Skip to main content

Safety over speed week: Our transportation system values some lives more than others

U.S. transportation policy focuses first and foremost on ensuring that drivers can travel with as little delay as possible. But this laser focus on speed sidelines other more important considerations like the preservation of human life and the health impacts of vehicle pollution. Prioritizing safety in our transportation policy—at the federal, state, and local levels—would be a major step towards a more equitable transportation system.

America’s transportation system is fundamentally inequitable. More resources go to wealthier and more politically connected communities; streets are designed to prioritize high-speed (expensive) vehicles over the safety of people, walking, biking, or taking transit; everyday destinations are out of reach for many people who don’t own or can’t afford a car. Those are just a few obvious examples.

Equity is a key consideration throughout our new principles for transportation, but it’s at the heart of the second one: Design for safety over speed.

In the U.S., our overarching priority in transportation for the past century has been to help cars to go as fast as possible, all the time, no matter the context. The term jaywalking was invented to shame people who dared to use public space that was increasingly becoming the realm of cars alone. We bulldozed entire neighborhoods—almost exclusively communities of color—in cities around the county to make way for new interstates that enabled white flight. And as interstates and other roads filled with traffic we spent vast sums of public money to bulldoze even more homes and businesses to widen the roads, only to watch them fill up with even more traffic.

But our focus on prioritizing speed above all else with the public right-of-way has not had the same negative impact on everyone.

The pollution that this futile pursuit of speed has generated disproportionately impacts lower-income people and people of color. “On average, communities of color in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic breathe 66 percent more air pollution from vehicles than white residents,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. This pollution shortens lifespans and can have lifelong impacts from developmental problems in children to increased rates of asthma, diabetes, and other chronic health impacts.

As our colleagues at Smart Growth America noted in Dangerous by Design 2019, “even after controlling for differences in population size and walking rates, we see that drivers strike and kill people over age 50, Black or African American people, American Indian or Alaska Native people, and people walking in communities with lower median household incomes at much higher rates.”

While federal data on traffic fatalities doesn’t include information on a victim’s income level, it does include where a person was walking when they were killed. And people walking in lower-income communities are far more likely to be struck and killed by drivers than people walking in middle-income communities. (One would logically assume that these victims are more likely to live in those lower-income communities.) The disparities in these fatality rates are a direct reflection of policy and funding decisions. Low-income communities are less likely to have sidewalks (in good condition), marked crosswalks, and street design to support safer, slower speeds.

We need to prioritize the safety of those outside of vehicles

Part of the solution is making sure we’re putting the safety of people walking, biking, and taking transit on equal footing with people driving. In most places, the people more likely to be traveling outside of a vehicle are people who have suffered the most from the previously outlined disparities and inequities. Our call to design local and arterial roads surrounded by development for no more than 35 mph would dramatically improve equity. When you have people walking, shopping, dining, waiting for the bus or otherwise going about their lives, roads designed for drivers to travel at 40 or 50 mph are simply too fast and too deadly. A pedestrian hit by a driver at 50mph is about twice as likely to die as a person hit at 35 mph.

See the full interactive graph at ProPublica.

To be clear, this isn’t just a function of speed limits.

While lowering speed limits is important, what most people don’t understand is that once you’re behind the wheel of a car, you will drive at the speed you feel comfortable. Designing for safety is paramount. Wide, straight lanes and open skies give unspoken cues to drivers that this road is built for speed. In contrast, narrower, perhaps curvier lanes that are enclosed by buildings or streets trees signal to drivers that they should be driving slower.

Beyond being intentional about the safety of people outside vehicles, resource allocation is critical. Many federal grant programs for infrastructure projects, even small but critical ones like redesigning a deadly intersection, require a local funding match. But for many poor cities and towns—both rural and urban—securing such matching funds can be prohibitive. At the local level, officials need to be intentional about tracking where and how funds are being spent to ensure that the streets in lower-income areas designed for safe travel just more affluent areas.

Communities impacted by vehicle pollution should also have a larger voice in planning future transportation investments. Too often these communities are excluded, or their voices are given less weight than others even though they will be the ones who bear the greatest impact from a widening highway or larger road. One example of this is how most projects to widen or expand a roads typically only consider the limited improvements to travel time for commuters traveling through that area, while failing to consider the impacts on those who may need to cross that street, or the increased air pollution for those who live nearby.

It’s simply not part of the typical calculus; all of the underlying metrics in the federal transportation program focus simply on vehicle speed, delay, and throughput. Many states are even planning for more people to die in future years—it’s an implicit acknowledgement that their streets are unsafe yet nothing in federal law requires them to try and kill fewer people. So many simply won’t act.

Safety must be our priority. Making walking, biking, and taking transit safer will save lives and help reduce driving, in turn reducing the health disparities in low-income communities and communities of color.

In the end, this is about whether or not we value the lives of everyone. Today, our transportation policy—particularly at the federal level—values a few seconds saved for motorists each day over the lives of people walking, biking, or taking transit. It values the lives of the wealthy over the lives of low-income people. And it values the lives of white or more affluent Americans over the lives of other Americans. By putting safety at the heart of our transportation policy, we can start to create a more equitable transportation system.

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

Safety over speed week: Drive like your kid business lives here

Economic slowdowns are generally a bad thing. But slowing down might be good for the economy, so long as we’re slowing vehicle speeds. Streets designed to accommodate (slow) drivers, people walking and biking, and transit riders are better for businesses, save money on health care costs, and can help businesses attract and retain talent.

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 these 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 for more related content all week long.

Imagine a vibrant commercial corridor, with people window shopping, eating at a sidewalk cafe, or chatting in a plaza. Perhaps there are cars parallel parked under trees planted next to the wide sidewalk. Some are locking up their bikes while others are waiting at a clearly marked bus stop. Cars are traveling slowly and crosswalks are frequent. 

Now imagine that place where the slow traffic is replaced by high-speed vehicles on the nearby roadway. The sidewalks no longer feel like a place to stroll and window shop and outdoor seating is unpleasant—the people have disappeared because it feels unsafe. The sidewalk might be narrowed and trees removed to accommodate more lanes to move more cars quickly past the once vibrant corridor. The people may be gone, but the businesses are still there and struggling to hang on. 

In America today, we are much more likely to build the second lifeless street that prioritizes speed than we are to build the first vibrant street that prioritizes safety.

Our transportation policies are designed primarily to move vehicles as quick as possible while ignoring other users. Instead of sidewalk cafes and cyclists locking their bikes, the street is empty. Instead of parking and shopping, motorists speed through, on their way to somewhere else. Public transit riders have disappeared too, as this is no longer a destination, it is a place to drive-through. 2

Our focus on keeping cars moving above all else harms local economies. Study after study has shown that business sales at worst stay the same but often increase when we redesign streets to lower speeds and safely accommodate people walking and on bikes. Getting more people (i.e potential shoppers) on the street is key.

Streets with slower speeds are more inviting for everyone, including people walking, biking, and taking public transit, creating the crowds which spend and invest in the corridor. Streets with slower speeds enable environments where people will spend time and linger, creating a sense of civic community, a sense of place. Streets like this are the basic building block of creating and capturing long-term value. And most cities and towns, whatever their size, would never survive without having these incredibly financially productive corridors.


Downtown Erwin, TN photo by Brian Stansberry. Licensed with Creative Commons 3.0

Healthy streets are good for business

Beyond these direct economic impacts of safer streets, making it safer for people to walk or bike can improve community health and reduce medical costs, freeing up public and private dollars to be invested in other ways.

A 2010 report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that bicycle and pedestrian crashes caused “$16 billion in economic costs and $87 billion in comprehensive costs, accounting for 7 percent of all economic costs, and 10 percent of all societal harm (measured as comprehensive costs).” Imagine all that money, which could otherwise be spent in local communities. 

Making your downtown a safer place to walk is a key component of economic competitiveness in today’s economy. Research indicates that companies of all sizes are increasingly relocating to walkable and transit-accessible downtowns because that’s where talented workers want to be. Amazon’s recent search for a second headquarters—where access to transit was a core requirement—is just one example of this larger trend. We wrote about State Farm’s similar move to consolidate dozens of offices in just a few transit-connected, walkable locations a few years back.

Congress urgently needs to decide whether or not to prioritize safety over speed with the billions in transportation dollars they give to states and metro areas each year, but fortunately, we do not have to choose between safer streets and our economy. We just have to choose safe streets.

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

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

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

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

Slip lanes on roads and streets are emblematic of what it looks like in practice to sacrifice safety on the altar of speed, where this underlying goal of “keep cars moving fast at all times” runs counter to the goal of “keep everyone safe while moving from A to B”—even if you say that safety is important. If we truly prioritize safety, as T4America is suggesting in our second principle, we would never build a slip lane on a local street again. 3

What are slip lanes and why do they exist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What prioritizing safety over speed would look like

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

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

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

The lanes were narrowed, the slip lane was eliminated, the right turn was converted into a sharper turn that requires drivers to slow down before turning, and the crosswalk was moved to the safest and shortest point of the intersection where pedestrians will be the most visible. 4

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

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

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

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

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

Competition: Which street is the most dangerously-designed?

This week, we’ll be taking a deep dive on our second principle for transportation policy: design for safety over speed. Throughout the week, send photos of streets in your area that are designed for speeds far higher than the posted speed limit or where the speed limit is way too high for the context. On Friday (Nov. 8), you’ll have a chance to vote for the worst offender.

At slow speeds, cars can mix safely with other road users. High-speed interstates remove conflicts to keep people safe. But when people and high-speed traffic mix, that’s a recipe for disaster.

There’s a difference between the speed limit posted on a road and the speed the road has been designed for. People will drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the speed limit. Wide, straight lanes with open skies, long blocks, and few traffic signals or stop signs tell drivers it’s okay to go fast. Conversely, narrower lanes, more frequent crossings, and street trees can encourage slower speeds that are more appropriate for developed areas.

Off the interstates, in areas with shops & restaurants, offices, schools, and homes, we should be designing for slower speeds—speeds that keep people walking, biking, or taking transit safe and comfortable. Too often these very streets are designed to encourage high-speed thru traffic and then we wonder why our streets are so dangerous to people walking and biking.

Send us photos of dangerous streets in your area! Email us at jenna.fortunati@t4america.org or tweet your photo(s) to @t4america and tell us a little bit about it. On Friday, we’ll poll our followers to identify the most egregious example of a street that prioritizes speed of people’s safety.

Examples of unsafe streets abound, and it’s not just suburban arterials. Take for example, Georgia Ave NW through the heart of Washington, DC. The posted speed limit is 30mph, but this four-lane, two-way road is arrow straight and drivers rarely travel at or below 30.

Within a few hundred yards of this photo there are laundromats and pharmacies, numerous bars and restaurants, homes for thousands of people, an elementary school, and a church. There’s also a metro stop and a dozen different bus stops—people walking are everywhere. Yet the design of this street clearly prioritizes the speed of car traffic over the safety of everyone else.

We want you to send us photos of streets where cars routinely drive above the speed limit (or where the posted speed limit is way too high) because the street isn’t designed to prioritize safety, or not designed appropriately for its busy context. Snap a photo this week and send them to us with a short description via twitter or email. On Friday, we’ll hold a poll on our Twitter account where you can vote for the worst offenders.

Safety over speed week: There’s one thing that almost every fatal car crash has in common

We face an epidemic of people struck and killed while walking and biking because our local streets—not just highways—are designed to move vehicles at the highest speeds possible rather than prioritizing the safety of everyone. It’s high time to stop sacrificing safety on the altar of speed with the tens of billions that the federal government spends every year. Here’s how Congress could make that happen.

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.

Let’s start with a number: 49,340. 

That’s how many people were struck and killed by cars while walking on streets all across the United States between 2008 and 2017. Almost 50,000 preventable deaths. 

And yet, by and large, we call these crashes “accidents.” We still believe that these 50,000 deaths, and the deaths of almost 32,000 people every year killed inside of vehicles, are either just the cost of doing business for our transportation system, or were the product of bad behavior: distracted drivers, fatigued drivers, drunk drivers, or drivers not wearing seat belts. 

There’s no doubt that distracted driving increases crash risk and should be punished. But distracted driving can’t explain all of these deaths. There’s one thing that almost every crash has in common, though: high vehicle speed.

When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking.

In 2017—the year in which pedestrian and cyclist fatalities first reached the highest level since 1990—the NTSB issued a landmark study about how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, finding that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds. 

It’s easy to ignore something that you don’t understand, and most policymakers don’t understand when and how high speed roads can be safe—and when they aren’t. 

When are high-speed roads safe, and when are they deadly?

The only way to make a high speed roads safe is by separating opposing traffic; removing conflict points, like driveways and cross streets; and separating or removing cyclists and pedestrians. Of course, this is something we frequently do: it’s called a limited-access highway. 

But we’ve tried to design for similar high speeds on our arterial roadways in existing communities while retaining all the points of conflict that make those speeds deadly. Think of any suburban road lined with retail, offices, schools, and homes. Those streets—with multiple destinations along them—are designed like highways.5


Graphic from Strong Towns

Our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, explains that most cyclist and pedestrian fatalities occur on these 35-50 mph arterial roadways in our urban and suburban areas—roads designed for high speed but with all the conflict points of the slower speed streets, like slip lanes or numerous curb cuts for entrances and exits across a sidewalk. 

Reducing speed is the best solution

If we want these roads to be safe, they either need to become limited-access highways (unlikely, expensive and damaging for the local context) or they need to be designed for lower speeds with lower speed limits.

And we know exactly what speed these roads need to be designed for: 35 miles per hour, or less in many cases. But 35 should be the ceiling for these types of roads, not the floor, when it comes to design speed.

We are pursuing higher speed roadways because we have placed jobs and services far away from the homes of the people who need them. We make up for the inconvenient location of everyday necessities with higher speeds in hopes of shorter travel time, but it never works out that way. Instead, we get a lot of traffic congestion as everyone floods onto the same roads, seeking the same far-away, disconnected destinations. Even in free- flowing traffic, people save seconds or, rarely, a minute or two. And for that, we sacrifice thousands of innocent lives each year. More often than not, those killed are children, the elderly or those with lower incomes.

We need to better measure how speed contributes

Currently we only call a crash “speed related” when someone was driving over the speed limit. We don’t track whether the speed limit was inappropriately high, or if the speed  of the car played a factor in the crash or fatality even if the speed was under the posted limit. In fact, numerous local governments across the country are in arguments with states on who has the authority to lower speed limits. 

It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make a street safe and appropriate for its surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds. 

Congress can make protecting the safety of all people who use the street a priority by reflecting this in the decisions they make about how to fund, design, operate, maintain, and measure the success of our roads. The federal program should require designs and approaches that put safety—for everyone—first. 

Do climate plans do enough on transportation?

Climate change has become a top issue for Americans, so how do the top Democratic candidates plan to reduce emissions? Here’s a brief look at what some of the presidential candidates are proposing when it comes to emissions from transportation.

A recent poll found that most American teenagers are “frightened” by climate change. It is no surprise then that candidates for president and members of Congress are releasing their plans to combat the climate crisis. So what do the Democratic presidential candidate front-runners say about transportation in their climate plans? Not nearly enough.

Virtually every plan released to date focuses on promoting electric vehicles (EVs) and strengthening fuel efficiency (CAFE) standards. While EV adoption and increased efficiency are essential for reaching any ambitious climate target, they will not be sufficient on their own to decarbonize the transportation sector.

T4America Director Beth Osborne explained why recently in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Transportation is now the largest single source of climate pollution and the vast majority of those emissions—83 percent—come from the cars and trucks that people drive to the grocery store or school or that deliver our Amazon orders. All that driving is why transportation pollution keeps increasing, despite gains in fuel efficiency standards and the adoption of electric vehicles. Between 1990-2016, despite a sizable 35 percent increase in the overall fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet, national emissions rose by 21 percent. Why? Because those improvements were accompanied by a 50 percent increase in driving. Cleaner and electric vehicles are essential, but they’ll only ever be a small part of the solution. For one, it takes a long time for the vehicle fleet to turn over. Even if Americans purchased nothing but electric vehicles starting today, gas-powered cars would still be on the road for at least another 15 years.

Emissions won’t drop fast enough if we pin all our hopes on EVs. We need to reduce the amount and distance people drive through better land use and by promoting transit, walking, and biking. Today, our federal policy incentivizes high speed, long distance driving—rewarding states that increase both with more money—and makes it far too difficult to build communities which provide people with transportation choice.

Even the Green New Deal fails to adequately address the need to reduce driving and rethink our land use decisions.

The climate plans & transportation

We took an in-depth look at the climate plans from the top eight presidential candidates (according to RealClearPolitics polling data as of November 1, 2019) for the Democratic Party nomination. We’ve also included Jay Inslee in our analysis, despite the fact that he dropped out of the race, because his climate plan is widely considered to have set the standard for climate plans.

There are some candidates running for the Republican nomination for president, but none of them have released climate plans. The closest thing President Trump has to a climate plan is the “Affordable Clean Energy” rule which could actually increase pollution.

Note: Investments, quantifiable targets, or policy proposals below are bolded; broad value statements or acknowledgements of an issue without a proposal to address it are not bolded.

PollingCandidateElectrify vehiclesReduce drivingPromote bikeable/walkable communitiesInvest in transitSupport passenger rail
n/aBiden's unity task forceSupport “cash-for-clunkers” style approaches to incentivize accelerated adoption of zero-emission passenger vehicles. Provide incentives for manufacturers to build new factories or retool existing factories in the United States to assemble zero-emission vehicles or manufacture charging equipment.“Encourage states to prioritize allocation of transportation funds for public mass transit, and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and ensure transportation options and infrastructure meet the needs of tribal, rural, and urban communities to fully participate in zero-emissions transport.”“Encourage states to prioritize allocation of transportation funds for public mass transit, and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and ensure transportation options and infrastructure meet the needs of tribal, rural, and urban communities to fully participate in zero-emissions transport. Make major improvements to public transit and light rail. Preserve and grow the union workforce within the rail, transit and maritime sectors.”

“We commit to public transportation as a public good, including ensuring transit jobs are good jobs.”		Invest in high speed passenger and freight rail systems, while reducing pollution, helping connect workers to quality jobs with shorter commutes, and spurring investment in communities more efficiently connected to major metropolitan areas and unlocking new, affordable access for every American.
1Biden500,000 new public charging outlets by the end of 2030 and restore the full electric vehicle tax credit.Altering local regulations to eliminate sprawl and allow for denser, more affordable housing near public transit would cut commute times for many of the country’s workers while decreasing their carbon footprint. Communities across the country are experiencing a growing need for alternative and cleaner transportation options, including transit, dedicated bicycle and pedestrian thoroughfares, and first- and last-mile connections. Ensure that America has the cleanest, safest, and fastest rail system in the world and will begin the construction of an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts.
2WarrenZero emissions in all new light and medium duty vehicles by 2030.Expand and improve public transit across our country.
3Sanders100 percent electric vehicles powered with renewable energy.For too long, government policy has encouraged long car commutes, congestion, and dangerous emissions. Create more livable, connected, and vibrant communities.$300 billion investment to increase public transit ridership by 65 percent by 2030.$607 billion investment in a regional high-speed rail system.
4ButtigeigAll new passenger vehicles sold be zero-emissions by 2035.Switching from individual vehicles to public transportation not only reduces traffic congestion, but also reduces emissions while improving air quality.$100 billion over 10 years, which will include installing bike and scooter lanes.$100 billion over 10 years, which will include modernizing subways and other transit systems and deploying electric commuter buses and school buses.
5Harris100 percent zero-emission vehicles by 2035.Incentivize people to reduce car usage and use public transit...focusing our transportation infrastructure investments toward projects that reduce vehicle miles traveled and address gaps in first mile, last mile service. Funding robust public transportation networks to bring communities together.
6YangRequire all models from 2030 on to be zero-emission vehicles.$200 billion grant program to states to electrify transit systems.
7GabbardWhile Gabbard has not released a climate plan, she has introduced legislation in the U.S. House that would require all new vehicle sales to be 100% electric by 2035.
8O'RourkeRapidly accelerate the adoption of zero-emission vehicles.$1.2 trillion through grants and other investments, including: Transportation grants that cut commutes, crashes, and carbon pollution — all while boosting access to public transit.
--Honorable Mention: Jay InsleeInvest federal moneys and expand effective public policies linking community-based economic development to housing affordability and mobility. Promote vibrant communities, more healthy and walkable neighborhoods, and both the preservation of existing affordable housing and construction of new affordable units.Invest in expanding public transit and connecting people in communities through safe, multi-modal transportation options. More than double annual federal investment in public transit systems and incentivize expansion of transit networks.Provide major new federal investment in electrifying passenger and freight rail throughout the country, and offering federal investment to states and regional partnerships to expand ultra-high-speed rail.

Politicians think EVs will solve our transportation problems

It’s telling that each candidate has ambitious targets for EV adoption but largely lack policies and investments for other forms of transportation. While EVs will go a long way toward reducing transportation emissions, they don’t go quite far enough. As we’ve written about previously, an all electric vehicle fleet won’t reduce emissions enough to reach our climate targets.

Not only will EVs fail to address the climate crisis, but they will do nothing to address the larger shortcomings of our current transportation system.

EVs won’t make our communities more walkable, bikeable, or transit-oriented. We’ve designed many of our roadways and communities so that it’s almost impossible to get around without a car. People often have no choice but to sit in traffic to get to work and the grocery store. Electrifying everything won’t change this. Nor will it help those who can’t afford a vehicle in the first place, regardless of how it’s powered. We need holistic transportation solutions that make it safe, affordable, and convenient to get people where they need to go.

The elephant in the room

These plans are all missing any meaningful discussion and understanding of how land use and transportation are inextricably linked, likely because we tend to think that the federal government plays no role in land use decisions.

But federal transportation policy drives local land use decisions. Where we build roads and highways influences where developers build houses and stores. When we give states a blank check to build a new highway while giving them a minuscule amount for transit (if they can jump through all the regulatory hoops we apply to transit funding), we’re encouraging more sprawl. As houses, businesses, parks, and other daily destinations spread farther apart, people are forced to drive farther and farther, increasing our emissions in the process.

Federal transportation policy has an essential role to play in reducing transportation emissions and making our transportation system work for everyone. How we spend federal transportation money should reflect this and keep climate goals in mind. So far, it seems as though most Democratic presidential candidates don’t quite understand this.

Washington State leads in transportation improvements—one ballot measure could end all that

This November, Washington residents will vote on a ballot measure that would slash available funding for transit agencies as well as road maintenance and safety projects by limiting annual vehicle registration fees to $30 and reducing vehicle taxes.  

As gas tax and other transportation revenue failed to grow the way it used to in the 1990s and 2000s, states started filling those gaps by raising new state funds for transportation. Voters across the country, in places across the political spectrum, have supported increasing taxes to raise funds for transportation projects. In 2015, Washington passed legislation to increase the fuel tax by 11.9¢ per gallon and increase other vehicle fees, raising billions for transportation projects, including $1 billion for transit, pedestrian, and bike projects—and also gave locals more flexibility to raise transit funds through other mechanisms.

In Washington State, a ballot measure this November could change much of that. Initiative 976 seeks to limit annual license fees for vehicles at $30; base vehicle taxes on the Kelley Blue Book value rather than 85 percent of the automaker’s retail price; and repeal transit agencies’ ability to levy motor vehicle excise taxes, according to Ballotpedia. 

This cut to current and future funding would be disastrous all across the state. But perhaps the place most at risk—and the biggest example of a region taking control of its own destiny—is the Puget Sound area of greater Seattle, where voters passed Sound Transit 3 (ST3), a $53.8 billion investment to expand light rail to Everett, Issaquah and Tacoma and Seattle neighborhoods of Ballard and West Seattle, improve bus rapid transit lines, and increase capacity on existing rail lines. 

As the state’s economic engine, the Puget Sound region is choked by traffic that once threatened to hamper its growth and livability. ST3, in combination with local transit investments in Seattle and Snohomish County, put the region on track to develop a robust transit system that gives people an opportunity to avoid crippling congestion. 

I-976 puts this all at risk, as a large portion of the revenue needed to implement ST3 comes from a voter-approved 0.8 percent increase on license fees. I-976 would cut Sound Transit funding for light rail expansion, bus rapid transit and commuter rail in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties by at least $20 billion through 2041, according to Sound Transit spokesman Geoff Patrick. This cut consists of $6.9 billion in lower license fee revenue and $13 billion in higher borrowing costs in part to replace those funds.

Meanwhile, in Spokane, cuts from I-976 would reduce state funding for the Central City Line bus rapid transit project by $11 .7 million, slowing the project considerably.

While clearly anti-transit, I-976 is different than the anti-transit campaign that failed recently in Phoenix. The Phoenix effort aspired to ban all future light rail construction and was supported by funding from the Koch Brothers. In Washington, there’s no news indicating support from the Koch Brothers, and I-976 would cut far more than just transit. For example, communities in central Washington would see street maintenance funding cut substantially, with over $22.5 million cut for a maintenance and safety road project in Wenatchee.

The Seattle Times said it best in its editorial board’s resounding opposition to the ballot initiative: 

Nothing about I-976 is a good idea, in terms of responsible governance or prudent money management. [Tim Eyman, the political activist who sponsored the ballot initiative] asks voters to buy a falsity that there’s some miraculous way to fund our state’s backlog of bridge, road and transit needs. Because the courts cannot end this toxic nonsense quickly enough, voters must reject I-976 themselves.

Washington voters will have a choice on November 5: Pay less in car taxes to spend more time commuting on crumbling roads and bridges and non-existent transit services, or continue to spend money on improving quality of life through smarter transportation investments. 

Three things we learned from talking about maintenance this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That choice is in Congress’ hands.

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

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. 

It’s time for Congress to actually set a goal for repairing our infrastructure

We shouldn’t build new roads before fixing the ones we have. But that’s not how the federal transportation program is designed. Despite funding boosts, our backlog of maintenance needs have only increased because there is no requirement that federal funds be spent on repair.

The concept of fixing what you have before buying something new—when it comes to really expensive things—is pretty intuitive for most people. You should probably repair your leaky roof before building a new addition. You’d likely buff out that dent in the car you already own instead of buying a brand new one. 

But what’s obvious to everyone is not obvious to lawmakers. Under our current federal transportation law, states are allowed to spend federal funding on building new (and often unnecessary) roads before fixing decaying ones, all without providing a plan for how they will maintain these new roads in the future. 

This leads to massive and unsustainable fiscal problems. 

According to our report Repair Priorities that we co-authored with Taxpayers for Common Sense, states spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion between 2009-2014. These investments in expansion don’t just redirect funds away from much needed investments in repair; they continually grow our annual spending need, widening the gap. Every new lane-mile of road costs approximately $24,000 per year just to preserve in a state of good repair—to say nothing of the long-term lifecycle costs and required eventual major rehabilitation projects in the future. By expanding roads—and neglecting the ones we have—we are borrowing against the future while letting our existing assets wither.

Yet lawmakers insist that the reason why our transportation infrastructure is crumbling is not how we (poorly) spend our money, but the amount of it. “We need more money,” they say. “It doesn’t matter how it’s spent!”

These cries for more money echo throughout Capitol Hill every five to six years when surface transportation funding needs to be reauthorized. I described this Groundhog Day-esque phenomenon in our blog post announcing our three new principles for transportation investment:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to  “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program.  And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble.  And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

As the current transportation law, the FAST Act, expires next year, it’s time to do something different. We simply can’t afford to waste billions of dollars every single year. 

That is why we urge Congress to make a hard and fast commitment to cutting our maintenance backlog in half. We don’t want Congress to create some new federal program to achieve a state of good repair, or authorize more transportation funding. Simply setting a goal for our current dollars would be a sea change. 

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, Congress can tell us what the right target should be. 

But they should have to tell us precisely where we will be in addressing our state of repair when this bill expires in five or so years, not just how much money will have been spent. Until then, we believe cutting the maintenance backlog in half is an achievable goal and we expect Congress to finally tie federal funding to their rhetoric. 

Read our three policy recommendations for cutting the maintenance backlog in half.

Members of Congress launch a new caucus on transportation policy

Today, Representatives Chuy García (IL-4), Ayanna Pressley (MA-7), and Mark Takano (CA-41) launched a new caucus dedicated to creating a vision for the future of our transportation system that emphasizes equity, access, and sustainability.

Reps García, Pressley, Takano, and Earl Blumenauer (OR-3) at the launch of the Congressional Future of Transportation Caucus.

Transportation for America joined the representatives as they launched their new caucus in front of a packed room of constituents and transportation advocates. The “Future of Transportation Caucus,” as the members have dubbed their new group, will dedicate itself to revisiting the underlying policies that have built the transportation systems that continue to crumble into disrepair, fuel inequities, exacerbate climate change, and fail to connect people to jobs and services.

Speaking at the launch, the co-chairs of the caucus expressed the need for a more visionary and equitable transportation policy.

“Access to safe, reliable, and inclusive modes of transportation is a matter of social justice,” Rep. Pressley said during the event. She explained that the caucus would work to advance policies that prioritize “community connectivity, multimodal networks with seamless bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure so that every community has access to critical housing, education, employment, and the health services necessary to thrive.”

Rep. Garcia echoed this sentiment, saying, “It boils down to social justice. People cannot afford to get to where they need to go or stay where they grew up. We need to take a step back and start thinking about what it is we’re throwing hundreds of billions of dollars [at] every year.”

“This caucus will refocus Congress’s discussion on transportation that goes beyond just funding,” Rep. Takano said. He continued, saying that the caucus would “create an approach to transportation that centers on equity, accessibility, and sustainability.”

We couldn’t agree more with the caucus co-chairs. As we explained in our recent blog post outlining our new principles for transportation policy and investment, the one-dimensional debate about transportation funding leaves out an urgently needed conversation about the purpose of the federal transportation program. We need to ask ourselves what we’re trying to accomplish and provide accountability to the American taxpayer by making a few clear, concrete, measurable goals.

We know that existing policy exacerbates climate change, fails to maintain our roads, puts pedestrians and bikers in danger, and makes it nearly impossible to build new or expand transit systems.

We’re excited to see that some members of Congress agree with us on this. The Future of Transportation Caucus is a huge step in the right direction and shows the some policymakers are interested in actually writing new policy. This conversation desperately needs to be had on the Hill. We look forward to working with the caucus as they discuss new goals for our transportation system and the policies we’ll need to achieve them, not just some pie in the sky dollar amount for infrastructure.

The Senate’s first transportation reauthorization bill gets an F

EDIT, March 2021: If you represent an organization or are an elected official, please sign our letter urging the Senate to pass a long-term law completely unlike this one—a bill that orients the program transportation program around what counts: getting to where you need to go.

Authorizing federal spending on surface transportation is complicated, with different Congressional committees writing separate portions of the bill. That’s why we’ll score every reauthorization bill by how well it achieves our three simple principles for transportation investment. The America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act fails on all counts. 

With the current authorization for federal transportation spending—the FAST Act—set to expire in 2020, it’s time for Congress to set transportation policy for the next five to six years. Once passed, this legislation will set federal funding levels for transportation for another five to six years.

We’re tired of the same old transportation bills that pump money into building highways at the expense of our crumbling roads and bridges, people’s access to essential jobs and services, and human life. That’s why we’ll score every reauthorization bill on how well they achieve our three simple principles.

By our scorecard, the first reauthorization bill—America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act, which the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee approved in July—gets a big fat F. Here’s why. 

Maintenance

This bill fails to take steps toward cutting our country’s maintenance backlog in half because it contains zero new, binding requirements to ensure that states use federal funds to actually bring their roads and bridges into good condition. The bill provides an additional $32 billion annually—on top of the $40 billion they already receive— for existing road building policy. History has shown that without any requirement to invest in maintenance, many states simply won’t. While the inclusion of a new bridge maintenance program is a welcome step, it’s a relative pittance at just 2 percent of overall funding. 

Speed

We are in the midst of a massive safety crisis for people walking, with an alarming 35 percent increase in people struck and killed by drivers while walking from 2008-2017.  And nearly 40,000 people die each year in traffic crashes.

This bill includes significant new formula and discretionary safety programs and language encouraging states and planning organizations to adopt complete streets designs and plans. However, we’re concerned that these programs will be undercut by substantial funding increases for high speed roadways in the base formulas without any additional constraints to improve safety. Complete streets designs shouldn’t be optional, as this bill considers them. History has shown us that “optional” will result in many states failing to take action to save lives. 

Access

We were happy to see that the bill included 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 a pilot program isn’t enough. Access to jobs and services has to be the core of any transportation authorization. We need to reward the boldness of this pilot proposal by measuring whether all $358 billion in this bill is connecting people to jobs and services. 

Multiple states, including Virginia and Hawaii, have already started prioritizing their spending on projects that improve access. It’s possible—and necessary—to prioritize federal spending this way. We can’t afford another five or six years of wasted investment from using vehicle speed as our outdated measure of success.

Click on any image below to learn more about our brand new principles or download a sharable card

Rural areas desperately need a transportation overhaul, too

People disparage rural areas with the term “flyover country,” but our federal transportation program currently treats rural areas even worse—as “driveover” country. If Congress adopts Transportation for America’s three new policy principles, transportation investments could truly help rural areas prosper. 

A focus on speed rather than safety and access would result in telling Erwin, TN that they need to widen this road and get rid of the crosswalks. Federal transportation policy doesn’t work for rural America.

This week, we released our three guiding principles and three outcomes we expect from any new investment in transportation. These ideas will start to fix our broken system and improve safety and access to opportunity for all—including rural areas. 

When I was a small town mayor in Mississippi, I fought transportation policy that treated our town like it was “driveover” or “drive-through” country. Our transportation program makes it far easier for rural communities to build highways—which residents can use to drive far away for jobs, schools, education, and other services—than it does to help rural places invest in their vital town centers. 

What the federal government doesn’t realize about rural areas is that they are not comprised of empty towns and open fields that need to be driven through as fast as possible. In reality, rural areas are dotted with countless walkable town and community centers.

In some rural areas, these walkable places are the center of commerce and activity for that town. But unfortunately, in too many rural areas, thanks to federal transportation policy that prioritizes new highway construction and roads designed primarily for speed—no matter their context—these once-thriving walkable places have been hollowed out, with jobs and services now located far away.

Our three principles would improve life in rural areas by finally treating rural areas as places to be, not places to drive away from. 

Maintenance

When I was mayor of Meridian, Mississippi, the state had 12,000 bridges that were structurally deficient. This hammers rural places especially hard. If a bridge needs to be shut down—or even worse, collapses—some areas might lose their only quick connection, and then people can’t get to their doctors, produce can’t get to market, and students can’t get to the community college. Without these bridges, rural areas are isolated. 

Unfortunately, the current federal transportation law allows states to kick the proverbial maintenance can down the crumbling road. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble. (Something Mississippi did for many years, though their state DOT has recently made a drastic about-face, a story Mississippi DOT Commissioner Dick Hall outlined in our press briefing for Repair Priorities.)

That’s why our third principle, “prioritize maintenance,” would require states to fix these structurally deficient bridges before building new roads or bridges they can’t afford to maintain. It would ensure that rural places will not be stranded. 

Speed

Oftentimes, the main street of a rural community is a state highway that passes right through the heart of downtown. Because of federal design standards and a focus on the speed of travel above all other priorities, the main street is unsafe and unattractive for people to bike and walk in a very small urban grid, and it’s terrible for the local economy. 

Main streets shouldn’t be highways that get people through communities. They should be arteries that bring people in. Walkable main streets in rural areas can and should be a huge driver of economic development for a small town, generating a large, prosperous tax base in a very small area. 

In West Jefferson, NC, by prioritizing safety and access over speed, 10 new businesses opened along Jefferson Avenue—adding 55 new jobs— and the number of visitors to downtown increased by 14 percent. Four-way stop signs, crosswalks, and upgraded sidewalks were added—anathema to our broken system where speed is the top priority.

That’s why our second principle, “design for safety over speed,” would prioritize designing main streets to serve their intended functions, not as unsafe highways for speeding traffic right through a town center. Any road embedded in an urban grid where people walk and bike, where businesses or homes are located, and where an outside portion of the county’s economic base is located—like in countless rural downtowns—should never be designed for deadly highway speeds. 

Access

When state DOTs build new transportation infrastructure, they might share how wide the shoulders are going to be or brag about how much a new road will speed traffic up, but they never tell the public how transportation projects will make their lives better. That’s because improving people’s access to destinations is not how we measure success. We “measure” success by how fast vehicles are traveling, with no measurement of what destinations you can actually reach. 

Bentonville, AR’s downtown is a place to bring people to and connect to nearby neighborhoods, not to speed cars through on their way somewhere else.

Put another way, traveling for 15 minutes at 40 mph and going 10 miles is preferred to traveling for 15 minutes at 20 mph and only going five miles, for absolutely no good reason at all. If every daily need in a small town is a 15-minute drive at 20 mph, what’s the point of building a brand new road on the edge of town that can speed you along at 40 or 50 mph?

This focus on speed results in orienting every transportation project—whether in a big city or a small town—around the goal of moving cars as fast as possible, telling everyone who wants to live in vibrant small towns that the needs of their automobiles come first.

Rural areas also have higher percentages of elderly, low income, and disabled people, presenting greater challenges to connectivity and transportation infrastructure. But when access is truly prioritized—meaning that transportation projects are chosen by how they improve people’s lives by improving their access to daily destinations, no matter how they travel—everybody benefits. 

That’s why our third principle is “connect people to jobs and services.” Improving access means that instead of making a road wider for cars to drive just a little bit faster, a jurisdiction might instead build a crosswalk in a rural downtown, or add a new road to the street grid, because those investments would do far more to better connect more people to more destinations.

The goal of connecting people to the things they need—which is fundamental to the purpose of transportation—is currently missing from the federal transportation program, and this affects rural areas just like it does any big coastal city 

By making access the goal, designing local streets for safer, slower speeds, and ensuring that maintenance is more than just talking point politicians use to get more money to spend, we can improve the lives of people all across the country. 

America’s rural areas are filled with wonderful small towns and vibrant communities. It’s time for our federal transportation policy to build them up rather than pave them over. 

Click on any image below to learn more about our brand new principles or download a sharable card

Explaining our three principles for transportation investment

Today, T4America is releasing a new set of three concrete, measurable principles for transportation investment.

Last week we explained why T4America is no longer advocating for more money for the federal transportation program and why we need a clear set of explicit goals for the federal program. Today, we’re rolling out our new principles, which are clear, simple, and measurable. You’ll find them incorporated into the “platform” section of our website and we’ll be using them to evaluate every single proposal in the months and years ahead: whether a standalone infrastructure plan or the forthcoming proposals for reauthorizing the nation’s surface transportation law that expires in 2020. 

It’s time to stop spending billions with an unclear purpose for diminishing, marginal returns. We believe these three goals will help finally move us in the right direction.

#1 Prioritize maintenance

The process is inevitable as it is predictable every time the process of transportation reauthorization comes up. We’re stuck in a groundhog day with an infinite loop. Here’s how it goes:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to  “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program.  And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble.  And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

Our first principle is not about creating some new federal program to achieve a  state of good repair. And it’s not about how much money is needed to repair our infrastructure, either. Our principle is simply a commitment to the American people that the maintenance backlog is cut in half. This would be a sea change. 

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, let Congress tell us what the right target should be. But tell us exactly where we will be in addressing state of repair after this bill expires, not how much money will be spent. Until then, we believe half is right and we expect Congress to finally tie the program to their rhetoric. 

#2 Design for safety over speed

When we talk about safety, we typically talk about reducing drunk driving, wearing seat belts, and wearing helmets on motorcycles. In recent years, thanks to leadership from former US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood, distracted driving was brought up to equal importance as these areas. 

Yet what has been largely ignored is the role of speed itself in making our roadways completely unsafe for everyone outside of a motor vehicle. Speed isn’t always necessarily deadly. The way to make a high speed roadway safe is by separating opposing traffic; removing conflict points, like driveways and cross streets, and separating or removing cyclists and pedestrians. That’s called a limited-access highway. But we’ve tried to design for similar speeds on our arterial roadways in existing communities while retaining all the points of conflict that make those speeds deadly. 

Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people who were walking on streets all across the United States, reaching levels in 2017 not seen since 1990. When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking. Our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, found in their report Dangerous by Design that most cyclist and pedestrian crashes occur on these arterial roadways in our urban and suburban areas—roads designed for high speed but without removing conflicts. If we want these roads to be safe, they either need to become limited-access highways (unlikely, expensive and damaging for the local context) or they need to be designed for lower speeds with lower speed limits.

We have to take this seriously. The NTSB issued a landmark study in 2017 about how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, and that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds. Currently we only track whether someone was driving over the speed limit. We don’t track whether the speed limit was inappropriately high. In fact, numerous local governments across the country are in arguments with states on who has the authority to lower speed limits. It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make a street appropriate for its surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds. 

#3 Connect people to jobs and services by prioritizing accessibility

Fundamental to our transportation system (and the hundreds of billions of dollars we invest in it) is that it should provide people with access to jobs and services. This access is essential to an efficient economy, to ensuring that people can make a living and provide for their families, and to providing employers with reliable access to talent. 

Our current federal transportation program uses a poor proxy for measuring access to jobs and services. Transportation agencies measure the speed of vehicle movement along observed portions of roadways and assume that if those vehicles can move quickly, then all trips must be smooth and short. That kind of measurement has resulted in a system that values  a 40-minute commute to work in free-flowing traffic over a 20-minute commute in some congestion.

As it turns out, to make vehicles move quickly means building limited access roadways or widening roads and spreading out all destinations, making trips longer and biking or walking dangerous. So even though vehicles are traveling at high speed, people may not reach their destinations any faster because everything is more spread out. This is particularly true of pedestrians and cyclists, who once may have had to travel across short blocks, now have to cross long distances designed for cars, thanks to the limited-access changes that cut off local streets and eliminate shorter trips.

The technology has finally caught up.  We can now understand, quickly and affordably, how well the transportation system connects people to the things they need. Thanks to aggregated GPS data, we can know where homes and likely destinations are located. We also have congestion data and real-time transit arrival information. With this data, we can accurately calculate how easily people can access the things that they need and how various proposed transportation investments would improve or worsen it.

Some states, particularly Virginia and Hawaii, have already started scoring potential projects under consideration for funding based on the extent to which they improve access to jobs and services. Massachusetts and Utah are investigating doing the same. Congress should follow their lead.

As Congress considers the next surface transportation policy bill, they should ensure that these destination access data are available nationwide. Congress should also update performance measures to replace 1950s proxy measures like speed of travel with accurate, updated 21st century measures. People don’t talk about the average speed of a trip: they talk about how long it took. We should evaluate transportation projects and the overall system the same way.  

By the end of this next reauthorization cycle, the federal transportation program should be reoriented from a program focused on the fluidity of vehicle movement to one that prioritizes and measures access to jobs and services.

Go more in-depth on our principles here, and read our specific policy proposals for reauthorization here. 

Why we are no longer advocating for Congress to increase transportation funding

Since our inception in 2008, Transportation for America has always primarily advocated for reforming the federal transportation program. But raising the gas tax or otherwise raising new funding overall has also been a core plank of our platform since 2013. With the release of our brand new policy platform and principles coming this Monday, Transportation for America is no longer asking Congress to provide an increase in money for federal transportation program. Why?

Picture of Bellevue, WA light rail construction

For as long as I’ve been working in transportation and probably longer, the debate surrounding the federal transportation program has been a one-note affair: a never-ending fight over who gets money and how much money they get. Those who get money want more flexibility to spend it however they want. Those who get a little money want a bigger piece of the pie. And then both political parties come together in a “bipartisan” way to grow the pie and keep everyone happy.

This two-dimensional debate always leaves out an urgently needed conversation about the purpose of this federal transportation program. What are we doing? Why are we spending $50 billion a year? What is it supposed to accomplish? Does anyone know anymore?

Nearly seven decades ago we set out with a clear purpose: connect our cities and rural areas and states with high-speed interstates and highways for cars and trucks and make travel all about speed. These brand new highways made things like cross-country and inter-state travel easier than we ever imagined possible. We connected places that weren’t well-connected before and reaped the economic benefits (while also dividing and obliterating some communities along the way).

We’ve never really updated those broad goals from 1956 in a meaningful way. We’ve moved from the exponential returns of building brand new connections where they didn’t exist to the diminishing, marginal returns of spending billions to add a new lane of road here and there, which promptly fills up with new traffic.

Why in the world would we just pour more money into a program that is “devoid of any broad, ambitious vision for the future, and [in which] more spending has only led to more roads, more traffic, more pollution, more inequality, and a lack of transportation options,” as I wrote in the Washington Post during Infrastructure Week?

What the program should be about is accountability to the American taxpayer—making a few clear, concrete, measurable promises and then delivering on them. The program should focus on what we’re getting for the funds we’re spending—not simply whether or not money gets spent and how much there was.

Does anyone doubt Congress’s ability to successfully spend money? We all have supreme confidence in their ability to spend hundreds of billions of dollars. Our question is whether that money can be spent in a way that accomplishes something tangible and measurable for the American people.

Taxpayers deserve to know what they’re getting for their spending. Today, they don’t, and nothing about the debate so far in 2019 with Congress has indicated that will change. So we’ve scrapped “provide real funding” from our core principles. T4America has concluded that more money devoted to this same flawed system will just do more damage.

Coming next week: our new principles

With the conversation about money put behind us, on Monday we’re releasing three new principles for what we expect this upcoming surface transportation bill to accomplish. We believe that whether Congress decides to spend more money or less, these three things should be paramount.

Every time federal transportation reauthorization comes up, we hear endless cries about the poor state of our crumbling infrastructure. How many bridges are structurally deficient, how poor our roads are, the long backlogs of neglected maintenance, the (severely inflated) costs of congestion, perhaps even a few voices about the alarming increase in people struck and killed while walking…the list of woes goes on and on.

And then, predictably, states, interest groups, members of Congress and others call for more money for the federal transportation program as the only logical solution, with no clear promises made for how this money will solve any of the problems outlined above or precisely what will be better or different after five years of spending yet billions more.

So let’s stop limping along and spending billions with an unclear purpose and marginal returns. We need a clear set of explicit goals for the federal program. We’ll be back here on Monday as we unveil our principles.

See T4America’s new principles and outcomes for federal transportation policy >>

 

Shutdown averted; another crisis created

people waiting for a train

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) is refusing to obey the rules and Congress has so far been powerless to stop them. At stake are billions in federal funding for new and expanded transit systems that USDOT doesn’t want to award. But a policy change that attempts to reign in USDOT and make it obey the law could just be making matters worse.

Congress today has done its part to avert a government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution (CR) that will fund the federal government through November 21. The president has until Monday night to sign it. While a CR is generally just a continuation of existing policy, this one tweaks a key, but very wonky, policy for the Capital Investment Grant (CIG) program—the main source of federal funding for building new and expanding existing transit systems.

The CIG program has been under attack by the Trump administration, which is ideologically opposed to funding transit, since day one. Because Congress has continued to fund the program, USDOT has instead sought to sabotage the grant-making process by delaying grants, shutting down lines of communication, and making the whole process more opaque and confusing to everyone involved: Congress, project sponsors, and the public.

Now here’s where it gets wonky. In fiscal years (FY) 2018 & 2019, Congress tried to hold USDOT accountable by adding new language to their appropriations bills that required the agency to actually award (i.e. “obligate”) at least 85 percent of the funds for that fiscal year by the end of the following calendar year (so 85 percent of FY18 dollars would need to be spent by December 31, 2019 and FY19 dollars spent by the end of 2020).

The CR that Congress just passed changes that language to say that USDOT must “allocate,” rather than “obligate,” at least 85 percent of those funds. Allocation is not the same thing as obligation and results in zero dollars actually going to project sponsors.

The original “obligation” language was designed to force USDOT to advance projects through the CIG pipeline and actually award funding by signing grant agreements. The change comes from a concern that USDOT will simply ignore the law—let that statement sink in—which would result in Congress clawing back the CIG funding through a lengthy legal process.

In essence, USDOT doesn’t want the money even though Congress gave it to them anyway and ordered them to spend it because they know local communities are counting on it for their transit projects. But USDOT is ignoring the law and spending as little of the funding as they can get away with. To date, USDOT has only spent about a third of what Congress has authorized over the past three years. It’s understandable that Congress would seek another solution to get grants out the door—we agree more is needed—but focusing on “allocating” funds could create a new problem while failing to solve the original one.

Creating a new problem

Changing the requirement for “obligation” to “allocation” through the CR ignores the new realities on the ground. It used to be that an “allocation” meant something. USDOT would allocate funds to projects that were almost finalized and ready for construction to signal that a grant was to follow shortly. Under previous administrations, allocations would inform how much money Congress would provide in the budget for the CIG program and signal an imminent grant. But this administration has broken from precedent. “Allocations” from this USDOT are a big old nothingburger.

As we have previously described, an “allocation” is simply an internal accounting in the ledgers at USDOT. It doesn’t mean funding has been awarded nor does it guarantee that funding will ever arrive. In at least nine cases, communities have been waiting for months without funding despite receiving an allocation. One of those projects—the Purple Line subway extension in Los Angeles—has received two separate allocations without receiving a dime of federal money.

A table of nine nine unfunded transit projects with allocations and the date of the allocations

Congress’s new rules in the CR would unfortunately do nothing to ensure these communities receive funds and would give undue credit to USDOT for “allocating” these funds, regardless of whether that allocation eventually results in a formal grant.

Instead of simply swapping “obligate” for “allocate,” we’ve proposed that Congress requires a strict timeline for DOT between making an allocation and an obligation, along with requirements for the DOT to regularly communicate with Congress and project sponsors about the status of all projects that are seeking CIG funding. While Congress can’t do USDOT’s work for them, it can exercise aggressive oversight that would make it much harder for the agency to just sit on its hands. USDOT’s actions (or lack thereof) to date have more than justified such an approach.

Congress’s heart is in the right place; they’re trying to make USDOT obey the law and administer the CIG program as intended. The fact that Congress is even in this position speaks to the sordid state of affairs at USDOT. But their proposed remedy to this problem—changing policy in the CR to focus on tracking internal accounting (“allocations”) instead of executed grants—could just end up making things a whole lot worse.

In the San Francisco Chronicle: We need more than electric vehicles

A new opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle explains why electric vehicles and improved fuel efficiency aren’t enough to reduce emissions—and how our federal transportation program shoots any climate change effort in the foot. 

Today, a new op-ed from Transportation for America Director Beth Osborne makes the case that instead of putting all of our climate eggs in the electric vehicle basket, the better way to reduce transportation emissions is to “rethink a system that causes us to drive more and more in the first place.”

Transportation emissions are rising, despite gains in electric vehicle adoption and improved fuel efficiency. Beth writes:

Transportation is now the single largest source of climate pollution, and the vast majority of those emissions — 82 percent — come from the cars and trucks that people drive to the grocery store or school or that deliver our Amazon orders. All that driving is why transportation pollution keeps increasing, despite hikes in fuel efficiency standards and the adoption of electric vehicles. Between 1990-2016, despite a sizable 35 percent increase in the overall fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet, national emissions rose by 21 percent. Why? Because those improvements were accompanied by a 50 percent increase in driving.

Cleaner and electric vehicles are essential, but they’ll only ever be a small part of the solution. For one, it takes a long time for the vehicle fleet to turn over. Even if Americans purchased nothing but electric vehicles starting today, gas-powered cars would still be on the road for at least another 15 years. Plus, electric vehicles are only as clean as what powers the grid, which in most cases means electric cars will still be powered by fossil fuels.

The op-ed is specific to California, but this isn’t a California-specific issue: Our federal transportation program guarantees that driving will increase everywhere. But we can change this. The federal government encourages states and local governments to choose road projects over transit projects by paying for most of road projects, and only half (at most) of transit projects. Beth writes:

The expensive, inequitable and polluting transportation system we have today was created by a series of intentional policy decisions that started at the federal level and trickled down. It’s time to build a transportation system that gives people more options for getting around without guaranteeing more traffic, frustration and emissions — whether we have electric cars or not.

 

Share on Twitter

Because remember, even if we manage to replace every car with an electric vehicle, clean congestion is still congestion.

Read the full op-ed  and then share Beth’s message with on Twitter to help us spread the word!

Behold! The entirety of our #BeyondEVs Tweet Chat

It’s #CoveringClimateNow week, and over 220 media outlets have pledged to devote coverage to climate change. Unfortunately, there’s usually something missing in these important conversations: driving.

Driving makes up most of transportation emissions (and the transportation sector emits more greenhouse gases than any other). And every year, vehicle miles traveled increases. If we don’t do anything to drive a little bit less, we’ll negate all of the benefits from electric vehicles and improved fuel efficiency.

It’s time to move #BeyondEVs. We hosted a Tweet Chat yesterday to discuss why we need to reduce vehicle miles traveled, how government policy at all levels can help do this, and the additional benefits of driving less.

Thanks to our tremendous co-hosts for making the Tweet Chat a success: Smart Growth America, America Walks, League of American Bicyclists, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, Salud!America, Shared Use Mobility Center, TransitCenter, and U.S. PIRG.

If you’re a journalist or researcher, check out our climate change resources. And everybody stay tuned for a Tweet Chat on October 23rd on why the federal transportation program needs to prioritize maintenance over expanding highways.

Question 1: Electric vehicles are necessary but not sufficient to reduce transportation emissions. What else should we do to move #BeyondEVs and create a cleaner, zero-carbon transportation future?

Question 2: What can make it easier for people to take low-carbon trips by using transit, walking, or biking?

Question 3: What changes do we need (at the federal, state, and/or local level) to place destinations closer to where people live?

Question 4: The feds dedicate the vast majority of transportation money to building highways. How can we better distribute funding to reduce climate pollution?

Question 5: What else is missing from the debate about transportation and climate change?

Question 6: Reducing the amount/length we drive is essential for lowering transportation emissions. What are additional benefits of reducing the distance we drive?

Question 7: The implicit goal of the federal transportation program is to increase and encourage driving, which raises emissions. What would be a better, explicit, stated goal?

Question 1: Electric vehicles are necessary but not sufficient to reduce transportation emissions. What else should we do to move #BeyondEVs and create a cleaner, zero-carbon transportation future?

Back to top of the page

Question 2: What can make it easier for people to take low-carbon trips by using transit, walking, or biking?

Back to top of the page

Question 3: What changes do we need (at the federal, state, and/or local level) to place destinations closer to where people live?

Back to top of the page

Question 4: The feds dedicate the vast majority of transportation money to building highways. How can we better distribute funding to reduce climate pollution?

https://twitter.com/NUMOalliance/status/1174389963967758338

Back to top of the page

Question 5: What else is missing from the debate about transportation and climate change?

Back to top of the page

Question 6: Reducing the amount/length we drive is essential for lowering transportation emissions. What are additional benefits of reducing the distance we drive?

Back to top of the page

Question 7: The implicit goal of the federal transportation program is to increase and encourage driving, which raises emissions. What would be a better, explicit, stated goal?

Back to top of the page

 

Broad coalition takes the offensive on federal automated vehicle policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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