accountability Archives - Transportation For America

T4A Director Beth Osborne sets the record straight on federal regulation & oversight

A woman with shoulder-length dark hair wearing glasses and a maroon top speaks into a microphone. Behind her are wooden benches and a yellow wall

In testimony to the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, Beth Osborne explained how our current approach to transportation is failing average Americans and what steps need to be taken to build a system that responds to taxpayer needs.

Transportation for America Director Beth Osborne was invited to speak before the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee today during a hearing on the United States Department of Transportation’s regulatory and administrative agenda. In her testimony, she highlighted that current federal investments are failing to achieve their intended results, arguing for stronger accountability for the American taxpayer.

“The point is that federal spending and what we get for it is not regulated nor is there much oversight. There is very little transparency into where funding is allocated and there is rarely a report on whether a project delivered any of the benefits that were promised.”
—Beth Osborne

She also noted that the few regulations that are in place are slowing innovation, particularly for safe streets. Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design report found that pedestrian fatalities reached a 40-year high in 2022, concluding that designing for safety over speed would help save thousands of lives. However, street design engineers at the state and local level regularly cite federal rules and standards as the reason they cannot narrow lane widths, add color in the roadway, or slow traffic speeds.

Every five to seven years, our nation’s leaders funnel more taxpayer dollars into our transportation system, hoping that this time more money for the same old approach will lead to different results. Each and every time, they have been proven wrong. As transportation emissions rise and deaths on our roadways increase, accountability to the American people is long overdue.

Read Beth Osborne’s full testimony here.

National transportation policy is a rudderless ship sailing off into oblivion

For well over two decades, we’ve had no big-picture guiding purpose for the federal transportation program. Like a ship with a jammed rudder heading off aimlessly into forever, federal transportation policy has been limping along without an overarching purpose or destination in mind. How does this inertia lead us toward all the wrong things?

Is the purpose for the ~$60 billion in federal funds we spend each year merely to increase driving? To add more lane-miles? To ensure that pavement totals increase? To simply build some new stuff and try to keep up with the old stuff? To better connect people with opportunity in a measurable way? Here are six policies embedded in current transportation policy that are not a product of an intentional conversation about what we should accomplish, but rather the result of having zero direction and purpose since we completed the interstate system in 1992.¹

1) States are rewarded financially for encouraging more driving and longer trips

It’s no mystery why states spend too much of their money building new lane-miles, new roads, and new bridges at the expense of repair and everything else: The financial payout for states is based on increasing driving as much as possible.

The bulk of all federal transportation money is doled out to states based on a series of formulas tied largely to population, number of lane-miles, and how much everyone drives (vehicle miles traveled, or VMT). If a state encourages more driving or if everyone takes longer trips, that state receives more money the following year. Conversely, if your state finds ways to reduce driving by investing in transit, more logically planning jobs and housing in better proximity to one another, or finding creative ways to manage travel demand, your state loses money.

Put another way, perhaps the most core, embedded philosophy of the federal transportation program is to increase driving—as if more driving itself is an unmitigated economic and societal good.

2) Federal programs originally designed to support and encourage long distance driving are poorly suited to fulfill more complicated modern needs

“Most state departments of transportation were created largely for one reason: to implement a highway-building program,” wrote T4America director Beth Osborne in this series on the Smart Growth America blog, and even the most forward-looking of state DOTs today still have that highway-building DNA embedded deep in their culture. Today’s aimless federal program needs to accomplish far more than the original intended purposes of moving people long distances across states or between metro areas. Yet we still try unsuccessfully to make this old, outdated system serve today’s needs. As Beth wrote in the opener for that series, “the same department that delivered this highway below on the left a few decades ago is the same one tasked with delivering the street on the right, perhaps right in front of your house.”

Our transportation needs have changed, but the federal program has failed to keep up.

3) Transportation emissions are growing because the program is designed that way

Transportation is the #1 sector for emissions and driving represents 83 percent of those emissions. These emissions are rising because people are forced to make more and longer trips. The U.S. has added metro interstate lane miles faster than our metro population has grown, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and obliterating the modest gains made in more efficient vehicles and cleaner fuel. With new roads subsidized by the federal government (covering around 80 percent of the cost), localities struggle to stay ahead of development that spreads further from the center of metro areas, forcing people to travel further to access jobs and services. This leads to a demand for more roads, which induces even more driving and pollution.

We simply can’t continue expanding our roadway network and lower emissions at the same time. The two goals are incompatible, and unfortunately, increasing driving is a purpose embedded deeply in the program. If the main policymakers in Congress can stop talking about money long enough to do so, it’s past time for a conversation about making shorter trips and shared trips a core goal and purpose of the program.

4) We subsidize driving at the expense of providing any other options

Given a transportation challenge to solve, the federal program puts its thumb on the scale in favor of a road “solution” by covering about 80 percent of the cost, while only providing about half of the cost for a transit solution to the same problem. On top of that, not only do we make transit projects jump through more hoops in an arduous development process that no highway projects are subject to, but we actually hold them to a more realistic standard of long-term affordability. As we wrote for Strong Towns last week, “with new federally funded transit projects, agencies have to prove they have sufficient funding to operate and maintain the new line or service, and can do so without shortchanging the rest of their system.”

The federal program encourages costly over-expansion because it doesn’t require states to prove they can afford to maintain what they’ve been encouraged to build in order to get more federal money. Congress is perfectly fine with states building a new road they can’t afford to preserve long-term, even as they are failing to maintain the rest of their system in a good state of repair. And then, as we wrote in Repair Priorities, “those states return to the federal government every few years requesting more funds to address their unmet ‘needs,’ when those needs could have been prevented or delayed with more responsible spending practices.”

That’s why we’re in this goofy situation where every state and every lawmaker seems to thinks the problem is just a lack of money.

5) The program asks the wrong questions and measures the wrong things

The program is obsessed with vehicle speed and you can see it in the few, limited ways that we try to measure whether or not our system succeeds. If you have a 15-minute commute to work in congested urban street traffic, are you better off than if you have a 45-minute commute in traffic that moves quickly? All of the incentives embedded in the program related to how we measure and assess congestion would prefer the second commute. And because free-flowing traffic is considered the gold standard, roads are built to ensure that traffic flows quickly, and this is what leads us to more and wider roads, and more and longer trips. (And streets that are then uninhabitable for anyone walking or biking.) Perhaps, a better measure would be assessing whether or not people can reach jobs and services by any mode of travel, rather than the simplistic measure of whether some of them travel at high speed when driving.

6) We undercut all our other priorities with a strategy to reduce congestion that fails every single time

The federal program is obsessed with reducing congestion, yet everything we do to reduce congestion just makes it worse.

A new study from Cal State Northridge showed that increasing lane-miles increases driving proportionally: a one percent increase in lane-miles results in a one-percent increase in driving. The best part? Expanding roads also fails to improve traffic: the speed increases from highway widenings disappear in five years because of more traffic. We expanded the country’s road system by about three percent from 2009-2017, guaranteeing at least a three percent increase in driving right there. On top of that, it’s impossible to square the priority of speed with the other things we want to accomplish, like improving safety, increasing reliability, or lowering emissions. From the SGA series:

This assumption of “the cars need to always move fast and never slow down” is at the root of most of the big problems that [state DOTs] face. Engineers have a prerequisite—sometimes explicitly stated but always implicit in the agency’s culture of practice—that makes every other priority a nearly impossible task. In practice, what this turns into is a list of secondary goals states would like to accomplish, that usually get sacrificed for the real top priority of speed. Until we come to grips with the fact that moving cars fast at all times of day without delay is a goal that can’t always be squared with all of the other priorities, until we can admit that perhaps everyone is not going to be able to go fast all the time, we’ll continue building unnecessarily large and expensive roads where speed is the number one priority and most other priorities fall by the wayside.

Make sure the vehicles can always go fast

AND

Prioritize repair first
Keep everyone safe, including people walking & biking
Create vibrant places worth visiting
Keep your costs low
Don’t negatively impact nearby communities
Help connect everyone to jobs and opportunity, whether they drive or not
Promote sustainable and lasting economic development
Reduce transportation-related emissions

Wrapping up: It’s past time to make some new goals for what this program is supposed to accomplish

Back in the 1950s we dramatically reshaped our federal transportation policy around accommodating high speed vehicle travel, and our federal program functioned with this unifying purpose for decades. Brand new highways made cross-country and inter-state travel easier than ever before, boosting the national and local economies by connecting places that weren’t well-connected before. But they also started to transform the way we we built homes and destinations by enabling easier travel from cities to their fringes. ² Today, the challenge is making sure people have access to jobs, services and amenities within easy distance of their homes. To accomplish this, we will need to remove barriers, build bridges (real and metaphorical) and provide safe, affordable convenient alternatives to get around.

Rather than limp along, plowing billions into adding a lane here or a new road there with no equivalent economic return, let’s state a set of clear, explicit goals for the federal program, guaranteeing less driving, more options, healthier communities, and less pollution—all things we should be encouraging as we near the quarter pole of the new century.

Did you know that it’s Infrastructure Week once again?

After two solid years of everyone in Washington, DC talking nonstop about a standalone infrastructure bill to pump trillions into America’s infrastructure, we’d understand if you weren’t aware that the last Infrastructure Week ever ended.

If you haven’t seen the evidence in your inbox already, the incessant drumbeat for more money is already underway today. All this week, you’ll hear the usual interest groups starting this conversation by talking about nothing but money:

Why are they telling us the price before they’ve told us what we’re buying?

We think that this is backwards, and our Repair Priorities 2019 report, launching tomorrow, will help show why. Even as we gave states more than $300 billion to spend almost however they wanted to—in addition to billions more in the 2009 stimulus—the condition of our nation’s roads actually got worse from 2009-2017. Thirty-seven states saw an increase of roads in “poor” condition.

Our roads got worse not because we lacked money, but because too many states spent that money on building or expanding new roads rather than being good stewards by prioritizing repair. We built enough new lane-miles during that period to criss-cross the country 83 times, roads that will cost us $5 billion more per year just to maintain in good condition.

This is more than a money problem—it’s a priorities problem.

Congress has to stop asking taxpayers for more funding to fix crumbling roads and bridges without providing concrete, measurable assurances that any new money will actually improve things.

The public deserves to know first what more money is going to buy us—not just how much money they “need.” Congress’ decisions over the last two decades has just led to a lack of transportation options, more inequality, and more and bigger roads filled with more traffic and more pollution.

If you think we need to fix our spending priorities before we even think about pouring more money into this broken system, then bypass the Infrastructure Week rhetoric and share our social media message for Monday instead:

Today is the 1st day of #InfrastructureWeek. Why in the world would we give more money to the same people who have been neglecting basic maintenance in order to build more things we can’t afford to maintain? #BuildWHATForTomorrow?”

Repair Priorities 2019 is being released tomorrow. Sign up for Wednesday’s 3:00 p.m. EDT webinar examining the findings now.

Will Oregon’s DOT change how they do business?

Buttressed by public opinion, a new oversight effort and legislative action, momentum is building in Oregon for increasing transparency and accountability in how the state’s transportation agency does its business.

I-5 over the Columbia River in Oregon. Flickr photo by Doug Kerr. httpswww.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/7459949082

Governor Kate Brown and the Oregon legislature have been working for well over a year to restart efforts to raise new state revenues for transportation after a failed attempt in 2015. Two separate special committees have toured the state for listening sessions, and have developed or are in the process of developing proposals for a transportation investment package.

These efforts to raise new funding have put a spotlight on the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). A growing number of legislators, local leaders and members of the public are asking whether or not ODOT’s investment choices are maximizing return on investment, and whether those decisions are made with adequate accountability and transparency.

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.

In late 2015 members of the legislature demanded, and the governor commissioned, an audit of ODOT to review the agency’s management structure and oversight.

Just this last week, the Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC), a body of five volunteers appointed by the governor to oversee ODOT, has jumped into the fray. OTC Chair Tammy Baney took the unusual step of sending a formal letter to Governor Brown requesting dedicated independent staff and participation in the agency director’s performance review — to help the OTC fulfill its oversight duties.

This latest move by the OTC coincides with similar efforts in the legislature.

Representative Jeff Reardon (D) has introduced a bill (HB 2532) directing the “Oregon Transportation Commission to adopt rules establishing quantitative system for scoring and ranking transportation projects that are being considered by commission for inclusion in Statewide Transportation Improvement Program.”

Transportation for America has assisted in developing this bill, which draws on programs in Virginia, Massachusetts, Washington State, and others. The legislative session starts this week, and the bill already enjoys support from five other legislators, including top Senate transportation committee Republican Brian Boquist.

With all these efforts to reform ODOT now in motion, this Thursday’s meeting of the new oversight group should be lively. OTC members and meeting attendees will learn about the draft findings from the ODOT audit for the first time — a topic that will almost certainly touch on the accountability and transparency of ODOT’s business decisions.

Maryland’s governor is fighting a more objective process for choosing transportation projects

While other states and regions across the country are using new tools to evaluate potential transportation projects and pick the ones that offer the best return for taxpayer money, Maryland Governor Hogan and his administration are staunchly opposing similar new policies that add accountability and transparency to that process.

Many Americans find the byzantine nature of transportation decisions confusing, making them less willing to hand over more of their hard-earned tax dollars to increase investments in transportation — but who can blame them?

The public wants to know the answers to questions like: “Will these dollars give us better, safe, reliable, affordable access to necessities like jobs, education, health care, and groceries?” Measuring what transportation dollars are buying, in a clear way that matters to the public, is critical for restoring this trust — as well as for getting the most bang for the buck.

This was why Maryland legislators in 2016 crafted a new law to measure and score transportation projects based on state goals, helping to program (i.e. spend) scarce transportation dollars more objectively. The legislation in question requires the state department of transportation to objectively evaluate potential projects based on their impacts in categories like economic development, safety, community vitality, and accessibility.

The Governor vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode that veto and passed it in 2016. And now, as Maryland starts their 2017 legislative session, Governor Larry Hogan (R) has declared his number one legislative priority to be the repeal of this legislation. Last week a repeal bill was introduced.

Marylanders: Tell your state reps to defend transparency and accountability in transportation projects.

The governor is demanding a repeal of the law that created this new objective scoring system so he can preserve the opaque, politically driven process where projects are picked based on horse trades and political influence, not on need or expected benefits.

TAKE ACTION

In attacking what he calls the “road kill bill” and warning of “catastrophic” consequences, Gov. Hogan has exaggerated and incorrectly stated the provisions of the law. While the Governor said the law would “absolutely be responsible for the elimination of nearly all of the most important transportation priorities in every single jurisdiction all across the state,” the law explicitly gives the administration the power to fund any necessary project.

Del. Brooke Lierman (D-Baltimore, pictured below), who championed the project scoring legislation last year, was astonished by the Governor’s sweeping opposition.“It’s just a score, and that shows to us, the taxpayers, how we’re spending our money in a transparent way,” she told the Baltimore Sun. “I don’t know why the governor is so opposed to transparency in transportation funding.”

Delegate Brooke Lierman, right, one of the sponsors of the original legislation, explaining the mechanics of the bill to others at our Capital Ideas conference.

In recent years, several other states under Democrat or Republican control alike, have adopted similar scoring systems to clearly evaluate projects and communicate to taxpayers that the state is making sound investments. For example, in the past year Virginia and Massachusetts have each employed new project scores to build their state transportation plans.

Yet rather than follow these well-functioning models, the administration released a clumsy set of measures to implement the legislation.

Virginia’s DOT went all-in on the new process their legislature created, producing a new website and a 90-page step-by step guide to their process. In contrast, the Maryland DOT’s regulations run just a page and a half and offer no explanation for the basis for scores and weights. While Gov. Hogan has erroneously claimed that the new law would require that state to cancel dozens of planned projects, under the law the scoring process is only advisory — it just provides a new way for lawmakers and citizens alike to see which projects are being advanced and compare the relative merits of each.

Maryland’s taxpayers deserve transparent and objective scores that would let them understand state spending and need. Instead they have gotten a cynical, straw man argument, in which the governor has painted a sensible, good-governance reform as the “road kill bill.”

The Maryland General Assembly should not repeal this important new policy and the administration should use the flexibility in the law to develop a scoring process that matches the state’s need. We’ll be keeping our eyes on the developments down the road in Annapolis.

Maryland attempting to bring accountability & transparency into process for selecting transportation projects

Maryland is attempting to join the growing movement of states trying to ensure that transportation projects are selected and built on their merits in a more transparent process. T4America testified today in favor of a Maryland bill that would move the needle in that direction.

The Maryland Open Transportation Investment Decision Act (HB 1013/S 0908) would define state goals and measures to score and choose transportation projects, helping to program scarce transportation dollars more objectively. The bill is similar to a new process approved by Maryland’s neighbors in Virginia several years ago, which we covered recently in detail here: “Virginia launches program to remove politics from transportation investment decisions.”

T4America was invited by several START network members in Maryland to offer a national perspective on the bill, and policy director Joe McAndrew testified in support earlier this afternoon. (Note: START is T4America’s State Transportation Advocacy, Research & Training Network for state elected leaders and advocates working on these issues. Find out more here. -Ed.)

Many Americans find the byzantine nature of their transportation system confusing, reducing their trust and inclination toward increasing investments for a 21st century transportation system. Who can blame them? …The public wants to know that transportation funds are being invested to provide not just movement but safe, reliable, affordable access to necessities like jobs, education, health care, and groceries. Measuring our limited investments in a way that matters to the public is critical going forward.

One thing was clear in today’s House Appropriations Committee hearing as local & state officials, delegates, and other citizens had a lively back and forth: Few people look at how the Maryland Department of Transportation chooses projects and feels like they have any clarity on how decisions are made.

Maryland Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn, though testifying in opposition to the bill, isn’t opposed to bringing more transparency into that process, but he was reticent about this bill as the right solution.

“We are willing to study this concept to try and find a process that fits Maryland,” Rahn said. “That, I believe, is something that we can certainly agree to. But what’s come out of this process…is not Maryland. Rather than jumping into this to implement this now, should be a study so we can find something that’s more appropriate to Maryland.”

START Network members in Maryland, like Delegate Brooke Lierman (D-Baltimore), are hopeful and eager to work with Secretary Rahn (and other Delegates in the House and Senate) to amend and improve the bill, helping Maryland take this essential step.

Del. Lierman, while responding to MDOT director Pete Rahn’s testimony, questioned the impossibly opaque current system, holding up thousands of pages of project requests from counties where simple binary check marks were the only scores and suggesting that there was no way to know how projects were chosen.

What she and countless other Maryland taxpayers, local leaders or businesses really want to know after the state spends hundreds of millions more in transportation dollars over the coming few years, is: Will my commute get better? Will I end up with more options to get where I need to go each day? Are transportation projects being picked because they have political connections or because they make fiscal sense?

Projects in Maryland (and elsewhere) are rarely, if ever, justified through tangible, measured answers to these questions. And as a result, taxpayers understandably may have little confidence in handing over any more of their hard-earned money to invest in the system.

Even the Baltimore Sun knows that the current system is far from transparent, though coming down in favor of Maryland’s status quo in this fairly surprising recent editorial where they called politically motivated transportation spending an “unfortunate necessity” and “the grease that lubricates the squeaky political wheel.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds for transportation are far more important than political or partisan favors to be used to grease the skids. Taxpayers expect and deserve far more.

Maryland legislators should be applauded for this attempt to remove politics from the process of choosing which transportation projects to build — bringing some much needed transparency and accountability to a process that the public feels is murky, mysterious, and wholly political.

Stay up to date on the latest with state transportation policy & funding with our new resource for bill tracking.

Update: North Carolina legislature adjourns without addressing political meddling in transportation selection process

The NC legislature adjourned their session without addressing a damaging cap on state funds intended for a Triangle area light rail project. Their actions were widely decried in the state and circumvented a new bipartisan state process for evaluating transportation projects on the merits and awarding state funds to the best projects, intended to be free from political meddling.

As we previously reported this week, some unknown North Carolina legislators used the budget process to interfere with the state’s new Strategic Investments Law intended to evaluate and select transportation projects based on the benefits in an attempt to stop a rail transit project that’s already been selected for state funds. The unknown legislators’ action to insert a provision cutting the state commitment to a Durham-Chapel Hill light rail link from $138 million down to $500,000. drew wide condemnation from the state’s Republican governor, members of both parties and even legislators that also don’t like this particular project.

Early this morning, the North Carolina legislature adjourned their session without approving an amendment to remove that cap, leaving the state funds for the project in limbo for now. The House successfully passed an amendment to remove the cap by a large margin, but the Senate did not vote on it and referred it to committee, ending any chance to deal with it until the legislature reconvenes in April 2016, according to the Raleigh News & Observer.

The project is rolling forward for now with it’s environmental impact statement, and the GoTriangle transit agency is optimistic that the cap can be removed in the next session after such a strong showing in the State House.

All of this damages an improved process that was supposed to remove this kind of political maneuvering from deciding which projects are funded and which are not. From McClatchy via Mass Transit Mag:

[Durham Senator Mike] Woodard mentioned how well the Durham-Orange Light Rail line scored with the strategic transportation investments law (STI). The STI created a formula using “data-driven scoring and local input” to help determine what projects would get funding through the State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP). … “There are certainly Senate members who are not fans of transit,” McKissick said, adding members believe that politics have been put “right in the middle” of the discussion and debate of public transportation. McKissick said funding through STIP was a way to remove politics from the process.

Earlier this week, we included testimony from North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, who was proudly touting his state’s new process for evaluating transportation projects before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. His later exchange with Rep. Crawford is worth reading in full:

Representative Crawford: Your State took on a pretty big change in your transportation project selection process. What prompted you to do that? Talk about that a little bit.

Governor McCrory. Well, we were making a lot of decisions on our roadbuilding based upon politics. And as you went down, we did not have the interconnectivity that we should have had. You would go down from the East to the West, North to the South, and we would have highways going from two lanes to four lanes back to two lanes back to eight lanes. And it made no rhyme or reason on why the roads were wide in one area and very narrow in others. And we also saw that it was not an efficient use of limited tax dollars. So in a bipartisan agreement, Republicans and Democrats both agreed to change that formula. …We now base our formula on how we spend money on congestion, on economic opportunity, and on safety, the three major criteria of how we decide to spend the money.

Rep. Crawford: Safe to say that it has been pretty well received by the general public on that transparency and the streamlining the process, taking the politics out?

Gov. McCrory: Absolutely. And I think where I keep bringing up Eisenhower, for each of you, too, is I think as we look for more funding, Mr. Chairman, we need to also show the vision of where we plan to have this interconnectivity from a national perspective, from a regional perspective, from a State perspective, and even, yes, to a local perspective. If we show that, where we are planning to spend that money, and show that we do have a plan and a vision for the next generation and the generation after that, I think people are willing to pay for it. But if we do not have their trust and spend the money as we have always spent it, I do not think we are going to get the trust of the people to increase the amount of funding for transportation.

We’ll keep our eye on this issue over the next year, as will the members of the Raleigh delegation to this year’s Transportation Innovation Academy as they continue advancing plans to bring other new transit service to adjacent Wake County.

Politicians meddling with North Carolina’s shift to a merit-based process for choosing transportation projects

Just two years after instituting a new process to choose transportation projects based on merit and award funds in a more transparent process intended to be free of political interference, a handful of North Carolina legislators reinserted politics back into the process in an attempt to stop a light rail project in the Raleigh-Durham metro area.

Durham light rail rendering

UPDATED 5:45 p.m. Thursday 10/1: North Carolina’s legislature adjourned without addressing the cap. Read more about it here.

The surprise provision was inserted into a budget compromise as the state’s legislature was tussling over an annual budget resolution for the coming year. As Streetsblog earlier reported this week:

Lawmakers who still won’t identify themselves inserted language into a state budget bill sabotaging the light rail project. There was no public debate. There was no warning that transit funding was even under discussion. The budget measure placed an arbitrary cap on state funding for [any] light rail project: $500,000. Doing so undermined the process established by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature for awarding transportation funds, which is supposed to be free from political interference.

Back in 2013 the Republican-led North Carolina legislature approved the Strategic Transportation Investments Law, an attempt to get transportation decisions out of the hands of politicians and pick projects governed by objective metrics and projected benefits instead. It was an idea that had — and still has — lots of buy-in from legislators from both parties across the state. It was viewed as an important step toward a process that was more transparent, accountable, and less subject to political interference.

We featured North Carolina’s new process in Measuring What We Value, a free downloadable T4America report on the emerging practice of performance measures: “NCDOT’s focus on strategic selection shifted the department from a short-term portfolio of projects that were not explicitly tied to agency goals to a long-term, formal approach that uses data to assess outcomes.” (Page 17.)

Here’s how Governor Pat McCrory referred to the previous system while testifying before Congress earlier this year:

In my own State of the State address last month, I highlighted that during the past decade or so, as I have driven down the highways of North Carolina, I’ve noticed it goes from two lanes, to four lanes, back to two lanes, to eight lanes to four lanes and then back to two lanes. And everywhere it gets wider it’s named for a politician or a Department of Transportation board member. And where the congestion choke points still exist, the road is nameless.

The flaws of a system where projects are picked based on the political power or connections of the sponsors — regardless of how those projects fit into the state’s goals — was exactly why the process was changed in 2013, with notable consensus in the legislature to do so. Gov. McCrory’s testimony continues:

That’s not the way we do things anymore in North Carolina. We’ve taken the politics out of [transportation] by putting in place a transportation formula that focuses on relieving congestion, improving safety and growing and connecting the economy in all parts of our state. Those changes allow us to be more efficient with taxpayer dollars. In fact, we’ve more than doubled the number of transportation projects that will be built. This new approach will create thousands of new jobs during the next 10 years.

In the Research Triangle metro area — the city triumvirate of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill spans three counties — voters in two counties have already approved separate half-cent ballot measures to raise millions in local funds for a 17-mile light rail project connecting Durham and Chapel Hill. That local commitment was to be paired with $138 million previously committed by the state under the new merit-based process. This new cap essentially kills the Durham-Chapel Hill light rail line by cutting the planned state contribution down to $500,000 — regardless of the projected benefits.

Legislators from both parties have rallied together in support of removing the cap and keeping the new process politics-free. Even legislators that have reservations about this specific rail project believe the new process is a smarter one and have endorsed the cap’s removal, focusing on the consensus forged around the new Strategic Investments process.

Republican Representative Paul Stam told the Raleigh News & Observer that “he is not a fan of the light rail projects, but said the lawmakers ought to ‘stick with the numbers under our strategic transportation initiative.’”

Also in the Raleigh News & Observer

“I’m not a big supporter of light rail,” Rep. Bill Brawley, a Mecklenburg County Republican, said Wednesday. “But what I am a big supporter of is to have a process to assign projects based on the ability of engineers to calculate the benefits – rather than the ability of powerful legislators to get enough votes to spend the money in their district.”

There is good news to report today, however. The House passed an amended budget to remove the $500,000 cap and restore the state’s merit-based project selection process. The Senate is likely to consider the amended budget today or tomorrow, according to local news sources. If the Senate approves the House’s version, the final budget will go to Governor McCrory.

Follow us on twitter @t4america, along with Wake Up Wake County for more info as it becomes available.

Louisiana legislature makes a paradigm shift to better prioritize transportation dollars and restore public confidence

Louisiana passed a bill through the state House and Senate by unanimous votes last week that will make the process for spending transportation dollars more transparent and accountable to the public — a smart first step to increase public support for raising any new transportation funding.

At least 20 states have successfully raised new funding at the state level for transportation since 2012, a trend we’ve been tracking closely here at T4America. But all states are different, and in some states, raising new state funds for transportation can be a tough sell, especially if a skeptical public doesn’t have any faith in the process for spending the money already available.

Louisiana featured bridge construction Louisiana is taking some first steps to fix that process while also trying to raise new money. A recent bill to raise the state sales tax by one cent to fund major projects fell short in the House, though a few other bills to raise gas and general sales taxes to fund transportation projects are still active this session. As our Capital Ideas report from earlier this year noted, it can be challenging to develop public support for new transportation funding when voters have no certainty that those funds will be put to the best possible use.

One emerging strategy to restore public trust and confidence in an opaque and mysterious process is adopting the use of performance measures, which can demonstrate to the public what they’re going to get for their tax dollars.

The first step in a shift toward using performance measures is to establish what your goals are. And this just-approved Louisiana bill sponsored by Rep. Walt Leger, HB 742 (bill text), starts by laying out clear, understandable criteria in plain language “to prescribe the process by which the [Louisiana] Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) shall select and prioritize certain construction projects.”

From the bill text:

The legislature declares it to be in the public interest that a prioritization process for construction be utilized to develop a Highway Priority Program that accomplishes the following:

Brings the state highway system into a good state of repair and optimizes the usage and efficiency of existing transportation facilities.

Improves safety for motorized and nonmotorized highway users and communities.

Supports resiliency in the transportation system, including safe evacuation of populations when necessitated by catastrophic events such as hurricanes and floods.

Increases accessibility for people, goods, and services.

Fosters diverse economic development and job growth, international and domestic commerce, and tourism.

Fosters multimodalism, promotes a variety of transportation and travel options, and encourages intermodal connectivity.

Encourages innovation and the use of technology.

Protects the environment, reduces emissions, and improves public health and quality of life.

That straightforward list goes beyond what’s currently being developed as part of MAP-21 and the typical measures of success used elsewhere.

This legislation is a marked improvement on the current state statutes governing how the Louisiana DOTD chooses transportation projects, which has been described as open-ended, unaccountable and a total mystery to the public. This bill represents one of the more ambitious overhauls of a state’s decision-making processes and an important first step toward improving the transparency and accountability of distributing transportation funds, setting Louisiana on a path of ensuring every transportation dollar provides the greatest benefit.

The bill has cleared both House and Senate is is currently waiting for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s signature. The Louisiana DOTD supported the bill, and starting in 2017, the department is expected to be utilizing the new project selection process.

The next logical step for Louisiana and other states creating goals like these above is to follow it up by creating measurable data points to serve as yardsticks. That way, the public can see this straightforward list of priorities, examine what the tangible, measurable (i.e., quantifiable) goals are, and then evaluate whether or not the state is spending their transportation dollars on the projects that can help them meet those goals.

T4America congratulates State Rep. Walt Leger, the chief sponsor of this bill, for constructing and pushing it through the legislature on unanimous votes. Rep. Leger is a member of T4America’s State Advocacy Network (START), created to support efforts to successfully pass state legislation to raise transportation funding while improving accountability for spending it.

If you’d like to find out more about START, visit this page and get in touch.

Second proposed performance measure from USDOT makes some important improvements

You may have missed it amidst the flurry of holidays and the beginning of a new year, but after a long wait, the U.S. Department of Transportation finally released the second of three proposed rules to measure the performance of our nation’s transportation investments. Unlike the first proposed rule for safety, the news is much better this time around.

USDOT listened to the feedback offered by the public during the comment period following the first proposed rule — including more than 1,500 T4America and Complete Streets Coalition supporters — and made some important changes to this second proposed rule for measuring road and bridge conditions to increase accountability and transparency of our limited transportation dollars. (This follows on the heels of the small but incredibly meaningful change for non-motorized transportation users included in the omnibus budget passed just a few weeks ago.)

The first proposed performance measure for safety was “too weak to be effective,” allowing states to avoid taking any action to improve safety by giving them a passing grade even when they failed to meet half of the targets required in law — contrary to congressional intent in MAP-21. The American taxpayer wouldn’t accept failing grades for our schools, nor should they accept them for our transportation system.

At that point Transportation for America was worried that one of the few key reforms made by MAP-21 – performance measures and national goals – was going to become another paper-stapling exercise that would do little to actually improve how our dollars get spent.

But USDOT took the public’s advice and agreed that state DOTs and MPOs should be held accountable for meeting performance targets. Even better, USDOT makes it clear in the rule that they intend to share all performance reports submitted by state DOTs with the public — an important step toward improving the public’s trust and accountability in the nation’s transportation system.

We thank USDOT for their inclusiveness and willingness to engage the public. Along with our partners across the country, we want to build on this and ensure the public’s trust and accountability is guaranteed with the final rule.

We’ll have more details on this proposed rule and a full summary in the next few days.