Is this flurry of transit grants a blip or a trend?
The U.S. Department of Transportation has finalized five grants to expand and build new transit lines. It’s a stark departure from USDOT’s history of stonewalling grants under Trump. Could this surge of grants signal a shift in the agency’s stance? Perhaps. But it does highlight how our federal transportation system is structured to make transit hard to fund and why Congress should work to increase transit funding levels and certainty in new, long-term transportation policy that is currently being drafted. New transportation policy principles released in the House suggest that could be possible.
House environment coalition demands real transportation policy reform to tackle climate change
Last week, leaders of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC) urged Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio and Ranking Member Sam Graves to use surface transportation reauthorization as an opportunity to take serious action on climate change.
House principles could finally connect transportation spending to tangible outcomes
Transportation for America and the National Complete Streets Coalition released a statement regarding the principles for infrastructure released today by the House majority of the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee.
ACT Fellows learn from local leaders in the Twin Cities
Transportation for America believes in hands-on learning from experienced practitioners. We put that belief into practice through programs like our Arts, Culture and Transportation (ACT) Fellowship, supported by the Kresge Foundation, where we have been able to take our fellows to different communities to experience first-hand the power of arts and culture to produce better transportation systems.
14 cities join Transportation for America’s Smart Cities Collaborative
The roster for the Smart Cities Collaborative is set. Last December we announced the three cities that will be implementing pilot programs in this year’s Collaborative; today we’re unveiling the remaining 14 cities and agencies that will join this peer learning effort on curb management.
TransportationCamp DC in the rearview mirror
TransportationCamp DC 2020 was last weekend, and while it was a huge success, it almost didn’t happen at all. More than 500 people were there on Saturday and the waitlist topped 100. The creativity and energy on display was awesome. Recapping such a dynamic event is a challenge, but we collected some short reflections from staff who were there to help give you a feel for what we saw and felt on Saturday if you weren’t able to attend.
Business groups urge Congressional support for transit funding
The business community gets it—public transportation is critical for the strength and growth of local economies and federal funding for transit is needed to get projects off the ground. In a letter to Congress, members of the Chambers for Transit coalition called for fully funding the nation’s largest grant program for public transit and reorienting the entire federal transportation program around clear goals and priorities.
Congrats USDOT, for a job poorly done
Congress required USDOT to spend its 2018 transit funds by the end of this year, and USDOT was poised to fail. But at the last minute, Congress bailed them out by easing the requirement. As the deadline approaches, USDOT is still sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that it refuses to award, unnecessarily delaying critical new transit projects.
House bill sets new standard for GREEN Streets
Last week, Rep. Jared Huffman (CA-02) introduced a bill that would measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled on our roadways. This would be transformative.
T4America selects 3 cities to launch curbside management pilots
Transportation for America (T4America) is thrilled to announce that it has awarded three cities with funding and support to complete curbside management pilot projects. The three cities are Bellevue, WA; Boston, MA; and Minneapolis, MN.
Trump’s USDOT BUILDs even more roads
Federal grants for multimodal projects announced this month are decidedly not multimodal. As our research has shown previously, the Trump administration has dramatically undermined this grant program by funding traditional road projects that could otherwise already be funded by states, siphoning resources from other, harder to fund projects—the original intent of the program. But the U.S. House has adopted some policy changes to try and salvage some of what made the BUILD program so popular under the Obama administration.
Here’s what happens when Jarrett Walker takes over your Twitter account
A week ago, we gave Jarrett Walker + Associates the keys to our Twitter account to explain what a transportation system oriented around improving people’s access to jobs and services (not increasing vehicle speed) actually looks like.
“Voluntary safety assessments” for automated vehicles will result in more deaths
The National Transportation Safety Board agrees with us on automated vehicle safety: making safety assessments “voluntary” utterly fails to ensure public safety—and at least one person has already died as a result. The federal government’s current hands-off approach is incredibly unsafe for everyone except the bottom line of companies rushing to put unready driverless cars on the road.
Connecting people to jobs and services week: Hey Congress, we need your help to measure access
The Des Moines Area MPO wants to make a shift to award funding the transportation projects that do the most to improve the region’s resident’s access to jobs and services. But—like most MPOs and local governments across the country—its budget for the technology that makes this possible is small. It’s time for Congress to help local communities invest in the right projects.
Connecting people to jobs and services week: The legislative path to make access the goal of transportation investments
Measuring access—not vehicle speed—is smart policy. But local governments, states, and metropolitan planning organizations need support from the federal government to make this happen. It’s high time for Congress to make robust travel data and analysis tools available to transportation agencies.
Connecting people to jobs and services week: Rethinking shared mobility to prioritize access
Transportation is fundamentally about connecting people, but America’s transportation system focuses on moving cars instead. Madlyn McAuilffe from the New Urban Mobility Alliance wrote this guest post about the consequences of our misguided priorities and how we can get back to focusing on building places and transportation networks for people.
Connecting people to jobs and services week: What do destination access metrics look like in action?
Academics have long pointed to a metric called destination access—called by Transportation for America “access to jobs and services”—as a better decision guide than older, conventional measures that focus mainly on the speed of cars. But what does this new practice look like in real life, and where and how is it already being used?
To connect people to jobs and services, we need to measure what matters: people
Today we largely decide which transportation projects to build and where to build them based on how much delay vehicles experience, while entirely ignoring everyone not in a car in the first place. By ignoring walking, biking, or taking transit, we’re ignoring the impacts on everyone not using a car, particularly low-income persons, people of color, and older adults.
It’s time to define transportation success by what actually matters to people: getting where you need to go
For decades, transportation departments have been measuring the wrong thing: vehicle speed. Instead of measuring the speed of a car, we should measure the success of our transportation system by how many jobs and services people can access safely, quickly and affordably.
Connecting people to jobs and services week: How bad metrics lead to even worse decisions
When the top priority of our transportation investments is moving cars as fast as possible, the end product is streets that are wildly unsafe—as chronicled at length last week. But this focus on vehicle speed and throughput is the result of outdated metrics that also utterly fail to produce a transportation system that connects people to what they need every day.
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