accessibility Archives - Transportation For America

After your next trip, bring back a fresh perspective on transportation

pedestrian walks under bridge rolling a suitcase

Visiting communities other than our own can remind us to envision more for transportation in our own communities. This is especially important now, with so much infrastructure funding starting to flow that could actually make these visions reality.

When people travel, they shed routines and become open to new experiences. They’re likely to use various modes of transportation from carshare services and bike rentals to exploring the nearby environment on foot. For me, doing so gives me a more complete experience of the place I am visiting, and I often learn something.

For example, I recently visited a U.S. city which has made major strides to improve its transit and biking infrastructure. To get around, my family took advantage of a great new train line and enjoyed biking on separated paths. But my kids were quite frightened when we struggled to make it across a gap in the bike network the day we rented bikes. In addition, two of my children were very nearly hit by a right-turn-on-red driver speeding through the right-turn-only slip lane and failing to stop on time as we crossed a busy arterial road with the walk signal and the right-of-way. I was impressed by some of the improvements, but appalled by the gaps in networks, which mostly existed on dangerously fast arterial streets with little improvement to make them safer for people outside of cars.

I’m not naming the city in question because that’s not the point. Instead I want to emphasize that the perspective of the outsider, or visitor, is so valuable in helping us to see the infrastructure of our own communities with fresh eyes and fresh perspectives.

So how can you get this sort of new or fresh perspective on the transportation options and infrastructure in your community? You might think about how a newcomer navigates your community, or even someone with different physical abilities or a different race. How would a blind person or someone in a wheelchair navigate this intersection? A child on a scooter? Do wide streets without adequate crossings result in speeding or jaywalking? Does enforcement on those streets fall disproportionately on Black community members?

There are great examples of people doing exactly this all over social media. Vignesh Swaminathan (or Mr. Barricade, as he’s known on social media), who joined us at Smart Growth America’s Equity Summit last January, uses Tiktok to explain how street design can better meet the needs of all members of the community.

@mrbarricade
#accessibility is the most important part of #urbandesign if we build for folks in #wheelchairs it works for everyone. #freight #truckers #protectedbikelanes #civilengineering #trafficengineering #urbanplanning #equity #inequity #roadwaysafety #bikelanes #uber #dropoff #sanjose #quickbuild #ada #curbramp #curbs #loading
♬ original sound – MrBarricade

When you try to take on the perspective of someone different than you, or a visitor or tourist perhaps, and see your community with new eyes, you may see some of your successes (as Swaminathan often does), but you may also see the gaps in the network, confusing intersections and missing or confusing wayfinding. These are real barriers for your neighbors who may be thinking of trying out transit, biking or walking for the first time in their and your own community and people who are already get around in those ways. Maybe it renews your outrage at arterial streets that still lack safe bike infrastructure and safe pedestrian crossings, the longstanding gaps in the bike network, and the infrequent transit service.

Seeing your community’s infrastructure with this sort of “beginner’s mind” can help you better see how the status quo is failing to serve us. We’ve become so used to our transportation system being dangerous, inconvenient and expensive, that sometimes that terrible reality just fades into the background. But let’s face it. Aliens from outer space would give America’s transportation infrastructure a D- at best, and so would visitors, outsiders, and a lot of people living in the community that might be getting overlooked.

Try looking at your own community anew. If you travel, bring that fresh perspective back home and challenge the status quo in your own community. Take a walk audit. Talk to visitors about what they see. Reach out to decision makers to fill safety gaps, and stay wise to the strategies they use to deter change. Use our guide to implementation of the infrastructure law to think about how the infrastructure law’s historic funding can be spent to make transportation systems more accessible, safe, and intuitive.

We’re fighting a long fight and making incremental progress, but let’s not let go of making our transportation system truly great. We should imagine and fight for a time when the visiting alien analogy no longer works. It no longer works because we’ve built a transportation system that is so safe and sensible that anyone would be able to navigate it safely, without so much as a second thought.

Connecting people to jobs and services week: The legislative path to make access the goal of transportation investments

A heat map of bike accessibility in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lighter colors indicate fewer jobs can be reached within 30 minutes on “medium-stress” bike routes while darker colors indicate more jobs can be reached. Map via University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory.

Measuring access—not vehicle speed—is smart policy. But local governments, states, and metropolitan planning organizations need support from the federal government to make this happen. It’s high time for Congress to make robust travel data and analysis tools available to transportation agencies.

It’s “Connecting people to jobs and services week” here at Transportation for America. All week we’ll be exploring why improving access should be the goal of the federal transportation program—not vehicle speed.

Having thousands of jobs within a region doesn’t do much good if residents don’t have convenient, safe, and affordable transportation options to reach those jobs. That’s why the concept of measuring whether transportation investments improve access to jobs and services can be transformative. Improving access to jobs and services, not merely aiming for high-speed vehicle travel within a corridor or minimal delay, should be the goal of our transportation investments.

But right now, the implicit goal of all federal transportation investments is to increase vehicle speed, not improve access. Changing the goal from vehicle speed to improving access requires rethinking our federal transportation policy from the ground up.

With the current authorization for federal transportation spending—the FAST Act—set to expire in 2020, it’s time for Congress to determine transportation policy for the next five to six years. Once passed, this legislation will set federal funding levels and policy for transportation for the bill’s duration. It is critical for this bill to reform the federal program to prioritize access.

We need to determine how well the transportation system connects people to jobs and services, and prioritize projects that will improve those connections. Congress should require USDOT to collect the data necessary to develop a national assessment of access to jobs and services and set national goals for improvement.

To do this, Congress should:

Determine national connectivity: USDOT should develop a national assessment of access to jobs and services, and set national goals for improvement.
Measure the right things: apply accessibility to the federal transportation program in performance management and project selection.
Update standards: Phase out outdated metrics such as level of level of service.
Use 21st century tools: USDOT should provide accessibility data to states, MPOs, and local communities.

States such as Utah, Delaware, Virginia, California, Massachusetts, and Hawaii along with the cities of Sacramento and Los Angeles are already utilizing this type of data and seeing results.

Unfortunately, states and MPOs must currently pay to access this data while far less useful congestion data is made readily available by USDOT.

A bill before Congress would pilot destination access; let’s take it a step further

Earlier this year, members of Congress introduced the bipartisan Connecting Opportunities through Mobility Metrics and Unlocking Transportation Efficiencies (COMMUTE) Act in both the House and Senate. This legislation would pilot measuring access nationwide. We are grateful for the leadership of Senators Baldwin (D-WI) and Ernst (R-IA) and Congressman DeSaulnier (D-CA) along with Reps. Curtis (R-UT) and McAdams (D-UT), in the House.

The COMMUTE Act would create a competitive pilot program to provide five states, 10 metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), and five rural planning organizations with data sets to calculate how many jobs and services (such as schools, medical facilities, banks, and groceries) are accessible by all modes of travel. These data sets will also be made available to local governments and researchers.

In July, Congress took an important first step on transportation policy when the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee approved its portion of a surface transportation reauthorization bill (America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act). We were happy 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. This demonstrated the bipartisan support for the common sense idea of measuring the success of our transportation system by whether it creates access to jobs and services.

But we can and should do more. Access to jobs and services has to be the core of any transportation authorization. Support for the pilot in the Senate indicates an opportunity to do much more. That is why we are urging Congress to go further and require USDOT to collect the data necessary to develop a national assessment of access to jobs and services and set national goals for improvement.

The House of Representatives will soon release its proposed surface transportation authorization. This is an opportunity to demonstrate a new vision for transportation, based on modern data and valuing what really matters.

It’s time for Congress to act and hold ourselves accountable for improving access.

Connecting people to jobs and services week: Rethinking shared mobility to prioritize access

Transportation is fundamentally about connecting people, but America’s transportation system focuses on moving cars instead. Madlyn McAuilffe from the New Urban Mobility Alliance (NUMO) wrote this guest post about the consequences of our misguided priorities and how we can get back to focusing on building places and transportation networks for people.

Transportation has always been about connection—connecting people to places, resources, experiences, and of course, other people. Moving people—facilitating access—was the original goal. Transportation was simply the means by which we reached our destinations.

We’ve journeyed a long way since the advent of the automobile, and somewhere along the way toward creating a national transportation system, our priorities shifted to focus not on moving people but on moving cars.

Living with the consequences

The consequences of American auto-centrism have been devastating and far-reaching. Despite an urgent global climate crisis, transportation is the primary source of emissions in the U.S., and a growing source as auto sales (particularly for SUVs and trucks) rise

We’re told by $40-billion worth of endless, highly-stylized auto commercials that cars represent independence, yet they often are the largest purchases many American households will ever make. 72 months of payments, thousands of dollars of high-interest debt, and economic dependence on an inefficient and dangerous mode of transport can hardly be called freedom.

Even the metrics we use to determine the success of our transportation system are off. We measure the efficacy of our roads and policies by speed traveled (i.e., level of service) rather than by the number and diversity of people who can safely and affordably access jobs, school, healthcare, grocery stores, and community centers. Yet rather than reimagine how we fund transit projects or investigate zoning land for multiple uses, we spend outrageous amounts of money on adding lanes to highways, inducing demand for driving, and then condemning commuters to become stuck in hellish congestion.

We often hear about “crumbling infrastructure,” but rarely mentioned is the fact that transportation decision-makers invariably decide and are incentivized to expand the network of roads that are already poorly maintained rather than fix what we have already built.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but how do we begin digging ourselves out of the ditch we have created?

Any roadmap forward starts with rethinking the values underlying how we do transportation, land use, infrastructure, labor, and more. Change the values, change the system; change the system, change the world. Sounds easy, right?

The principle of the thing

A tectonic transportation value shift is already underway, though—and unsurprisingly, it’s a team effort.

Early 2017 witnessed the debut of the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities, a framework for policymakers, leaders, influencers, urban designers, academics, advocates—everyone—to guide stakeholders toward the best outcomes for all people. Developed by Robin Chase and a founding coalition of global NGOs including Transportation for America, the Principles encourage us to rethink how we plan not just our mobility, but also the design of both our transportation system and cities to value inclusivity, connectivity, and shared mobility that is sustainable and just.

The first three Principles—planning cities and mobility together; prioritizing people over vehicles; and supporting the shared and efficient use of vehicles, streets, and land—are key to understanding the Shared Mobility Principles as a whole. The remaining Principles stem from the core value of access, which must also serve as the metric by which any transportation, infrastructure, or other development project must be reviewed. What opportunities will this proposed transit-oriented development project provide and to which communities of people? Will this mobility hub provide first/last-mile solutions in transit deserts? Which transportation investment will create improved access to jobs, school, and other destinations for the greatest number of people: an additional lane for single-occupancy vehicles or a dedicated bus lane for thousands of passengers each day?

Admittedly, the Shared Mobility Principles are ambitious. Relearning everything we’ve come to accept as a given in planning, developing, designing, and maintaining not just our transportation system but cities themselves is daunting. To create lasting change that reaches and improves the lives of everyone, however, we must start by rethinking our values as well as what and whom we prioritize with the policies we craft and the projects we undertake. After all, cities are built for people, not cars. If people can’t access what they need where they live…we’ve failed.

To connect people to jobs and services, we need to measure what matters: people

Today we largely decide which transportation projects to build and where to build them based on how much delay vehicles experience, while entirely ignoring everyone not in a car in the first place. By ignoring walking, biking, or taking transit, we’re ignoring the impacts on everyone not using a car, particularly low-income persons, people of color, and older adults.

A century ago, we didn’t have GPS and GIS mapping systems. Google Maps on a handheld computer (i.e. your cell phone) that would allow you to instantly look up directions to anywhere with any mode was still in the realm of science fiction. Given those limitations, when the country started spending billions to build a national network of highways—and a bunch of streets to feed cars onto those highways—the easiest thing to measure was vehicle delay. Free flowing traffic = good; delay = bad. If cars were getting stuck in traffic, it was a sign that we needed to build more or wider roads, or redesign an intersection to improve traffic flow.

This was the most sophisticated proxy for success we could manage for many decades but this myopic focus on vehicle speed also ignored anyone outside a car and it actively undermined other transportation options. People walking or rolling were relegated to sidewalks (if they existed) or banished from the street altogether. Transit was now being mired in traffic and wide, free-flowing roads lured those who could afford a car onto the open road. And if you happened to live in the path of a future freeway—a path often selected because an area was deemed undesirable based on racist redlining policies—your home or business was razed. What remained of formerly walkable and vibrant Black neighborhoods were suddenly cut off from the rest of the community to make room for cars.

None of these people outside of personal vehicles are considered or counted when we use vehicle delay to measure the effectiveness of our entire transportation system. The ability of people walking, rolling, biking, or taking transit to get where they needed to go is sacrificed for people who can afford and operate a car.

This old measure hasn’t scaled very well, either. As more and more Americans began driving, traffic became more common. We hollowed out city centers in a quest to keep cars moving and then give them a place to park. Today, we still hear calls to widen roads to keep traffic moving. The problem, as it’s presented, isn’t that we have too many cars, but not enough road space for all those cars.

With technology available now, we can figure out where people are trying to go, we can measure how easy or hard it is to get there, and we can do this for every mode of transportation, not just cars. We call this measuring access and using it to evaluate how our transportation system is performing and to decide what projects to build next would make for a much more equitable transportation system.

Access to a better future

If you don’t own a car and you rely on walking, biking, or transit, your needs are largely ignored under the current paradigm. If you don’t want to spend $9,000 a year to own and maintain a car, improving your access to jobs and services is secondary to the needs of people driving. If you can’t drive, for whatever reason, you can only hope that there are viable options to get you where you want to go.

Using access as the primary consideration to evaluate projects may show that building and repairing sidewalks in a community would dramatically improve access to jobs and services for more residents than redesigning one intersection for cars (and for the same amount of money). It may show that a new bus line would make it easier for residents in a low-income community to access healthcare. It may show that filling a gap in a bike lane network would improve the ease and safety of reaching the closest grocery store from neighborhoods in a food desert. Or it may show that the length of a bus ride to school could be cut in half with a short connector road. Using access to guide our transportation investments may show these things, but we wouldn’t know because most transportation decisions focus only on the delay of cars alone.

That’s why our third principle for transportation policy is connecting people to jobs and services. Instead of using an outdated proxy that gives us an incomplete and indirect view of whether or not the system is actually working to get people to their destinations, let’s measure the actual thing that proxy was attempting to measure. Congress should direct USDOT and states to determine how well the transportation system connects people to jobs and services, and prioritize projects that will improve those connections.

Measuring access alone won’t erase all the structural issues that disadvantage low-income communities and communities of color, but it will solve one of those issues. By measuring access we can begin to make sure that everyone regardless of income, age, race, or ability can get where they need to go by whatever mode they choose.

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.

Congress considering a smarter way to measure transportation investments

Having thousands of jobs within a region doesn’t do much good if residents can’t use their local or regional transportation network to reach those jobs. A bill being reintroduced in Congress this week will provide transportation agencies with robust data to support smarter transportation planning that can better connect residents to jobs and services by all modes of travel.

The Connecting Opportunities through Mobility Metrics and Unlocking Transportation Efficiencies (COMMUTE) Act was introduced in the Senate by Senators Baldwin (D-WI) and Ernst (R-IA) and in the House by Congressman DeSaulnier (D-CA) along with Reps. Curtis (R-UT) and McAdams (D-UT). The COMMUTE Act requires the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to create a competitive pilot program to provide five states, 10 metropolitan planning organizations, (MPOs), and five rural planning organizations with data sets to calculate how many jobs and services (such as schools, medical facilities, banks, and groceries) are accessible by all modes of travel. These data sets will also be made available to local governments and researchers.

This simple concept—measuring whether transportation investments improve access to jobs and services—can be transformative. Improving access to jobs and services, not merely aiming for a high speed of travel within a corridor or minimal delay, should be the goal of our transportation system.

In Virginia, they are using this approach to prioritize projects for funding. Some of the leading experts on this issue are our colleagues at the State Smart Transportation Initiative (SSTI) in Senator Baldwin’s hometown of Madison, Wisconsin. SSTI has worked closely with the Virginia Department of Transportation to develop a national model for selecting projects based on how they will improve access to jobs and services. In 2018, Utah took a similar step by passing legislation to overhaul its transportation planning system to prioritize improving access to jobs and services.

The key thing that makes these better approaches possible is more robust data—data which most communities do not have access to.

The incredibly blunt metrics that most planners or communities have used since the 1960s, like overall traffic congestion and on-time performance for transit, paint a grossly two-dimensional picture of the challenges people face while trying to reach jobs and services. They don’t provide sufficient information for agencies to make accurate decisions about what to build in order to best connect people to the places they need to go. These 1960s metrics lead to singular and expensive solutions (like highway expansions), while often failing to solve the problem or even creating new ones.

Today, precise new tools allow communities to accurately calculate accessibility to employment opportunities, daily errands, public services, and much more. These tools allow states and MPOs to better understand where people are traveling and to design transportation networks to maximize the ability of people to travel. It also allows states and MPOs to optimize their transportation networks to utilize all modes of transportation and even to understand how their investments interact with land use policies.

States such as Utah, Delaware, Virginia, California, Massachusetts, and Hawaii along with the cities of Sacramento and Los Angeles are already utilizing this type of data and seeing results.

Unfortunately, states and MPOs must currently pay for access to this data while the far less useful congestion data is made readily available to them by USDOT.

This bill will start to change that, creating a pilot program to give a small group of states, metro areas and rural areas access to better data, and allowing them to choose the best possible investments and make better use of limited taxpayer dollars.

The bipartisan introduction of this bill, in both the House and Senate, with support from members of the relevant committee’s is a huge step forward. We are grateful for the bipartisan leadership of Senators Baldwin and Ernst and Congressmen DeSaulnier, Curtis, and McAdams.

A bipartisan effort to help states and metro areas determine if their transportation systems get you there

Providing states and metro areas with powerful data and accessibility tools can help them better measure the destinations that their residents can easily reach, equipping transportation agencies to more effectively plan investments that will help address those gaps.

In late September, Senator Baldwin (D-WI), along with cosponsors Senators Ernst (R-IA), Hatch (R-UT), and Markey (D-MA), introduced bipartisan legislation to provide communities with new state-of-the-art data tools that can be used to better assess how well their transportation networks provide access to jobs and daily needs.

S. 3491, the Connecting Opportunities through Mobility Metrics and Unlocking Transportation Efficiencies (COMMUTE) Act, requires the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to create a pilot program to provide a handful of states, metropolitan planning organizations, (MPOs) and rural planning organizations with data sets to calculate how many jobs and services (such as schools, medical facilities, banks, and groceries) are accessible by all modes of travel.

These data tools can be revolutionary for communities, enabling them to take a truly holistic view of their transportation networks and make more informed planning and project selection decisions. Why?

As we noted when a similar bill was introduced in the House last year, connecting people to work is arguably the most important goal for our transportation system that we generally do a pretty poor job of measuring. But as important as measuring jobs access is, only 20 percent of all trips and only 30 percent of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are to and from work. This means that 80 percent of trips (70 percent of VMT) are for our other daily essentials—going to the store, visiting the doctor, dropping the kids off at school, etc.

The incredibly blunt metrics that most planners or communities have access to, like overall traffic congestion and on-time performance for transit, paint a grossly two-dimensional picture of the challenges people face while trying to reach their needs within a reasonable period of time. And these limited measures certainly don’t provide enough information to help these agencies make the hard decisions about what to build to best connect people to the places they need to go.

The use of these simple metrics results in the consideration of simple “solutions,” like adding expensive lanes to existing highways and road networks—costly solutions that often don’t solve the problem, or make it worse.

But today, there are precise new tools available that allow communities to more accurately calculate accessibility to employment opportunities, daily errands, public services, and much more, and then optimize their transportation networks and utilize all modes of transportation. (Like the tools used to evaluate Baltimore’s bus system overhaul, for example.)

But unfortunately, states and MPOs must pay for this more helpful accessibility data while the less useful congestion data is made readily available to them. This bill could start to change that by creating a pilot program that will give a handful of states, metro areas, and rural areas free access to the data, helping them make better use of their limited taxpayer dollars to bring the greatest benefits.

With the introduction of this bill, there are now bipartisan bills in both chambers of Congress to provide better data to local communities. Each bill is sponsored and cosponsored by members who sit on the committees with jurisdiction over the bills. This represents a tremendous step forward and we’re grateful for the bipartisan leadership of Senators Baldwin, Ernst, Hatch, and Markey.

House transportation spending bill takes unprecedented steps to increase access to opportunity for all Americans

Transportation for America, PolicyLink, and The Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights applaud the House Appropriations Committee for directing the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to measure how transportation investments will connect all Americans to opportunity and essential daily needs such as jobs, schools, healthcare, food and others.

For immediate release
May 26, 2016

Our organizations thank Representatives Waters, Carson, Ellison, Grijalva, and Quigley for their leadership in including this important provision in the 2017 House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) Appropriations report that passed the House Appropriations Committee yesterday.

“Connecting people to opportunities is one of the primary reasons we build transportation infrastructure, plain and simple,” said Transportation for America Director James Corless. “It’s incredibly encouraging to see the House Appropriations Committee recognize the fact that transportation isn’t an end in itself. To determine if we’re building the right things in the right places, it’s critical that we measure — and improve — the access people have to opportunities. Jobs, healthcare, schools, grocery stores full of healthy food — it’s critical that the streets and transit systems we invest in give as many people as possible more affordable access to all of these things.”

“Each day, millions of Americans — particularly low-income communities and communities of color — struggle to access the resources they need to thrive, simply because they have no transportation to get them where they need to go,” said PolicyLink President and CEO, Angela Glover Blackwell. “By calling on USDOT to work with communities to measure how well we are connecting people to opportunity, Congressional leaders have taken a key step toward equipping local leaders with the equity-focused data they need to reimagine and build a more just transportation system.”

“We are encouraged that the House Appropriations Committee has acknowledged the importance of measuring how our transportation investments stack up in terms of connecting our communities to opportunity, and the Department of Transportation must take up the charge to establish an accessibility performance measure without delay,” said Nancy Zirkin, Executive Vice President of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Without access to transportation, our communities lack the ability to connect to all of the things that they need to sustain their families, including jobs, child care, and affordable housing. With access to transportation, our communities have a world of opportunity opened up to them. The Department of Transportation should leave no stone unturned in ensuring that dollars spent on transportation are being used in the smartest way possible to connect our communities to opportunity.”

The report accompanying this bill encourages the Secretary of Transportation, in coordination with the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration, “to establish an accessibility performance measure to be available to states, metropolitan planning organizations, and transit agencies to assess the degree to which the transportation system, including public transportation, provides multimodal connections to economic opportunities, including job concentration areas, health care services, child care services, and education and workforce training services, particularly for disadvantaged populations.”

USDOT is in the middle of an ongoing process to establish a new series of performance measures for transportation spending — resulting in a new system that will require states and metro areas to measure the impact of their transportation dollars. But the measures developed so far have been limited to metrics like road and bridge conditions, safety and congestion, among others — failing to consider whether or not investments give all people better access to what they need each day.

Do the projects proposed by state and local transportation agencies divide communities or knit them back together? This new accessibility measure will direct USDOT to find ways to measure the answer to questions like that.

The House THUD Appropriations bill, in its current form, also provides robust funding for the Federal Transit Administration’s capital investment program and has strong funding for the important TIGER multimodal discretionary grant program. Both of these programs are essential to helping communities throughout the country build cost-effective multimodal transportation systems that can help connect all residents to opportunity.

Our organizations look forward to working with House leadership as the bill moves forward to ensure USDOT, states and local leaders have the resources needed to successfully build and measure our transportation investments to ensure that all Americans have access to basic needs and economic opportunities.

For more information, contact:
Steve Davis
Director of Communications
202-971-3902
steve.davis@t4america.org