorities included in the Bloomberg American Cities Climate Challenge, and is being supported in nine challenge cities. If you’d like more detailed information on these policies, check out the Climate Action Playbook sections on bike and pedestrian infrastructure. We’ll also give you a quick snapshot of what this policy looks like in action:

Prioritizing bikeway, sidewalk and crossing improvements (Portland, OR): Portland leads large U.S. cities in the percentage of commuters who bike to work and ranked tenth in 2016 for the percentage of commuters who walk to work. The city has 350 miles of bikeways, with more than 50 miles funded to be installed in the next few years. Portland has developed this infrastructure not just by creating bike plans, but by backing these plans up with funding. Portland is currently updating its pedestrian plan to prioritize sidewalk and crossing improvements and other investments to make walking safer and more comfortable across the city. It will identify gaps and needs in Portland’s pedestrian network, prioritize funding to locations with the greatest need first, and identify performance measures to track progress. (Read more.)

Responding to the need for safety improvements (Cincinnati, OH): After facing a record breaking year of pedestrian-involved crashes—430 in 2018—Cincinnati Councilmember Greg Landsman led the charge for safer streets. The city is now pursuing a Vision Zero strategy that included appointing new leadership and dedicated staff resources within the city’s Department of Transportation, prioritized funding for pedestrian safety improvements, and increased enforcement. Through the American Cities Climate Challenge, Cincinnati’s transportation team will also receive Vision Zero design training from the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO). (Read more.)

Every community deserves safe streets, clean air and action on climate. Thankfully, many cities are taking the first step by implementing Vision Zero policies locally. There is also work to be done at the federal level. On October 23, 2019, Representative Earl Blumenauer introduced the Vision Zero Act, which would make Vision Zero policies and investments eligible for federal funding. NRDC supports this legislation. Transportation for America’s push for safer streets as part of a comprehensive federal transportation investment strategy.

Safety over speed week: The key to slowing traffic is street design, not speed limits

Today, as “safety over speed” week continues, we’re running a guest post from our friends at Strong Towns that uses some simple pictures to explain how street design is a far more powerful tool for slowing down traffic and prioritizing safety compared to the strategy of lowering speed limits.

It’s “safety over speed” week here at T4America, and we are spending the week unpacking our second of three principles for transportation investment. Read more about those principles and if you’re new to T4America, you can sign up for email here. Follow along on @T4America this week and check back here on the blog for more related content all week long. Today’s post was written by Strong Towns and was originally posted in January of this year. We are thankful to Chuck Marohn and his Strong Towns team for letting us repost it here.

The cost of auto orientation—designing our towns and cities around the easy, fast movement of cars—is not just measured in dollars and cents. The number of U.S. traffic fatalities in 2017 topped 40,000 people. Nearly 6,000 of those people were on foot—a 25-year high. Each of those people had a unique story. Each of them had a family.

And after each high-profile crash, we all hear the same litany of advice from law enforcement and traffic safety professionals.

“Be hyper-aware of your surroundings.”

“Always obey the speed limit.”

“Speed is a factor in 30 percent of crashes.”

“Safety is a shared responsibility.”

And yet, we know that people are sometimes going to make mistakes. Even conscientious drivers make mistakes. People walking, going about their business, are going to make mistakes. No one is going to be hyper-vigilant every moment that they’re out in the world. And why should we have to?

We can’t regulate our way to safety. We must design our streets to be safe.

Two simple photos reveal what it means to design a street to be safe, versus counting on the speed limit alone to do the job. This meme was created by planner Wes Craiglow of Conway, AR, and shared on social media by the “Transportation Psychologist,” our friend, Bryan Jones. We first shared it back in 2015, but it remains timeless, so here it is again:

As Wes points out: “The meme is intended to help viewers consider how different street designs makes you feel as a driver, and ultimately affect how you behave behind the wheel. Generally speaking, as depicted by the lower photo, narrower travel lanes, shorter block lengths, and a tree canopy, all contribute to drivers traveling more slowly. Conversely, wide lanes, long block lengths, and open skies, as seen in the upper photo, communicate to drivers that higher speeds are appropriate.”

Look again at the two photos. Imagine yourself behind the wheel of a car on each street. On which street would you drive faster? On which street would you exercise more caution?

“Forgiving” design is a misnomer

The first photo looks like tens of thousands of suburban streets all over America. It’s entirely representative of something the transportation engineering profession calls “forgiving design.” The premise is simple: drivers will make occasional mistakes—veer a bit out of their lane, fail to brake quite hard enough—and if the street is wide, with high visibility in all directions, and free of immediate obstacles such as trees and fences, those mistakes won’t be catastrophic.

The problem: this street feels too forgiving to a driver. Too safe and comfortable. So drivers speed up. The engineers didn’t account for this aspect of human psychology.

This residential street is built like a four-lane highway, and so even though its legal speed limit is 20 miles per hour, it’s no surprise when somebody guns it up to 40 miles per hour or more down a street like this. It feels natural to do so. It feels safe. But it isn’t safe—because on a city street, unlike a freeway, there might be people around. People who will most likely be badly hurt or killed if a speeding driver hits them.

Read transportation engineer Jon Larsen’s explanation of why the forgiveness of slow speeds is better than the “forgiving” design of wide streets.

The paradox of street design: if it feels a bit dangerous, it’s probably safer

The second photo, on the other hand, represents the most basic, frugal approach to designing a street for slow speeds. It’s not perfect. It lacks sidewalks or bicycle facilities, which some of our readers might take issue with—and yes, many places ought to have those things.

But this “slow street” does something really profound and important. It causes drivers to slow down, whether or not there’s a posted speed limit or law enforcement is present, because of the uncertainty and sense of heightened risk.

The street is narrow. Visibility is limited—look at that front left corner of the intersection, where a red fire hydrant stands next to a white fence. The lack of visibility there is not a safety hazard: paradoxically, it’s probably the single biggest thing that promotes safety at this intersection. Because if you’re driving here, and can’t see whether a vehicle is approaching from the left, what are you going to do?

That’s right. You’re going to slow down.

Read Daniel Herriges’s article on why narrow streets can deliver a ton of benefits to our cities and towns at low cost.

Why 20 miles per hour?

If we could keep most urban traffic to 20 miles per hour or less, we could eliminate the vast majority of deaths from car crashes in our cities and towns. We wouldn’t eliminate mistakes—people, both inside and outside vehicles, are going to make them—but those mistakes would rarely be deadly.

The place for wide lanes and “forgiving design” is on a high-speed road. City streets, on the other hand, should be places for people. We know how to design streets that will slow down traffic automatically, without the need for heavy-handed enforcement, and regardless of what the speed limit sign says. We just need to do it.

Read Chuck Marohn’s article on the crucial difference between a street and a road.

Learn more about our Slow the Cars campaign. Do you like this content, and want to help us produce more like it? Become a member of the Strong Towns movement, and support Strong Towns’s work to make our streets safe, welcoming, and productive places for people.

Thanks again to Strong Towns for participating in yesterday’s Twitter chat, for letting us share their content here, and for running our post on slip lanes from earlier this week.

Safety over speed week: Prioritizing safety is intrinsically connected with improving transit service

Nearly every bus transit rider starts and ends their trip with a walk, and decisions made to prioritize vehicle speed over safety often have significant impacts on transit. This excerpt from the new book Better Buses, Better Cities helps explain how better bus transit and prioritizing safety over speed are intrinsically related.

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

The content that follows is an excerpt from “Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit” by Steven Higashide, published by Island Press. Steven is a former colleague of ours at T4America as an outreach associate based in New York a few years ago before moving on to the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and then to TransitCenter, where he today serves as the research director. We are proud to see his book in print and are thankful to him and Island Press for letting us share this long excerpt from Chapter 4 entitled MAKE THE BUS WALKABLE AND DIGNIFIED, sourced from pages 59–61 and 74-75. – Stephen Lee Davis, T4America.

On a Saturday afternoon in April 2010, Raquel Nelson, her 4-year-old son A.J., and her two other children (aged 2 and 9 years) stepped off the bus across the street from their apartment in Marietta, Georgia. It had been a good but long day. Raquel and her children had celebrated a birthday with family and pizza. To get home, they took their first bus from the pizza restaurant to a transit center, where they missed their connecting bus and had to wait more than an hour for the next one.

Home was across a five-lane, divided road. And so, together with several other people who had been on the bus, the Nelson family crossed halfway across the street to wait in the median. As Raquel stopped to gauge traffic, one of the other adults in the group decided to start walking. Raquel’s son A.J. broke free from her grip to follow, and Raquel hurried to catch up.

A.J. was killed moments later, by Jerry Guy, who was behind the wheel of a van despite having “three or four beers” in his system.

Raquel and her 2-year-old daughter were also struck and injured. And yet that was only the beginning of her ordeal.¹

County prosecutors charged Raquel with vehicular homicide, which carried a potential sentence of 3 years in prison. A jury convicted her, and she was sentenced to 12 months’ probation with the option of a retrial, which she chose. Her case wound through the courts for 2 more years before Raquel agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of jaywalking.

Raquel Nelson’s case made national news. But the loss she and her family experienced is replicated in nearly every city on wide “arterial” roads that encourage high speeds. In the City of Los Angeles, for example, 6 percent of streets are responsible for 65 percent of traffic deaths and injuries. When mapped, pedestrian deaths line up on these roads like dominoes.

Because they tend to have important destinations on them, arterial roads also tend to carry the most bus riders. But the tie between transit and walkability goes beyond pedestrian safety. Nearly all transit riders are pedestrians at some point during their trip. In Los Angeles, for example, 84 percent of bus riders get to their bus stop on foot.

The pedestrian experience is the transit experience, then. A bus rider may appreciate frequent and fast service but still be dissatisfied with her trip if she has to trudge through mud on the way to the bus stop, cross the street with her head on a swivel, and wait in the rain with no shelter. Someone who uses a wheelchair may be unable to use the bus at all if there are no sidewalks leading to the stop.

Poor walkability is corrosive to bus ridership and makes it harder to improve transit service. In Staten Island, New York City, transit planners had to make major adjustments to a redesign of the borough’s express buses after riders complained that the changes forced them to walk in the street or on lawns.

Although Austin’s bus network redesign has generally been considered a success, it ran into the same problems. More than a month after the launch of the redesign, Capital Metro was still moving stop locations in response to complaints that people had to transfer in places without good walking infrastructure. “If you’re going to go to more of a grid-based system and you’re going to have more on-street connections, then you really need to look at the pedestrian experience of those intersections,” Capital Metro’s Todd Hemingson said. (As of April 2019, only about 60 percent of streets in Austin have sidewalks.)

Improving the walk to transit, on the other hand, can have measurable impacts on transit ridership. Ja Young Kim, Keith Bartholomew, and Reid Ewing of the University of Utah found that after the Utah Transit Authority built sidewalk connections to bus stops that lacked them, ridership at those stops grew almost twice as fast as at stops in similar neighborhoods that had not been improved. Demand for paratransit was also stemmed near the stops with sidewalk improvements, saving the agency on its budget.

Although walkability and transit can’t be separated, government usually makes its best effort to do so. Just as transit agencies must convince cities to give transit priority on the street, they must rely on local and state government to create a good walking environment. That’s no given.

The state of walking in America represents an enormous collective failure. Even in urban neighborhoods where many people walk, engineering practices that favor drivers tend to degrade the experience. Intersections can be designed with slip lanes that allow cars to gun through turns. Zoning may allow curb cuts that turn the sidewalk into a gauntlet of traffic. The default rule at most intersections is “right turn on red,” intrinsically hostile to people walking because there’s never a time when they can be sure cars won’t turn into their path.

These decisions are rooted in a philosophy that prioritizes vehicle speeds and is often baked into engineering measures and practices. Engineers often assess streets using a metric called “automobile level of service,” where an A grade is free-flowing traffic. A major traffic engineering manual recommends against striping crosswalks unless at least ninety-three pedestrians already cross the intersection per hour—or if five people were hit by cars at the intersection in the past year. Peter Furth, an engineering professor at Northeastern University, has pointed out that “Synchro, the standard software [traffic engineers] use, is based on minimizing auto delay, and it doesn’t even calculate pedestrian delay.”

Although most streets are municipally maintained, most cities require local property owners to maintain sidewalks abutting their property. This means that wealthier neighborhoods tend to have better maintained and safer sidewalks. The further you get from downtown, the more likely it is that sidewalks themselves will shrink, decay, or vanish. Property owners may not be required to build sidewalks at all, which means many cities simply lack sidewalks in a huge portion of their territory.

Fighting for People on Foot

Pedestrian infrastructure doesn’t cost much relative to other transportation infrastructure. Houston’s $83 million in backlogged sidewalk requests could mostly be wiped out by nixing a $70 million project to add an interchange on an area toll road. Even the $1.4 billion price tag to build functional sidewalk on every Denver street doesn’t look so daunting when the Colorado Department of Transportation is spending $1.2 billion in just 4 years to widen Interstate 70, which runs northeast of downtown Denver.

Shelters aren’t particularly expensive either, costing roughly between $5,500 and $12,000 each. In 2017, medium and large transit agencies spent $297 million on infrastructure at bus stops and stations, compared with $2.2 billion on rail stations—or about 6 cents per bus trip and 47 cents per rail trip.

Creating walkable places requires changing municipal processes so that compact planning (creating neighborhoods where there are many destinations worth walking to) and pedestrian-friendly street design become routine.

This often starts with outside advocacy and political action.

The do-it-yourself movements I mentioned earlier in this chapter ultimately seek not to supplant government but to prod it to action. A year after MARTA Army launched its “adopt-a-stop” campaign, the state of Georgia awarded the Atlanta Regional Commission $3.8 million for bus stop signs, shelters, and sidewalks. Cincinnati’s Better Bus Coalition doesn’t just build benches; it has also published an analysis showing that shelters are disproportionately in wealthy neighborhoods. Streetsblog USA runs an annual “Sorriest Bus Stop in America” contest that has gotten governments in Kansas City, Maryland, and Boston to address bus stop walkability.

In Nashville, a long-time neighborhood activist, Angie Henderson, was elected to the city’s Metropolitan Council on a platform of walkable neighborhoods in 2015. Henderson later sponsored and passed a law requiring most developments in inner-city neighborhoods and near commercial centers to include sidewalks or pay into a citywide sidewalk fund. Denver’s City Council created a $4 million fund to help lower-income homeowners fix the sidewalks in front of their houses and budgeted for three new Public Works employees to manage the program and step up enforcement of sidewalk regulations throughout the city. And Seattle’s Department of Transportation has broken with the engineering guideline that says crosswalks should be striped only where many people already cross or where there are frequent pedestrian crashes.

Within transit agencies themselves, it’s important to raise the profile of the walk and the wait. Metro Transit’s Better Bus Stops Program is a great example. The decision to elevate a routine process into a branded program gave bus stops new stature throughout the agency.

“[The process of siting bus shelters] could be thought of as very dull and unimportant,” Farrington said. “But to package it, to get a great little logo and have it be a substantial program with its own name and people, it’s been a positive spiral of more resources and more support of the work.” She said that staff who had previously worked on park-and-ride stations were now spending more time on bus stops. True, in some ways the program was an outlier, funded by an Obama-era discretionary program, Ladders of Opportunity, that no longer exists. But transit agencies could replicate it using funding from many other sources.

Metro Transit’s program also offers a clear example of how well-resourced, well-planned public engagement can strengthen and educate both the transit agency and the communities it operates in.

Thanks again to Steven Higashide and Island Press for allowing us to run this excerpt. You can buy his book direct from Island Press or find links to purchase at other various outlets there. -Ed

Our three policy recommendations for cutting the maintenance backlog in half

Yesterday we discussed our first of three new principles and outcomes for transportation investment: “Prioritize repair.” But how? Today we’re taking a quick look at three policy recommendations Congress should consider implementing to help reduce the maintenance backlog by half.

It’s Maintenance Week! This week we’ll be exploring our first principle for transportation investment, prioritize maintenance, in-depth. On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. EST, we’re hosting a tweet chat using the hashtag #FixItFirst. We’re also holding a briefing on Capitol Hill with the Future of Transportation Caucus and an evening salon for journalists And stay tuned for more blog posts!

For decades, presidents, governors, and members of Congress from both parties have decried our crumbling roadyway infrastructure, sounding increasingly dire warnings. Yet Congress has repeatedly failed to require states to actually repair that infrastructure before creating new financial liabilities in the form of new roads and bridges. As a result, the percentage of our roads in poor condition nationwide has increased from 14 percent in 2009 to 20 percent in 2018.

Expanding the system while ignoring basic maintenance is a recipe for disaster. With the Highway Trust Fund approaching insolvency (or already there, technically) and our maintenance needs continuing to grow, it is time to direct federal investment toward preserving the system we have before adding to it. (Not only is this smart, but it’s incredibly doable: we already spend over $40 billion every year on roadways, much of which is spent on expansion.

Transportation for America believes that Congress needs to set a concrete goal of cutting the maintenance backlog in half. We can do this by prioritizing highway formula dollars for maintenance, and creating new programs and accountability measures for expansion. Let’s get a little wonky:

Prioritize highway formula dollars for maintenance

Every year, states receive over $40 billion through highway formulas. Federal law gives the states flexibility in how they spend these dollars, with maintenance being an “eligible” expense. There’s a big difference between maintenance being an “eligible” use of federal dollars, and actually prioritizing maintenance with those dollars. As we’ve outlined in the past, states are rewarded with more money for building new capacity at the expense of their repair needs. Congress should give power to the existing asset management requirements by requiring that maintenance be prioritized within the National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) and the Surface Transportation Block Grant Program (STBG). Parallel language should be put in place for bridges.

Check out our suggestive legislative language for achieving this.

Create a competitive program for new highway capacity

Here’s a big idea. Rather than letting states choose whether or not to prioritize repair with their formula dollars (i.e, dollars awarded based on lane-miles, population, amount of driving), Congress should consider dedicating today’s formula funding to maintenance, and then provide a new, special pot of funds for new projects or major replacement projects that have regional or national significance—more like the way we have set up the transit program.

In the transit capital program, transit projects have to apply for funding and demonstrate that they advance national and local goals, including environmental benefits and economic development. On top of that, project sponsors also have to prove that they have the resources to operate and maintain their new transit line or system without shortchanging the rest of their system. We don’t have any such standard for new highway projects—we don’t even ask states if they’ll be able to afford what they’re building, we just let them come back to Congress in a few years and ask for more money.

Creating a competitive program for new highway capacity would ensure that new roads advance national and local goals and, similar to the transit program, Congress should require a plan for covering maintenance costs. It’s borderline astonishing that we allow states to build assets that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars without having to provide any plan for covering long-term maintenance costs.

This new program should cover up to 50 percent of the capital cost for the project with federal funds, just as the federal government does for new transit projects.

Improve highway performance measures

In MAP-21, the surface transportation authorization that passed in 2012 and expired in 2014, Congress made a deal with the states: They gave states far more discretion over spending in exchange for a weak, opaque system of accountability in which states are required to set targets for transportation safety, state of repair, and traffic movement. However, after seven years, those targets are very hard for the public to find. (They’re hard for US to find sometimes!) The public can’t hold their state accountable for meeting their targets if they don’t even know what they are.

States can also set these targets however they want. It is within their discretion to spend all of their money on expansion and set a target for roadway and bridge conditions to get much, much worse. If states miss their self-set targets, there are only minor penalties imposed.

Congress should require real accountability in the next reauthorization bill:

Make performance measure targets user friendly and connect them to funding decisions. Congress should require that the Secretary make all targets public, easily searchable, and comparable across states. Currently the only targets available on FHWA’s webpage are safety targets and to find them, you have to download and decipher 55 separate, 60-page long, complicated documents. Further, USDOT should require that states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) make clear how projects prioritized for funding address national priorities and how their performance management program informed their project selection process.
Prioritize formula funding for repair (see #1 above).
Create rewards for the states which set ambitious targets and meet them. As Repair Priorities showed, some states are doing a good job with maintaining their system, and they should be rewarded. Funding for new capacity projects should first go to states with a track record for good asset management. Competitive grant programs, except those for safety, should prioritize project sponsors with a good record for asset management.

10 questions every presidential candidate should answer about transportation and climate change

The debate has passed, but the relevance of these questions have not. We’ll continue to urge candidates to answer these questions.

On September 4, 10 Democratic presidential candidates will participate in a town hall focused solely on climate change. We have a list of questions related to transportation that we want every candidate to answer.

Climate change is undoubtedly a defining issue of our times, and the transportation sector is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. But there’s little understanding about where transportation emissions come from or how to reduce them. Many think we just need to replace all gas powered vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs). But we cannot address this crisis without an understanding of the crucial role that the design of our communities and roadways play in producing our transportation emissions.

While many other sectors have reduced emissions, transportation is headed in the wrong direction. Driving represents 83 percent of all transportation emissions and these emissions are rising—despite cleaner fuels, more efficient and electric vehicles—because people forced by our development patterns and transportation system to drive more and make longer trips.

It’s time to have a more robust conversation about the connections between transportation and climate change. The future depends on it. Here are the questions every candidate should be asked:

1) How does your plan to respond to climate change allow people to make fewer and shorter car trips?

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and those emissions are rising. Studies show that we cannot reduce emissions by relying on expected growth in clean vehicles and fuel, that we must also reduce expected growth in driving.

2) What are the ways in which we can change development patterns to place jobs and other essential services closer to the people who need them?

Our reliance on cars and driving to our destinations often goes back to development decisions that place people’s needs—banks, groceries, schools, jobs—far away from where they live.

3) As President, what will you do to ensure the United States measures greenhouse gas emissions in transportation?

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Soon after taking office, the Trump Administration scrapped a U.S. Department of Transportation plan to measure greenhouse gas emissions in transportation. If we aren’t taking the basic step of measuring these emissions, how can we take steps to reduce them?

4) How should Congress rethink how federal highway dollars are spent?

Federal surface transportation policy prioritizes highways over all other forms of transportation. Federal highway formula dollars are guaranteed and allow states to spend over $40 billion per year on highways and highway expansion. Highways often result in a more spread out development pattern, which generates both more traffic and more emissions. There is no limit on federal funds used for highway expansion and no requirement that states use that money to maintain the system we already have. As a result, our emissions keep going up and our potholes get larger.

5) How does your plan orient more investment toward transit?

The federal government makes it easy for states to build and expand highways, providing up to 80 percent of funding for highway projects. In contrast, the federal government will only pay no more than half of the cost of public transit projects, which places a greater burden on communities to build transit compared to highways. The federal government spends five times the amount on highways than on transit.

6) How would you shift the program to promote and reward efficiency and reduced emissions?

Under the current formula structure of the federal program, states are rewarded for inefficiency. The more gas is burned—the more people drive and the more they emit—the more funding the state gets. Is this the message you support?

7) What should change in the federal transportation program to support walkable communities which are better for the economy and the environment?

Core, walkable areas are responsible for the highest density of economic activity in most regions. Yet the federal program is much more focused on supporting high speed vehicle traffic, even in these walkable areas, which makes walking deadly.

8) How does your infrastructure plan address this pedestrian safety epidemic and make it possible for people to take more trips by walking and biking?

Almost half of all car trips are under three miles. But our roadways are designed for vehicle speed over pedestrian safety, making it unsafe in many situations for people to walk instead of drive. In the past decade, the number of people struck and killed while walking increased by 35 percent, reaching overall level of fatalities not seen in nearly 30 years.

9) How would you support communities that are shifting their transportation systems to integrate more transit?

Small and mid-sized cities across the country are recognizing that providing transit options is essential to boosting their economic activity and reducing their emissions.

10) As President, what would you do to strengthen and support Amtrak’s existing long distance and inter-city network?

Many presidential platforms, including the Green New Deal, proclaim the need to invest in and build a national high speed rail network as a way to connect communities and reduce emissions.

Marcus Young to be Minnesota Department of Transportation’s first Community Vitality Fellow

CONTACT: Ben Stone, bstone@smartgrowthamerica.org / 410.370.3843 and Jessica Oh, jessica.oh@state.mn.us /651-366-4939.

Transportation for America and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) are excited to announce MnDOT’s inaugural Community Vitality Fellow, Marcus Young. Young will be embedded within the agency for a year in its Saint Paul headquarters where he will serve as an artist-in-residence, taking a fresh look at the agency’s goals to promote economic vitality, improve safety, support multimodal transportation systems, and create healthier communities.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation joins Smart Growth America’s artist-in-residence program as the second statewide agency to host an artist-in-residence, following the launch of Washington State DOT’s artist-in-residence program last week.

About the program

Mr. Young will gain a thorough understanding of the inner workings of a state department of transportation, while supporting MnDOT’s efforts to encourage local public-private partnerships that support the aesthetic, environmental, social and cultural values of communities within transportation projects. The project(s) executed during the residency will be developed in close partnership with T4America and MnDOT. The MnDOT Fellow will be tasked with exploring the following:

Developing processes and procedures to further evaluate and integrate elements that elevate the unique character of each community within the transportation system.
Bringing creative problem solving skills and strategic thinking to design challenges, while providing guidance on potential improvements to how MnDOT plans, builds, operates and maintains its infrastructure using community feedback.
Piloting innovative public engagement strategies to further build customer trust as set forth in the MnDOT 2018-2022 Strategic Operating Plan by engaging a wide range of stakeholders, including elected officials, tribal governments, community organizations and transportation partners.

About Marcus Young

Photo of Marcus Young by Laichee Yang courtesy of Ananya Dance Theatre.

It is not artist Marcus Young’s first foray into government. Young served as the City Artist for the City of St. Paul for nine years where he created Everyday Poems for City Sidewalks, a work of art that has embedded more than 1,000 poems created by city residents into city streets. Young has a background in theater, music and dance and calls himself a “behavioral artist” who wants to approach this role with humility and curiosity. He is a recipient of awards from the McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations, and received his MFA from the University of Minnesota.

“Working alongside MnDOT, I’ll be searching for obvious and hidden possibilities for change, moving along the borders of known and unknown,” explains Young. “Approaching the context of government with a creative spirit, I hope to engage all Minnesotans’ desire to live a good life and their yearning for a more just world.”

The team at MnDOT is thrilled to welcome Young onto their team, and looks forward to engaging his expertise as an artist embedded in government and interest in equity. “Marcus Young brings an openness, curiosity and deep listening to his approach working within government agencies,” says Jessica Oh, Highway Sponsorship Director with MnDOT’s Office of Land Management. “He is interested in how art can create a more equitable world, both representational and lived, and his artistic practice considers those that are not at the table. We think this is a great fit for the agency.”

“The quality and quantity of artists who applied for the Community Vitality Fellowship blew away our selection committee, and we’re thrilled to have selected Marcus Young to serve as MnDOT’s first ever artist-in-residence,” said Ben Stone, Smart Growth America’s director of arts & culture. “Marcus’ deep history working within government as a City Artist with the City of St Paul, his intellectual curiosity, and his interest in behavioral art and relationship-building make Marcus an ideal fit for the position. I can’t wait to get started working with Marcus and to see all of the creative ideas he develops over the coming year.”

About artists embedded in government

Recognized as a tool for pioneering innovative and creative solutions, artist-in-residence programs have been piloted across the nation in municipal governmental agencies, including the cities of Los Angeles and Seattle, but until 2019, never before at a statewide agency. In Fergus Falls, MN, artists-in-residence have increased cultural programming to support community development. In Lanesboro, MN, the artists-in-residence have used art as a catalyst for deeper community engagement. In Minneapolis, artists-in-residence have used theatre to help the city’s Regulatory Services Department develop more empathetic policies and better relate to their constituents, while St Paul’s artists-in-residence have worked to make community meetings more creative, fun, and productive.

Support for the Fellowship

Smart Growth America, ArtPlace America, the McKnight Foundation, and MnDOT collaborated on creating the Community Vitality Fellowship position. Transportation for America (T4America) will administer both the funds and the overall program, including providing staff and consulting assistance. The State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI) will also provide staff support. Both T4America and SSTI are programs of Smart Growth America. MnDOT will supply in-kind contributions consisting of work space for the selected Fellow and staff time for agency workers to collaborate on the groundbreaking new program.

Transportation for America (T4America) is a national nonprofit that supports a transportation system that safely, affordably and conveniently connects people of all means and all abilities to jobs, services and opportunity through multiple modes of travel with minimal impact to communities and the environment. We accomplish this through research, advocacy, technical assistance and thought leadership. T4America is a program of Smart Growth America.

Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) oversees transportation by all modes, including land, water, air, rail, transit, walking and bicycling. The agency is responsible for maintaining, building and operating the state highway system to ensure a safe, accessible, efficient and reliable transportation system that connects people to destinations and markets throughout the state, regionally and around the world.

Senate Transportation Infrastructure Act makes welcome additions but fails to change the status quo

Today the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works approved America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act, a bill that will reauthorize the FAST Act once it expires in September 2020. T4America director Beth Osborne offered this statement:

“This first attempt at reauthorization from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has some notable new additions worth praising, including the first-ever climate title and new programs aimed at measuring transportation by access to jobs and services, reconnecting communities torn apart by highways, reducing carbon emissions, increasing resilience, and improving safety. The bill also includes a focus on complete streets and increased funding for existing programs that make biking or walking safer such as the Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP.)

“But overall, four years later, this bill unfortunately fails in many of the same ways the FAST Act did in 2015. First, it does very little to accomplish what is perpetually promised by lawmakers: actually repairing our existing infrastructure. Despite the rhetoric we’re sure to hear in the days ahead, this bill has zero new, binding requirements to ensure that states use their core formula programs to actually bring their roads and bridges into good condition, while providing them with more than $32 billion more for existing road building policy. While the inclusion of a new bridge maintenance program is a welcome step, it’s a relative pittance at just two percent of overall funding. T4America believes anything short of holding states and metro areas accountable for cutting the maintenance backlog in half is unacceptable.

“Secondly, although the National Transportation Safety Board has been repeatedly sounding the alarm on speed as a primary risk factor in traffic fatalities—especially for people walking—this bill fails to require states to use complete streets designs to address the alarming 35 percent increase in people struck and killed while walking from 2008-2017. Instead, the bill makes these designs optional, and history has shown us that ‘optional’ will result in many states failing to take advantage of the option to save lives.

“Third, it’s time to organize this overall program around connecting people to jobs and opportunity. T4America is delighted to see a pilot program based on the COMMUTE Act to help a select group of states and metros measure whether or not their investments are connecting people to jobs and services. But we need to reward the boldness of this proposal by expanding it to more of the population by measuring whether all $358 billion in this bill is connecting people to daily essentials.

“The inclusion of a climate title is an overdue addition and the committee is to be commended for their bipartisan approach to this pressing issue. We need more lawmakers like these willing to step out and tackle the risks of climate change. Though new money for reducing carbon emissions, resilience, alternative fuels, and reducing port emissions are notable, this approach unfortunately fundamentally fails to recognize that a federal program still focused primarily on delivering high-speed roads guarantees more driving and will undercut the committee’s worthwhile efforts to reduce emissions or stem the tide of climate change.

“Lastly, we also welcome the inclusion of new safety formula and discretionary programs, designed to invest in proven strategies for reducing fatalities and reward communities that have demonstrated progress in reducing fatalities. However, the funds available through these programs could be put to better use by requiring them to be used for complete streets and rewarding communities for specific investments in complete streets. As with the climate title, these programs will be undercut by substantial funding increases for high-speed roadways in the base formulas without any additional constraints to improve safety.”

The Generating Resilient, Environmentally Exceptional National (GREEN) Streets Act introduced in the Senate today

Today Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Tom Carper (D-DE) introduced a bill that would measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled. This would be transformative.

Crossing the street in Boston. Photo by Yu-Jen Shih on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG), contributing 28 percent of the United States’ total GHG emissions. While many other sectors have improved, transportation is headed in the wrong direction. Driving represents 83 percent of all transportation emissions and these emissions are rising—despite cleaner fuels, more efficient and electric vehicles—because people are driving more and making longer trips.

Unfortunately, our federal transportation program forces people to drive more by measuring success through vehicle speed—not the time it actually takes people to reach their destination. Building wider highways and sprawling cities to accommodate high-speed driving creates a feedback loop of more driving, virtually guaranteeing ever-increasing transportation emissions (and congestion).

To reduce emissions we must make it possible for people to take fewer and shorter car trips, as well as make it easy and convenient for people to bike, walk and use transit. But we can’t do this if we only measure and value high speed car trips. The bill introduced today would change what we measure and value in transportation to include reducing GHG and vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

The Generating Resilient, Environmentally Exceptional National (GREEN) Streets Act, introduced by Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Tom Carper (D-DE), will create new performance measures and goals requiring that states measure, and reduce, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and GHG in their transportation systems.

“To combat climate change, we must reduce emissions and build safer, healthier and more resilient communities,” said Senator Markey, a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee and co-author of the Green New Deal resolution. “That means advancing the goals of clean energy, climate progress, and healthy communities, as well as fortifying ourselves against the adverse impacts of climate change. An essential component of that effort is to re-envision how we plan for, construct, and maintain our federal highway transportation system, using climate measures that matter and hold systems accountable.”

To reduce VMT and GHG, states would likely have to employ a variety of strategies, including better transportation options and smarter land use. These strategies come with a host of benefits besides reducing GHG: reduced congestion, lower household transportation costs, safer streets, more attractive communities and better health outcomes. By measuring how successful transportation projects are by how many destinations—like jobs, schools, and grocery stores— people can access, the federal government can incentivize states and local governments to invest in transit, biking, and walking, as well as build places closer together.

“For decades our federal transportation program has been full of incentives that encourage more driving, longer trips, and more congestion. It’s high time for us to reduce all three of those things as a unifying purpose for the program,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “Doing so will help give Americans more freedom to choose how to get around, save them money, and also reduce the harmful emissions wreaking havoc on our climate. We are hopeful that the GREEN Streets Act will help kickstart an important conversation about finding a new, more productive purpose for the federal transportation program and we are pleased to support it.”

Transportation for America strongly supports the GREEN Streets Act and urges Congress to pass this transformative legislation.

Announcing our inaugural Arts, Culture and Transportation Fellows

Top left across to bottom right: Keiko Budech (WA), Cecelia DeLeon (WA), Katherine Gregor (TX), Sue Lambe (TX), Danicia Malone (IN), Jackie Nirenberg (TX), Jessica Ann Ramirez (WA), Antony Ramos (AR), Brittanie Redd (IN), Shann Thomas (WA), Erika Wilhite (AR).

Transportation for America announces its inaugural class of fellows for the new Arts, Culture and Transportation Fellowship to help 11 individuals in four cities take their work at the intersection of arts and transportation to the next level.

Transportation for America is excited to announce the fellows for its first Arts, Culture, and Transportation (ACT) Fellowship. Eleven fellows will represent four cities from around the country. The fellows are:

Keiko Budech, Communications Manager, Transportation Choices Coalition (Seattle/Puget Sound, WA)
Cecelia DeLeon, Visual Artist and Teaching Artist (Seattle/Puget Sound, WA)
Katherine Gregor, Principal, Katherine Gregor Communications / Communications, Austin Transportation Department (Austin, TX)
Sue Lambe, Manager, City of Austin Art in Public Places Program, City of Austin (Austin, TX)
Danicia Monét Malone, Urban Planner, Programs & Facilities Manager, Purdue Black Cultural Center (West Lafayette, IN and Indianapolis, IN)
Jackie Nirenberg, Community Engagement Manager, Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Austin, TX)
Jessica Ramirez, Director of Community Engagement, Puget Sound Sage (Seattle/Puget Sound, WA)
Antony Ramos, Director of Digital Marketing, Fruit of Business (Springdale, AR)
Brittanie Redd, Principal Planner for Land Use Strategy, Department of Metropolitan Development (Indianapolis, IN)
Shann Thomas, Visual Artist and Teaching Artist: Film & Photography (Seattle/Puget Sound, WA)
Erika Wilhite, Artistic Director, En Masse Arts (Springdale, AR)

About the ACT Fellowship

The ACT Fellowship is a new opportunity for professionals to increase their knowledge of the transportation planning and design process while developing creative placemaking skills to better integrate artistic and cultural practices in transportation projects. With generous funding from the Kresge Foundation, T4America will provide hands-on, curated learning opportunities. T4America and SGA staff, as well as a team of national experts, will educate fellows on best practices, while fellows will have an opportunity to share their own challenges and learn from one another.

“Transportation for America’s arts & culture team has supported the integration of artists and the arts into transportation projects around the country for the past three years. We’re thrilled to now move into the next phase of this work with the launch of our inaugural class of Arts, Culture, and Transportation Fellows,” explains Ben Stone, director of arts & culture for Smart Growth America. “These fellows include artists, planners, arts administrators, and advocates representing some of the country’s most innovative organizations and agencies, and I look forward to supporting their work, providing an opportunity for them to learn from one another, as well as to learn from each of them.”

The fellowship is also designed to cultivate new national leaders in this arena. After the fellowship concludes, several graduating fellows will be offered the opportunity to assist with the next round of T4America’s State of the Art (SOTA) Transportation Trainings in communities across the country. By serving as consultants on these trainings, participating fellows will have the opportunity to develop new leadership, facilitation, and presentation skills.

About the fellows

Seattle/Puget Sound, Washington: The four-person team of Keiko Budech, Cecelia DeLeon, Jessica Ramirez, and Shann Thomas aims to co-create artworks at new light rail stations to create new community hubs that will preserve and celebrate each neighborhood’s history and culture in the Seattle/Puget Sound area. With the passage of Sound Transit 3, a ballot initiative that is raising $54 billion for light rail expansion and the most significant transit expansion package in Washington State history, this is an exciting opportunity for this group of fellows to undertake an arts, culture, and transportation project and gain skills to execute this work.

Austin, Texas: Sue Lambe, Jackie Nirenberg, and Katherine Gregor will work together to capitalize on the momentum of Capital Metro and the City of Austin’s Art in Public Places (AIPP) program. Capital Metro, Austin’s regional public transportation provider, is in the process of launching an art program that the team will work to formalize through new policies and processes. The AIPP program also has a new, historic opportunity to create public art projects on major streets through a percent-for-art program and the current $482 million Corridor Improvement Program.

Springdale, Arkansas: The duo of Antony Ramos and Erika Wilhite will incubate their project En Route, a creative placemaking initiative on buses and along bus routes in Springdale. Their work will center the perspectives and stories of the people who will be most impacted by transit development in Springdale. They hope to inform Connect Northwest Arkansas, a 10-year transit development plan that will create a blueprint for improving and expanding transit in the Northwest Arkansas region.

Indianapolis, Indiana: Danicia Monét Malone and Brittanie Redd are undertaking a tactical urbanism and equitable design initiative called #MyRide. This emancipatory data/design project will address a bus rapid transit development corridor in Indianapolis, directly confronting infrastructure changes, challenges, and concerns around how details are translated to residents.

The fellowship is generously funded by the Kresge Foundation, which defines creative placemaking as an approach to community development and urban planning that integrates arts, culture, and community-engaged design strategies to expand opportunities for low-income people in disinvested communities in American cities.

CONTACT: Steve Davis, sdavis@smartgrowthamerica.org / 202.971.3902

For resources on how arts can improve transportation projects, check out our Creative Placemaking Field Scan, which identifies seven trends and best practices.

Letter urges lawmakers to fully fund transportation this year and rethink the federal transportation program

WASHINGTON, DC – With over 200 signatures from elected officials and organizations,
Transportation for America today sent a letter to Congress calling for Members to use fiscal year
2020 appropriations and the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization as two opportunities
to fundamentally change the federal transportation program.

Transportation for America (T4America) urges Congress to fully fund critical transit, passenger rail
and multimodal programs at historic and/or FAST Act authorized levels this year and to set a vision for
the next reauthorization, including holding the program accountable for maintaining our
transportation system, building safer streets, and connecting people to jobs and services by providing
reliable transportation choices.

“We can no longer afford to keep doing the same thing when it comes to our broken federal
transportation policy,” said Beth Osborne, Director of Transportation for America. “With several
potential opportunities ahead—FY20 appropriations, the looming surface transportation
reauthorization, or an infrastructure package— it’s vital that Congress recognize that new funding
alone will not solve our problems. We are asking Congress to reset our priorities, like prioritizing the
repair and maintenance of our existing roads before allowing states to build expensive new ones that
also bring decades of new repair costs. We are asking Congress to invest in providing more
transportation choices and to measure transportation success the way normal people do: by
measuring what destinations they can reach quickly, safely, and affordably, rather than by just
measuring how fast vehicles are traveling. We are urging Congress to prioritize safety and equity by
embedding these values in our system. And we are urging Congress to harness the power of
technology as a means to achieve these goals and prevent it from exacerbating our problems. These
are achievable shifts that would make a huge, positive difference in people’s lives across the country.”

The letter also asks that the surface transportation reauthorization do more to provide people with
real transportation options—rather than just driving—by investing in transit, biking and walking. And
that it ensures that local entities are allowed to regulate new technologies, such as autonomous
vehicles and electric scooters, focuses on elevating communities of color and low-income
communities that have been disproportionately harmed by past transportation investments, and
prioritizes safety over vehicle speed when designing roads.

Regarding fiscal year 2020 appropriations, T4America specifically asks that Congress fund the transit
Capital Investments Grants (CIG) program, the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage
Development (BUILD, formerly known as TIGER) program, the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and
Safety Improvements (CRISI) program for passenger rail at or above the authorized levels; and take
legislative action to keep the mass transit account of the Highway Trust Fund solvent. These locally
driven programs provide communities with resources to invest in important transportation
infrastructure and operations that are otherwise difficult to fund.

The full letter with the list of all 200+ signatories spanning 40 states and including 50 elected
officials can be found here.

Gulf Coast passenger rail receives $33 million in federal funding

New Orleans to Mobile passenger service gets a boost

BATON ROUGE, LA, June 7, 2019 — The Southern Rail Commission’s efforts to restore passenger rail service to the Gulf Coast received a significant shot in the arm Friday with the long-awaited announcement of a $33 million grant from the Federal Rail Administration (FRA). This federal grant will be matched with commitments from the state of Mississippi, the Mississippi Department of Transportation, the city of Mobile, Amtrak, and private partners, and is paired with priority investments from the state of Louisiana. Combined, this funding will be used to make the major infrastructure and capital investments required to allow Amtrak to move ahead with launching new, regular, reliable passenger service between New Orleans, LA and Mobile, AL.

The Southern Rail Commission (SRC), which applied for the grant from the federal Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) program, has been steadfastly committed to restoring the Gulf Coast passenger rail service that stopped nearly 14 years ago when Hurricane Katrina devastated rail infrastructure along the coast. This has been and continues to be a bipartisan effort of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama SRC commissioners, the populace of the states, Gov. Phil Bryant and Gov. John Bel Edwards, and Congress.

Commissioner Knox Ross of Mississippi praised his state’s leadership in this effort, saying, “We would never be this close to seeing trains run again without the strong support of Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker and his hard work to authorize the necessary programs and supply them with funding. I also want to recognize the contributions of the late Senator Thad Cochran for his repeated appropriations support for these programs. And Governor Phil Bryant fulfilled his promise to the people of Mississippi by committing significant state funds to the project, backed with the full support and funding of the Mississippi DOT, led by commissioner Dick Hall.”

Chairman John Spain recognized Louisiana’s investment in the project, noting that, “Governor John Bel Edwards, with strong support from DOTD Secretary Shawn Wilson, made the necessarily financial commitments for the infrastructure desperately needed in Louisiana to restore service. And we never would have been able to navigate these complex issues in Washington, DC without the policy guidance and hard work of our colleagues at Transportation for America.”

Thanks to work from Senators Wicker and Cory Booker (NJ), Congress created the Gulf Coast Working Group in the 2015 federal transportation reauthorization (the FAST Act) to perform an exhaustive study on restoring the service, which was administered by the FRA. The FRA and the US Department of Transportation, including Secretary Elaine Chao, are to be praised for their work to advance this vital project.

Finally, Amtrak has also showed a consistent commitment to the project, providing an inspection train in 2016, working to minimize freight conflict, and contributing matching funds for the grant application. “Amtrak has strong state and local partners in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana,” said Amtrak President Richard H. Anderson. “The Mobile-New Orleans route exemplifies the type of short corridor service Amtrak wants to establish throughout the nation.”

“As the inspection train rolled through scores of communities back in 2016, we were overwhelmed at the thousands of people who turned out in every stop to make it clear that they urgently want passenger rail service back in their communities,” said John Robert Smith, chair of Transportation for America, former mayor of Meridian, MS and former chair of the board of Amtrak. “They understood that new rail service would be a win for the economy, for tourism, for local business, and for all of their residents who get a new affordable way to travel the region. We’re hopeful that Congress also gets the clear message that they should be aiming to replicate this kind of story in other corridors all across the country as they maintain a vital national passenger rail network.”

This new passenger rail will serve the coastal south in a more robust way than the old service ever did, stopping four times a day in New Orleans, Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula with business-friendly, daytime service. It will link visitors, employees and state residents to Gulf casinos, military bases, historic sites, tourist attractions, and colleges. These capital investments will not only benefit passenger traffic, but freight as well, and the SRC is committed to supporting port access and circulation. According to the Trent Lott National Center for Excellence in Economic Development and Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern Mississippi, the passenger rail will generate $282.58 million annually in the State of Mississippi, and will create 45 new full-time, permanent, high-wage train operating jobs in Louisiana. The impacts on tourism could be even more dramatic, as the study found that just a modest five percent increase in visitors in Harrison County (MS) could generate $92 million more in spending and income annually. The SRC hopes Alabama will come to the table with matching funds for the next grant cycle so passenger rail can be extended to downtown Mobile.

The $33 million grant from the FRA comes from the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) Program.

With these long-awaited grant funds awarded, the SRC, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Amtrak intend to move quickly and have trains running in 24 months, anticipating productive negotiations with CSX as Amtrak works with the private railroad to clear the way for space for passenger service. They’ll do so with the support of a landmark Supreme Court decision made earlier this week that will allow the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak to finally set on-time performance standards and increase the reliability of passenger rail service.

Senator Wicker and his staff helped organize the inspection train in 2016 and worked for the past four years to get the CRISI funding. SRC thanks the late Senator Cochran for helping to get these grant programs funded, and Senators Shelby and Hyde-Smith for supporting the appropriations. The SRC further applauds the support of the congressional delegations from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama for their support of Gulf Coast passenger rail. The SRC commissioners commend Transportation for America, Center for Planning Excellence, and DSD Services Group for helping to support this effort.

“The SRC encourages Members of Congress to continue to support and expand the CRISI and Restoration & Enhancement Grant programs for the benefit of our three States and the nation. These programs would support additional priorities including restoring passenger rail service between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Meridian and Dallas Fort Worth, and Mobile, Montgomery, and Birmingham.”

###

About the Southern Rail Commission

Created by Congress in 1982, the Southern Rail Commission (SRC) was designed to engage and inform public and private rail interests to support and influence Southeast rail initiatives. The SRC is led by governor-appointed commissioners from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and promotes the safe, reliable and efficient movement of people and goods to enhance economic development along rail corridors; provides transportation choices; and facilitates emergency evacuation routes.

About Transportation for America

Transportation for America is an alliance of elected, business, and civic leaders from communities across the country, united to ensure that states and the federal government step up to invest in smart, homegrown, locally-driven transportation solutions — because these are the investments that hold the key to our future economic prosperity. T4America is a program of Smart Growth America. www.t4america.org

The inside scoop on Repair Priorities 2019

After the release of Repair Priorities 2019, we hosted a webinar in partnership with Taxpayers for Common Sense to talk about the findings and recommendations of our new report. During the webinar we heard from our own Director of Transportation for America, Beth Osborne, and Steve Ellis, Executive Vice President of Taxpayers for Common Sense, about why we need reevaluate our federal transportation policy (which governs how we spend money) before dumping more money into the same broken system.

We were also joined by two speakers from state DOTs working to prioritize repair with available funding. Jack Moran, Deputy Chief of Performance and Asset Management for the Massachusetts DOT, talked through the nitty-gritty of how MassDOT has set up a state transportation program that puts repair needs first and demonstrates accountability to the public. Dick Hall, Chairman of the Mississippi Transportation Commission, spoke about why and how Mississippi DOT has made a recent dramatic shift away from road expansion toward repair, including making a difficult decision to halt expansion projects already in the pipeline.

Watch the recorded webinar below and download your copy of Repair Priorities 2019.

Other related resources:

Forget the infrastructure plan — we don’t need it.
In a pointed opinion piece published by the Washington Post, Transportation for America Director Beth Osborne made the case for focusing on federal policy reform instead of a one-time infusion of more funding into a yet-to-be-defined infrastructure plan.

How to build a better state DOT
Smart Growth America took a long look at how current practices and policies at state departments of transportation (DOTs) lead to the construction of huge, expensive road projects (i.e. highways) as a ‘solution’ to almost every transportation problem and how they can do better. Governing Magazine also published a piece on the work with state DOTs that includes interviews with Beth Osborne and Washington State DOT Secretary Roger Millar.

In the Washington Post: Let’s skip the infrastructure spending spree

A new opinion piece in the Washington Post takes a contrarian view of all the talk about money during Infrastructure Week. Let’s skip the infrastructure plan and focus on policy, because without good policy more spending could actually do more harm than good.

Yesterday, Repair Priorities 2019 showed how America desperately needs to change federal transportation policy that allows states to neglect their repair needs in favor of costly road expansions.

Today, a new piece in the Washington Post from Transportation for America Director Beth Osborne makes that clear with some pointed language:

At best, this infrastructure plan would throw more money into the same flawed system. At worst, Congress and the president would be signing a blank check with no sense of what the money is intended to accomplish, no clear system for accountability, no requirements for states to actually repair our “crumbling roads and bridges” and no guarantees that any of us would have an easier time getting from A to B when all that money has been spent.

What we need from Congress is an update to federal transportation policy for the next six years, which governs how we spend some $61 billion annually on highways and transit programs. And we need lawmakers to find more than $13 billion a year to cover shrinking gas-tax revenue.

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Agencies competing for limited federal funds to expand transit must prove they can also cover long-term maintenance and operations, something no road project ever has to do. When state highway departments can’t cover their commitments because they’ve prioritized expansion over repair, they’ll just ask for more money.

After all, there will always be another Infrastructure Week.

While decision makers are focused on infrastructure this week, so are we. Read the full op-ed and then share Beth’s message with your networks on Twitter and/or Facebook to help us spread the word!

Repair Priorities 2019 is here — and it shows that more money won’t fix our infrastructure problems

It’s infrastructure Week again and politicians are back at it, bemoaning our “crumbling roads and bridges” and insisting we must spend more to fix the problem. But we’ve got some cold water to throw on this pity party: Despite more transportation spending over the last decade, the percentage of the roads nationwide in “poor condition” increased from 14 to 20 percent.

That’s the headline from our new report—Repair Priorities 2019—which finds that states are neglecting repair and routine maintenance in favor of costly expansions and widenings. Even when given more flexibility by Congress to spend money as they see fit, states, on average, spent as much money expanding their road networks ($21.3 billion) as they did repairing their existing roads ($21.4 billion) each year.

In short, our infrastructure issues are more of a policy problem than a money problem.

As T4America Director Beth Osborne said in our release today, “While a handful of states are doing an admirable job putting their money where their mouth is by devoting the bulk of their federal dollars to repair, many other states are spending vastly more on expanding their roads or building new ones—creating new liabilities in the process—even as their existing system falls into disrepair.”

Download Repair Priorities for a state-by-state look at how states are spending their money and what it will take to fix the system. Then join us for awebinar on Wednesday May 15 at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT to hear from two state DOT officials about the findings.

Putting the (money) cart before the horse

Two trillion is the hottest number in Washington right now—it’s how much money politicians want to pump into a yet-to-be-fleshed-out infrastructure plan. Although they haven’t yet articulated what all that extra spending will actually achieve or how this money will be spent more responsibly than the hundreds of billions we spent over the last decade, they already know the price tag.

We need to #BuildForTomorrow, they say. We have a question: Build WHAT for tomorrow?

The scope of our vision and ambition should determine how much money we need to spend on infrastructure. And that vision should then be supported with thoughtful policy—not a blank check—that will make sure we achieve our goals.

Getting back on track

So what might thoughtful policy look like? For starters, we should give taxpayers an idea of what they’re paying for with clear, measurable outcomes—do we want to cut the number of roads in poor condition in half over the next six years? Reduce traffic fatalities by 60 percent? Decrease emissions by 70 percent? Define the vision and set some measurable goals first.

We could require states to use available federal funding—billions of dollars they’re given automatically every year—to fix the system before expanding it. We could establish a competitive funding program for new road capacity that requires a higher standard for asset management—just like we do for transit. We could require more frequent and diligent reporting so that taxpayers can hold their officials accountable.

What do all these ideas have in common? They’re about policy not money. Whether it’s a stand-alone infrastructure bill or our existing federal transportation program, policy is the key to fixing America’s infrastructure problem. It’s about time the policy makers took that to heart.

Download Repair Priorities 2019

New report chronicles how the nation’s road conditions have worsened as many states prioritize expansion instead of repair

Report comes as the White House and congressional leaders continue discussing a $2 trillion infrastructure package that could exacerbate the problem

WASHINGTON, DC — Repair Priorities 2019, a new report released today by Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense, shows that, despite more spending, the percentage of the roads nationwide in “poor condition” increased from 14 percent to 20 percent and 37 states saw the percentage of their roads in poor condition increase from 2009-2017.

This is happening because states are neglecting basic repair in favor of expanding their roads. Given increasing spending flexibility by Congress over the last two long-term transportation reauthorizations, states spent nearly as much money expanding their road networks as they did repairing their existing roads ($120 billion spent building new lane-miles from 2009 to 2014).

“Whether during debate over an infrastructure bill or the long-term reauthorization looming next year, the rhetoric I hear over and over again from Capitol Hill and the White House about the need to invest more money in transportation is all about ‘repairing our crumbling roads and bridges.’ But our spending priorities rarely match this oft-repeated rhetoric,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America.

“A look at the numbers from the Federal Highway Administration in Repair Priorities makes it clear that we can scarcely afford to maintain the roads we have, let alone the new roads we keep adding to the system. While a handful of states are doing an admirable job putting their money where their mouth is by devoting the bulk of their federal dollars to repair, many other states are spending vastly more on expanding their roads or building new ones— creating new liabilities in the process—even as their existing system falls into disrepair.”

“Lawmakers and officials like a good ribbon cutting at a new road, but repair is too often treated like flossing teeth: A tedious, sometimes painful extra step that’s all too easily skipped. Except that it’s critical and saves taxpayers cash and pain down the road,” said Steve Ellis, executive vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Instead of sending blank checks to the states, federal taxpayers deserve to have some assurances that their tax dollars will be spent effectively and efficiently on the highest priority projects, which in most cases is taking care of what we already have.”

It’s unclear if we could even afford to maintain all the roads that we’ve built, even if we devoted all available capital dollars toward repair. Repair Priorities estimates that we would need to spend more than $231 billion per year just to keep our existing road network in acceptable repair and bring the backlog of roads in poor condition into good repair over a six-year period (the typical length of a federal transportation reauthorization). By comparison, all highway capital expenditures across all government units in 2015 totaled just $105.4 billion, only a portion of which goes to repair.

The latest available data shows states have made some improvement in their spending since the first edition of Repair Priorities in 2011, but states are still spending just as much on road expansion as road repair. States spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually between 2009-2014 and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion.

When states devote money to expanding their roads, it doesn’t just redirect funds away from repair and maintenance; it also continually expands our overall annual spending need. We built enough new lane miles from 2009-2017 to criss-cross the width of America 83 times, requiring an additional $5 billion per year just to keep those new roads in good condition. That’s more than Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas receive combined in federal highway apportionments every single year.

So what will it take to fix the system? Transportation for America and Taxpayers for Common Sense provide four concrete recommendations for Congress to consider in any infrastructure package they consider, including the upcoming 2020 federal transportation bill. Congress should: guarantee measurable outcomes for American taxpayers with any new funding, require that states repair their existing systems before expanding, require project sponsors to demonstrate that they can afford to maintain new roadway capacity projects, and track progress and require that FHWA publish results.

Repair Priorities 2019 provides a national snapshot and state-by-state evaluation of current roadway pavement conditions, spending trends, and unmet needs. It also recommends crucial actions federal policymakers should take in the next transportation reauthorization bill to get the nation’s roads—and spending priorities—back on track.

The full report and state-by-state findings are available at https://t4america.org/maps-tools/repair-priorities

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Transportation for America, a program of Smart Growth America, is an alliance of elected, business, and civic leaders from communities across the country, united to ensure that states and the federal government step up to invest in smart, homegrown, locally-driven transportation solutions. These are the investments that hold the key to our future economic prosperity.

Smart Growth America envisions a country where no matter where you live, or who you are, you can enjoy living in a place that is healthy, prosperous, and resilient. We empower communities through technical assistance, advocacy, and thought leadership to realize our vision of livable places, healthy people, and shared prosperity.

Taxpayers for Common Sense is an independent, nonpartisan voice for taxpayers working to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly and that government operates within its means.

How TIGER/BUILD can help improve the federal transportation program

The third and final part of our analysis of 10 years of awarding transportation funds competitively through the TIGER/BUILD program illuminates three simple principles that should help guide reform of the federal transportation system.

Read the first two posts in the series (part one, part two) or download the full analysis.

The federal transportation program is in need of a major overhaul. America today is very different than the America of the 1920s. The interstate highway system as envisioned is now complete, new technology is changing the way people move almost daily, there is far greater awareness of the social impacts of car-focused transportation, and climate change is an urgent threat and transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

But the most glaring shortcoming is the total absence of a broader vision of what today’s program should accomplish tomorrow. While Congress has made small tweaks here and there over last few decades, the program as a whole largely fails to meet the needs of the modern day and the basic goal of the program is not clear. Its initial purpose was to build out the interstate system but that has been completed. What now? Is the purpose to keep the current system in a state of good repair? Reduce fatalities on our roadways by half? Ensure that Americans have access to the majority of regional jobs by car and transit?

If we can’t answer these questions of vision, goals, or purpose—if we don’t know why we are spending billions of dollars—it is hard to believe we will accomplish much of anything. Yet Congress is poised to come back to taxpayers and ask for more money, just to accomplish more of the same.

How can this 10-year experiment with awarding a small slice of federal transportation funds competitively to the best possible projects across a range of modes help guide the debate over how to reform the federal transportation program at large? As lawmakers move toward reauthorizing the long-term federal transportation law in 2020, here are three lessons we’ve learned from 10 years of TIGER/BUILD that we could apply to the broader federal program.

Competition for limited funds results in better projects

Competition for funding helps improve projects. The introduction of a flexible, competitive program has pushed applicants to go further, to dream big, collaborate effectively, and design better projects that meet a community’s needs. There are a handful of projects that failed to win funding in one year and came back in another with a stronger application and a recalibrated project and won funding. The BUILD program proves what’s possible when we focus on funding the best possible projects instead of relying on blind formulas to dispense money automatically.

Make funds directly available to local communities

Local governments are generally more in tune with community needs and the land-use implications of transportation projects than statewide entities. The BUILD program has given locals a much needed source of direct federal funding that should be emulated in the broader federal transportation program.

As our colleagues at Smart Growth America have shown, most state departments of transportation (DOTs) were initially created solely to build highways and have that DNA embedded deep in their culture and practice. And they don’t always share the same priorities of their local communities when it comes to choosing how to disburse the funding. Giving locals more of a say with how funds should be spent within their borders results in a transportation system that’s far more responsive to the real needs at a local level.

Incentivize transportation choice

The modern federal transportation program was designed to build the interstate highway system. Today, that system is complete but like a ship with a stuck rudder, federal policy lacks clear new direction and continues to focus primarily on doing the same thing: building roads. The result is a national transportation system that is heavily skewed toward private vehicle travel, often jeopardizing the safety of people walking, biking, and taking transit. But 10 years of BUILD have shown that there is great demand for multimodal infrastructure.

There’s no reason that the federal government should pay for a greater share of a road project than that of a transit project. Federal policy currently stipulates an 80 percent share for roads but a much lower amount for transit—usually around 50 percent. And when it comes to overall funding levels, again, there is no reason we should we should prioritize roads over other transportation options. If anything, transit projects should be prioritized in light of the great demand for more transportation choices, rising inequality, and climate change. The federal program should create more parity between the modes in terms of federal match and the overall funding levels.

Congress has a vital role in BUILD’s future

The greatest strengths of this program have always been found in the numerous ways it is different from other federal transportation funding programs. Over the past decade it has funded numerous projects that have stimulated investment in communities big and small across the country, many of which would have never happened without it. It hypothesized and tested a new model of funding smart projects: funds given directly, allowing more flexibility and innovation in approach, and encouraging teams of multiple partners on complex projects.

While the program still has the potential to continue to fund great projects, it will only do so if Congress stays diligent and ensures that USDOT executes the program as intended.

TIGER is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a roads program, a rural funding program, or just another vehicle for funneling more money without any accountability to state DOTs. It is wildly popular because it is multimodal, advances projects in urban and rural communities alike, funds projects that don’t easily fit in today’s narrowly defined federal funding silos, and is open to any public entity.

We should keep it that way.

Download the full analysis here

Sean Doyle was the primary author of this report for Transportation for America, with contributions from Beth Osborne, Scott Goldstein, Jordan Chafetz, and Stephen Lee Davis.

BUILDing a better competitive grant program, in 5 steps

Under President Trump, USDOT has hijacked the TIGER/BUILD competitive grant program, taking it far from its intended function. After a decade of experience with the program there are a number of simple steps that lawmakers could take to get it back on track and even improve it.

This is the second post in a series about the BUILD program. Learn more about the Trump administration’s dramatic changes to the BUILD program in the first post. Read the third post or download the full analysis.

The BUILD program’s greatest strengths lie in its differences from other federal transportation funding programs, which should be reinforced, rather than diminished in order to award funding to the same kind of projects as core federal transportation programs. BUILD has the potential to continue to fund great projects only if Congress stays diligent and ensures that USDOT executes the program as intended. BUILD is not a roads program, it is not a rural funding program, and it is not another vehicle for funneling more money without any accountability to state DOTs.

Recommendations to improve BUILD

1. Eliminate the $25 million cap on awards.

Even though the program is now larger (average of $967 million during the Trump administration) than it was in most years of the Obama administration ($596 million per year on average), the most recent appropriations bill included a $25 million cap on BUILD grant awards. This has the unintended consequence of making it more difficult to advance innovative, multimodal, and far more transformative or nationally significant projects. For such projects, $25 million simply isn’t enough.²

The maximum award of $25 million was an informal practice established by USDOT early on when the program was funded at substantially lower levels, in order to help them equitably distribute a small amount of funds across the country, as mandated by Congress. However, with Congress providing larger amounts of funding for BUILD, this unnecessary cap serves only to limit the program’s ability to support larger projects that also bring more benefits.

2. Award planning grants, particularly for transit-oriented development and transit projects.

While recent appropriations bills have made planning grants eligible for funding, no such grants have been awarded. Many local communities desire investments in transit, transit-oriented development, and other multimodal infrastructure, but lack the resources or expertise to adequately plan for such investments.

Congress authorized planning grants within TIGER/BUILD four times—in 2010, 2014, 2018, and again in 2019, and USDOT awarded a combined 64 planning grants in 2010 and 2014. These grants helped local communities advance projects that were ultimately funded by a subsequent TIGER/BUILD construction grant, or other sources. For example, the 2014 funding of the San Francisco Bay Area Core Capacity Transit Study helped enable the advancement of the Transbay Corridor Core Capacity project in the federal transit capital program. In Indiana, another 2014 planning grant helped locals to advance the Red Line BRT project which also successfully received funds from the transit capital program and is currently under construction.

Innovative projects can struggle to get off the ground because transportation agencies can be hesitant to spend money on planning a project if there isn’t going to be any funding available to build it. But a program like BUILD can’t cover the capital costs of a project if no basic planning has been done. That’s why these BUILD planning funds are so important. USDOT should use its authority to make planning awards where appropriate, and Congress should also encourage USDOT to use this authority as well.

3. Strengthen requirements for modal parity.

This administration has made a dramatic shift to use the BUILD program to fund traditional road projects which can already be easily funded without restriction through a variety of conventional federal programs. This misuse of the program should prompt Congress to strengthen requirements to allocate funding to multimodal projects, including transit and passenger rail. Alternatively, Congress should consider dedicating more trust fund money to these modes if BUILD funding is not going to be made available to them.

4. Require a more equitable urban/rural funding split.

Congress should make clear that a more equitable urban-rural split is appropriate and provide more clear guidance to USDOT about how they are expected to consider the needs of both urban and rural America. Currently, USDOT awards grants to either urban or rural projects, with a set-aside for rural projects. This creates a false choice between the two.

For example, the CREATE project in Illinois, which will relieve freight rail bottlenecks and allow goods to more easily move to market through the country, is considered an “urban” project. This, despite the fact that about 25 percent of rail traffic in the United States travels through the Chicago region, and farmers and businesses from rural areas will benefit from reduced freight congestion. The benefits of an urban or rural project are not limited only to the jurisdiction where construction will take place. USDOT should consider the full impact of a project, on both urban and rural areas when determining a projects classification.

5. Authorize the BUILD program in long-term transportation policy.

The TIGER/BUILD program stands out as the only major federal transportation program that has not been authorized by the FAST Act and previous authorizing legislation, leaving its fate in limbo each year. While Congress has continued to fund it through the annual appropriations process, authorizing the program over multiple years at $1.5 billion annually would provide some certainty to potential applicants and allow Congress to establish more policy guardrails to ensure it operates as intended.

Many of these recommendations currently have support in Congress. In particular, 20 members of Congress recently signed a letter led by Representative Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11) to USDOT expressing concern about how they have been facilitating the BUILD program. That letter endorsed some of these recommendations.

The BUILD program has long been a bipartisan winner because it is so flexible. It gives communities a unique opportunity (and in some cases the only opportunity) to win direct federal assistance for a priority transportation project that would otherwise be hard or impossible to fund. However, the dramatic shift in focus underway at USDOT seriously undermines the utility of the program by directing dollars away from innovative, multimodal projects and instead heavily favoring conventional road projects that can already be more easily funded.

The recommendations above will help Congress keep TIGER roaring (or BUILD building) as the program enters its second decade.

Up next, lessons from the past 10 years of TIGER/BUILD that should inform federal transportation policy at large. Read the final post or download the full analysis.

Sean Doyle was the primary author of this report for Transportation for America, with contributions from Beth Osborne, Scott Goldstein, Jordan Chafetz, and Stephen Lee Davis.

Taming the TIGER: Trump turns innovative grant program into another roads program

Under President Trump, the U.S. Department of Transportation has effectively turned the formerly innovative BUILD program—created to advance complex, hard-to-fund projects—into little more than a rural roads program, dramatically undercutting both its intent and utility.

Following this week’s announcement of an 11^th round in BUILD competitive grants ($900 million) available to almost any public entity for transportation projects, Transportation for America is releasing this new comparative and constructive critique of USDOT’s BUILD program (formerly known as TIGER) in three parts. Up first today, what we found after examining ten years of awards. Read the second post in the series or download the full analysis.

The Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) program has been one of the most popular and impactful transportation programs in the federal arsenal. Conceived during the first few months of the Obama administration at the height of the financial crisis in 2009, the program originally bore the name TIGER: Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery.

This unique program was powerful precisely because of how it differed from most other federal transportation programs.

The program is uniquely popular because of its flexibility.
Funds can be awarded to any public entity—like a city government, public university, or tribal government—and can fund almost any kind of transportation project—roads, bridges, transit, freight, ports, bike, pedestrian, or any combination—in a wide variety of contexts. Given that most federal transportation programs award funding to state DOTs and restrict funding to one particular mode, the BUILD program has provided a much needed avenue for local entities to finance multimodal or complicated projects that cross numerous jurisdictional lines.

The program’s competition resulted in projects with greater benefits.
Unlike nearly all federal transportation dollars that are awarded automatically by formulas based on population, lane-miles, or other simple criteria, USDOT receives, scores, and awards BUILD funding based on the extent to which projects improve safety, state of repair, economic competitiveness, quality of life, and environmental sustainability. If you have a great project that’s multimodal, crosses city lines, and includes multiple partners, BUILD is an opportunity to fund it—and often the only way to do so with direct federal resources. Over the 10 rounds of the program so far, USDOT received more than 8,443 applications from all 50 states and U.S. territories requesting more than $156 billion in funding.³

The program encouraged more non-federal investment in transportation.
Since 2009, the program has awarded nearly $7.1 billion to 554 projects across the nation, leveraging billions more in non-BUILD funding. Over the first eight rounds, on average, projects attracted more than 3.6 additional, non-federal dollars for every TIGER grant dollar.

The focus has shifted since the Trump administration took over the program

A program which once heavily funded multimodal, transformative projects of regional and national significance which would otherwise be difficult to fund is now focused on expanding road capacity with an extreme bias for projects in rural areas. By comparing the projects selected for funding over the last 10 years and their level of funding, we identified four dramatic shifts in the program.

More roads, less multimodal

In the two most recent rounds of TIGER/BUILD awards—the first two years the program was managed by the Trump administration—only about 10 percent of funding went to transit projects. This is a big departure from the previous eight years when transit projects received between 28 and 40 percent of funding. Conversely, the share of funding dedicated to traditional road projects has grown to all-time highs; in 2018, road projects—most of which are eligible to receive normal formula dollars from their state—received more than 60 percent of the funding for the first time, after hovering below 30 percent for years.

While the name of the program may have been changed to BUILD in 2018, the congressional intent did not change. The small amount of funding for multimodal projects is inconsistent with the law which directs USDOT to invest “in a variety of transportation modes.”⁴ TIGER was created in part because most federal transportation dollars are already focused on roads via the highway formulas.

If a road project didn’t rank high enough to be funded from a state’s share of the $42 billion guaranteed to be spent annually from the Highway Trust Fund, it likely isn’t essential and shouldn’t displace other more creative projects that can’t be funded through conventional federal transportation programs.

More capacity, less repair

A closer look at the road projects selected over the years shows that the Trump administration has focused more heavily on capacity expansion (i.e. new roads and road widenings) versus repair and bridge replacement. The first year of BUILD (round X) set two records: not only was a record share of total funding devoted to roads, a record percentage of that funding (70 percent) was dedicated to capacity expansion.

Note: this graphic only includes projects that were categorized as “roads” in the first graphic above. It does not include complete streets projects.

While policymakers of all stripes echo the constant refrain of “repairing our crumbling roads and bridges,” the Trump administration has prioritized doing the exact opposite with the BUILD program, largely opting to build new infrastructure (increasing the amount of infrastructure that needs to be maintained) rather than focusing on caring for our existing assets.

More rural, less urban

The past two of years of awards have disproportionately favored rural areas. While rural areas certainly deserve transportation investments, they should be proportional. The U.S. Census Bureau found that in 2016, approximately 19 percent of Americans lived in rural areas while 81 percent of Americans lived in urban areas.⁵ Reflecting where most Americans live, during the first eight years of the TIGER program (2009-2016) projects in urban areas received, on average, 75 percent of funding. Yet in the past two rounds of the program, projects in urban areas have only received an average of 33 percent of funding.

When providing BUILD funding in the last two appropriation bills, Congress directed USDOT to fund projects in rural and urban areas “to ensure an equitable geographic distribution of funds.”⁶ Disproportionately awarding grants to projects in rural areas is hardly equitable and is inconsistent with the intent and letter of the law.

Critics often complained during the earlier years of the program that it was too urban-focused based solely on the location of the chosen projects. However, many projects classified as urban were actually projects of national significance that have great utility and benefits for rural areas. For example, Port of New Orleans Rail Yard Improvements were funded during TIGER II “to reduce congestion, facilitate the movement of marine and rail cargo, stimulate international commerce, and maintain an essential port.” This project brings immense benefits for the city, the rural areas around it, and the country even though it was classified as an “urban project.” It creates jobs in New Orleans at the port and moves exports like poultry, paper, and pulp to market, a critical need for farmers and manufacturers across the country.

While the Trump administration has made investment in rural communities a key talking point, USDOT’s project selection reflects a very narrow and overly simplistic understanding of what can actually help those communities. Projects that get goods from rural America to market are left off the table just because they might be located in an urban area.

A new rail flyover at 63^rd and State in Chicago that eliminated an at-grade crossing. TIGER I provided $100 million to a package of rail infrastructure projects in the Chicago region known as CREATE. While classified as an urban project, CREATE is addressing a series of bottlenecks that result in passenger delays in Chicago and freight delays throughout the country, bringing benefits to urban and rural communities alike across the region, state, and country. Photo by Mark Llanuza.

More funding for state DOTs, less for anyone else

One of the greatest strengths of the BUILD program is that it’s one of the few ways for local governments (or any public entity) to directly receive transportation funding from the federal government to advance their own priority projects, without having to go hat-in-hand to the state. If a municipality or public transit agency conceives of a great project that ticks the required boxes under the law—and if they can identify a local matching contribution—BUILD funding is an option.

Most other federal transportation funds are directed to and controlled by state DOTs. (A smaller share goes to regional metropolitan planning organizations.) As most mayors or other local elected leaders know from firsthand experience, a state DOT’s priorities for spending within their community’s borders are often not the same.

Under the Trump administration, more funds have been going to state DOTs—an average of 37.5 percent awarded to state DOTs compared to 28 percent under the Obama administration.⁷

Up next, our recommendations for re-BUILDing the program in the second post. Or download the full analysis.

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Sean Doyle was the primary author of this report for Transportation for America, with contributions from Beth Osborne, Scott Goldstein and Stephen Lee Davis.

Washington State Department of Transportation announces the selection of two artists to serve in the country’s first statewide artist-in-residence program

With today’s announcement that Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome have been selected to serve as artists-in-residence with WSDOT for a year, Washington becomes the first state to embed an artist in a statewide agency.

CONTACT: Ben Stone, bstone@smartgrowthamerica.org / 410.370.3843 and Barbara LaBoe, laboeb@wsdot.wa.gov/ 360.705.7080

Artist team Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome will spend a year working with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) as artists-in-residence to bring a creative approach and help develop new ways to achieve agency goals through a first-of-its-kind program created by ArtPlace America and Transportation for America, a program of Smart Growth America.

Recognized as a tool for pioneering innovative and creative solutions, artist-in-residence programs have been piloted across the nation in municipal governmental agencies, but WSDOT will be the first statewide agency to pilot such a program at the state level. These two artists will help find creative ways to advance WSDOT’s strategic plan goals of inclusion, practical solutions and workforce development.

“The quality and quantity of applications we received for the artist-in-residence position impressed our selection committee, and we’re thrilled to have selected the team of Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome,” said Ben Stone, Smart Growth America’s director of arts & culture. “Their collaborative approach, insatiable curiosity, and experience with design, planning, community engagement, and Washington state make them ideal artists-in-residence. I can’t wait to share their work with other states who are in the process of considering setting up their own similar programs.”

“We’re excited to work with Kelly and Mary to find innovative ways to better engage the communities we serve and deliver the best possible transportation projects,” said Roger Millar, WSDOT’s secretary of transportation. “They have experience with both rural and urban communities that will help us foster deeper community engagement, build relationships with underrepresented communities, and bring creativity to design challenges.”

“This opportunity stood out because it brings together so many of the issues we care about: transportation, infrastructure, community, the rural-urban continuum, and the role of civic service in stewarding the commons,” Gregory and Welcome said. “As artists and activists, we have a history of working in collaboration with non-arts communities and building relational bridges between fun and function. We really believe in the power of artists to bring fresh perspectives and strengthen community connections.”

About the two artists

Mary Welcome, of Palouse, Washington, is a multidisciplinary cultural worker collaborating with complex and often under-represented rural communities, with projects rooted in community engagement and the development of intersectional programming to address hyper-local issues of equity, cultural advocacy, inclusivity, visibility, and imagination. She collaborates to build cooperative environments that encourage civic engagement, radical education, and community progress.

Kelly Gregory is an itinerant social architect based on the Pacific coast. Her practice is rooted in socially-engaged work: affordable housing projects, exhibitions, reimagining spaces of incarceration, democratic public space, and in-depth community-driven research. Her projects fold current communities and future solutions into functional, beautiful spaces for collaboration and engagement. As a team, with a multi-disciplinary backgrounds in arts, outreach, architecture, and activism, they listen with communities and imagine new solutions in collaboration with neighbors.

For more information about the team, read this Q&A between the artists and Transportation for America: https://t4america.org/2019/03/21/get-to-know-washington-states-new-artists-in-residence

What will these artists do?

The residency, based in Olympia, will run for one year with both artists making rotations as a team through several WSDOT core divisions to gain knowledge on the agency’s operations, priorities and challenges. The artist team will then propose projects to address WSDOT’s overarching goals. Their work may address some or all of the following topics: improving community engagement, supporting alternatives to single occupancy vehicle transport, creating healthier communities and enhancing safety and equity. After four months of rotations, eight months will be devoted to the artists’ project(s) development and production.

The artists will begin the residency in July 2019.

More details about the program

Several organizations collaborated on the artist-in-residence program. ArtPlace America is providing a $125,000 grant for the program, including a $40,000 stipend split between the two artists and $25,000 for a final project(s) the artists and staff develop. Transportation for America will administer both the funds and the overall program, including providing staff and consulting assistance. The State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI) will also provide staff support. Both T4A and SSTI are programs of Smart Growth America. WSDOT is not providing funding for the program, but will supply in-kind contributions consisting of work space for the selected artists and staff time for agency workers to collaborate on the new program.

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The State Smart Transportation Initiative promotes transportation practices that advance environmental sustainability and equitable economic development, while maintaining high standards of governmental efficiency and transparency. It is jointly operated by the University of Wisconsin and Smart Growth America.

ArtPlace America is a ten-year collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions. We began our work as an organization in 2011, and will finish in 2020. Our mission is to position arts and culture as a core sector of community planning and development.

WSDOT keeps people, businesses and the economy moving by operating and improving the state’s transportation systems. To learn more about what we’re doing, go to www.wsdot.wa.gov/news for pictures, videos, news and blogs. Real time traffic information is available at wsdot.com/traffic or by dialing 511.

Get to know Washington state’s new artists-in-residence

We announced earlier today that Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome have been selected to serve as artists-in-residence with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) in a new fellowship program created by ArtPlace America and T4America, bringing a dose of creativity to the statewide transportation agency. Get to know this team of two artists with this brief Q&A.

WSDOT is launching the country’s first statewide artist-in-residence program, embedding this team of two artists within the agency for a year starting later this summer. Kelly Gregory (left, above photo) and Mary Welcome (right) will help develop new ways to achieve WSDOT’s goals through a first-of-its-kind program. They took a few minutes to answer a few questions from Ben Stone, the director of arts and culture for Smart Growth America.

What was it about the WSDOT artist residency that inspired you both to apply? Now that you’ve been selected, what excites you most about the residency?

As artists and activists, we have a history of working in collaboration with non-arts communities and building relational bridges between fun and function. We are excited for the opportunity to shape what a statewide artist-in-residence can look like on a national level because we really believe in the power of artists to bring fresh perspectives and strengthen community connections. As a nationally recognized transportation agency, WSDOT addresses the needs of every resident and visitor of the state and we are excited to help build relationships with communities across the entire state. What an incredible opportunity—to study the communities of Washington based on how we move around.

While you’ll have a lot of time to formulate project ideas once the residency starts, what are your initial thoughts on how you’ll approach the residency?

We’re especially interested in the statewide services and the many different people (from road crews to planners) and places (both rural and urban) that make up the WSDOT community. We think some of the best outreach is done on a conversational level, spending intentional time with folks outside of formal meetings and work hours (riding in a snow plow! hanging with the captain of a ferry!). During this residency we hope to develop meaningful, equitable, and impactful ideas into a long standing project that WSDOT can take ownership of in order to continue to be national leaders in the transportation sector.

Tell us about one of your recent projects that you feel is relevant to the residency.

Our collective Homeboat has spent the past three years working with the town of St. James, Minnesota with funding from an ArtPlace America grant. Using an extensive community research process, we collaborated with city employees and local leaders to create a Community Advocate Program that equips community members to connect neighbors, family members, and friends to critical resources, information, and opportunities. We also collaborated with the St. James community on a Healthy Housing Initiative that developed strategies for improving options for affordable, safe, housing to neighbors.

This kind of work is really relational, necessitating a lot of listening and grappling with the complex layers of what makes up a community in order to identify invisible barriers. We appreciate the added challenge of problem solving within our creative practice, but we’re also pretty good at keeping it fun for everyone involved.

In our Arts, Culture, and Transportation Field Scan, we profiled seven roles that artists play in solving transportation challenges, from generating creative solutions to healing wounds and divisions. How would you describe your roles as artists working on transportation projects and how to do these roles match up with or expand beyond those seven roles?

The seven roles profiled are focused on equity—from planning and construction to collaboration and engagement. Equity is at the core of our work, and manifests in our practices by working toward equal access, collaborating with the spirit of a place, building hyperlocal, designing for shared stewardship, moving at the pace of trust, and including all community voices. It is critical that all of our transportation systems are equitable, safe, and inclusive for all people from rural to urban places.

How do our transportation systems shape the places we inhabit or experience? We feel especially close to role number five: Fostering Local Ownership. Local stewardship of valuable shared resources, like our streets, that serve as the country’s connective tissue, are critical to more equitable, connected communities.

What kind of professional or personal experiences do you have in Washington state? What lessons from your work outside of Washington do you hope to bring to the residency at WSDOT?

Mary is based in Palouse—a small rural town on the eastern edge of the state that is inaccessible by any type of public transportation and sits at the intersection of three small highways. She cares deeply about cultural equity in the state of Washington. Her projects seek to build systems of exchange across the rural-urban continuum and she’s excited to collaborate with an agency that recognizes—and also has to effectively serve—the entire state. WSDOT is more than the sum of its parts. The agency is a living network of people and place. She brings a keen and curious place-based practice, a deep affection for the hinterland, and extensive experience as a long-haul cross-country driver who has never taken the same way twice.

Kelly has long been an advocate for alternative transportation. She has worked on a number of transportation related initiatives throughout the last decade. With the urban design firm Gehl, Kelly helped create the National Street Service, a participatory social movement to transform America’s streets into enjoyable and fulfilling places for all people. She also co-founded Post-Car Adventuring—a micro-publisher which creates guidebooks for outdoor adventure using public transport and bicycles. She loves long train travel and rides her bike everywhere.

Full artist and team bios

Mary Welcome (Palouse, WA) is a multidisciplinary cultural worker collaborating with complex and often under-represented rural communities. As an artist-activist, her projects are rooted in community engagement and the development of intersectional programming to address hyper-local issues of equity, cultural advocacy, inclusivity, visibility, and imagination. She collaborates with local schools, city councils, civic groups, youth, summer camps, libraries, neighbors, and friends to build cooperative environments that encourage civic engagement, radical education, and community progress. She believes in small towns, long winters, optimists, parades, and talking about feelings. www.bangbangboomerang.com

Kelly Gregory is an itinerant social architect based on the Pacific coast. Her practice is rooted in socially-engaged work: affordable housing projects, exhibitions, reimagining spaces of incarceration, democratic public space, and in-depth community-driven research. Her projects fold current communities and future solutions into functional, beautiful spaces for collaboration and engagement. www.rovingstudio.com

As a team, with a multi-disciplinary backgrounds in arts, outreach, architecture, and activism, they listen with communities and imagine new solutions in collaboration with neighbors.