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Seven things to know about our last Smart Cities Collaborative meeting of 2018

Last week in Atlanta, Georgia we wrapped up our second cohort of the Smart Cities Collaborative with the fourth meeting of 2018. Once again, staff representing cities, counties, transit agencies and other public sector agencies from 23 cities gathered together to share their experiences and learn how others are using technology and new mobility to become better places to live. Here are seven things we learned or heard last week.

1. Atlanta has a tremendous amount of momentum and potential

As someone said during the week at one point, it’s much harder to affect significant change if you’re not growing, and Atlanta (both the city and the region) have been booming. In fact, after losing population for nearly thirty years, the rate of population growth in the city proper has been near the top of the list within the (massive) region over the last few years. Which also means that the city and region alike are struggling to keep those people moving and well-connected to jobs and opportunity. Atlanta City Councilman Amir Farohki and Planning Director Tim Keane shared a little of the Atlanta story and how they’re working hard to keep people and residents at the center of their city’s efforts to improve mobility and access.

Atlanta Councilman Amir Farokhi, left, and Planning Director Tim Keane speaking to the Collaborative in Atlanta.

One of the best illustrations of that effort is the Atlanta BeltLine, an unprecedented and multi-decade project to add trails, parks and transit to old railroad corridors that form a ring around the core of the city. We were fortunate enough to get out of our meeting space in downtown (provided by the Atlanta Regional Commission) long enough to get a terrific tour of a small portion of the BeltLine, and it’s truly a transformative, people-centered project that will have immense long-term benefits for the city.

Touring the Atlanta BeltLine with staff from Atlanta Beltline near the Ponce City Market on the city’s east side, and on bottom right, touring a just-opened portion of the west side trail with the portion set aside and prepped for transit on the left side of that photo.

2. This was the last meeting of the second cohort of the Collaborative

This meeting wrapped up our second yearlong cohort of the Collaborative, putting a bow on a year that kicked off with 23 cities in Denver way back in the spring, traveled to Seattle over the summer, and then met in Pittsburgh near the beginning of the fall. We’re planning to reflect a little more later on in another post about a year spent learning with these cities, but suffice it to say we covered an immense amount of ground over a net total of only about a full week of time together, and we will miss working together with them every few months.

3. Arcadis sponsored the meeting and made an interesting offer to the cities

Data. Daaaaaaaaata. We all hear about it nonstop.

And it’s true: new technologies and mobility options are providing a wealth of detailed, real-time transportation data to planners and managers across the country. This is creating new opportunities to analyze historical data and better measure operations, understand network conditions and trends, and ultimately help cities make better decisions about how to manage their transportation networks.

But, despite all this wonderful new data, most cities haven’t been able to fully realize its benefits, update their models or turn it into meaningful action. It’s certainly possible to use this data to better understand what’s actually happening on the ground with present and future travel demand, but it’s a tough job for any city—especially the small and mid-sized cities—to do this on their own.

Arcadis, a large global planning and design firm that sponsored this meeting, came with an interesting proposal: They offered a three-month data analytics pilot project of nearly any kind to Collaborative cities for free. But they don’t want to just roll ahead with an idea of their own—they wanted to collaborate and work together with cities to figure out what would be most helpful. So their team, and others from Sam Schwartz Engineering, HR&A and Cityfi, met with the cities in small groups for a half-day to better understand their specific challenges and identify key areas to include in potential data analytics pilots, craft the scope for coordinated pilots across multiple cities, and highlight a few options for differing outcomes in each community.

4. We heard a lot about tangible projects happening on the ground right now

The Collaborative has always intended to be about action and real, tangible efforts to improve mobility and experiment with new technologies and tools. While a lot of our time was taken up with some big picture issues, we also heard short presentations from other cities that are forging ahead about how specific pilot projects are faring, with the hopes of sharing lessons and experience with the other cities that might want follow—or chart their own path.

Dan Hoffman from Gainesville, Florida shared about the automated vehicle shuttle pilot that they’re hoping to get rolling in early 2019. He explained the goals of the pilot, where and how it will operate and all of the hurdles they’ve cleared along the way to try to put a real AV shuttle on the ground connecting downtown and the University of Florida, providing a useful test case for other cities hoping to obtain a NHTSA waiver for AV testing or how to partner effectively with the state.

Robin Aksu from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation also joined us to speak on mobility hubs and how their project is progressing. Robin shared what they’re hoping to accomplish by creating mobility hubs, the focus on primary and satellite hubs and how the design will reflect those differences, and how they’re approaching implementation along with communications, marketing, and their community outreach program.

Mark de la Vergne from Detroit, Michigan joined us to share more about Night Shift and some of their other transit programs. Night Shift is specifically designed for late night and service workers to help connect them to transit and improve access to jobs. Mark shared about the process his team has gone through to conduct engagement and outreach in their local community to not only design the service, but ensure it meets the community’s ongoing needs. Detroit’s pilot is an excellent example of how cities can think about improving access from the ground up with the user’s perspective in mind and without a predetermined solution.

5. Mobility as a Service will definitely be one of 2019’s hottest topics — but it won’t end there

We’ve talked a lot here about Mobility as a Service and that this is where most of the companies like Uber or Lyft or Lime are ultimately headed: not a provider of one specific mode, but a mobility provider allowing multiple options for however you choose to get around. It’s likely part of the reason why Lyft bought Motivate and Uber bought Jump (both are bikesharing companies), and why we’ll continue to see more moves like that in the future.

So what will it mean to roll all these services into a single platform offering multiple modes of travel. Who would control the data? What would the role of the city be in helping to plan for travel demand? How would cities ensure that it improves access for everyone?

We had two representatives from the public side (Warren Logan from San Francisco and Alex Pazuchanics from Pittsburgh) discuss the topic with two reps from the private side (Lilly Shoup from Lyft and Matt Cole from Cubic.) And the back-and-forth that ensued (moderated by Cityfi’s Gabe Klein) was a terrific, open, and honest discussion that pulled no punches.

5. LADOT’s Mobility Data Specification is already shifting the conversation

There have been a lot of conversations over the past year about LA DOT’s Mobility Data Specification (MDS) and how cities can better use data to actively manage their operations. Starting with shared active transportation services operating in Los Angeles, Marcel Porras from LADOT shared more about their short- and long-term goals along with the topic of how cities manage the right-of-way today physically and how they will need to manage it in a digital future.

Apparent from the beginning of the conversation was significant interest from the participants to use MDS in their communities to accomplish similar goals. And, there was also a stated desire to work with Los Angeles to further co-create and build out MDS to help manage the other challenges they’re facing such as managing curb space, carsharing, ridesourcing and eventually automated vehicles.

One of the most poignant parts of the conversation was a deep dive into how MDS is being administered and governed today, how cities might work together to evolve MDS into a national standard, and how a governance structure might take shape that could foster its development long into the future. It was one of the best conversations we’ve had in the Collaborative this year and highlighted the growing need for cities to evolve their structures, capacities and capabilities as data management becomes paramount for mobility management.

6. We turned the tables and tossed the private companies into the Shark Tank

Cities get pitched all day long from private companies and providers. But it’s rarely in a forum where these maxed-out city staff can really engage in a thoughtful way and certainly not one where they can benefit from the expertise of their colleagues from other cities. So we tried to turn the tables a little bit and take a page from TV by creating the Smart Cities Shark Tank where private companies were given ten minutes to pitch a panel of reps from a range of cities about Mobility as a Service and curb space management solutions, and then take some tough questions from the panel as they tried to assess whether it would be a good fit for their cities. And then the panels huddled to evaluate the presentations and pick a “winner” with the best pitch for the cities.

Photos from the Smart Cities Shark Tank, including a picture of the location at Monday Night Garage on the BeltLine in West End.

The night was a lot of fun but it was also a useful exercise that forced the private companies to meet the cities on their terms and also allowed the cities to tap into the expertise of their colleagues from across the country—something they don’t typically get to do when one of these companies shows up in their office with a pitch.

Thanks to the International Parking & Mobility Institute for helping host the Shark Tank.

7. Year two is done, and we’re already looking ahead to year three

It’s hard to believe we’re already wrapping up the second yearlong cohort of the Collaborative, but we’re already looking ahead to another cohort of cities for year three in 2019.

We would never have been able to make the Collaborative happen without the hard work and leadership of Russ Brooks, who has been T4America’s Director of Smart Cities for the past three years (and has been part of T4America in some fashion for seven years in total.) He helped conceive of the program and pull together the initial group of cities that met on a fairly surreal day in Minneapolis after the 2016 presidential election, and he’s contributed his blood, sweat, and tears to build the relationships required to bring almost 150 participants from 27 different cities together throughout the first two years—and the private industry—to the table for such a productive and useful forum.

We’re especially grateful for the representatives from the 23 cities who came to one or more of these meetings this year and contributed their time and their wisdom and made the Collaborative, well, truly collaborative!

We’re actively looking for the next Director of Smart Cities to guide year three, and we’re hoping for someone with some experience on the ground within a city or agency to run the show. Read the job description here.

The second cohort of the Smart Cities Collaborative at our first 2018 meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Kicking off the first year of the Collaborative in Minneapolis on November 7, 2016.

States that take chances get rewarded, and six other things we learned this year at Capital Ideas 2018

We’re fresh back from Capital Ideas 2018 in Atlanta, and as in years past, this year’s conference was an incredible alchemy of passion, knowledge, inspiration, and amazing people from around the country. For those of you who weren’t able to make it to Atlanta, here are seven things that we learned.

Left photo: Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, MO, right, one of Capital Ideas’ keynote speakers, talks to Toks Omishakin of the Tennessee DOT, and T4America chair John Robert Smith. Right: During a keynote on day two, Rusty Roberts, VP for Government Affairs at Brightline, shared his company’s ambitious plans for private passenger rail currently unfolding in Florida.

1) States that innovate, try new things, and take chances, get rewarded

There’s a common thought when it comes to new mobility or improving transit that it’s really only about cities. While we certainly think cities have a major role to play (see our Smart Cities Collaborative!), the role of the state is still vital.

The City of Gainesville, FL is on the cusp of launching a new automated vehicle shuttle pilot project to connect the University of Florida with downtown Gainesville via an automated driverless shuttle. Dan Hoffman, Gainesville’s city manager, shared their progress to date but made one thing clear: They would never be able to make this happen without the state of Florida’s involvement…and money, with the state contributing over $1 million. But it’s also worth noting that the state isn’t trying to run the pilot project—they’re collaborating to help a city run their own pilot. And the lessons that Dan and his city learn will be shared with the state as they collaborate with other cities. That’s a great recipe for success.

Sometimes states try new things and lose before they taste the eventual reward. But the smart ones learn from the experience. In Georgia, Atlanta bounced back from a painful failure to raise new revenue for transportation at the ballot box in 2012. They dusted themselves off, figured out why they failed, rebuilt trust in the transit agency, and then built vital new relationships with the state (and especially with legislators) that paved the way for a successful ballot measure effort in 2016 that raised money for billions in new transit projects in metro Atlanta.

A big difference between the 2012 loss at the polls to fund transportation in the Atlanta region and the successes that followed was confidence in GDOT increased. -Michael Sullivan #T4CapIdeas

— Beth Osborne (@BethOsborneTA) December 5, 2018

Suburban Gwinnett County has rejected ballot measures to join the MARTA regional transit system multiple times over the last few decades. However, this March they will vote on a measure to finally join the MARTA system and dramatically expand transit service in a rapidly changing county where 25 percent of the population was born outside of the United States.

While others may have written off their state legislatures, the Metro Atlanta Chamber and the rest of their coalition did the hard work required between 2012 and 2016 to turn skeptical state legislators into outspoken champions for transit. Michael Sullivan from the American Council of Engineering Companies in Georgia so aptly summarized at the end of this panel discussion: never assume that your opponent today has to be your opponent in the future.

As Commissioner Charlotte Nash from Gwinnett County noted on the panel, their work paid off: action by that same legislature is enabling her county to go to the ballot this March to raise new funds for transit. Never write off your opponent or a skeptic.

States that refuse to take chances might avoid some failure, but they are also likely to avoid great success.

Our sincere thanks to Dave Williams from the Metro Atlanta Chamber for his commitment to transportation in the region and to taking selfies whenever he moderates a panel for T4America. From left, Dave Williams, Michael Sullivan, Georgia State Rep. Kevin Tanner, and Gwinnett County Commissioner Charlotte Nash.

2) “Transit access is the #1 factor in upward economic mobility”

Our opening keynote speaker on the first day summed things up when it comes to the “why” for improving access to transit:

Transit access is the #1 factor in upward economic mobility. Poor transportation access exacerbates #inequality.” – Debra Lam, Managing Director, Center for Smart Cities and Innovation at @GeorgiaTech #T4CapIdeas pic.twitter.com/lmIbQUtv4c

— Calvin Gladney (@SmartGrowthCEO) December 5, 2018

As a different speaker would explain later, exactly how we measure access matters a great deal, but is there anything more that needs to be said? If we want to lift up those on the lower socio-economic rungs of our communities, then improving transit service and expanding access to it should always be a primary goal.

3) We are swimming in data, but very little of it has anything to do with the people who use the system.

A few audible cheers went up in the room when Stephanie Pollack, the Secretary of MassDOT, made that statement during an incredible panel moderated by T4America director Beth Osborne about the role of the state in new mobility services. She was joined by Commissioner Polly Trottenberg of the NYC DOT and Lilly Shoup, the Senior Director of Transportation Policy for Lyft. (More on that in a moment.)

On the second day, we took a deep dive into measuring accessibility and how so many of our metrics and data poorly assess what really matters. Nick Donohue, assistant secretary of the Virginia DOT, shared a story about the oft-cited Travel Time Index that measures congestion, and how it’s so far removed from the experience of real people and what really matters to them.

Nick tells story about his ten-minute, mile-long commute in Richmond with relatively slow travel speed. Boss comes from Fredericksburg in 45 minutes at a high rate of speed. Travel time index would show latter commute as “better!” #T4CapIdeas

— Transport. 4 America (@T4America) December 6, 2018

Congestion measures treat every road the same and have an implicit bias: always moving as fast as possible is the preferred goal. But streets are all about creating a place and a framework to create and capture value—not just a place for vehicles to move fast. This difference is often best illustrated with an image:

Another example from Denver: Street on the left has great congestion measures, low accessibility. Street on the right, probably worse congestion, higher accessibility. #T4CapIdeas pic.twitter.com/PHZGk4uxla

— Transport. 4 America (@T4America) December 6, 2018

4) We don’t always agree with one another, but we have to keep working together

The panel discussion on new mobility definitely got “spirited!” Sec. Pollack is a provocative quote machine, but we also had a representative from Lyft sitting a few feet away from the person charged with keeping America’s biggest city moving. And as Commissioner Polly Trottenberg noted, congestion and VMT are both up in NYC while transit ridership is down since TNCs like Uber and Lyft arrived on the scene.

Though there were some (entertaining!) disagreements on this panel, the most important lesson we learned was that at the end of the day, many of these companies do want to try and accomplish the same things that the cities do, and we have to find a way to work together. As an example, Lyft’s long-term goals are to have fleets of vehicles in cities that are shared, electric, and automated, which certainly dovetail with the goals of a city like New York, as described by Commissioner Polly Trottenberg.

Ultimately it’s more productive for state or local officials to find ways to work together with private industry rather than against one another. And as Sec. Pollack noted, we have a lot of work to do to make more of these trips shared, and we won’t be able to make that happen without the private providers at the table.

5) You have to be ready and willing to listen

If you show up to a meeting about a transportation project or issue, you’ll have to talk about more than just the item at had: everything that came before you will be on the table. For example, in the public sector, you might have to address and resolve your agency’s past sins in a community first, even if the project proposed is an attempt to try and rectify the damage. As Sec. Pollack said, state DOTs might have to do something radical: listen to the people that they serve.

Our first panel on the second day was focused on making development around transit more equitable. Carol Wolfe from the City of Tacoma—which is in the midst of a rail extension through their city—noted that all too often planners and officials forget that there’s already a “place” that needs to be kept at the center of the process.

[Economic & Community Development] is not about creating new spaces. Take the time to honor and embrace the places that are already there. – Carol Wolfe, @CityofTacoma #Truth #T4CapIdeas @T4America #HowWeThrive @ThrivingRegion #ThrivingCommunities

— Bridgett Massengill (@bmassen) December 6, 2018

And it’s a little thing, but when an agency or planning firm makes renderings of future development, do they incorporate existing places and people? Does the community see themselves in the picture, or do the renderings include the same generic details as every other rendering?

Carol Wolfe (City of Tacoma) begins by making the point that if your TOD renderings do not reflect the community&are not culturally competent, you show how you didn’t listen to the community – people can’t imagine themselves in that TOD and feel how they belong. #T4CapIdeas

— Victoria Payne (@VictoriaCSPayne) December 6, 2018

6) People are hungry to exchange information and learn from one another

As we did in 2014 and 2016, we spent the first afternoon in roundtable discussions. Participants got to choose two of 12 topics, sit down with an expert, and then have a completely open-ended discussion with them and a dozen others interested in the same thing. These roundtables are one of the best features of Capital Ideas, and many of them are just a starting point for a longer exchange of information that will continue for weeks or months to come.

This year, our roundtables covered the Smart Scale project funding process in Virginia, the mileage-based user fee pilot in Washington State, the deployment of automated vehicles, strategies to compete for competitive federal transportation grant funds, the Metropolitan Planning Council’s Transit Means Business Report, and the Partnership for Southern Equity’s “Opportunity Deferred” report, among many others.

7) Atlanta is a wonderful city with lots of momentum (including on the soccer front!)

It may have partially been due to the fact that Atlanta United, the city’s Major League Soccer team, was preparing to host MLS Cup last weekend and beat the Portland Timbers in front of 73,000 screaming crazy fans for the city’s first championship since the Braves in 1995, but the energy in the city was palpable.

The capital of the New South has made tremendous progress. It’s a terrific city loaded with momentum and possibility, within a region that is making huge strides to invest in transportation and capitalize on their numerous walkable downtowns. All of this is occurring inside a state that has done a complete about-face on the importance of transit for their economic future.

We wrapped up the conference with two concurrent tours, one of a selection of TOD sites in the city with representatives from MARTA, and the second of the ongoing BeltLine project of trails and transit around the city with representatives from Atlanta BeltLine and the Rails-To-Trails Conservancy. To close things out, here’s a short thread from the BeltLine tour collected in a Twitter moment:

#T4CapIdeas BeltLine tour

Participants: Have a story to share? Learn something new? Reach out to us at info@t4america.org. All photos by Stephen Lee Davis, T4America director of communications.

Our sincere thanks to our sponsors and host committee for making Capital Ideas possible. And to our many participants from around the country who came to Atlanta and hopefully took some helpful information—and inspiration—back home with them.

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On National Walking Day, too many Americans are still having to endure unsafe streets

Since we missed recognizing National Walking Day last week while the Complete Streets conference was happening in Nashville, we wanted to come back this week and revisit a T4America post from 2012 looking at what’s actually keeping more people from walking in many of our metro areas.

Originally posted on April, 4 2012.

You may not have known it — its not the most publicized special day on the books — but today is National Walking Day. Some of you may have traded part or all of your drive or transit trip today for a walk to work. But for many, every day is walking day, and it happens on streets with dangerous or inconvenient conditions that no one should have to endure just to walk to school, their job, or the grocery store.

Last Friday, I spent some time driving around the sprawling Atlanta, Georgia metroplex photographing some well-known trouble spots for pedestrian safety. Though some improvements have been made in places, there are still so many unsafe streets, corridors and intersections for pedestrians, finding streets that are dangerous by design is about as easy as blindly putting your finger down on a map.

The Atlanta Regional Commission has helped address some of these problems through their popular and oversubscribed Livable Centers Initiative that gives metro communities small grants to help make a dangerous street safer, improve MARTA access, add new crosswalks or streetscaping, or other small improvements to the built environment that help improve quality of life for residents. And the local group PEDS has had their boots on the ground for years now, working hard to make metro Atlanta more walkable. But we need far more of these kinds of efforts — and similar efforts from others in cities across the country — to make the kinds of improvements we need to save lives and end the 4,000-plus deaths that happen to people walking each year.

Many of these deaths occur simply because the design of a road just hasn’t adapted to the changing needs of all the people who use it.

Consider: at one point, Old National Highway in South Fulton County was probably a sleepy state highway through a relatively unpopulated area on ones way south out of Atlanta. Now, its teeming with retail on both sides of the street just south of Interstate 85. Add in the fact that its a relatively low-income area (read: people more likely to walk or take transit) with apartment complexes on both sides of the main highway and you’ve got a street that no longer meets the needs of everyone who uses it, and certainly not for the people who live there.

Though the first few miles away from Interstate 85 have sidewalks and there are a handful of signalized intersections with crosswalks, sidewalks soon end completely and there are many stretches where there are no safe places to cross for hundreds or thousands of feet — all in an area with MARTA bus stops on both sides of the highway. The sidewalks may end, but the walking doesn’t, as the desire paths through the grass indicate.

Of course, the most well-known road in Atlanta thats dangerous for walking and biking is certainly Buford Highway. This stretch near Clairmont Road is a whopping seven lanes across, with crosswalks often so far apart as to be merely dots on the horizon.

This corridor is lined with more affordable apartments and has also been a popular landing place for Latino and Asian immigrants for years, and many portions of the street are filled with small ethnic shops catering to the local clientele — many of whom are likely to be walking. According to the data in our map, in just the few miles from I-285 south down to 400, 20 pedestrians were killed from 1999-2009. There are stretches with no sidewalks on either side of the street and no safe crosswalks almost as far as the eye can see.

In this picture alone, not only are there no sidewalks but there are nine separate curb cuts where this man could be easily struck by a right-turning car before reaching the next safe crosswalk at the intersection.

Some key improvements have been made on Buford Highway in recent years, though, which have helped to increase safety. Thanks to recent efforts by Dekalb County and the Georgia Department of Transportation, a busy stretch of Buford Highway south of Doraville with high density of retail on both sides of the street received several new signalized intersections as well as new pedestrian-only mid-block crossings that use a special light called a HAWK signal. This is a light that stays dark until a pedestrian pushes a button, activating a light that flashes before turning red for cars. These crossings also include a refuge to shorten crossing distances and give people a safe place to wait while crossing.

And then there’s southern Cobb County, the northern Atlanta suburb where Raquel Nelson was walking when her son was killed and she found herself prosecuted after the fact. Some busy corridors have sidewalks and some don’t — though walking isn’t very pleasant next to seven lanes of traffic — and crosswalks can be interminably far apart.

This photo below bears some similarities to the conditions on the street where Raquel Nelson’s son A.J. was killed, which isn’t too far from here.

Note the bus stop on the other side of the street with a Cobb County bus approaching. See a marked crosswalk anywhere? Perhaps this man is trying to catch the bus? What happens when the bus drops you off and you need to reach a destination across the street? Should we really expect people to walk half a mile out of the frame to find a safer place to cross, and then walk half a mile back?

And some streets around here just have zero accommodation for pedestrians, including a busy street that serves two major universities and the county’s biggest employer (Dobbins AFB/Lockheed) right in the center of the county.

Keep in mind that these pictures represent just one busy American metropolis — there are hundreds more cities and thousands of places with similar conditions that need urgent attention. We have a long way to go to retrofit these streets to help make them safer for everyone that needs to use them. The complete streets provision in the Senates MAP-21 bill would be a step in the right direction, as would be the flexible funding that local governments can use to help address some of these dangerous areas under the Senate bill. (These provisions are a little out of date now. -Ed.)

With 67 percent of all pedestrian fatalities happening on federal-aid roads — many of which that were designed in this unsafe way because of federal design guidelines and standards — theres a clear role for the federal government to play in improving them.

So what would happen in our communities if we started by looking at our map of pedestrian fatalities to see where the worst trouble areas are and devoted a small slice of transportation money into small, tangible improvements like new sidewalks, new crosswalks, and new signals for making walking safer and more convenient? What if we made it a clear priority to make every day National Safe Walking Day?

Wouldn’t we be saving lives immediately? And for a small price?

Trump’s budget will hurt local communities

President Trump’s first budget request for Congress is a direct assault on smart infrastructure investment that will do damage to cities and towns of all sizes — from the biggest coastal cities down to small rural towns.

After months of promises to invest a trillion dollars in infrastructure, the first official action taken by the Trump administration on the issue is a proposal to eliminate the popular TIGER competitive grant program, cut the funding that helps cities of all sizes build new transit lines, and terminate funding for the long-distance passenger rail lines that rural areas depend on.

Tell your representatives that this proposal is a non-starter and appropriators in Congress should start from scratch.

The competitive TIGER grant program is one of the only ways that local communities of all sizes can directly access federal funds. And unlike the old outdated practice of earmarking, to win this funding, project sponsors have to bring significant local funding to the table and provide evidence of how their project will accomplish numerous goals. The TIGER grant program has brought more than three non-federal dollars to the table for each federal dollar awarded.

Eliminating the funding to support the construction of new public transportation lines and service is a slap in face of the millions of local residents who have raised their own taxes to pay their share. Like the voters in Tempe, AZ, who approved a sales tax 13 years ago that’s been set aside to pair with a future federal grant to build a streetcar. Or the voters last November in Indianapolis, IN, who approved an income tax increase to pay their share of a new bus rapid transit project, and in Atlanta, GA, who approved a sales tax increase in part to add transit to their one-of-a-kind Beltline project.

These local communities and scores of others who are generating their own funds to invest in transit will be left high and dry by this proposal, threatening their ability to satisfy the booming demand from residents and employers alike for well-connected locations served by transit.

Terminating funding for long-distance passenger rail service will hit rural communities especially hard, like the communities along the Gulf Coast who are even now demonstrating their commitment to restoring service wiped out by Hurricane Katrina by stepping up and pledging their own dollars to match or exceed any federal dollars to make it happen.

Our nation’s infrastructure serves as the backbone for economic growth and prosperity. The Administration’s proposed budget falls short of prioritizing investment in the local communities that are the basic building block of the national economy, and we need you to help stand up and send that message loud and clear to Congress.

Three separate ballot measures for transportation in the Atlanta region cleared to proceed

After the crushing defeat of a huge regional transportation ballot measure back in 2012, Atlanta is poised to rebound this fall. After recent action by city and county leaders to place measures on the ballot, voters in metro Atlanta will be making at least three critical decisions this fall about sizable new investments in transportation.

People biking along the booming Atlanta Beltline’s east side trail, which would get a big boost through two separate ballot measures in November to help buy additional right-of-way and start to add transit to the mix.

Thanks to a law passed by the Georgia legislature (SB 369) in the dying hours of the 2016 session, the city got the go-ahead to put at least two questions on the ballot that will raise funds to finally add transit to the one-of-a-kind Beltline around the city, expand existing bus and rail service, fund other new transit projects, and make other general transportation investments in the city.

We wrote about the legislation back in March:

The legislation enables three new local funding sources, each dependent on approval through voter referenda. 1) The City of Atlanta can request voter approval for an additional half-cent sales tax through 2057 explicitly for transit, bringing in an estimated $2.5 billion for MARTA transit. 2) Through a separate ballot question the city could ask for another half-cent for road projects. 3) And in Fulton County outside the city, mayors will need to agree to a package of road and transit projects and ask voters to approve up to a ¾-cent sales tax to fund the projects.

The first of these three options got the go-ahead back in June when the Atlanta City Council approved a tentative list of transit projects to fund with a new half-penny tax for MARTA and placed the measure on the ballot — though this list of projects could still change as they move into planning and public meetings following a successful vote.

But for now, according to the presentation from MARTA (pdf), the $2.5 billion that would be generated by the new half-penny sales tax raised locally would help fund subway extensions, hefty improvements in bus service, new light rail on the Beltline project which will eventually encircle the city with transit, a walking/biking trail and linear parks, and improvements to bike and pedestrian connections near stations and bus stops. The half cent tax would run for 40 years.

marta tax transit projects` marta tax bike ped projects

The state legislation also allowed The City of Atlanta to additionally raise up to another half-cent sales tax for a shorter period of time (five years) for other local transportation projects within the city limits. The Atlanta City Council chose to use only part of that taxing authority, putting a second measure on the ballot asking voters for 0.4 cents in additional sales tax, which will raise $260 million over the five-year life of the extra 0.4¢, and go toward a range of projects, according to a release from Mayor Kasim Reed’s office:

$66 million for the Atlanta BeltLine, which will allow the BeltLine to purchase all the remaining right of way to close the 22-mile loop;
$75 million for 15 complete streets projects;
$3 million for Phase 2 of the Atlanta Bike Share program;
$69 million for pedestrian improvements in sidewalks; and
$40 million for traffic signal optimization.

Note: The traffic signal optimization was a core part of the city’s application to the USDOT Smart City Challenge.

Mayor Reed said in his press release:

Infrastructure investments are vital to Atlanta’s quality of life and continued economic competitiveness. Between the $250 million being spent through the Renew Atlanta bond program and these TSPLOST funds, Atlanta will reap the benefits of more than a half billion dollars invested in new and improved roads, sidewalks, neighborhood greenways, parks and congestion reduction efforts. Combined with a $3 billion expansion of our public transit system through MARTA, Atlanta residents will see unprecedented new investments in strengthening our transportation networks.

If both of these ballot measures for transportation are approved — half a penny for MARTA and 0.4 cents for transportation — Atlanta will have a local sales tax rate of 8.9 percent, certainly among the higher rates in the country but still lower than Seattle, New Orleans, Chicago, nearby Nashville and other cities.

There’s also a third measure on the ballot this fall, but it only applies for residents of Fulton County that live outside of the city’s borders. There, voters will be deciding on a 0.75 percent sales tax for transportation projects that would fund only projects outside of the city limits in unincorporated Fulton County and in other cities. Fulton is a large county that stretches far enough to the north and south to encompass suburbs on both sides of Atlanta proper.

This Fulton-only measure would be explicitly for road projects, with nothing going toward public transportation. Widening roads, safety projects, resurfacing roads, and some streetscape improvements including bike lanes and new sidewalks.

This roads-only measure for the county is the result of the legislature’s lack of agreement on a larger bill that would have enabled a bigger single transit measure in Atlanta and both adjoining counties, Fulton and DeKalb. The larger MARTA ballot measure would have raised somewhere around $8 billion for MARTA. Opposition to new transit measures — especially in parts of Fulton County — sunk that legislation.

So Fulton County gets this roads-only ballot measure, but no chance at MARTA expansion further into the county for the immediate future.

In 2012, Atlanta’s large regional transportation measure that would have split over $7 billion between road and transit projects across the ten-county region failed miserably at the ballot, for a number of reasons. Yet voters in the City of Atlanta and Dekalb county strongly voted in favor of it, and we suggested at the time that an Atlanta-only measure could be the next path forward for the city.

Four years on, Atlanta voters will soon be deciding whether or not to make one of the biggest investments in infrastructure of any city of its size over the next few years. Taken with the $250 million Renew Atlanta infrastructure bond measure that passed last year, these measures would raise over $3 billion to invest in transportation over the next 40 years, with about $500 million of that coming over just the next five years.

Keep up with all of the notable local ballot measures we’re tracking with Transportation Vote 2016

Spokane is one of a growing slate of cities considering transit ballot measures to help stay competitive and successful

With a ballot measure for transit looming this fall, T4America Chairman John Robert Smith traveled to Spokane, WA to speak to city officials, business leaders, and other community stakeholders about the long-term economic and social benefits of public transit investments.

Spokane residents will be deciding on an upcoming ballot measure that would improve the city’s existing transit infrastructure and provide operating funds for a new bus rapid transit line. Echoing his appeal in an op-ed in the Spokesman that ran shortly after his visit, John Robert called upon voters to consider how important transit access is not only for connecting all residents to jobs, but also for staying competitive and helping to keep some of the thousands of students from the region’s universities in town after graduation:

Is Spokane the kind of place where young, mobile, talented workers want to stay after they graduate? Will the Lilac City be able to compete with other midsize cities in the Pacific Northwest and beyond to attract a younger workforce and prosper for decades to come?

While these questions may have been addressed to the city of Spokane, it’s a question that scores of other mid-sized cities are attempting to answer right now. As we covered last week, Indianapolis will be going to the ballot this fall to dramatically expand and improve their bus system. Atlanta voters could approve adding more than $2.5 billion in new transit service. Raleigh could join other regions in the Triangle region by raising a small sales tax to begin beefing up transit service in the booming region. And larger metropolitan areas including Seattle and Los Angeles will vote on whether to raise new money for transportation and transit.

Young, mobile workers are increasingly locating in areas — big and small — that offer connected and dependable public transit, a movement that cities ignore at their own peril. Mayor Smith continued:

I heard a story out of Indianapolis recently (a city facing similar talent retention challenges as Spokane). A younger resident testified in the Statehouse about efforts to build a new system of bus rapid transit lines across the region. Lawmakers were told that “selling a city without transit to millennials is like selling a phone without a camera.”

Along with Spokane’s upcoming measure, T4America will be following these measures closely and watching these cities attempt to take crucial steps towards securing long-term economic success.

A look at progress around the country on improving state transportation policy & raising new funding

Scores of state legislatures are still in session or nearing the end of their sessions. With transportation funding and policy on the docket in scores of states, here’s a roundup of the progress being made in states working to create more transparency, build more public trust in transportation spending, and even raise new money.

Many state legislatures are in the crunch time of crossover days and committee deadlines. Many more are already taking the long view and looking ahead to big policy changes later this year or after the next election. Here’s a roundup of the top stories:

Our refreshed state policy bill tracker is the best way to keep tabs on the most current information about these states attempting to raise new funding in 2016, states attempting to reform how those dollars are spent and states taking unfortunate steps in the wrong direction on policy — all tracked in three separate searchable, sortable tables of that information.

In addition, our hub for state policy and funding related resources includes all past and current reports, bill trackers, and other state-focused resources.

LOCAL FUNDING

After an up-and-down last few years when it comes to transportation funding, the Georgia state legislature successfully passed a pared-back bill last week that will allow voters in the City of Atlanta to decide the question of raising new funds for expanded transit service throughout the city, in addition to other transportation investments in the city.

A similar bill (SB 313) earlier this year would have allowed all counties served by MARTA to raise sales taxes for transit, but that one stalled due to opposition from outside the city. We wrote about the new alternative compromise package last week after its passage:

The legislation (SB 369) enables three new local funding sources, each dependent on approval through voter referenda. 1) The City of Atlanta can request voter approval for an additional half-cent sales tax through 2057 explicitly for transit, bringing in an estimated $2.5 billion for MARTA transit. 2) Through a separate ballot question the city could ask for another half-cent for road projects. 3) And in Fulton County outside the city, mayors will need to agree to a package of road and transit projects and ask voters to approve up to a ¾-cent sales tax to fund the projects.

The bill passed the House 159-4 on March 16 and passed the Senate last week, on the last day of the session.

While empowering local voters to raise new local funds is a step forward, the Georgia legislature also took a step back last week, passing a bill that requires a successful voter referendum before any county can spend money on fixed-guideway transit projects. Georgia doesn’t require a similar hurdle for highway projects. This bill (SB 420) exempts current MARTA service areas, the Beltline and the Atlanta streetcar, but it would slow down planned bus rapid transit projects in Cobb County in suburban Atlanta.

Support is building in Massachusetts for a proposal introduced by Rep. Chris Walsh (D-Framingham), a START network member, to enable cities and towns to raise local taxes to fund transportation projects with approval through voter referenda. See some of the supportive arguments for Massachusetts’ bill here and here. T4America provided a national perspective and supported the bill at legislative briefing earlier this month at the capitol. Also briefing legislators was Mayor Greg Ballard, former mayor of Indianapolis, a region that recently gained legislative approval to raise local taxes for transit projects. Ballard provided lessons learned from his efforts at the state capitol and preparation for an expected ballot question this fall.

What’s the START Network?

We support efforts to produce and pass state legislation to increase transportation funding, advance innovation and policy reform, empower local leaders and ensure accountability and transparency through our State Transportation Advocacy, Research & Training (START) Network of state and local elected officials, advocates and civic leaders. Join the START network today.

STATE FUNDING

Louisiana legislators just ended a special session on the budget without a comprehensive or long-term plan to fully close the state’s structural budget deficit. With more red ink looming in the state’s general budget, efforts to raise new revenue for the transportation fund face long odds.

Looking past the budget deficit, new Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) identified new Baton Rouge-to-New Orleans rail service as a priority, vowing to do “everything he could” to get new trains rolling.

Connecticut’s transportation committee advanced a “lockbox” provision (HJ 1) to dedicate certain revenue only for transportation projects. Republicans warn they will still oppose the measure unless the wording is tightened to prevent any diversion of money from the state’s special transportation fund. Constitutionally dedicating revenue from fuel taxes, vehicle fees, and a portion of the gas tax is seen as a necessary prerequisite to raising these taxes to bring in new money for transportation. While there is bipartisan support, at least in principle, a measure earlier this year failed to reach the necessary supermajority when a bloc of Republican House members said the measure would not go far enough in dedicating transportation dollars.

Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) called for big investments in all modes across the state in the 30-year, Let’s Go CT plan. But adding a new lane in each direction on I-95 across the state, one of the biggest and most expensive projects on the list, is drawing substantial opposition. Opponents note that a new lane will do little to ease traffic or advance the state’s 21st century knowledge economy. The state DOT counters that their plan for new capacity coupled with dynamic management through new electronic tolling would cut down on “induced demand” by making it more expensive, and so less desirable, for new drivers to fill new space on the roads.

A proposal in the Mississippi Senate to raise transportation taxes or issue bonds to fund road projects (SB 2921) was kept alive, but just barely. A procedural move allows negotiations to continue and may allow a last-minute agreement on the issue later in the session.

Minnesota’s legislature is in the fourth week of a short session that must conclude May 23. In that time, legislators will need to find $135 million for the next phase of the Twin Cities’ light rail system — or risk losing $895 million in federal funding and drastically setting back the planned project. Twin Cities local governments are expecting the state to do its part — they’ve already directed $118 million in local funding into the project. Transportation funding was a top issue in last year’s legislative session and members are again looking for a compromise to get more state funding— possibly including new revenue — to roads, bridges, and transit.

STATE REFORM

The Maryland House passed two bills to add objective scoring to the way the state DOT selects projects (HB 1013) and to create a new board to give local oversight over the state transit agency (HB 1010). Both measures are still being revised in the Senate; they must pass both chambers by the time the session ends on April 11th.

MOVING BACKWARD

Tennessee’s bill that would restrict gas tax receipts for any bicycle or pedestrian projects may be losing steam. The bill (HB 1650/SB 1716) was slowly making progress in the House, but this week the House delayed a hearing and the Senate scheduled a hearing for the bill on the last day of the session – a common way to signal the bill will not be passing this year.

FUNDING & POLICY TRACKER

You can access the full list of funding bills being considered and policies we are tracking throughout the country at our tracker here. As always, get in touch if there are bills you are working on that we should have our eyes on.

Georgia’s legislature moved last night to enable Atlanta to fund new transit & local projects

After an up-and-down last few years when it comes to transportation funding, the Georgia state legislature successfully passed a pared-back bill last night that will allow voters in the City of Atlanta to decide whether or not to raise new funds for expanded transit service throughout the city, in addition to other transportation investments in the city.

Thanks to state legislation, transit could be finally coming to Atlanta’s BeltLine, running alongside the popular trails. Photo via Beltline.org

Under a new law passed late night by the Georgia legislature in the dying hours of the session, the city will be able to put a question on the ballot to finally add transit to the one-of-a-kind Beltline around the city, expand existing bus and rail service, or fund other new transit projects. The city will also be able to raise new funds for streets and highways and the remainder of Fulton County (which surrounds and includes part of Atlanta) will be able to raise new local sales taxes for road and transit projects outside the city.

The legislation (SB 369) enables three new local funding sources, each dependent on approval through voter referenda. 1) The City of Atlanta can request voter approval for an additional half-cent sales tax through 2057 explicitly for transit, bringing in an estimated $2.5 billion for MARTA transit. 2) Through a separate ballot question the city could ask for another half-cent for road projects. 3) And in Fulton County outside the city, mayors will need to agree to a package of road and transit projects and ask voters to approve up to a ¾-cent sales tax to fund the projects.

After a bigger regional bill failed a few weeks ago that would have given the transit ballot authority to more counties and municipalities outside of the core city and Fulton county, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that last night’s bill “represents a compromise with GOP lawmakers who opposed an earlier plan put forth by Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta.”

That effort earlier in the session would have enabled a larger transit measure in Atlanta and both adjoining counties, Fulton and DeKalb. Opposition to new transit measures — especially in Fulton County — sunk that legislation and when that bill died a few weeks ago, it seemed at the time like the end of the line for new transit funding in this legislative session.

Last night’s compromise bill that emerged from the ashes will enable a new, long-term funding stream for transit in the city of Atlanta, where support is the strongest. If approved, the new funding would allow the largest expansion of MARTA in the system’s history and allow more transit to connect and permeate growing in-town neighborhoods.

LOOKING BACK IN ATLANTA

After an up-and-down last few years for transportation funding, this is a big win for the regional economic powerhouse of metro Atlanta.

T4America members like the Metro Atlanta Chamber have been hearing from their members (and potential recruits looking to locate in Atlanta) how important expanded transit is to the city and region’s future. In our widely-cited story from last year, we chronicled how employers in the city are increasingly locating near transit to attract a younger, talented workforce, including State Farm’s plan to build literally right on top of a northside MARTA station.

Dave Williams, VP of Infrastructure & Government Affairs for the Metro Atlanta Chamber and T4A Advisory Board member remarked, “We’re thrilled that MARTA will be back in expansion mode for the first time in more than 15 years. The measure that passed will give Atlanta the opportunity to generate over $2.5 billion in local funding for transit projects. It’s an extraordinary positive step to create more commuting options and there will be more to come.”

“This success resulted from many partners in our community collaborating, including business interests, civic groups, environmental concerns, labor and trades, and engaged citizens,” he added.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed called the failure of 2012’s massive regional transportation ballot measure that included an enormous list of road and transit projects the biggest failure of his political career. Back in the beginning of 2015 in our 15 things to watch in 2015 series of posts, we pointed to Mayor Reed as a person to watch last year, as he was trying to find a way forward on new transportation funding for the city.

[After 2012’s failed referendum, Reed] has often suggested that Atlanta might instead pair up with a few other nearby municipalities on a separate measure to raise funds for transportation. City of Atlanta and Dekalb county voters strongly favored the 2012 measure, so a joint Atlanta-DeKalb plan could be a possibility to watch for discussion of in 2015.

Which is pretty close to what happened this year.

After that 2012 mega-measure failed, they came close to getting new local funding authority for MARTA included in last year’s broad state transportation legislation which raised $900 million, mostly for road projects. But:

At one point during negotiations there was a provision that would have allowed the cities and counties that contribute to MARTA to increase the sales tax dedicated to the system by 0.5 percent via ballot measures, but this provision was removed from the final bill.

With potentially $2.5 billion to invest in new projects, if approved by the voters, MARTA Board Chairman Robbie Ashe told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that the regional transit agency is already working on a list of projects that could be funded through a new local tax in Atlanta.

“My best guess is the lion’s share would go to expanding the transit on the Beltline,” said Ashe, adding that the city might also contemplate building infill rail stations or extending a rail line by a stop or two.

Because of financial constraints, constructing transit lines along the entire 22-mile circle of the Beltline would likely have to be done in phases, rather than all at once, said Ashe.

This is welcome news, but they’re not finished yet. We’ll be watching closely as the city formulates their plan and begins to put together a campaign for a successful ballot measure, possibly as soon as this Fall.

This post was co-written by Dan Levine and Stephen Lee Davis

Urban bike trails in cities like Indianapolis, Dallas and Atlanta are proving to have rich economic benefits to city neighborhoods

Affirming a trend seen in other cities, Indianapolis’s eight-mile Cultural Trail has been a boon to the neighborhoods adjacent to it — as well as the city as a whole — increasing property values of homes and businesses and giving residents and tourists a convenient, attractive, unbroken path to walk, bike and move around the city.

Since opening in 2008, the value of properties within a block of Indy’s high-quality biking and walking trail have increased an astonishing 148 percent, according to this recent report on the impacts of the trail. The value of the nearly 1,800 parcels within 500 feet of the trail increased by more than $1.01 billion from 2008 to 2014.

The $62.5 million investment, funded mostly by private or philanthropic donations that leveraged a federal TIGER grant, is an eight-mile landscaped bike and pedestrian pathway through the heart of the city that is, in the words of the New York Times in 2014, an “accessible urban connective tissue — an amoeba of paths shot through with lush greenery and commissioned works of public art.”

Residents and tourists alike have been drawn to the trail, and it’s proven to be not just a quality-of-life asset but an economic one as well, with business and property owners witnessing firsthand the benefits of being close to high-quality infrastructure that makes it safe for almost anyone of any age to safely walk or bike through the heart of the city.

The Cultural Trail is an important cog in the city’s transportation network, which the city hopes to dramatically expand through increased public transportation service in and around the city. It provides an unbroken loop around Indy’s downtown that allows cyclists and walkers of almost any age or ability to safely traverse the city. The trail stitches together neighborhoods and connects to various theatres, hotels, sports venues and shopping areas, among other popular destinations. Spurs reach out into neighborhoods and connect to other city trails, making bike commutes to downtown easier.

A family walking along Indy’s Cultural Trail. http://indyculturaltrail.org/about/

The numbers in this report are eye-opening, but Indy isn’t the only place where investment in ambitious projects to make cities more livable and functional for people have netted sizable economic rewards over the last few years. Dallas and Atlanta have both invested in their own similar in-town, separated, high-quality multipurpose paths to great economic rewards, just to name two.

Some bars and restaurants in Dallas claimed a threefold jump in business since the first day the new Katy Trail opened, centered in Dallas’s Uptown district. In a story last summer, The New York Times described how the Uptown neighborhood changed after the opening of the Katy Trail:

Since 2006, property value in Uptown has climbed nearly 80 percent to $3.4 billion, based on the improvement district’s assessment income. In the early 1990s, it wallowed around $500 million, said Joseph F. Pitchford, senior vice president for development at Crescent Real Estate Equities, based in Dallas. Crescent will begin building a $225 million, 20-story tower this summer that the law firm Gardere Wynne Sewell will anchor.

Dallas added 95,900 jobs in 2013 and is looking to attract young, talented professionals. While the Katy Trail helps, they still have work to do to change their reputation: Dallas was identified as one of the least walkable cities in America by Smart Growth America and George Washington University in their Foot Traffic Ahead report.

In Atlanta, when fully completed, the Beltline will be a 26-mile loop of walking and biking trails (along with transit eventually) in a loop around the city following mostly old railroad right-of-way. The few finished segments are already making a notable difference in property values of homes and businesses that surround it.

Pedestrians and cyclists enjoy the Atlanta BeltLine’s Eastside Trail. http://beltline.org/explore/photos/?setId=72157651531843045

In a 2013 Curbed article, the REMAX realty firm claimed homes near the BeltLine and other city cycling infrastructure that used to stay on the market for 60 to 90 days were now selling within 24 hours. Maura Neill, a realtor who has specialized in the Atlanta market for over 12 years told Curbed, “The new bike lanes are absolutely an attractive selling point, putting Atlanta in the limelight as a progressive city.”

“When people realize the savings of not relying solely on a car, they’re much more inclined to pay a little more now in exchange for saving a lot later,” said Rebecca Serna, executive director of the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, pointing to some buyers’ willingness to pay upwards of $5,000 extra for a home if it means less traffic and less time spent commuting.

“The old ‘drive to qualify’ [for a mortgage] paradigm is shifting as people forego the family car. Factors like time and money saved are much more valuable than the number of square feet.”

Other cities have also seen a boost in housing prices thanks to nearby bike trails, including Vancouver, which saw 65 percent of realtors featuring new bike paths as a selling point; Pittsburgh, which “ignited commercial and business activity”; and in North Carolina, where property prices increased by $5,000 or more alongside the small Shepherd’s Vineyard greenway in the town of Apex, outside Raleigh, just to name a few of the many recent examples.

The uptick in property values and economic development are often attributed to the preferences of millennials, whom are shown (in our recent survey and others) to have a clear preference for places that provide a range of mobility and transit options, including biking and walking.

With transportation dollars more limited than ever, it’s clear that even relatively small investments in projects like Indy’s Cultural Trail or the Beltline or Katy Trail in Atlanta and Dallas are smart bets to bring significant economic benefits, and also help attract the younger, talented workforce so envied by many top employers.

State Farm is moving to concentrate thousands of employees in locations near transit

State Farm, one of the country’s largest insurance companies, is betting big on transit in three cities by building or expanding regional hubs on sites with good access to public transportation, reflecting a clear strategy to attract and retain talent who increasingly want to live and work in locations connected by transit.

A State Farm Insurance executive told a crowd in Tempe, AZ, that the company’s decision to build a huge new hub there was directly tied to the nearby availability of light rail and other transportation options that are attractive to recruiting talent.

“We’re designing these workplaces to be the future of State Farm,” chief operating officer Michael Tipsord said at an Arizona State University event. “We’re creating a live-work-play environment that will give employees easy access to their work from the neighboring communities.”

The new hub in Tempe will give State Farm enough space to expand their Phoenix-area workforce from 4,500 to more than 8,000, and will be a ten-minute walk from a Valley Light Rail stop right by Sun Devil stadium at the edge of the Arizona State University campus.

tempe state farm google map location

In Atlanta, State Farm is at the center of an enormous 2.2-million-square-foot development at Perimeter Center, already one of the biggest job hubs in the entire metro region, located immediately adjacent to a MARTA heavy rail station. State Farm’s plan to lease more than 500,000 square feet in a larger development has been making waves in economic development circles in Atlanta. They’re planning to hire another 3,000 employees to augment the 5,000 already in metro Atlanta, bringing new jobs to this region as well.

It’s likely to be part of consolidating workers presently at other sites in far-flung Atlanta suburbs that State Farm has already sold. In a region with notoriously bad traffic and jobs scattered all over the metro area, it’s hard to overstate the significance for Atlanta.

Atlanta State Farm Master plan state farm atlanta hq rendering

North of Dallas in Richardson, TX, State Farm is building a new hub from scratch on the main north-south light rail line that will anchor an enormous new mixed-use development. This site, with room to expand further, is so close to the light rail stop that the executives could probably hit golf balls off the roof of the new buildings and hit the tracks. And at over 2 million square feet of office space, the Dallas Business Journal called it “the largest lease in North Texas history.”

dallas state farm google map location

State Farm is just one of many companies coming to the realization that a key part of recruiting and retaining talented workers is having convenient access to public transportation and being better integrated into nearby communities rather than isolated in a 1970’s style office park.

Though plenty of companies are still located in those office parks and will continue to be, other notable employers are looking to move to the kinds of locations more in demand by their workforce.

Just last week, Marriott hotels, a major employer in the Washington, DC, region, announced they’ll be looking for a new headquarters in the area when the lease expires on their existing suburban campus. And one of the most important things they’ll be looking for in a new HQ as they try to keep up in the race for attracting talent?

“I think it’s essential we be accessible to Metro and that limits the options. I think as with many other things our younger folks are more inclined to be Metro-accessible and more urban,” chief executive Arne M. Sorenson told the Washington Post.

Expect more news like this in the coming months and years as more companies realize that locating in vibrant, walkable areas with good transit options are not only good for business, it’s critical for the companies trying to stay competitive.

15 issues to watch in ’15, Part III: People

The members of Congress who will rewrite the nation’s transportation policies and attempt to raise funding to keep the program afloat is just one important discussion taking place this year. More states will continue efforts to raise transportation revenue and mayors in communities of all sizes will move forward key transportation initiatives; among others on a long list of people with an important role to play in 2015. Here are five that rose to the top, but tell us who you think we missed.

Ed: As the year began, we thought it would be fun to identify 15 people, places and trends worth keeping an eye on the next 12 months. We covered this list in three posts — read about five policy issues worth watching on Capitol Hill in 2015, and five places worth keeping an eye on this year.

People

1. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

The senior Senator from Oklahoma is once again leading the Senate’s powerful Environment and Public Works Committee, which is responsible for the largest portion of the Senate’s transportation reauthorization. Back in 2012, as the ranking member, he teamed up with then-Chairman Barbara Boxer to write MAP-21 and shepherd it through their committee and Senate passage. They worked in a bipartisan fashion to reach agreement with their House colleagues on the version of MAP-21 enacted into law in July 2012.

Sen. Inhofe also chaired the committee during the passage of MAP-21’s predecessor (SAFETEA-LU) and has regained the chairmanship for the 114th Congress. A staunch advocate for the federal role in investing in infrastructure, he has been on record this year saying an increase in the gas tax may be the fairest way to charge users for fixing and improving the nation’s transportation system.

After a few years on the back burner, the question of funding and rescuing the nation’s transportation fund from insolvency will be front and center in 2015, and Sen. Inhofe will be right in the middle of it. While we know roughly where he stands on the issue of funding, the bigger questions have to do with policy: Will he keep MAP-21’s policies largely intact? Will he work closely once again with Senator Boxer (who is back as ranking member) to write the bill? Will he support the inclusion of a policy like the Innovation in Surface Transportation Act to improve opportunities for local elected officials to access the program? However those questions are answered, he will be at the center of the debate in the Senate this year, and will likely have his stamp on any authorization enacted this Congress.

2. Representative Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL)

You may not have heard his name much yet, but the seven-term representative from the Miami region has been handed the reigns to a powerful House subcommittee overseeing transportation (and housing) issues. Replacing the retiring Tom Latham (R-IA) on the Appropriations Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) Subcommittee, he’ll have direct involvement in the budgeting for the U.S. DOT each year.

While Highway Trust Fund spending levels are largely determined by the current surface transportation authorization (MAP-21 in this case), Rep. Diaz-Balart will still approve annual spending levels for the department at large, including key discretionary (non-trust fund) programs like the popular TIGER grant program, transit funding, and passenger rail programs. His mantra so far in interviews has been accountability and rooting out potential waste, but he also represents a district with a greater range of transportation options to move people and goods than his predecessor on the subcommittee. Time will tell, but there is reason to hope that Diaz-Balart will be supportive of broader transportation interests in the annual transportation appropriation bill.

3. Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan

Pushing the legislature on this package is nothing new for Gov. Snyder, who has been a strong advocate on critical transportation issues in Michigan. He released a smart plan to invest in infrastructure statewide and raise new revenue all the way back in 2011. He supported the 2012 fight in the legislature to create a long overdue regional transit agency for Detroit to organize and catalyze investment there. Passenger rail statewide has had a significant boost with help from Gov. Snyder as well. Michigan has received about $500 million for the Chicago-Detroit/Pontiac passenger rail route, including funds to purchase track so that more trains can run at higher speeds for longer distances.

In May, voters will decide on increasing the sales tax for schools and municipalities in one ballot question. The other tax changes in the package are contingent on the passage of that referendum. Annually, these bills will bring in an additional $1.3 billion for transportation. It’s a critical vote looming in May. We’ll continue to keep our eye on Gov. Snyder and this important decision.

4. Mayor Marilyn Strickland of Tacoma, Washington

Many states and localities are working to raise additional transportation revenues of their own, but they are doing so with the expectation that federal aid will continue. Few have expressed the need better than Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland did in this terrific OnPoint interview:

A lot of the projects that have helped Tacoma have been a direct result of assistance we’ve received from Washington, D.C. We remediated our waterfront, we’ve done great infrastructure projects. We’re trying to expand our light rail in Tacoma, and we will absolutely, positively need federal help to do that. We recently met with Senator Patty Murray and Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx in Seattle two days ago, and we talked about the need for the federal government to continue to invest in infrastructure.

Mayor Strickland is as proud that Tacoma is part of the Seattle metro area (“We aren’t in its shadow, we bask in its glow.”) as she is of the city’s own blue-collar, working-class identity. But as it becomes more entrepreneurial and diversifies into healthcare and technology, Tacoma hopes to stay competitive by investing in the kinds of transportation options that can help retain and attract a younger, talented workforce. Expanding the regional light rail system that now ends at SeaTac airport, halfway between the two cities, is a big part of that.

The Sound Transit 3 package would enable the localities to raise a part of the funding to make it happen. If that passes the legislature, the measure would go to Puget Sound voters in November of 2016. With local money in hand, strong federal commitment in the form of New Starts and/or TIGER support would leverage those local dollars to ensure the Link light rail finally reaches Tacoma and beyond to Dupont, connecting it to the regional light rail transit network.

Mayor Strickland knows how important that connection is for the future of her city, and the level of cooperation required to make it a reality:

Having support at the federal level really helps us do some things that we need to do. And, again, it’s about connecting the dots. When we have better public transportation options, we are more attractive to people who are creative who want to come live in our cities. When we have a talent pool like that we are more likely to attract high paying jobs. And, so, you have to connect the dots between federal government, state government, and local government.

5. Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta, Georgia

Buoyed by the long-awaited opening of the city’s first streetcar line in decades, Mayor Reed is bouncing back from the disappointing defeat of a regional transportation ballot measure in 2012 and moving forward an Atlanta-only bond plan to raise revenues and make a dent in citywide infrastructure needs. While Renew Atlanta 2015 goes beyond transportation, it will allow the city to make some much-needed repairs and improvements, “including repair and construction of complete streets projects, sidewalks, bridges, and curb ramps.”

Mayor Reed will certainly be focused on turning out the votes for this measure on March 17, but he’s also looking beyond and dreaming much bigger. After the disappointment of the T-SPLOST regional tax referendum, which he called “the biggest failure of my political career,” he has often suggested that Atlanta might instead pair up with a few other nearby municipalities on a separate measure to raise funds for transportation. City of Atlanta and Dekalb county voters strongly favored the 2012 measure, so a joint Atlanta-DeKalb plan could be a possibility to watch for discussion of in 2015.

They have a lot of needs to meet. The short streetcar line is just the first phase of a longer planned line. MARTA is just now getting back to pre-recession levels of service. And Atlanta’s one-of-a-kind Beltline plan for parks and transit lines circling the city in an old railroad corridor has years of investment required to see the entire thing come to fruition.

Even if Atlanta manages to pass the bond measure and take on a more ambitious local funding measure to make more significant transportation investments happen, city leaders still will be looking to the feds for support. After years of funding the decentralization of cities like Atlanta for decades through various federal programs, mayors like Mayor Reed will be counting on support from the federal government to aid their efforts to reverse that trend.

Metro areas on the cutting edge of transportation planning: Introducing The Innovative MPO

On Dec. 10, Transportation for America will release a one-of-a-kind guidebook showcasing leading-edge approaches to regional transportation planning, called “The Innovative MPO.” We will launch it with a webinar the same day, open to all. To learn more and register, click here. In this post, we provide a preview of the kind of topics you’ll encounter in the guidebook.

Click here to register for the Dec. 10 webinar and find out more.

Innovative metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) are working with business leaders and economic developers to make sure their regions are competitive and attractive to talented workers. They are stretching to maximize the impact of investments by setting priorities for selecting projects and measuring performance.

They are refusing to be bound by existing trends, but instead are planning in tandem with the aspirations of their citizens. They’re using creativity and flexible funds to fill gaps in transit service or break up bottlenecks that impede freight movement. They are reaching out across racial, language and income divides to make plans that can help everybody live prosperous and healthy lives.

This reporter first became aware of MPOs as a journalist covering growth and development issues in Atlanta in the 1990s. MPOs, you may know, are creatures of federal transportation law, which requires metro regions to program funding through a regional planning process. Their role is to ensure that federal investments are coordinated within metropolitan areas so that individual communities are considered along with the needs of the region as a whole.

And, as Atlanta discovered in the late 1990s, MPOs also must ensure that regional transportation plans do their part to keep harmful emissions in check. Just after the 1996 Olympics, the Atlanta Regional Commission — metro Atlanta’s MPO — received notice that the region faced a shut-off of federal funds because its projected emissions were exceeding the limits of a strengthened Clean Air Act. Stories I filed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the crisis made national headlines, because Atlanta was the first to face such sanctions.

The problem was that the region’s long-range transportation plan was based on projections that the region’s out-of-control sprawl would continue as usual for the next 20 years. That would require more and more highway lanes to accommodate longer commutes in congestion that got worse despite the investment, producing untenable levels of vehicle emissions. The only way to make a plan that could meet Clean Air Act requirements was to assume the region would accommodate more of its growth in core areas and town centers. People living and working in those areas would take shorter and fewer car trips, and some could be replaced by other options.

Here’s where I first saw just how innovative an MPO can be.

The ARC had no control over land use — local governments had that authority — and thus little say over the sprawling development. But it turned out that the transportation funding controlled by the MPO offered plenty of opportunity to incentivize better-planned growth. Chief ARC planner Tom Weyandt and his staff came up with the Livable Centers Initiative. The MPO set aside money for competitive grants to support local governments planning for compact, walkable town centers and corridors. Those with smart plans would then be in line for a much larger pool of money for transportation projects to fulfill those plans.

The Livable Centers program not only helped restore the region to compliance with the Clean Air Act and avoid financial penalties, it also unleashed a wave of pent-up demand from communities that were bursting with ideas for reviving moribund downtowns or transforming tired commercial corridors. It helped change regional planning to ensure that transportation spending was in line with overarching goals and created a framework for prioritizing projects.

The LCI program in Atlanta is just the tip of the iceberg of what MPOs can do to help ensure the long-term economic health and quality of life in their regions.

The type of studies conducted in the Atlanta metro region from 2000-2012. Source: ARC

Innovations are not limited to the rich regions on the coasts, but are cropping up all across the country in MPOs of all sizes. It may be no surprise that the MPO in the San Francisco Bay Area has developed a sophisticated method for scoring potential projects that evaluates impacts on everything from climate to access to jobs for lower-income residents. Or that Metro in Portland, OR, puts dollars from the federal highways, transit and bike/ped pots into a combined fund that goes to the projects — whatever they may be — that best serve the region’s overall goals for development, equitable distribution of benefits and sustainability.

But did you know Nashville’s MPO is a leader in soliciting public engagement across race, income and age and is pioneering ways to evaluate impacts on health and safety, and prioritize projects accordingly? Or that the Tulsa, OK, MPO literally takes its planning to the people on a specially equipped bus, while the Flagstaff, AZ, MPO figured out a way to use the flexibility of federal funds to sustain a critical bus service?

The Denver MPO has partnered with the local AARP chapter to create “Boomer Bonds” that help local governments around the region create age-friendly environments, allowing older adults to remain in their homes and communities for as long as they desire. The Savannah, GA, MPO has put together a sophisticated program to ensure the performance of its port, rail and trucking networks in a way that also keeps residents safe, healthy and mobile.

This is just a quick sample of the initiatives large and small that you’ll find in The Innovative MPO, which will be released next Wednesday, December 10. The full guidebook features 30 useful tools from seven areas of focus, 20 detailed case studies (like Atlanta’s) and more than 50 real-world examples from MPOs in regions large and small. There’s also an MPO 101 appendix with a simple, clear explanation of what MPOs are and what they do.

There is a lot to be excited about, and there will be even more to celebrate as MPOs swap their good ideas and challenge each other to push even farther to put transportation dollars to work for the long-term health and prosperity of their people.

We will be hosting a webinar on the day of the release, December 10th at 1p.m. EST. Register here.

UPS chief and other business leaders urge Congress to pass a bill that helps both commuters and freight

David Abney, the recently hired chief executive officer of UPS, recently penned an editorial in Bloomberg/BNA that provides an illuminating look inside the priorities of the booming freight company — based in the same city where we hosted a policy breakfast on metro freight movement just two weeks ago.

Everybody wins. Flickr photo by Thomas Merton

Abney’s comments put a bright line under the importance of Congress updating our country’s outmoded freight policy in the next federal transportation authorization.

He argues that Congress still needs to update the federal program from its roots in a 20^th century “highway bill” to a truly 21^st century “transportation bill” that knits all modes of transportation together. “My sense tells me that to truly impact America’s transportation infrastructure problem, we can’t approach it just from the standpoint of ‘trying to fix our road’ or ‘trying to fix our ports,’” he said. “Instead, we need to think first about the real end goals: 1) getting to and from our destinations and 2) making those commutes as quick, efficient and cost-effective as possible.”

When we were developing our policy platform a year ago based on the feedback we were hearing in meetings around the country, a consistent theme — especially when meeting with local chambers of commerce or metropolitan business leaders — was that moving freight and people was often one of their top priorities. Forget about the usual simple debates between spending on maintenance versus new road capacity, or whether a particular area should build this rail line or that highway; chambers especially seem to grasp that a) freight movement is critically important to the local (and national) economy and b) you can’t make a plan to move people that doesn’t also account for the movement of stuff, and vice versa.

But like any discussion of federal transportation policy these days, the elephant in the room is always funding. And affirming much of what you’d expect from businesspeople, they’re willing to pay more, but only for a smarter approach that can improve the bottom line:

Of course, before even having a broader debate about infrastructure, we need Congress to pass, at minimum, funding support for vital maintenance and repair programs. Otherwise today’s infrastructure won’t even be around for tomorrow’s solutions. …To address congestion and drive down transportation costs, we need a holistic approach–one that integrates all modes of transport, and that includes dedicated funding mechanisms. Whether it’s a vehicle-miles-traveled tax, raising the gas tax, implementing waste-reduction policies or reallocating government spending, we’ll need a way to pay for these crucial investments.

Abney’s thoughts are similar to what we heard in his company’s hometown just a couple of weeks ago for a policy breakfast we convened with the Metro Atlanta Chamber. At the Chamber offices in downtown Atlanta, we heard from Doug Hooker, executive director of the Atlanta Regional Commission (Atlanta’s MPO), Jannine Miller, senior manager at The Home Depot, and David Abney’s colleague Frank Morris, UPS’s vice president of corporate and public affairs.

All the speakers represented Atlanta-based businesses or metro leaders with a keen interest in seeing the region keep freight and people moving each day. “Atlanta started as a freight hub and has stayed true to that,” said Doug Hooker with ARC. “We, as leaders in Atlanta, need to figure out how that job growth center will continue in the future.”

While there are real flaws with the “Travel Time Index” when it comes to putting a specific dollar value on congestion’s cost to everyday commuters, businesses like UPS or Home Depot that deal in very specific timetables see much more tangible losses. “If UPS’ drivers are stuck, the company puts more drivers on the road. For UPS, a 5 minute delay on every driver every year costs UPS $110 million,” said UPS’ Morris.

“One of metro Atlanta’s biggest advantages is our multimodal transportation system,” said Miller with Home Depot, with a nod to the railroads that helped make Atlanta an economic powerhouse. “The future of our business will be heavily invested in utilizing those last mile connections.” The home improvement chain certainly knows about last-mile connections: the goods from manufacturers around the U.S. and the world eventually have to reach stores located everywhere from downtown NYC to small towns in California.

Because most companies like UPS can’t deliver off-peak, finding ways to reduce demand or more efficiently utilize roadway space at peak times can be a win-win for everyone. A robust and heavily-used transit system in a metro region could be a freight company’s best friend, moving large numbers of people quickly during peak commuting hours without having to take up space on highways they depend on, while also lowering transportation costs for metro residents. UPS’ Abney illustrated this people-first way of thinking in the superb conclusion of his editorial.

America’s transportation infrastructure can become stronger and more efficient if we work at moving people, not just planes, trains and automobiles separately. “Good” can’t be defined exclusively according to road engineering manuals, and while a nationwide “people-based approach” might sound idealistic, it’s also the approach most informed by bottom line impact. A truly functional transportation infrastructure system isn’t just about how many cars we can fit on a particular stretch of highway; it might be, for example, about how we can allow trucks to deliver along busy retail corridors, or how we can best facilitate customers being able to reach their local businesses, no matter where they are in the world.

Put differently, to really get the best bang for our infrastructure buck, we must measure and account for how transportation investments drive growth and support quality of life. The questions we ask about infrastructure need to change accordingly. Are there ways to achieve the same transportation goals by investing limited resources differently? Are we investing in the research, engineering and alternative fuels that will transform commutes and save money? And are we thinking about ways to “right-size” projects–selecting infrastructure investments that might accomplish 90 percent of our goals, but at a fraction of the cost?

Read the full UPS piece here.

Our thanks to Dave Williams and the rest of the team at the Metro Atlanta Chamber for hosting and organizing the terrific policy breakfast.

Important transportation ballot measures decided yesterday

Despite the defeat Tuesday of some high-profile measures, transportation funding asks continue to be approved at very high rates – and a few key wins may have impact for years to come.

While some of the key measures we were tracking did not fare well, on the whole, transportation (and transit specifically) did well at the ballot box (See the full list of measures we’re tracking below.) According to the Center for Transportation Excellence’s final results, 72% of all transit or multimodal measures were approved this year, including yesterday’s results – similar to the trend of recent years.

One of the most significant measures at the state level was considered in Massachusetts, where voters were deciding whether or not to repeal a legislature-approved provision to index the gas tax so revenues could keep up with inflation and allow the state to keep up with their pressing transportation needs. The measure to repeal was approved, albeit at a fairly close margin (52.9-47%), which means that Massachusetts will lose a portion of their new funding for transportation, but not all — they also raised their gas tax by three cents, but that was unaffected by this ballot measure.

The Massachusetts vote was definitely one that other states were watching closely as a potential bellwether for attempts to raise new revenue elsewhere. As Dan Vock at Governing Magazine wrote today, “That is not good news for transportation advocates, who are looking for politically feasible ways to raise money for infrastructure improvements.” Though a handful of other states did succeed in raising their gas taxes over the last couple of years, it’s possible that more states hoping to raise revenues in the next few years will consider a shift away from the per-gallon tax to a sales or wholesale tax (as Virginia and Maryland did for example) rather than trying to add in automatic indexing, which many voters saw negatively in Massachusetts.

Rhode Island voters approved a statewide ballot measure to fund some pretty significant transit improvements across the state, including new transit hubs to connect their popular passenger rail services with buses and other forms of transportation, and improvements to the statewide bus network. Scott Wolf, the executive director of Grow Smart RI, which ran the campaign on the measure, was full of praise today:

We commend our fellow Rhode Islanders for recognizing that these investments will provide benefits far beyond their costs and make it easier for the state to retain and recruit a young, talented and mobile work force. If we can continue to pursue this kind of asset based economic development strategy under Governor-Elect Raimondo, we at Grow Smart RI are confident that Rhode Island’s best days will still be ahead of us.

At the local and regional level, there was perhaps no more significant symbolic vote than the one taken in metro Atlanta yesterday. For the first time in more than 40 years, Atlanta’s MARTA system will be expanding into a new county, as Clayton County, Georgia overwhelmingly approved (73% in favor) a one-percent sales tax increase to join MARTA, expand bus service into the county, and save half of the projected revenue for planning and implementing a possible rail connection into the county.

Clayton was the only one of Atlanta’s five core counties that lacked a local public transit system, and there was a surge of momentum for this referendum after a limited county bus system folded in 2010. When it did, Clayton State University saw a drop in enrollment and scores of jobs at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport got much harder to reach for county residents.

From a regional perspective, with more of the region now having a stake in MARTA — it was intended to serve all five metro counties when it was created, but only two opted in — the agency will expand their base of users and bring more local officials to the table who care about seeing it succeed. And the resounding vote of support with local dollars will likely help continue develop support from the state legislature, where MARTA CEO Keith Parker has been hard at work to create allies for the only major transit agency that receives no dedicated funding from the state.

The news was not so good one state further south, where Pinellas County, Florida (St. Petersburg/Clearwater) saw their Greenlight Pinellas referendum roundly defeated, with only 38% in favor. (A smaller similar measure was also defeated in Polk County, to the east of Tampa.) The referendum would have made enormous expansions to their existing bus service, added new bus rapid transit corridors, and begin laying the groundwork for light rail running through the spine of the county.

It’s a blow not just for Pinellas County, the most densely populated county in the state, but also for the Tampa region at large. Business and civic leaders were hoping that Pinellas would take a first step that Tampa would follow in 2016 with a measure of their own, as they stitch together a region with two major cities divided by the bay. Pinellas leaders can take heart, however, in the fact that many places have lost their first (or even second) run at an ambitious ballot measure, before winning in the end.

We’ll be back shortly with a look at some of the national and state candidate races, and the implications of all the moves in Congress will have on the precarious nature of the nation’s transportation fund, and the upcoming reauthorization of MAP-21 in 2015.

State

Massachusetts – Question 1 to repeal state’s new funding for transportation
Result: Measure Approved (52.9% – 47.1%)
T4A summary: Massachusetts vote a bellwether for efforts to raise state transportation revenue

Rhode Island – Question 6 transit bond measure
Result: Measure Approved (60% – 40%)
T4A summary: Rhode Island’s first statewide ballot measure to support transit

Wisconsin – Question 1 for transportation funding
Result: Measure Approved (79.9% – 20.1%)
T4A summary: Voters in two states consider measures to restrict funding to transportation uses

Maryland – Question 1 on transportation funding
Result: Measure Approved (81.6% – 18.4%)
T4A summary: Voters in two states consider measures to restrict funding to transportation uses

Texas – Proposition 1 to direct rainy day funds into highways
Result: Measure Approved (79.8% – 20.2%)
T4A summary: Texas looks to voters to ensure billions in highway funding

Louisiana – State infrastructure bank
Result: Measure Defeated (67.5% – 32.5%)

Local

Clayton County, GA – One percent sales tax to join MARTA and re-start bus service
Result: Measure Approved (74% – 26%)
T4A summary: After spurning it for decades, suburban Atlanta county seems poised to join regional transit system

City of Seattle, WA – Proposition 1 to add a 0.1% sales and use tax to prevent bus cuts
Result: Measure Approved (59% – 41%)

Austin, Texas – Proposition 1 for $600 million bond for light rail
Result: Measure Defeated (43% – 57%)

Pinellas County, Florida (St. Petersburg) – Greenlight Pinellas for improving transit service & adding light rail
Result: Measure defeated (38% – 62%)
T4America summary: Leaders say St. Petersburg measure key to economic success

Alameda County, CA – Measure BB for a half-percent increase in sales tax to fund local transit and transportation projects
Result: Measure Approved (70% – 30%)

Gainesville, FL (Alachua County) – 1% sales tax for a range of transportation improvements
Result: Measure Defeated (40% – 60%)

After spurning it for decades, suburban Atlanta county seems poised to join regional transit system

In many states local jurisdictions have to get permission from their state legislature to raise local funds for transportation. One of the most notable examples of this will be taking place in a county in the heart of metro Atlanta, Georgia.

Click for more stories and information about a few key issues that will be decided on November 4

From the day when Clayton County, one of metro Atlanta’s core five counties, had to cancel their bus transit service outright in 2010, local leaders have been trying to figure out how to bring back transit service back and better connect their residents with jobs and opportunities.

In a county with a large population of low-wage workers, residents and employers alike are hungry for an affordable and reliable way to get around and get to work. C-Tran, the former county-run bus service, provided more than 2 million rides each year, helping residents get to jobs — especially the thousands of jobs in or near bustling Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in the north end of the county.

Read a short story of how shutting down the system affected one Clayton resident. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Click to open

It was a huge blow to the residents of Clayton County when county commissioners shut the service down in 2010 in the face of a recession-fueled budget crisis. Federal start-up funds and support from the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority had kept the service going since the early 2000s, but with that funding drying up the county faced a deficit that was too much to overcome.

Clayton County voters will decide a one-percent sales tax on Nov. 4 that will bring them into the MARTA system and bring bus service into the county. Flickr photo by James Williamor.

On Nov. 4, Clayton County voters will decide on a measure to increase the local sales tax by a percent to join MARTA, the regional transit system. Doing so would restore bus service and jumpstart planning for bus rapid transit or a rail extension in the years to come. As county commissioners debated whether or not to put the question on the ballot, they heard hefty support from residents, who turned out to meetings to urge commissioners to make a vote happen. And most of the commissioners saw the need. From a piece by Next City, published just yesterday:

At a packed board of commissioners meeting on July 1st, former State Rep. Roberta Abdul Salaam described what this looked like for formerly bus-dependent residents.

“I have people, students, young men that can’t take jobs for the summer because we don’t have transportation for them,” she said. “And someone said earlier don’t make it emotional — well let me just apologize now. I get emotional when I see little old women walking down Tara Boulevard in the ditch in the rain, and there’s not even anywhere to pull over and pick her up.”

Yet voters in Clayton County, or anywhere else, can only have this opportunity if the state they live in has authorized local communities to raise revenues through ballot measures.

“Enabling” legislation

State enabling laws must be in place before local ballot measures can even be considered — they either have to be on the books already, or passed ahead of a specific measure (as happened in Clayton’s case). These laws can govern many aspects of local ballot measures, including the type and duration of the levy, the process for getting a measure on the ballot, the permissible uses for the revenue, and sometimes even the exact language that must be presented to the voters.

A handful of bills were passed recently enabling local governments to raise local revenues for transportation in MN, PA, IN, NV, and CA and bills were considered in AL, MD, MI, SC, SD, UT, VA and WA during the 2013-2014 sessions. We recently covered a notable example in Indiana, where a law was passed just this year allowing Indianapolis to finally raise local funding to invest in their ambitious regional IndyConnect plan.

To make this vote possible for Clayton County, the Georgia General Assembly had to pass a pair of laws to “enable” Clayton to take the measure to the ballot, and they did so in 2013, with some specific restrictions.

Interestingly, state law already provided for Clayton to be a part of MARTA, and as one of the five core counties included in the 1970’s charter actually had a vote on the MARTA board. But Clayton and two other counties declined to pass the sales tax, and only the City of Atlanta, Dekalb and Fulton counties ponied up. In the meantime, Clayton had used it’s available sales tax percentage — state law caps it — for other purposes. That meant that the state had to waive that cap specifically for Clayton so they could decide on the MARTA tax. (A second piece of legislation was required to restructure the MARTA board to give Clayton County two representatives on the board starting next year.)

The legislation specified that the vote be restricted to raising revenue to join MARTA, rather than contracting for service as in the past, and the county had to take action this year.

Read this short primer on enabling legislation from our “Measuring Up” package of resources geared around state transportation funding.

Measuring Up

All state enabling laws are not created equal. A great counter-example is the one provided by the same Georgia assembly just a few years earlier. After no fewer than three tries before the state legislature, the state finally gave all Georgia metropolitan regions the power to pass regional transportation sales taxes. But that also came with a mandated two-year political process to develop a project list that swelled to 157 highway and transit projects for Atlanta in the end.

That 2012 referendum to raise $7.2 billion to invest in regional transportation needs failed in metro Atlanta for a lot of reasons, but as we opined at the time, the way the enabling law was written by the legislature may have contributed to its demise.

“Many voters also complained of a sense that the project list was a goodie bag for various political interests and not a cohesive plan to address well-articulated needs. The Legislature-mandated process almost assured that outcome. It called for creating a 21-member “regional roundtable” made up of a mayor and county commissioner from each of the region’s ten counties, plus the mayor of Atlanta. While the “pro” campaign pitched the project list as a solution to congestion, the list struck many voters as a collection of pet local projects that did not necessarily add up to a thought-through plan.”

In the end, there was a lot of “include my project on the list and we’ll support yours” horse-trading amongst the representatives developing the project list that might have doomed the measure.

Clayton’s prospects on November 4

But Clayton voters face a simple question on November 4: raise local sales taxes by a percent to join MARTA, create new robust bus service into the county starting in March 2015, and save half of the revenues (locked away in escrow) for planning or building some higher capacity transit in the years to come. And one thing we know from experience with ballot measures is that the simpler the question and the more clear it is what the money is going to buy, the more likely voters are to support it.

It’s also worth looking back at how Clayton County voted on that aforementioned regional transportation tax from 2012 — one that did include restored local bus service for Clayton, but which wasn’t expected to begin service for at least two to four years after the vote. It also included a handful of road improvement projects and initial development of a long-awaited commuter rail line south toward Macon that would run through the county.

If you look at that graphic, where Clayton is highlighted near the bottom, the bulk of the county’s precincts supported it between a 42-66% clip, with a handful of precincts at numbers below that. On top of that, more than 7o percent of voters approved the concept of participation in a regional transit system in a nonbinding referendum on the ballot just a couple of years ago.

The local experts we talked to were all cautiously optimistic that it’s going to pass, and many local political analysts are suggesting that it could possibly win by a pretty significant margin. Of course, turnout will play a big role in what happens, as always. We’ll be watching closely on election night and reporting back here, so stay tuned.

Want to know more about enabling legislation? Need help doing what Clayton County had to do and getting your state to clear the way for a local revenue-raising measure? Join us in Denver in just a few weeks on Nov. 13-14 for Capital Ideas — the premier conference for state legislation related to new transportation revenue.

Locals encountering help or hindrance from states on their transportation plans

Flickr photo by John Greenfield http://www.flickr.com/photos/24858199@N00/10090187245/

Several places have been in the news lately as they find their ambitious efforts to solve transportation challenges hinging on legislative action this lawmaking season. In some, state legislators are helping out with enabling legislation, but in others they are challenging the concept of local control and threatening needed investment.

The prime case of the latter has been in Nashville, where a handful of Tennessee legislators decided to interfere in a regional Nashville plan to build a first-of-its-kind bus rapid transit system through the region’s core.

An initial measure from a non-Nashville lawmaker would have required a vote of the General Assembly to approve the BRT line, despite the state DOT’s role in planning the line as a member of the Nashville Metropolitan Planning Organization’s board. An amendment to an unrelated bill said flatly: ”No rapid bus project in a metropolitan form of government, such as Nashville, could be built without the permission of the … General Assembly.”

Mayors of Tennessee’s four large cities immediately saw the threat that legislative micromanaging posed to their ability to meet their economic challenges and fired off a letter (pdf) that helped persuade legislators to try a different tack. The House version now simply affirms the status quo that the DOT must approve use of state right-of-way for a transit line and that only the legislature can appropriate state funds.

But new language was added in the Senate’s version that would prohibit any transit system from picking up or dropping off passengers in the middle of state roads as a “safety” measure — exactly what’s planned for The Amp line — regardless of what the Federal Transit Administration or engineers at TDOT have to say about the safety track record of center-running BRT. (Center running BRT is already in use or on the way in Cleveland, OH; Eugene, OR; San Bernardino, CA; Chicago, IL; and a handful of other cities.)

Current conditions on Ashland in Chicago, and rendering of the new planned center-running BRT for the corridor. Does one of these streets look safer for pedestrians than the other?

In Indiana, meanwhile, the legislature finally granted metro Indianapolis the right to vote on funding a much-expanded bus network, including bus rapid transit. What it won’t include is light rail, as dictated by the new law, which would allow six counties to hold referendums to let voters decide whether to build a transit system using mostly income-tax revenue, according to the Indianapolis Star.

Despite the mode-specific directive, it was a big victory for the business community, who pointed out that the state stands to benefit if growth engine Indianapolis continues to succeed economically. The region is a hotbed of healthcare jobs, and once again, providing a better bus system — something Mayor Greg Ballard and region’s other leaders are committed to doing — means that those employers get access to a bigger pool of workers, and workers of all incomes can reach a greater range of jobs.

Four years after their bus service was completely canceled, Clayton County just south of Atlanta proper is catching a helping hand from the Georgia general assembly. Lawmakers just passed a measure that would allow Clayton County voters to vote on approving a penny sales tax to restore local transit operations — something voters, local leaders and citizens alike strongly support.

When Clayton County lost that bus service, they lost something that employers — especially those at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport — depended on to get employees to work every day. There are thousands of jobs at that enormous airport right at the edge of Clayton County, and a good transit connection was a boost for jobs and residents to benefit from that economic magnet.

Up in Minnesota, the state is moving a huge comprehensive funding package for transportation across the state — one of many states considering ways to raise their own new revenue for transportation. (See our tracker) A House committee voted 9-6 Friday to pass the comprehensive transportation funding bill (HF 2395). Similar legislation didn’t make it through the House committee in 2013.

Supporting and enabling these efforts is exactly what states should be doing as local cities and regions are trying desperately to make these sorts of investments a reality, usually with their own skin in the game; not obstructing them at every turn.

When a city or region wants to raise a tax via public ballot vote to improve their transportation network, shouldn’t the state leaders proudly support those efforts of a city bootstrapping their way up?

Editors note: We’re in the process of updating it with 2014 information, but you can find similar information to the Minnesota plan over on our State Funding Tracker, which focuses largely on state (i.e., not local) plans to fund transportation.

Congestion rankings make news, but what do they really mean? Very little for most residents

The Texas Transportation Institute always garners a flurry of headlines with the release of the annual Urban Mobility Report and its Travel Time Index (TTI), which purports to rank metro areas by congestion. Oft-cited and interesting though they may be, however, the rankings don’t really say much about the lives of the people who live in those places.

That’s because the TTI is a theoretical construct that doesn’t fully reflect what we experience on a day-to-day basis. Its fixation on peak-hour speeds ignores the actual time and distance of most residents’ commutes.

As an example, consider the findings for Chicago and Atlanta, two metros that ranked close together in the report released this week, as they have in years in past. According to the 2012 Travel Time Index (pdf), they’re near the top with scores of 1.24 and 1.25 respectively, and tied for seventh in yearly delay per commuter.

The graphic below was created based on an earlier Urban Mobility Report, from 2009, but its key points are valid today. At the time Chicago was actually 23 percent worse than Atlanta according to the TTI. That must mean the commute for most Chicagoans was worse than for most Altantans, right? Well, actually … no.

In truth, Chicago commuters had an average travel time of almost twenty minutes less than their counterparts in Atlanta. In Chicago, the average peak period travel time is 35.6 minutes – 38 percent less than the 57.4 minutes in Atlanta. A major reason for the better highway performance in Chicago is that drivers do not have to travel as far as drivers in Atlanta – 13.5 miles compared with 21.6 miles.

Study that for a minute. Most Chicagoans live closer to work and spend less time getting there. Metro Atlanta residents spend much more time in the car. Yet the two are ranked similarly because the difference in traffic speed during peak hour versus off-peak (say, 3 a.m.) is similar in both places. Ultimately, the TTI doesn’t really care about overall quality of life for the majority of residents. It’s all about how fast you can drive at peak hour.

The Washington, D.C. and Denver metro areas are two that have seen their congestion rankings remain stubbornly high. In truth, though, both places have seen pay-off from actions that are expanding the share of homes in walkable neighborhoods with access to good public transportation and other options. As a result, commute distances are dropping. More people are living closer to work, more are walking, biking or taking transit to work. They are avoiding peak-hour traffic altogether – or spending less time driving because jobs and shopping is closer together. That’s making life better for them – they report enjoying their commutes more than freeway travelers – and it’s taking the pressure off the overcrowded freeways.

We’re not big fans of congestion. We think a lot of it could have been avoided with better planning and smarter development. But doing more of the same is not going to solve the problem. That’s why it’s so critically important that the performance measures being adopted by states and the feds under the new MAP-21 look beyond the blinkered TTI and delay measures for indicators of transportation success. How far do most people have to travel for work? How long does it take them? What is most effective at reducing the amount of time it takes to get places? Those are the kinds of metrics we need to use in order to find real solutions to help people spend less time in or stay out of those rush-hour traffic jams.

Telling only half the story of congestion, travel time and the quality of our metro areas

A popular study on traffic and congestion in our metropolitan areas is widely cited by the national, state and local media with every annual release, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. Far from it. That’s because measuring congestion while ignoring the actual time and distance spent commuting is a poor measure of what residents’ actually experience on a day-to-day basis.

The popular and oft-cited Texas Transportation Institute’s annual Urban Mobility Report isn’t an incorrect metric, it just tells half of the story. For starters, let’s consider two metros that appear to be ranked pretty close together in the latest report out today. Atlanta and Chicago appear to both be pretty miserable in regards to congestion, right? According to the 2012 Travel Time Index (pdf), they’re near the top with TTI scores of 1.24 and 1.25 respectively, and tied for seventh in yearly delay per commuter. (In 2009, Chicago’s TTI was 1.43 – 23% worse than Atlanta’s 1.35.)

That must mean that the commute is just as bad in both of these areas, right? Well, no.

These statistics are from 2007, due to a limitation with how we can break down the TTI data.

Take an informal poll of your friends and co-workers: Who wouldn’t agree that a 35-minute commute is better than a 57-minute commute? Then why do we rely on measuring performance in a way that says the exact opposite? The TTI is almost the exact same for these two metros now, yet Chicago commuters had an average travel time of almost twenty minutes less than their counterparts in Atlanta a few years ago. That’s because TTI focuses only on how fast we can drive at peak while ignoring how far apart the destinations are in these two places.

In Chicago, the average trip to work is 35.6 minutes – 38% less time than the 57.4 minutes it takes Atlantans to drive to work. A major reason for the better highway performance in Chicago is that drivers do not have to travel as far as drivers in Atlanta – 13.5 miles compared with 21.6 miles. The amount of time it takes to go somewhere isn?t just about speed, that’s only half of it — it?s influenced both by how fast you travel and the distance you have to travel. Chicago and Atlanta are different places, so what about comparing an apple to an apple?

Denver, Colorado (8th worst TTI in 2012) has experienced a rebirth in its city core in the last decade or two, with residents flocking to new apartments and homes in the city center and close-in neighborhoods, attracted in part by the huge investment in regional transit. More people live near transit today in Denver than years ago, and with accompanying investments in new housing and jobs near transit and in more walkable neighborhoods, that means more people have shorter trips to get to work each day. Yet TTI shows that commuting in Denver is far worse in 2007 than it was 25 years ago. (TTI in 2012 is 1.27)

Look at the average travel time in 2007 in Denver compared to 25 years ago — it’s about the same. Rush hour delays have almost tripled, but the travel time without traffic (a good proxy for the average length of trips) actually decreased by almost ten minutes. Destinations are closer. Residents have more options. Commuters take shorter trips.

Denver downtown construction near light rail. Creative Commons Flickr photo by vxla ***

Relying solely on TTI to try and measure congestion and travel time in your city is like measuring only measuring two dimensions of a three-dimensional object. Like measuring the length and height of a new couch for your living room while ignoring the depth. The couch is 48 inches tall, but without measuring the depth, do you have any idea if it’ll fit through your front door?

This gets at the core problem with TTI — when cities and regions (or the USDOT) rely solely on TTI as the single measure of congestion and make all their decisions about future transportation investments based on only part of the whole picture, regions prioritize projects to reduce TTI or shave a few seconds off of rush hour delay.

Legislators, the Federal Highway Administration, state DOTs, and newspapers all use the Travel Time Index to measure highway performance. Then we spend millions or billions to build projects that lower this number, but we rarely get to work in less time.

As the nation shifts to a performance-based transportation system — beginning under MAP-21 — it is key that the first national performance measures get this right. Any national performance measure needs to allow communities to consider both factors — speed and distance.

There’s probably a handful of federal, state or local legislators looking at the headlines in their local newspaper today about congestion in their metro region. Maybe they’re saying “we’ve got to do something about this!” We need to do “something” — they’re right! But accurately measuring the problem is the only way to find an appropriate solution.

Let’s start there.

Is metro Atlanta vote a bellwether for transportation funding?

Flickr photo of Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction” by Felicity Green

In my best grandpa voice: Way back in 19 and 96, as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I wrote a series of stories under the heading “Gridshock” that laid out the traffic hell facing metro Atlanta absent something resembling a plan. At the time, the Georgia DOT was wrapping up its $3 billion “Freeing the Freeways” paving bonanza, and the last planned extension of MARTA rapid rail was winding down.

Meanwhile, metro Atlanta was sprawling out of control, spreading out in all directions and in ways that ensured that options other than lengthening car commutes would be hard to provide. At the same time, the metastasizing traffic was far out-pacing the existing and projected highway funding, and the region was facing a collision with the Clean Air Act that would put federal dollars on hold for several years.

Fast forward to 2012. After three tries in the Legislature to win the right to vote on a regional sales tax for transportation and two years of a mandated political process to develop a project list, metro Atlanta voters July 31 finally had a say over a bold transportation spending plan.

The result: Still no plan. Two-thirds of the voters rejected the Transportation Local Option Sales Tax – or T-SPLOST – which would have put $7.2 billion toward 157 projects throughout the 10-county region, evenly split between highways and transit. It was a serious blow to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, whose leaders led the battle to get the right to have a regional vote, and to politician-supporters such as Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. (His City of Atlanta voters, though, comprised the only jurisdiction to approve the measure.)

But is it a bellwether for transportation votes in other states and metros? The short answer, most likely, is “no”. To be sure, many were following it nationally. The vote came on the heels of MAP-21, a federal bill that seems to presage a shrinking federal role in transportation funding, at least for the near term. Many wondered: Will metro regions and localities be able to make up the gap and bootstrap their way out of congestion and mobility woes?

Like most ballot measures, the Atlanta vote failed for its own peculiar reasons. The Legislature had ensured an uphill battle by mandating the vote be held during the primary election, rather than the November general election. The vast majority of contested races were in Republican districts in the suburbs. The Republican primaries drew an anti-tax electorate to the polls, while residents in the core, who tend to be less tax-averse, had fewer reasons to turn out.

The vote also bore out what we heard in focus groups there last year: Georgia voters are especially negative about their government. Polls and exit interviews showed that many were mistrustful of Georgia DOT on the heels of outrage over the decision to continue tolls on Georgia 400 after the promised sunset. MARTA, too, has been under the cloud of a long fiscal crisis as a result of the economic slump and depressed sales tax revenues.

Many voters also complained of a sense that the project list was a goodie bag for various political interests and not a cohesive plan to address well-articulated needs. The Legislature-mandated process almost assured that outcome. It called for creating a 21-member “regional roundtable” made up of a mayor and county commissioner from each of the region’s ten counties, plus the mayor of Atlanta. While the “pro” campaign pitched the project list as a solution to congestion, the list struck many voters as a collection of pet local projects that did not necessarily add up to a thought-through plan.

Was this an anti-transit — or anti-transit rider — vote? Certainly, some of that sentiment exists. But remember there was plenty of money in this for road building too. As someone who lived in and wrote about the region for many years, I think the other reasons offered here had far more to do with the loss than the public transportation components did. Atlanta is made up of thousands of newer and younger residents who do not carry the baggage of race-based, anti-transit battles of previous decades. Most of them just want a system that works, regardless of mode, and they want efficiency and accountability in their operation.

Are there generalized lessons to be taken from the Atlanta experience? Two important ones:

First, regional votes in places without a tradition of regional institutions and decision-making are an extremely heavy lift. In our focus groups, the idea of a regional solution held a lot of appeal. But in reality, voters were being asked to send a lot of their money to a “regional” approach with unclear lines of accountability. The money would have gone to GDOT, MARTA, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and to local jurisdictions throughout 10 counties.

But with money spread all over the place, where did the buck actually stop? They were being asked to trust, not just their local electeds, but government writ large. In this day and time, with this electorate, that may have just been too much to ask.

And second, important though it is, a project list is not necessarily a plan. The Atlanta proponents understood that the 70 percent of transportation tax measures that pass nationwide almost always have a clearly articulated list of promised projects. Given the legislature-mandated process and the resulting list of 157 projects, voters perceived the T-SPLOST as a grab bag of pet projects, offered with a plethora of justifications.

If you can’t sum up the rationale for the plan in a couple of lines, and point to an elected official or body that is ultimately responsible, you are going to have a tough time. Again, our polling and focus group work, as well as lessons gathered from many of our members during ballot fights, bear this out.

So where does this leave metro Atlanta? Two follow-up pieces are worth reading. In one, longtime Atlanta columnist Maria Saporta – a devoted regionalist – suggests it’s time for the core to go it alone. (The piece also includes a very interesting map of the voting results, included below.) And in the other, Georgia Sierra Club President Colleen Kiernan recaps what happened, and suggests the Club’s “strange bedfellows” alliance with the Tea Party may offer a way forward.

Update: Also worth reading is this hopeful editorial in Creative Loafing encouraging those Atlantans that supported the measure to imagine a path forward together, similar to Maria Saporta’s suggestion of the core “going it alone.”

Graphic of the vote by precinct, provided by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

Atlanta transportation vote: “You pay it one way or another”

It took three tries in the Georgia legislature for metro Atlanta to win the right to vote itself a regional sales tax to fix its transportation woes, and another two years of a grinding political process to come up with a list of 157 highway and transit projects that just might do the trick. Now comes the really hard part: Convincing the voters likely to show up for the July 31 primary election to vote for it.

A piece in the New York Times today lays out what is at stake:

For more than a decade [ed. note: make that two decades], Atlanta has been among the fastest-growing regions in the country, but the road and rail system in a state that ranks 49th in per capita transportation spending just could not keep up. Hourlong commutes are common, and more than 80 percent of commuters drive alone. … The approach is also an attempt to thread the political needle in an era when the recession and smaller-government sentiment have made any effort at new public spending, especially one with the word “tax” attached, a Sisyphean task.

A Sunday piece by the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Ariel Hart noted that, without the sales tax revenue, the region is likely to be so strapped for transpo cash that tolls are the only real option. As a consternated voter told her: “I guess you pay it one way or another.”

A nice overview today by Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt noted that, “An odd coalition of opponents has come together including the local Sierra Club, the DeKalb County NAACP and the Tea Party Patriots.” Coalition might be too strong a word; these groups aren’t actually working together, but they each have their reasons.

The Sierra Club feels that a few big highway projects, including an old bugaboo known as the Northern Arc (of a defunct proposed “Outer Perimeter”), make it a deal killer. They hope that Atlanta could follow in the footsteps of Seattle, where voters turned down a highway and transit referendum only to approve a transit-only measure the next year. Supporters of this month’s project list argue that the convoluted process for getting a vote almost certainly requires another trip through the legislature and a couple years’ delay, with very uncertain political prospects after that.

The DeKalb NAACP feels the county got short-changed by getting a rapid bus line rather than rail, among other concerns. And the Tea Party folks actually prefer a regional gas tax over a sales tax. While that might be a more responsible position than a reflexive “no taxes” stance, there are several problems. One is that the gas tax would have to be fairly stiff to raise the same amount of money as a penny sales tax. The other is that gas taxes are even less popular than sales taxes.

The biggest hurdle supporters face is the likely composition of the electorate, in a low turnout primary race where most of the contested races are among suburban Republicans. Support is strongest in the urban core within the I-285 beltway, but there are fewer reasons for those voters to go to the polls than in the farther-flung suburbs. At the same time, though, many of those suburban voters face some of the worst traffic, because their communities grew up almost overnight and the infrastructure has hardly kept pace. In a couple of weeks we’ll know whether they think a penny sales tax would truly, as the campaign ads say, “Untie Atlanta”.

This photo accompanied the New York Times July 16 piece on Atlanta's regional transportation vote.