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

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

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

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

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

Comparing House & Senate 2018 appropriations

Enacted 2017 levelsPresident Trump's request for 2018House 2018 AppropriationsSenate 2018 Appropriations
TIGER Grants$500 million$0$0$550 million
Transit Capital Grants$2.4 billion$0$1.75 billion$2.133 billion
Amtrak & passenger rail$1.495 billion$795 million

(All cuts come from eliminating federal funding for all long-distance routes)		$1.4 billion$1.6 billion
TOTAL THUD FUNDING$57.65 billion$47.4 billion$56.5 billion$60.058 billion

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

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

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

And they didn’t stop there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building public transit back better

About that infrastructure package

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

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

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

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of July 21st

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

  • The Senate Appropriations Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development “THUD” Subcommittee is scheduled to markup the THUD appropriations bill on Tuesday and the full Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to markup the bill on Thursday. T4America will have more details on the bill’s provisions later this week. (Senate THUD Subcommittee, Senate Appropriations Committee)
  • Last week, the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection passed comprehensive legislation related to automated vehicles. (Bloomberg)
  • The House Budget committee passed the FY 18 budget resolution out of committee last week on a party-line vote, but its prospects are uncertain in the full House because of an internal Republican divide on how much to cut non-defense spending. (The Hill)
  • Politico takes a deep dive into Republicans’ struggle to pass a budget that includes cuts to discretionary non-defense spending. (Politico)
  • The NY Times investigates where Trump’s infrastructure draft plan is and finds that it has stalled. (NY Times Note: NY Times has a limit of five free articles a month)
  • The Caltrans electrification project, which obtained a Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA) from the Trump administration after a period of uncertainty, broke ground last week. Service is expected to start in 2021. (Streetsblog SF)
  • An influential Colorado House Republican has proposed to tax bicycles to pay for infrastructure projects. This proposal comes after Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed into law a transportation-funding package that includes a tax on bicycles. (Colorado Politics)

Transit projects threatened in the Pacific Northwest by cuts to the federal New Starts program

Various planned bus rapid transit and light rail projects in Oregon and Washington would be eliminated if Congress heeds President Trump’s budget request to entirely eliminate the federal funding for new transit construction projects, profoundly impacting these communities’ futures.

Whether planned to accommodate new growth, attract talent, provide alternatives to soul-crushing congestion or access to jobs, these projects are essential to the vitality of these communities. Here’s a rundown of the transit projects in the Pacific Northwest that would be affected.

Spokane’s Central City Line

Spokane is a mid-sized city of over 200,000. Although it boasts seven college campuses, many students choose to move elsewhere after graduation, draining the city’s potential talent pool. Spokane understands the new paradigm: College graduates want to live in vibrant places with transit options, and attracting that talent is critical for economic success.

Part of Spokane’s plan to stem the emigration of talent includes building the Central City Line (CCL), an all-electric bus rapid transit line from Brown’s Addition through downtown to the University District. The project improves connections across the bus system and provides a better option to cross downtown. The region passed a ballot measure in November 2016 to cover operations costs for the CCL. But for the project to proceed with construction, it will need to win a federal Small Starts transit grant of $53.43 million to complete the $72 million project. Spokane’s ability to attract and retain a talented workforce and build its competitive edge hangs in the balance.

Eugene’s EmX Network

Expanding upon the Eugene-Springfield region’s successful EmX bus rapid transit network is key to their plans to accommodate growth without having to sprawl onto some of the world’s best farmland. The region already has two EmX bus rapid transit lines with a third under construction and several more lines planned. Lane Transit District (LTD) was awarded $131 million in Small Starts grants to build its first three lines. The agency won’t be able to proceed with lines in northwest Eugene, or on East Main Street in Springfield without continued federal support to augment their local contributions.

“With the fact that this area is growing so rapidly, there’s going to be a need and a want from the community to expand our transportation network,” said LTD spokesperson Theresa Lang in a recent article in the Eugene Register Guard. “If this budget goes into effect, that would be devastating for those future plans.”

Greater Portland’s Southwest Corridor and Division Transit Project

Greater Portland has plans to go big and small using transit to help accommodate more people in its fast-growing region. The big plan is the SW Corridor, a proposed light rail line from Portland to Tigard and Tualatin through Southwest Portland paralleling the frequently congested I-5 corridor. The planning for this corridor integrates land use and active transportation, but light rail is central. Currently in environmental review, the project’s sponsors are counting on receiving a full funding grant agreement (FFGA) in 2021 to begin construction and be completed in 2025.

“From a city standpoint, it has to do with traffic congestion and housing density,” says Tigard Mayor John Cook. “Without light rail, things will happen but it will take 50 years instead of 25 years.” With about a half-million more people expected in the region by 2040, they don’t have 50 years.

On the east side of Portland, planners endeavor to make a faster, less expensive investment. The Division Transit Project is a 14-mile express bus that will enhance speed, reliability and capacity on Portland’s busiest bus line from downtown Portland to Gresham through the most diverse neighborhoods in Oregon.

This smaller project is now eligible to apply for the $100 million Small Starts grant it needs in 2018 to open in 2021. The new line will reduce travel times by up to 20 percent and add articulated buses to address crush-load conditions that often force drivers to pass waiting riders with today’s inadequate service.

“Residents and businesses have been clear with us: Keep investing in transit,” says Metro Councilor Bob Stacey. “It’s critical, particularly as Portland grows and we all need more options to get places reliably and safely.”

Local access to jobs and a regional vision in Puget Sound

The Puget Sound region’s transit ambitions are supported by ballot measures passed by voters in the City of Seattle and Snohomish County in 2015, and in the entire region when voters passed Sound Transit 3 (ST3) in 2016. The local measures fund plans for a seven-line BRT network in Seattle and additional BRT lines in Snohomish County. Expansion of Sound Transit’s regional Link light rail network and freeway-running BRT are major components of the regional plan funded by ST3. While local voters have committed billions of their own dollars to these projects over the next few decades, these plans all rely on federal support to varying degrees.

Community Transit’s Swift Green Line from Bothell to Paine Field connects a great portion of Snohomish County with the massive employment center at Paine Field, where much of Boeing’s operations are based. . In the meantime Community Transit is proceeding to construction based on a “Letter of No Prejudice” (LONP) from FTA. That LONP is not a guarantee of federal funds but allows the agency to seek reimbursement once funds are committed through the single-year grant agreement. The agency is planning several other bus rapid transit lines in the future including the Swift Orange Line connecting with light rail when it reaches Lynnwood in 2023. Along with nearly all other similar transit projects, those projects will depend on future federal transit construction grants.

Move Seattle passed in the core city of the region in 2015, and provides much of the funding for seven BRT lines crisscrossing Seattle. Madison Street BRT (also called the RapidRide G line) is already in planning. The $120 million project was originally planned with the expectation of a $60 million Small Starts grant. Without federal funding, the fate of the project, which would enhance access to the dense downtown Seattle core, may have to be delayed from its 2019 completion date. This pushes back construction of the other six BRT lines in this fast-growing city with major traffic congestion; lines that Seattleites already committed to paying their share for.

The amount of federal funding sought for the full 25-year Sound Transit 3 plan is small in proportion to the amount locals voted to pay in local taxes and fees — just $4.7 billion in New Starts funding vs. $54 billion total cost. But without federal support the plan cannot be completed within the 25-year timeframe, leaving communities on the edge of the region like Issaquah without the light rail connections they were promised.

Puget Sound residents have stepped up and voted to tax themselves to build these systems with the expectation they’d be joined by a reliable federal funding partner.

“The ballot measures adopted by our voters assumed a reasonable level of federal matching funds to deliver our most challenging transit solutions through the continued funding of the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Grant program,” said Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff in a joint statement with the LA Metro CEO. “But the administration’s budget proposes to terminate that federal partnership for challenging projects at a time when ever-worsening road congestion threatens to choke off our and other regions’ economic growth.”

If the federal government disregards its historical role and commitment as a funding partner on transit projects, it will absolutely hamper this economic powerhouse’s job growth, harming the national economy in turn.

With so many critical projects on the chopping block if the relatively small federal transit capital program is eliminated, it’s no wonder that many in the Pacific Northwest are eager to weigh in with the administration and Congress as they choose what to do with this vital program in the 2018 budget that is due to begin in October.

Announcing the winners of our three creative placemaking grants

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

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

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

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

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

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

City of Dothan / Dothan, AL

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

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

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

LA Commons / Los Angeles, CA

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

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

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

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

Transit Drives Indy / Indianapolis, IN

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

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

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

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

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

Catch up with the recording of our online discussion of a Colorado city’s partnership with Lyft

Last week we held a webinar with the city of Centennial, CO, one of the 16 members of our Smart Cities Collaborative, about their six-month partnership with Lyft to connect more residents to their existing transit service. Catch up with the full recording of the session right here.

Centennial is a mid-sized suburb southeast of Denver that has connecting light rail service, but it’s difficult for many of the residents of Centennial to reach the stations from their homes. This pilot project provided free Lyft rides between between the Dry Creek light rail station and nearby homes within a 3.75 square-mile service area with the aim of incentivizing transit use and reducing congestion for trips into downtown Denver.

Did you miss the webinar? Catch up with the full recorded presentation below, and download the accompanying slide presentation here. (pdf)

The pilot project was of the first of its kind in the nation and ran from August through February of this year. The city recently finalized its final report with detailed project results, lessons learned, and next steps. Melanie Morgan, a Data Analyst for Centennial’s Innovation team and the pilot project manager, presented on the report and fielded participant questions on funding, payment, data reporting, scalability, paratransit, and more.

For more on the pilot project and to download the full report, visit http://go.centennialco.gov/.

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of July 14th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

  • The Transportation and Housing Appropriations (THUD) bill was released last week and it proposes to eliminate the TIGER program and decrease funding for other important programs, including New Starts and Small Starts. See T4A’s full member summary here.
  • last week USDOT put out a notice for approximately $226.5 million in funding for the Bus and Bus Facilities Infrastructure Investment competitive grant program. Applications must be submitted by August 25, 2017. (USDOT)
  • The full House Appropriations Committee will markup the Transportation and Housing Appropriations (THUD) bill on Monday July 17th. (House Appropriations Committee)
  • House Republicans are looking at passing all 12 appropriations bills, including the transportation and housing appropriations bills, in one large “omnibus” package before the August recess. (The Hill)
  • The House Budget Committee will mark up their fiscal year 2018 budget resolution in Committee on Wednesday. The resolution is expected to include special instructions directing committees to start working on tax reform, potentially allowing tax reform to pass in the Senate with 50 votes, instead of the usually required 60 votes. It is still unlikely that tax reform will be used to fund an infrastructure package. (The Hill)
  • The Bipartisan Policy Center explores what “asset recycling” is and the potential benefits and challenges. (Bipartisan Policy Center)
  • The Nation Magazine comes out strongly against asset recycling and articulates why they just view it as another form of privatization. (The Nation)
  • Des Moines Register Editorial: “Trump’s infrastructure plan isn’t a plan at all.” (Des Moines Register)

U.S. DEPARTMENT of TRANSPORTATION FY2018 APPROPRIATIONS BILL SUMMARY

As introduced on July 10, 2017

Late on July 10, the House Appropriations subcommittee released a draft bill to fund transportation and housing programs for fiscal year (FY) 2018. The bill would appropriate $56.5 billion in discretionary spending, which is $1.1 billion below FY 2017. USDOT would receive $17.8 billion in discretionary FY2018 funding, a $646 million decrease from FY2017. The House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to markup the draft bill on Monday, July 17.

The full text of the draft bill can be found here. A summary of the appropriations bill can be found on the House Appropriations Committee page here.

BACKGROUND

Congress must take action on addressing the budget caps enforced through the Budget Control Act (BCA), which passed into law in 2011. The Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney has hinted that the Treasury Department could run out of room to borrow under the current debt limit as early as September. While Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has not given an estimate of exactly when the Treasury was most likely to hit the debt limit, October or November is likely.

Despite the absence of a budget deal, the House Appropriations Committee has come out with interim 302(b) allocations, which set the spending level for each appropriations subcommittee. Under this document, the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) subcommittee has a FY 2018 funding cap of $56.5 billion, a $1.1 billion decrease from FY 2017 funding level. See interim sub-allocations document here.

TIGER

The House FY2018 bill eliminates funding for the TIGER program. In past appropriations, the House has also used this same strategy – zero out the program and rely on the Senate to maintain funding for TIGER. Then when they conference the House and Senate bills into one bill, the House pushes the Senate to cut funding from another program in order to maintain TIGER funding.

It is unclear the extent to which the Senate will continue to carry the weight of supporting the program moving forward.

New Starts, Small Starts, Core Capacity (Capital Investment Grant Program)

The House bill allocates $1.75 billion to the Capital Investment Grant (CIG) program, which is a 27 percent cut from, or $660 million less than, the FY 2017 funding level of $2.4 billion. It is also $549 million less that the authorized level for the program in the FAST Act. Of this, $1.008 billion is set-aside for New Starts projects that have full funding grant agreements (FFGAs), $145.7 million for Core Capacity projects, and $182 million for Small Starts.

Of the remaining CIG funding, $400 million would fund “joint Amtrak-public transit projects.” This language provides a clue that the Subcommittee intends the funding to go to the Gateway project, a rail improvement project in the Northeast Corridor. With all this funding dedicated to Gateway, there would be no remaining funding would be available for any of the CIG projects that anticipate getting an FFGA signed in 2018 or late 2017.

While the House leaders included language directing the USDOT Secretary to “continue to administer the Capital Investment Grant Program in accordance with the procedural and substantive requirements of” the law, the lack of funding available to do that would effectively prevent projects from moving forward until at least 2019.

Amtrak, CRISI, State of Good Repair, and REG

The FY2018 draft bill provides $1.4 billion for Amtrak. Of this, $1.1 billion is for the National Network, which is consistent with the FAST Act authorized amount, and $328 million for the Northeast Corridor (NEC), which is a decrease from the $515 million authorized amount in the FAST Act.

The Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) grant program is funded at $25 million, a decrease from the $230 million authorized under the FAST Act and less than half of the $68 million that the program received in FY 2017.

The draft bill does not provide funding for the Restoration and Enhancement Grants (REG) program, which authorized at $20 million under the FAST Act.

The FY2018 bill provides $500 million for Federal State Partnership State of Good Repair grants, significantly above the $175 million authorized for FY 2018. In spending this funding, the bill directs USDOT to “first give preference to eligible projects for which the environmental impact statement required under the National Environmental Policy Act and design work is already complete at the time of the grant application review, or to projects that address major critical assets which have conditions that pose a substantial risk now or in the future to the reliability of train service.” This language indicates that funding would be directed to the Gateway’s Portal North Bridge and Hudson River Tunnel projects. Overall, the Gateway project could receive $900 million in grant funding under the bill – about one sixth of the $5.4 billion in discretionary appropriations for non-aviation programs.

Analysis

The House draft THUD appropriations bill does not have as drastic funding cuts as those proposed by the Administration (see T4America summary of the Administration’s FY 2018 budget proposal here). However, it still represents significant cuts from current funding levels and would have far-reaching impacts for communities’ transportation and housing programs.

On July 11, the House Appropriations THUD Subcommittee held a short mark-up and passed the draft bill without any amendments. The bill is scheduled for consideration by the full House Appropriations Committee on July 17 and may move forward to the House floor. However, Congress is not expected to complete any of the FY 2018 appropriation bills before the fiscal year begins on October 1. T4America encourages communities to reach out to their representatives to ensure funding is maintained for the key programs your community relies on.

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of July 3rd – July 7th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

  • Congressional Republican disagreement over a plan to private the air traffic control system could mean trouble for President Trump’s broader infrastructure plan. (Washington Examiner)
  • The House Appropriations subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development will mark up the FY18 “THUD” bill on Tuesday evening. T4America will have more coverage of the markup and the bill when it is released. (House Appropriations Committee)
  • The Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development will hear U.S. DOT secretary Elaine Chao testify on Thursday about U.S. DOT’s FY18 budget request. T4America will have more coverage of that hearing later this week. (Senate Appropriations Committee)
  • “House Republicans stymied in their efforts to adopt a budget.” (Fox News)

Oregon’s legislature just approved a transportation package that goes big for transit

The Oregon Legislature just passed a transportation package that makes historic investments in transit while also advancing congestion pricing and putting funding toward safe routes to school infrastructure, electric vehicle purchase incentives and fixing roads and bridges.

As local stakeholders, the governor, and legislators worked over the last year and a half to develop legislation to invest in Oregon’s transportation system, a common refrain emerged: “Go big, or go home!” The idea being that if legislators were going to take a tough vote to increase taxes, they might was well make it a significant enough increase to make a substantial difference for the state’s commuters, traveling public and shippers. The Oregon House passed HB 2017 yesterday (Wednesday), and the Senate approved the legislation late today, which the governor is expected to sign. If Governor Kate Brown signs the bill, Oregon will become the sixth state to raise new transportation funds in 2017, and the 30th since 2012.

Oregon puts some skin in the transit operations game

Now virtually at the finish line, the overall package isn’t as big as initially proposed, but it has gone big for transit. The legislation introduces a new statewide transit-dedicated 0.1% employee payroll tax expected to generate $103 million annually. This represents over a 200 percent increase in state funding for transit — truly a game-changer that will increase transit service in rural and urban areas across the state.

Change from 2014 state funding per capita for transit, compared to potential funding with new transit funding. Via bettertransitoregon.org

A committee created by the legislative leadership to develop the initial funding package toured the state last year and heard about the importance of transit from every community they visited, large and small, rural and urban. However, like many other states, Oregon has a very strict constitutional restriction on motor-vehicle user-fees like gas taxes, registration fees and title fees. Funds from these sources can only go to infrastructure within the road right-of-way, and definitely not to transit operations.

This wasn’t Oregon’s first recent attempt to raise new funds for transportation. An employee payroll tax to fund transit had originally been proposed in the failed 2015 “Gang-of-8” package. While there were concerns about the regressiveness of this funding source, and a more progressive income tax was floated as an alternative, ultimately, the payroll tax stuck. To mitigate the regressive payroll tax, transit agencies will be required to submit public transportation improvement plans explaining how they will improve service and/or reduce fares for low-income riders.

As part of the effort to win this component of the package, the Oregon Transit Association compiled stories about the value of transit and how additional funding could effectively be spent to improve the lives of Oregonians. The Better Transit Oregon website outlines, for example, improvements like seven new bus lines and increased service on 20 other transit lines in the Portland region, and enhancing service that Kayak Public Transit provides between Pendleton, Hermiston, La Grande and Walla Walla in eastern Oregon. Overall, the funding could provide a 37 percent increase in service hours statewide.

Many ways to skin a cat

The joint legislative committee tasked with producing the package recognized from the start that this package had to be multimodal. While there was a focus on freeway projects that would address three bottlenecks in the Portland region, many committee members quickly recognized that these freeway projects were certainly not silver bullets and possibly wouldn’t help much at all in the long term.

Senator Brian Boquist from a rural part of the Willamette Valley regularly told his colleagues and the media that, “We cannot build our way out of congestion,” and “We cannot tax our way out of congestion,” to advance tolling and congestion pricing as critical strategies to address Oregon’s congestion challenges. The legislation directs ODOT to study, and, if feasible, implement congestion pricing on the two major north-south freeways in the Portland region, I-5 and I-205.

Ironically, as the size of the package shrank due to pressure from trucking and automotive stakeholders, the funding available for the freeway projects shrank, but congestion pricing stayed in the bill along with smaller investments like $10-15 million annually for safe routes to school infrastructure, a $12 million annual program for electric vehicle purchase incentives and the aforementioned transit funding. Overall the package shrank from $8 billion over 10 years to $5.3 billion.

Recognizing the need for accountability and transparency – but coming up short

Legislators recognized the need for improved transparency and accountability but lacked the political will to fully address the issue in any meaningful way.

While the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is known for its emphasis on state of repair, and certain data-driven programs like All Roads Transportation Safety and Connect Oregon, it has stumbled significantly, particularly with more expensive projects like the failed Columbia River Crossing and the over-budget Pioneer Mountain Eddyville highway project.

A working group was specifically charged with developing policies to address accountability and transparency. T4A had worked with Representative Reardon to put forward HB 2532 modeled on Virginia’s “Smart Scale” concept as way to identify projects that maximize return on investment. It proposed to do this by giving each project a return-on-investment (ROI) score and only selecting for funding those that scored the best. In the end, the workgroup opted for “the Nevada model” which involves cost-benefit analysis of projects, a different tool aimed at the same task of evaluating project ROI.

Unfortunately, the committee didn’t make a strong commitment to this new approach, exempting all the earmarked projects in the bill, and only including modernization projects that cost more than $15 million. To put this in perspective, the draft 2018-22 State Transportation Improvement Plan (STIP) includes no projects that that clearly would be subject to the new analysis.

This means Oregon won’t be able to use this system to meaningfully compare proposed projects — including nearly $800 million in earmarks in the package — to report on, let alone prioritize, those that maximize return on investment. To make matters worse, the Connect Oregon program — renowned for its data-driven merit-based project selection process similar to the federal TIGER program — is now completely consumed by earmarks for the next two biennia.

The bill does give the governor-appointed and legislatively-confirmed members of the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) greater capacity and authority to oversee ODOT. OTC will be granted independent staff and the power to hire and fire the ODOT director in consultation with the governor. These changes create the some hope for administrative change to improve ODOT’s accountability, transparency and ability to make data-driven decisions that maximize return on investment toward achieving Oregon’s goals.

Stories You May Have Missed: June 26th – June 30th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week. 

  • Senator John Thune (Republican-South Dakota), the Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said work on an infrastructure plan could slip into next year. (The Hill)
  • With “asset recycling” a big part of President Trump’s infrastructure plan, the Economist explores the “promises and pitfalls” of asset recycling. (The Economist)
  • S. DOT has revised the FASTLANE program’s criteria and changed the name to the Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) program. (The Hill)
  • Amidst proposals from the White House to privatize some infrastructure to pay for their proposed infrastructure plan, the Senate Commerce Committee has rejected the White House’s proposal to privatize the U.S.’s air-traffic control system. (The Hill)
  • Amtrak has named former Delta Airlines CEO Richard Anderson as their new CEO effective June 12th. He will be co-CEO with current CEO Wick Moorman until December 31st. (The Hill)
  • The Hill lists six potential contenders to be Uber’s new CEO after former CEO Travis Kalanick resigned. (The Hill)
  • Oregon Governor Kate Brown and state legislature leaders reached an agreement on a package to raise funds for transportation. (The Register Guard)

Oregon’s attempt to raise new state funding for transportation is coming down to the wire

The Oregon legislature has just two weeks left to vote on a transportation package that — in addition to funding highway maintenance and expansion — takes steps to significantly fund transit, safe routes to school and implements forward thinking strategies like congestion pricing and active transportation management.

Flickr photo by Oregon DOT. https://www.flickr.com/photos/oregondot/15035881385

Update: 7/6/17: A deal was struck by legislators and approved in the Oregon House and Senate this week. More details here in this newer post.

The Co-Chairs and Co-Vice Chairs of Oregon’s Joint Committee on Transportation Preservation and Modernization Committee (JTPM) have been negotiating the details of HB 2017 while a constitutionally mandated end-of-session ‘sine die’ on July 10 looms. This committee was formed last year to develop a transportation package for the 2017 legislative session, and has conducted a tour of state to gather input and convened many meetings to develop and flesh out the details of the package over the course of this past year.

The package has too many moving parts to describe in this post, but here are five notable elements to Oregon’s proposal:

1) Five diverse sources of revenue

To raise new transportation funds, the proposal includes traditional mechanisms like gas tax and registration fee increases, and not-so-traditional ones like an excise tax on bicycle sales, employee payroll taxes and congestion pricing. These sources are so diverse in part because of a strong interest from legislators in seeing different user groups have ‘skin in the game,’ and because Oregon’s constitution prohibits any motor vehicle-related user fees from being used on transit, off-road paths, or non-highway freight infrastructure. Add in new tolls and there are actually six sources of revenue contained in the legislation.

2) It includes significant funding for transit operations

The state of Oregon pays only about 3 percent of the cost of operating the numerous transit systems in the state while nationally, states cover about 24 percent of transit operations. A new 0.1 percent statewide payroll tax on employees would significantly change that, dedicating 85 percent of the projected $107 million it would raise toward transit operations annually. This would bolster transit service in small towns and large cities across the state, improving access to jobs and other services, and making the state a valuable partner in running the multimodal transportation networks that are vital to the state’s prosperity.

3) Freeway widening is not the only congestion solution offered

Like other recent state transportation funding packages, Oregon’s includes funding for freeway expansion — including freeway projects intended to address three specific bottlenecks in the Portland region. But an earlier presentation outlining the proposal also acknowledges the limitations of this approach, noting that we “cannot tax our way out of congestion” and “cannot build our way out of congestion relief.” The bill calls upon the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) to implement — where possible — pre-construction tolling, congestion pricing, “zip lanes” (we take this to mean high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes) and active traffic management. While the benefits of freeway widening are often lost to induced demand, congestion pricing can more effectively address congestion if coupled with investments in other traffic-reducing travel options like transit.

4) A “Regional Increment”

The biggest congestion challenges in Oregon are in the Portland metropolitan region. While business interests around the state are concerned about congestion in Portland since they move their goods through this port city and economic hub, it’s still a tough sell for the rest of the state to pay for big freeway projects in Portland. To solve this politically and financially, the package levies an additional “regional increment” on the Portland region with higher gas taxes, registration fees and title fees, and dedicates that funding to projects in the Portland region. This helps Portland fund its big projects and holds together political support from rural, more tax-averse parts of the state.

5) Significant discussion on accountability

We’ve written before about Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) effort to regain public trust.

“While the agency is respected for innovative programs like ConnectOregon’s competitive grants and a strong commitment to fix-it-first principles, it has stumbled occasionally as well, including the failure to win support for the problematic Columbia River Crossing mega-project, massive cost overruns on a rural highway project in the landslide-prone coastal mountains, and ill-timed miscalculation of carbon emissions estimates related to failed 2015 transportation investment legislation.”

Legislators are anxious to show the public that they can improve transparency and accountability in this bill. The proposal calls for giving the Oregon Transportation Commission greater power and capacity to oversee the Oregon Department of Transportation. It also calls for cost/benefit analysis of future projects and communicating construction progress on an improved website.

We expect new amendments to be released this week as the legislature races to complete its work before the deadline.

Stories You May Have Missed: June 19th – June 23rd

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

  • U.S. Conference of Mayors attendees are “hungry for details about Trump’s infrastructure plan.” (Marketplace)
  • The Senate Commerce Committee has rejected the White House’s proposal to privatize the U.S. air-traffic control system. (The Hill)
  • Autonomous vehicle bills are on the horizon. (The Hill)
  • “States raising gas taxes to fund transportation improvements.” (Fox News)
  • Inside Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s resignation. (NY Times)

Equipping the next generation of Ohio leaders on transportation & transit

Local elected, business, and community leaders from cities across Ohio gathered last week for the first workshop of our Ohio Transportation Leadership Academy. Over the next six months, teams from across the state will learn from peer regions and transportation experts and develop their own plans to use transportation as an economic development tool in their cities.

This Ohio-only edition in our series of leadership academies is focused on training and equipping civic leaders from multiple Ohio cities to spearhead a fresh approach to transportation that will foster sustainable economic growth and boost the economy in metro areas and the state. In a state where many cities struggle with either slow or negative population growth, the last generation’s economic development strategies are no longer delivering results. Smart investments in transit, main streets, and walkable communities are part of a new recipe for future success. The academy, co-hosted with the Greater Ohio Policy Center, includes teams from the Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Delaware, and Toledo regions.

In this first session, participants heard from Indianapolis leaders about their recent progress using transportation as an economic development tool. Former Mayor Greg Ballard shared how he led the city to add miles of new biking and walking trails and kickstarted the development of an all-electric bus rapid transit network. Mark Fisher, Chief Policy Officer for the Indy Chamber, explained why the Indy business community was front and center in the campaign to improve public transit in order to connect workers to jobs. And Nicole Barnes, of the Indianapolis Congregational Action Network (IndyCAN) shared lessons from the grassroots, faith-based campaign to help turn out voters to successfully pass a transit funding referendum on the ballot last November that will dramatically improve bus service in the region.

Through workshop activities, participants identified specifically what success should look like for their regions and how transportation projects would help get them there. To distill that vision and think about the long-term outcomes they want, participants went through an exercise to imagine the future newspaper headlines they’d want to see written one day. “Region’s Economy Grows; Small, Minority-Owned Businesses Open at Record Pace”, “Downtown population doubles,” and “Region has a growing population, rising incomes, and less disparity” were among some of those brainstormed.

Participants see the shortcomings of their current transportation infrastructure and are focused on creative ways to make improvements including redesigning their existing transit networks, incorporating new transportation technology, building partnerships with employers to better serve trips to work, and finding new sources of local transportation funding.

We’re looking forward to the upcoming sessions of the academy where these local leaders will learn more about the best practices and emerging ideas successfully employed in peer cities across the country, become effective champions for change in their cities and be a part of expanding access to jobs and restoring walkable communities to lead to sustained economic success in Ohio’s cities.

Hear from a city that partnered with Lyft to increase access to their public transit network

Join us on July 13th to hear about how one Colorado city in our Smart Cities Collaborative has been experimenting with connecting more residents to their transit service by partnering with Lyft.

Updated 7/19: If you missed the webinar, you can watch the full recording here.

One of the major challenges faced by the members of our Smart Cities Collaborative is figuring out how to improve first- and last-mile connections to existing transit hubs in order to leverage existing transit service and connect more people to quality service that might not live within walking distance of it. Over the course of the Collaborative, cities have considered a number of pilot projects to solve this issue, from microtransit options, to on-demand transit shuttles, to partnerships with ridehailing companies like Uber, Lyft and others.

One of the cities in the Collaborative, Centennial, CO, recently completed their own first/last-mile pilot project. (The launch was covered here last August by Laura Bliss in CityLab.) Centennial is a mid-sized suburb southeast of Denver that has light rail access to downtown Denver, but it’s difficult for many of the residents of Centennial to reach the stations from their homes.

To help residents take advantage of this service, the city entered into a six-month partnership with Lyft to provide free rides between the Dry Creek light rail station and nearby homes within a 3.75 square-mile service area. The aim of the project was to incentivize transit use, enhance regional transportation, and reduce congestion for trips to and from downtown Denver by shifting some of those trips to transit.

One of the core principals of our Smart Cities Collaborative is encouraging cities to thoughtfully test new technologies and share those results with other cities to inform their pilots and help them learn from another city’s progress — or mistakes? So how did this pilot turn out? What was the response from their residents? Was the partnership with Lyft successful? Transportation for America and guests from the City of Centennial, CO will host a webinar on July 13th at 3 p.m. Eastern to discuss the results of the GoCentennial pilot.

REGISTER HERE

 

The team from Centennial will present on its final report, which includes metrics, lessons learned, and next steps. Full text of the report can be found here. (pdf) We’ll also provide participants with the opportunity to pose questions to Centennial on the results of their pilot, their evaluation tactics, and their plans for future projects. If you would like to submit a question ahead of time to ensure your question is answered, please share it with us via email (smartcities@t4america.org) at least 48 hours before the webinar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of June 16th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week. 

  • Both Republican and Democratic House Appropriators pushed back against the Trump Administration’s proposed U.S. DOT budget cuts during a hearing with U.S DOT Secretary Elaine Chao. (Bloomberg)
  • U.S. DOT Secretary Elaine Chao called the TIGER program “earmarks” and said the Administration equivocally does not support the New Starts program during the hearing with House Appropriators. (Route Fifty)
  • “After President Trump’s ‘infrastructure week’ was widely mocked among media members, some politicians, lawmakers and advocates who are serious about wanting to see the nation’s roads and bridges improved are grappling with how to move forward.” (Washington Examiner)
  • Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (Republican-South Dakota) and Ranking Member Bill Nelson (Democrat-Florida) released a set of six bipartisan legislative principals for any future regulation of automated vehicles. (GovTech, Senate Commerce Committee)
  • An effort to raise the Louisiana gas tax this legislative session failed and may not come back until 2021. (The Advocate)
  • A new report finds that New York City “vision zero” efforts finds that pedestrian and cyclist fatalities have declined on streets have that have received vision zero redesigns, but increased on streets that haven’t received redesigns. The report also finds that New York City is not investing enough money in street redesigns in low-income neighborhoods relative to the risk of biking and walking in these neighborhoods and a large factor is internal community board resistance. (Streetsblog, Manhattan Institute)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of June 9th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week. 

  • President Trump and the bipartisan infrastructure plan?  (Washington Post)
  • President Trump’s infrastructure plan relies on public-private partnerships. (Politico)
  • “Australia’s Tantalizing Lessons on Privatizing Infrastructure.” (CityLab)
  • The Columbus Dispatch covered President Trump’s speech on his infrastructure plan and how his plan may not help Ohio that much. (Columbus Dispatch)
  • “Uber Weighs Leave of Absence for Chief Executive.” (NY Times)
  • “NACTO Wants to Find Out How Cities Can Design Better Streets, Faster.” (Streetsblog USA)

We All Have a Role To Play in Winning More Transportation Funding

Last week, I attended the Center for Transportation Excellence’s (CFTE) bi-annual Transit Initiatives and Communities (TIC) Conference in Seattle. The conference focused on how to win local ballot measures to fund transit, but many of the lessons can be applied to different transportation ballot measures. The big take home message was this: everyone has a different role to play.

The reason for holding the conference in Seattle is pretty obvious to those familiar with the recent ballot measure victories for the county, city and region. Speakers were on hand to tell those stories, including T4A members like Tacoma, Seattle, King County, Transportation Choices Coalition, Move LA, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber. We also heard lessons learned from places big and small, including: Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Spokane, and Ellensburg.

So, what do I mean by “Everyone has a role to play”? Agency staff, local politicians, business leaders, labor leaders, and advocates all have very specific roles in bringing a ballot measure across the finish line. As we heard T4A Advisory Board member Denny Zane say at Capital Ideas last fall and again here at TIC, you need to pull together this broad coalition early to ensure everyone is bought into winning. Assuming you’ve already done that, here is what each player can do in their role:

Agency Staff often feel disempowered because the law tends to prohibit advocating for a measure that will benefit the agency on agency time. We learned from Steven Jones at AC Transit that many agencies could do a lot more. With the caveat that agency staff should check with their legal council, Steven told the story of being very aggressive in sharing information about their ballot measure, reminding transit riders about the registration deadline and election dates, and even registering new voters while making sure they never told anyone to vote a particular way. “The bus is your friend. Use it!” said Steve. They used bus marquis, and pamphlets on buses to communicate about election dates and voter information. They even dedicated a bus to voter registration, bringing it to events and festivals. Another key role for agency staff: delivering on the promises of the campaign. “The way to change perception is to be effective every day,” said Rob Gannon, general manager of King County Metro, a T4A member.

Local Politicians tend to step a bit farther forward than is optimal in many campaigns. Yet, can be a very powerful source of support if they are restrained about elbowing their way into the limelight, according to Jay Schenirer, a Sacramento City Council member. Jay informed us that politicians are better off leaving the campaign organizing to community groups as stakeholders have reason to not be honest about their positions with politicians while lobbying other issues. Politicians can do a number of critical things to lay the groundwork for a successful campaign. These include: polling, education, raising money and providing infrastructure like mailing lists and campaign volunteers. Local elected officials can also sometimes be helpful in bringing certain groups on board like the business community. Perhaps most important, politicians can “rig the election” by adjusting the geography and timing of a ballot measure to maximize the prospects of success.

Business leaders typically get less engaged in the exact contents of a measure. They can provide funding for the campaign, and can bring effective spokespeople in the right context, especially from the healthcare industry. “The business community doesn’t knock on doors, but they do raise money for campaigns,” said Hilary Norton of Fixing Angelenos Stuck in Traffic (FAST).

Labor has some capability to raise funds, but their biggest strength is boots on the ground. “Labor is good at knocking on doors and making phone calls,” said Rusty Hicks from the LA County Federation of Labor. Labor groups have big memberships that represent a voter and volunteer base. They have the organizing infrastructure like call centers and newsletters to members. Rusty cautioned organizers to acknowledge diversity of labor membership and tailor the message and approach accordingly to recruit support from service sector, building trades and government worker unions. “Thirty percent of union members are Republican so you need some labor spokespeople to reach those voters,” he said.

Advocates by contrast care a lot about what’s in a package. This type of group can bring legitimacy of the measure from a particular perspective such as transit or biking and walking, and expertise in building coalitions and running campaigns. Shefali Ranganathan of Transportation Choices Coalition, a T4A member, who led the successful ST3 campaign for $54 billion-worth of transit investments in the Puget Sound region, talked about using polling data and modeling to identify a group of persuadable voters on which they could focus messaging and outreach efforts.

There were several overarching messages that participants took from the conference. Denny Zane admonished participants to make big plans, telling us, “Fortune favors the bold.” Furthermore, the work does not end when the campaign ends. In reference to the successful passage of “ST3” in the Puget Sound region last November, Tacoma mayor Marilyn Strickland said, “The campaign didn’t end in November. It began in November. Sound Transit needs to deliver because someday there will be an ST4.”

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of June 2nd

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

  • President Trump has kicked off a week-long focus on infrastructure that the White House is calling infrastructure week. (Washington Post)
  • “President Trump Launches $1 Trillion Initiative to Fix America’s Infrastructure.” (Time)
  • “Trump Plans to Shift Infrastructure Funding to Cities, States and Business.” (NY Times)
  • “Trump ‘Self-Help’ Infrastructure Plan Irks State, Local Leaders.” (Bloomberg)
  • Oregon Legislators release a proposed 10-year $8.2 billion transportation spending plan. (Statesman Journal)
  • Bill to raise the gas tax dies in the Louisiana House of Representatives. (WBRZ)
  • San Jose, California released an autonomous vehicle (AV) request for information as part of an effort to launch AV pilot projects in five city corridors. (Govtech)