equity Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Transportation For America

Electric vehicles aren’t good for equity, but we should try

An electric Smart car charges at a curbside charging station in DC

Electric vehicles, while vital for reducing emissions and meeting our long-term emissions reduction goals, are not a good strategy for improving existing inequities in transportation. But there are specific things we can and should do to make this transition more equitable than it otherwise would be.

Yesterday, in part one of this post, we chronicled why it’s going to be difficult or impossible for electric vehicle adoption to be a major force for improving equity, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it as equitable as possible. Here are some ideas for how:

E-bike incentives and infrastructure

Most daily trips on average are short, but many can still be just outside of the realm of capability for a lot of people to take by walking or biking, especially in hot climates that make it difficult. E-bikes are a game changing option for many people, increasing the ease, range, and comfort of biking trips while still delivering the public health, space-efficiency, and zero-emission benefits of bikes. They are way cheaper than electric cars and therefore cheaper to subsidize. Perhaps this is why e-bike sales have more-than doubled last year, and why e-bikes are projected to out-sell electric cars globally in the coming decade. For the cost of the incentive for a new electric car, you could outright buy an electric bike for someone. All this means we can help get more e-bikes into the hands of people for whom it can make a real impact on their access to opportunity, and reduce emissions. The e-bike incentive in the Build Back Better Act is a great start. To get the most out of this new option, we also need to invest in infrastructure where e-bike riders feel safe.

Fleet conversions

Cars for individual drivers sit parked most of the time, using up valuable space for parking—and not presenting as big and quick an emissions reduction. Transitioning institutional fleets to electric has a good return on investment, whether they are for carshare fleets that give low-car households access to a car when they need it, rental fleets that quickly rack up mileage, business fleets that are used by company personnel throughout the day, or diesel trucks and buses that produce more pollution. Incentives can also target non-profits that deliver valuable community services. We should also consider targeting high-polluting areas for specific and notable impacts, for example prioritizing truck conversions at ports adjacent to neighborhoods that bear the brunt of port pollution. If we’re going to subsidize electric vehicles, focusing on fleets first can build the EV market while delivering the most bang-for-the-buck on pollution reduction and benefits to impacted communities.

Deploying the right charging strategy in denser urban environments

A heavy bike sits to the side next to a hanging bike rack

One of the benefits of EVs for consumers is charging at home. If you plug in your car overnight, you never have to go to a charging station unless you’re taking a trip that exceeds your car’s range. Your car has a “full tank” every morning. But that only works if you have a dedicated parking space with access to your own electricity. In denser urban environments, many people lack a driveway or garage to charge an EV. Historically excluded communities are much less likely to have the kind of dedicated parking where overnight charging from your own outlet is possible.

Photo on left courtesy of @kiel_by_bike

We’ll need a comprehensive set of solutions to address this that won’t all fit in this blog post (and no one has all the answers for that yet). But there are two areas to focus on. First, we need building codes that require charging access in multifamily housing parking AND bike parking that accommodates level entry and charging for e-bikes that are much heavier. No one wants to lug a heavy e-bike up and down stairs. Second, we need a comprehensive policy on curbside charging that considers the vast complexity of managing curb space, which is something we have written about before, including:

Prioritizing carshare
Protecting current and future bike and bus lanes
Integrating chargers with public space and ensuring an uncluttered pedestrian environment including quality Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) access
Ensuring deployment in historically excluded neighborhoods

Phasing out ICE vehicles through legislation

Much of the discussion around getting EVs into the hands of consumers has been around incentives and subsidies. This is an approach to benefit industry and wealthier new-car buyers. At this point, every major car company has electric models coming to the market soon. If we need to transition the fleet to electric, rather than offer subsidies to buyers who least need them, eventually we’ll need to consider both carrots and sticks. Why not follow the lead of California, which is moving to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, and set a date to phase out new internal combustion engine (ICE) cars by a certain date a few years from now?

Workforce training and support

As with any major change in how we do things, some jobs will disappear and others will be created. We’ll need programs to support mechanics and other workers impacted by the EV transition. For example, programs supporting the EV transition should incorporate training for mechanics who work on cars, trucks and buses so they can transition to working on electric vehicles. Likewise, we also need to provide workforce education, training, and certification for electricians installing and maintaining EV charging infrastructure. Training for new manufacturing jobs should target deployment of jobs and job training programs so that frontline communities are prioritized and have an opportunity to benefit from manufacturing jobs. Finally, policies should require prevailing wages for jobs installing publicly funded charging infrastructure and/or union representation for publicly subsidized manufacturing jobs. The Coalition Helping America Rebuild and Go Electric (CHARGE), with which we’ve worked this past year, has done a great job thinking about workforce considerations as part of their policy recommendations.

EV advocates can and should do what they can to address equity in the EV transition, but they need to recognize that the strategies for doing this are by their very nature afterthoughts. EVs are a GHG reduction strategy, not an equity strategy. Investing in transportation options like public transit, walking and biking, and meeting the demand for new (attainable) housing in locations where people naturally drive less is the way to truly address transportation equity as part of an overall GHG reduction strategy.

If you’re interested in digging deeper into equity and electrification, EVNoire and Forth, two partners we work with in the EV space, are hosting the E-Mobility Diversity Equity and Inclusion Conference next Wednesday and Thursday, November 17 – 18.

Electric vehicles are good for emissions, bad for advancing equity

A Black man walks to a bus stop along a multi-lane highway

Climate funders, electric vehicle industry groups, and environmentalists are rightly confronting the question of how to address equity in the electric vehicle space. They may not like the answer.

Converting the transportation fleet to electric vehicles is essential (but not sufficient) for us to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets that can limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis. As the crisis of social justice has also risen to the fore in the past several years, advocates for EVs are rightly looking for ways to address equity in how we deploy electric vehicles.

So how do we bolster equity in a significant way by increasing the adoption of EVs? The hard-to-hear answer is that we don’t. Other strategies must be paired with this transition to ensure that we don’t make existing inequities worse.

Cars are expensive to own and operate, full stop. The infrastructure that serves them is expensive and environmentally damaging, whether they are fueled by gas or electricity. Many people cannot drive due to age or disability. A transportation system in which everyone must drive to reach jobs and services is by definition one that is not equitable because it excludes many people from participating fully. Electric vehicles fail to fix these problems.

Iceberg chart showing the many invisible aspects of car-related transportation emissions

Building and maintaining lots of roads also produces significant climate impacts, generating emissions from the resources required and creating heat islands that exacerbate the impact of heat waves. Expanses of asphalt and concrete roads and parking lots also increase stormwater runoff and flooding, and use up a lot of land. Because they are heavier, tire friction from EVs releases even more particulate matter and micro-plastic pollution than equivalent standard cars which already has a disproportionate impact on low-income communities and communities of color.

Subsidies for EV purchase and EV infrastructure—expected to become even more prominent in the years ahead—benefit EV buyers, who skew wealthier and whiter. Cars are so expensive (even more so than a decade ago) that it takes a pretty big incentive to convince many people to switch over, especially lower-income people who are more likely considering a used vehicle if they’re buying one at all.

We do need to transition our vehicle fleet to electric vehicles, but the best way to fundamentally address equity (while also reducing emissions) is to focus on the affordable, healthier transportation options we already know how to provide: expanded public transit service (as we chronicled last week) and more safe streets for more people to walk, bike, and roll. Our Driving Down Emissions report provides the right framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while addressing equity, if equity is really the focus:

The good news is that, when paired with other strategies, we can make a significant dent in the growth of emissions simply by satisfying the pent-up market demand for affordable homes in the kinds of walkable, connected communities where residents drive far less each day than their counterparts in more sprawling locations. And providing these more affordable homes would help make the transition to a lower carbon economy in a way that doesn’t place a heavier burden on those with less means.

EVs, while important for reducing emissions, just aren’t the right arena for tackling transportation equity, which is why it’s so important to pair significant and historic investments in expanded public transit and safe streets along with any investments in the transition to electric vehicles. Improving transportation options will also have positive impacts on public health and the environment in historically marginalized communities, which already deal with staggering levels of pollution from transportation and other sources, as chronicled in last week’s devastating map of industrial pollution from ProPublica.

Having to buy a brand new car isn’t the only way to transition out of an older, gasoline-powered, polluting vehicle—or minimizing their use. Making more trips possible by transit, walking, biking, or rolling would bring significant positive impacts on our climate goals.

In a second post, we’ll take a closer look at some specific ways to ensure that the transition is as equitable as possible.

Strides towards Building Back Better the US transportation program

The revised version of the Build Back Better Act preserves $40 billion in important additions that will advance racial equity, address climate change by lowering emissions, and foster community-oriented economic recovery. T4America is encouraged to see these inclusions, but they’ll be a drop in the bucket compared to the much larger infrastructure deal, which doubles down on our dangerous, disconnected, high-speed-vehicle-dominated status quo.

UPDATED 11/8/2021: The infrastructure deal (the IIJA) passed on its own on Friday night (Nov. 5), minus the budget reconciliation act (BBB) detailed below. Read our short statement here and see the updated sections noted below.

“We are encouraged that the revised Build Back Better Act maintains several important proposals to improve the infrastructure deal by reducing emissions and addressing climate change, improving access to transit service—especially for those who can benefit from it most—and advancing racial equity,” said T4America director Beth Osborne.

“We are encouraged to know that Congress is taking seriously the need to address climate change, equity, and economic recovery. But the $40 billion included here unfortunately won’t be enough to redeem the $645 billion-plus infrastructure bill that will continue to make many of those same problems worse. As we’ve said throughout the second half of this year, the administration has a difficult task ahead to advance their stated goals of repair, safety, climate, equity, and access to jobs and services through these small improvements, while spending historic amounts on unchanged programs that have historically made those issues worse.”

How did we get here? An explainer

The last year has been one of the most complex for those who care about transportation policy, and it’s easy to get lost with all the acronyms and jargon as bills have been introduced and replaced and merged together. Over the past year the House and Senate made respective attempts at writing new five-year transportation bills to replace this year’s expiring FAST Act, with wildly diverging results.

The House’s five-year INVEST Act “commits to a fix it first approach, prioritizing safety over speed, and connecting people to jobs and essential services—whether they drive or not,” as T4 Director Beth Osborne said in the summer when it passed. It made notable strides to fix past problems ($20 billion for tearing down divisive highways) while taking the vital step to update the underlying programs that are continuing to create those same problems.

The Senate took a different approach, ignoring the INVEST Act and crafting their five-year transportation policy as part of the larger infrastructure bill (the IIJA). Their bill doubled down on the status quo—more money for the same old things—with important but marginal attempts to account for equity, climate, repair, electric vehicle infrastructure, safety, and community connections. The Senate approved that infrastructure bill and sent it to the House for final consideration, leaving the House in the unenviable position of choosing between their INVEST Act or supporting the larger infrastructure bill—one of the president’s key priorities.

UPDATE 11/8/2021: After months of the debate about combining the above infrastructure deal with the budget reconciliation act detailed below (read on for details about that), Congress finally moved on the infrastructure deal alone and approved it on Friday, November 5. This means that everything detailed above has now passed through Congress: the $600+ billion infrastructure deal which also included a five-year reauthorization to replace the expiring FAST Act. Read our short statement about that deal here.

The Build Back Better Act and the modest but notable transportation improvements within it (detailed below) are still awaiting action from Congress. Some other updates have been made to the post below to reflect that only the Build Back Better Act is still up for consideration at this point.[End of update. -Ed]

During the fall, Congress also began considering President Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act through the mechanism known as budget reconciliation to advance funding for all sorts of programs, including transportation and the infrastructure bill. This gave the House Transportation & Infrastructure (T&I) Committee an opening to make additive improvements to the lackluster infrastructure bill (IIJA) included in reconciliation that would focus on climate, equity, transit, and connecting communities. Here are three notable improvements we urged T&I to include, which were included in the initial version:

Affordable Housing Access Program – Provides $10 billion for competitive grants to support access to affordable housing and the enhancement of mobility for residents in disadvantaged communities or neighborhoods, in persistent poverty communities, or for low-income riders generally.
Community Climate Incentive Grants – Provides $4 billion towards addressing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions, specifically $1 billion for state incentives and $3 billion in competitive grant funding for regional and local government entities to pursue carbon and GHG reduction projects.
Neighborhood Access and Equity Grants – Provides $4 billion for competitive grants towards improving affordable transportation access via removing transportation barriers, building community connections that promote active and affordable transportation, and community capacity building aimed at assessing community impacts and enhancing public involvement in the decision making process.

Though members of the House were ready to move on this budget reconciliation bill and the infrastructure bill in September, the deal stalled due to opposition in the Senate from Senators Manchin (D-WV) and Sinema (D-AZ), who objected to the reconciliation bill’s top line spending extremely late in the process.

Where are we now?

In late October, Congress presented a revised and pared-back $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act. We are encouraged to see that the drafters maintained the above three provisions which will significantly contribute towards equity, climate change mitigation, and fostering community connections.

But the (now approved!) $645-plus billion infrastructure deal (the IIJA) is the elephant in the Build Back Better Act room, and its’ shortcomings dwarf these good and worthy $40 billion improvements. As we said in our statement upon the IIJA’s passage, “the transportation portion of the infrastructure bill spends a lot of money but fails to target it to the needs of the day: building strong economic centers, providing equitable access to opportunity, addressing catastrophic climate change, improving safety, or repairing infrastructure in poor condition.”

It will be critical to build upon the work laid out upon passage of both the IIJA and the Build Back Better Act to make the most of the US transportation program to advance repair, safety, climate, equity, and community connection priorities and hold Congress and the administration accountable to deliver on what they are promising.

A way to improve the infrastructure deal

The transportation programs for the budget reconciliation package would help fill the gaps left by the bipartisan infrastructure deal.

Close-up of Capitol building — *Photo by S Chia on Flickr*

Update 9/21: This post was updated to include progress made in the House since its original post date.

Congress’ final infrastructure deal (the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) didn’t live up to the original bipartisan package announced with pride by the White House and Senate on June 24, cutting transit funding by $10 billion while almost all other areas matched the original proposal. The House’s budget reconciliation package takes steps to restore this funding, while also going further to provide equitable access to goods and services, improve climate outcomes, and reduce the negative impacts of the transportation system on disadvantaged communities.

The House’s reconciliation package includes a new $10 billion transit program, helping to rectify the $10 billion taken from transit in the final bipartisan infrastructure bill. This funding includes flexibility for operations support, which will be key for transit agencies hit hard by the pandemic. It’s also specifically designed to connect residents of disadvantaged or persistent poverty communities to jobs and essential services.

Another win for equity: the budget also provides $4 billion for communities negatively impacted by transportation. These funds can be used to improve walkability, reduce the public health impacts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and improve road safety.

There’s an additional $4 billion for incentive grants for states that reduce GHG emissions significantly or adopt targets to reach zero emissions by 2050. Funding is also included for USDOT to institute a GHG emissions performance measure to help prioritize projects that reduce travel time and emissions. Former President Trump repealed this measure and reinstating it is one of our key tasks for the Biden administration.

To help address needs at a local level, the House added $6 billion to advance local surface transportation projects.

The House also added $10 billion for the planning and development of public high-speed rail projects and $150 million for credit risk premium assistance, making it easier for smaller railroads to access and benefit from these funds. This funding will help improve passenger rail service, making it a more convenient and reliable form of transportation.

We enthusiastically support these programs and encourage you to tell your senator to include them in the final budget reconciliation package.

Three ways reconciliation can restore funds taken from transit and equity

Nancy Pelosi speaking into a microphone with Chuck Schumer on her right, AFGE behind her

With the bipartisan infrastructure deal approved by the Senate, opportunities to shift long-term transportation policy will shift to the House and to program implementation. The opportunity in the House is through targeted investments via the budget reconciliation bill that will accompany the House infrastructure bill vote.

(UPDATE 8/18: Clarified details on the passage of the Affordable Care Act)

After a strong five-year reauthorization proposal was approved by the House, the Senate transformed their reauthorization offering into a larger bipartisan infrastructure deal, funding everything from broadband to water infrastructure, which passed the Senate last week. This deal, which was crafted and passed in the Senate with the White House’s backing, doubled down on maintaining the status quo in regards to transportation policy, focusing on highway construction and expansion without incorporating maintenance of roads and bridges as the priority, improving transportation safety, and better connecting communities.

Rep. Peter DeFazio criticized the deal, specifically citing the bill’s treatment of public transportation.

From Washington Post Live

Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly refused to approve the Senate’s deal, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act without the Senate first approving a sweeping budget reconciliation bill that focuses on strategic national investments across a broad spectrum of infrastructure concerns, including but not limited to agriculture, environment (air and water), education, first responders, and public health. The Senate granted her wish, passing a budget resolution, kicking off the reconciliation process, and this bill provides an opportunity to invest more in transit funding, including transit operations.

What is budget reconciliation?

As noted in the graphic below, the Senate budget resolution provides key directions to specific committees on both the House and Senate side on how to program the specific budget called for in the resolution. (Budget reconciliation is often used to pass more controversial or partisan legislation. For example, the final Affordable Care Act package resulted from the House passing the Senate’s healthcare bill and then amending it through the reconciliation process. However, reconciliation only happens once each year as part of the annual budget-making process.) The House will return next week, with respective committees deliberating how they will program and craft legislative text to the directives of the Senate’s budget resolution, before cobbling together the final reconciliation bill for passage in both chambers of Congress.

Diagram listing the steps of budget reconciliation — Image from Peter G. Peterson Foundation

As the respective committees in the House and Senate contemplate legislative text for the final reconciliation bill, there are key restrictions for what can be included. Unfortunately, introducing brand new policies or making major policy changes not connected directly to new funding are difficult if not impossible.

As the graphic illustrates, any legislative text in the final reconciliation must pertain to policy that has budgetary impacts and stays within the programming directions and funding limits of the budget resolution.

Table showing changes that are permitted and not permitted in budget reconciliation — Image from Twitter/ House Budget GOP

As it pertains to transportation, the resolution allocates $60 billion to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to program as they deem prudent, while also adding unspoken pressure not to revisit items called for in the IIJA. The resolution also calls for an additional $30 billion for respective Senate committees focused on surface transportation to program accordingly.

Within those constraints in place for this reconciliation process, T4America has outlined three key investments that need to be made to better connect communities and improve equity and climate outcomes.

1. Increasing public transportation funding levels by $10 billion

The original bipartisan infrastructure framework, agreed to and announced by the President and the Senator’s part of the negotiations in June, called for $49 billion for transit. As the final IIJA was set, transit was the only part of the plan that took a cut (of $10 billion) from that original proposal, down to $39 billion. Less money for transit means greater challenges for transit agencies, for keeping transit running, and making the necessary capital investments, including transit electrification. There is much more that can be done to improve transit, but advocating simply for restoring the agreed funding amount is an easy fix within the limits of the budget resolution.

2. Increasing funding for the reconnecting communities program by $12 billion

President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) contained approximately $24 billion for reconnecting communities (tearing down highways that separate marginalized communities, reintegrating community mobility and streetscapes). The Senate’s deal slashed that program down to just $1 billion. (The House’s INVEST Act allocated $20 billion.) By restoring at least some of this program’s funding, meaningful progress can be made to reconnect and reinvest in diverse communities across the United States.

3. Increasing funding for zero-emission vehicles and charging infrastructure by $7.5 billion

Currently, transportation is responsible for a significant portion of climate change-inducing emissions, but emerging technologies are making it possible for reliable zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs). Meeting the moment with significant investments in ZEVs (especially medium and heavy duty vehicles such as transit, school bus, and municipal fleet vehicles) and their associated charging infrastructure will help drastically curb emissions. This funding would also involve investments in domestic manufacturing to help ramp up capacity and lower costs to deliver on ZEVs and their charging infrastructure.

While Congress is in recess and members are in their home districts, it is a great time for constituents to engage their members on these issues. Share these three simple, key investment priorities for reconciliation with your members of Congress, while explaining what these investments can mean in your local community in regards to jobs, equity, and climate change.

The bipartisan infrastructure deal’s passage: More money for more of the same

Yesterday the Senate passed the bipartisan infrastructure deal, which incorporates the Senate transportation reauthorization in all its good and all its flaws. We outline what’s in it and where to go from here.

an out of service bus drives through an intersection — The White House and Senate’s infrastructure deal says a lot about change, but largely maintains the broken status quo. Photo by BenderTJ on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Mostly lip service for climate and equity

The bipartisan infrastructure deal includes a lot of new spending, but that spending isn’t directed toward outcomes, much less the priorities that the President articulated in The American Jobs Plan. Though this bill mentions safety, climate, and equity often, as it stands, it will fail to produce meaningful shifts. “The White House will soon discover that they’ve dealt themselves a challenging hand in their long-term effort to address climate change and persistent inequities, while kicking the can down a crumbling road that’s likely to stay that way,” T4America director Beth Osborne said in our full statement after Tuesday’s final vote.

Overall, despite all the headlines about the $1.2 trillion total investment, the bulk of the bill’s five-year funding for transportation will be governed by the two reauthorization proposals approved by Senate committees earlier this year and folded into this deal. (Here’s some of what we had to say about the highway title, and the Commerce committee’s rail and safety title. A transit title was never produced by the Banking committee.)

Some funds ($1 billion) will go to reconnecting communities separated by highways, an important step in undoing the ongoing damage of urban renewal programs. However, these funds are a fraction of the $20 billion originally proposed by the House and are dwarfed by historic increases in highway spending, without any guarantee that future highway expansions won’t separate more communities. (This isn’t just some historic, old problem from the Civil Rights era—it continues today. See I-45 in Houston, I-49 in Shreveport, I-5 in Portland, etc.)

There’s language supporting Complete Streets and vulnerable transit users, but the overall status quo approach to safety will undermine those modest improvements. States are still allowed to shift safety funds for non-safety projects and set annual “safety” targets for increasing numbers of people to die on their roads, with no penalties or accountability for doing so. Competitive funding is offered for states, regions, and local governments, but local leaders still have very little control over the projects and the designs of projects that will be built in their neighborhoods with formula funds.

This bill includes a climate program that many states can opt out of, so long as their population and economy is growing faster than their carbon emissions. It offers funding for electric refueling stations, but a late change diverted one-third of those funds to emissions-producing natural gas and propane stations. And the freight program is still written to have states identify their biggest freight needs and then require the majority of the available freight funding to only address the highway projects on that list.

There were four amendments that could have significantly improved the bill’s repair, climate, and equity outcomes (listed below). Along with nearly all of the 400 amendments offered, none of these four were even considered.

Sen. Kaine (VA) offered a proposal to require a “fix it first” approach to highway funding
Sen. Klobuchar (MN) offered a proposal to eliminate regressive safety performance targets
Sen. Cardin (MD) offered a proposal to create a greenhouse gas performance measure
Sen. Warnock (GA) (and Sen. Cardin (MD)) offered a proposal to increase funding for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program to $5 billion

Rail is the deal’s silver lining

The Senate Commerce Committee’s plans for rail, which we praised in June, made it into the final deal, increasing funding for passenger rail across the board. Amtrak is rightfully treated as a valuable national service deserving of federal funding. The mission of Amtrak is to now maximize convenience and service to the customer, not to cut costs making the experience difficult to those traveling on rail. Plans to duplicate the success of the Southern Rail Commission across the country also made it into the final deal.

This bill doesn’t meet the moment

The only major cut made to the original bipartisan deal announced with fanfare in June was to transit, by $10 billion.

The deal’s $39 billion is still more than what the current FAST Act has been providing over the last five years, and the White House believes that the overall increase is a win. But Transportation for America cares far more about how the money is spent. This bill provides every category of spending with more funding, but it doesn’t change the balance nor does it create accountability to the taxpayer for results.

The administration believes they can run any program so well that the flaws don’t matter. This is an admirable goal, but one that’s putting them in a bind. There are a record number of competitive grant programs, which provides great opportunity for this USDOT (and future ones) to implement their priorities, but they’ll have to battle the flaws in their own legislation. We are not sure that an administration that struggled to do things like call for state road safety targets that would improve safety, or stand on their laurels to make long overdue safety updates to the manual that guides street design is really up to the challenge of, for example, stopping every project that harms a minority neighborhood. We certainly hope they are and will do all we can to help. But the administration has put themselves in a challenging position.

The IPCC’s latest climate report calls for transformative, immediate change—less emissions, less waste. This bill is far from transformative. It adds some new money for programs to fix some problems while spending far more perpetuating those same problems.

Going forward

Now that the reconciliation bill has passed in the Senate, the House is expected to come back during the week of August 23rd, before the end of August recess, to consider the infrastructure deal and the reconciliation package. Though it’s not clear yet if we can expect to see further policy changes to the infrastructure bill, it will be worthwhile to remain engaged in how additional funds will be distributed through the budget reconciliation process in the House. The budget resolution passed in the Senate gives the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure $60 billion in additional budget authority to appropriate how they see fit.

Beyond that, our eyes turn to the administration to see how they’ll manage this program. They’ll have control over a lot of money, and they’ll need to move quickly to provide better accountability for lowering emissions, improving racial equity, and increasing access to economic opportunity. They’ll have the power to provide greater control for local governments over what is built in their communities. We’ve been keeping tabs on what the administration has accomplished so far, and we’ll continue to do so from here on out. If they’re going to accomplish what they set out to do, they’ll need help from all of us to do it.

Nine ways the House’s transportation proposal starts to make a “paradigm shift”

With the House’s INVEST in America Act being considered in committee on Wednesday, it’s a good time to look at what else beyond our core three principles in the bill are worth praising and potentially even improving.

Photo of Metroway (bus rapid transit in Northern Virginia) by BeyondDC on Flickr’s Creative Commons.

Most of the time, when we evaluate long-term transportation policy proposals or infrastructure bills from Congress, we start with a “good, bad, and ugly” post, but this House bill doesn’t fit well into that rubric. There’s a lot of great, some good, a few things that could use further refinement, and a couple of missed opportunities; but nothing that falls into the category of “bad,” much less “ugly.” It also has a lot of the same language in the INVEST Act introduced in the last Congress which stalled before a Senate vote, which also went 3 for 3 (after some modifications) on our scorecard.

With that in mind, here are nine specific things in the House bill (INVEST 2.0 for shorthand) that we wanted to highlight. Bear with us, this is a longer post!

1) Avoids the Senate’s cardinal sin of creating small, new programs to fix mistakes actively being perpetuated by the larger, unchanged, status quo transportation program

The overall approach of the last 30 years has been to create small, exciting new programs to fix established problems (safety, pollution, etc) while allowing the much larger core program to exacerbate and further those same problems. This was our biggest complaint about the Senate’s bill from a few weeks ago.

If you want to create a program to fix the issues created by running interstates through neighborhoods, you should also stop actively running interstates through neighborhoods. Or consider the issues of repair and maintenance. As we noted in our scorecard post, this bill doesn’t just create some new repair programs, it requires states to produce a plan to maintain any proposed new capacity while making progress toward their state of repair goals anytime they spend money from the biggest pot of highway funding. That’s the kind of new approach that the Senate completely missed, but the House is proposing to implement for key issues like repair, climate change, and others.

2) It recognizes that transportation is primarily about people and connecting them to what they need

The current federal transportation program does not require that states actively improve access to jobs and services for the real people who use the system every day. Say what? This is why the bulk of current transportation funding goes toward increasing vehicle speed, a “goal” that focuses on concrete and steel instead of the needs of actual people and where they need to go. This House bill kickstarts a huge shift toward focusing on people instead of vehicles by instituting a new performance measure that requires project sponsors to improve access to jobs and services by all modes.

Under the House bill, state departments of transportation and regional planning organizations would have to measure whether all people traveling (not just driving) can reach jobs, schools, groceries, medical care, and other necessities. Further, states and MPOs would have to project the impact their projects would have on access and USDOT will review and publicly report their targets and progress. USDOT also has to collect that data and make it available to help with the measurement of multimodal access, and there are requirements to analyze the accuracy of the models and update direction to states and MPOs on how to improve access.

While seemingly minor and perhaps a little wonky, this would mark a big shift in how transportation projects are evaluated. Measuring access—not vehicle speed—is a people-first way to consider the impact of the billions we spend on transportation each year. With this, we can create more equitable access to economic opportunity, lower transportation costs, and reduce emissions and the damaging climate and health impacts of them.

3) Nails all three of T4America’s core principles

As we’ve done with every infrastructure proposal or long-term policy proposal for the last few years, we’ve produced a scorecard to evaluate how it starts to redirect transportation policy toward T4America’s three core principles of 1) maintaining the current system, 2) protecting the safety of people on the roads, and 3) getting people to jobs, schools, groceries and health care. This bill nails all three of these principles Read more about how the House bill advances these three simple priorities in this post with the scorecard.

4) Advances our proposal to start tearing down divisive infrastructure and repairing the damage

Since 2020, with help from Third Way, T4America has been advancing a policy to undo the damage of “urban renewal” projects that have displaced more than a million Americans since construction of the Interstate Highway System and that continue to harm communities of color today. Our plan focuses heavily on creating a competitive grant program to redesign or deconstruct things like divisive highways, and creating strategies to prevent displacement so that this work generates wealth for the communities that suffered most, in addition to a few other strategies.

What the sunken, divisive Rochester Inner Loop used to look like, before being filled in and replaced with a surface boulevard. The House bill would kickstart efforts like this across the country. Flickr photo by Friscocali

The House runs with our proposal through a $3 billion ($600 million a year) Reconnecting Neighborhoods program, which is six times larger than a similar proposal in the Senate bill. This program will analyze neighborhood barriers (like interstates) and identify candidates for remediation, repurposing, or removal. In addition, part of that money can also be used to establish a community advisory board or a land trust to preserve the new wealth for those most affected by the divisive infrastructure. There are some details we’d like to enhance, but this idea has gained incredible traction over the last year and we are excited about the possibilities for the future.

5) Recognizes that you must address climate change within the entire transportation program

Download our report on lowering emissions through better land use and transportation

Transportation is the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States, and the majority of them come from driving. The bill addresses the entirety of the transportation program by establishing a new greenhouse gas performance measure and requiring states to set positive targets to reduce emissions. It gives states the latitude to figure out their own preferred path to hitting those targets, but we know that infrastructure investments that give people more options than hopping in the car are key to reducing these emissions. INVEST 2.0 creates programs to fund these projects at both the state and city levels.

While making it easier to drive less overall should be central to our short-term climate and transportation strategy, we do need to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles as well. This is why we’re part of a unique coalition called CHARGE—the only “electric vehicle” coalition where improving and expanding public transit is the first priority. This bill creates a new program to build electric vehicle charging stations along corridors and sets standards to require them to be open to the public and work with all kinds of electric vehicles.

There are also some good provisions targeted at making the transportation system more resilient to climate change and making resilience an eligible use in the largest highway programs. One place where the bill could be improved is to require resilience to be built into the design of all projects.

6) Measuring access to jobs and services is one of the best ways to address equity, but this bill includes others

As noted above, requiring agencies to measure and improve access to jobs and services for all people is perhaps the single greatest change to remake transportation policy in a more equitable way. But INVEST 2.0 would also improve equity in other ways—something we wrote about at length last summer in the context of the House’s very similar 2020 proposal. Prioritizing access, investing in more and better transit, building safer streets for people, and investing in what we have would all have an impact on equity. Considering the similarities between that bill and this year’s INVEST in America Act, that evaluation still stands.

7) Support for expanded national passenger rail

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) addresses an enormous crowd in Gulfport during a rally for restoring Gulf Coast passenger service. Photo by Steve Davis / T4America

Expanding and improving our nation’s passenger rail network to bring better, more reliable passenger rail service to more people is one of the best ways to improve access for millions of Americans in big urban areas and small rural ones alike. This bill creates a new $5 billion a year program for high speed and intercity rail investments, triples the funding for the existing program for improved safety and efficiency in passenger and freight rail service, and funds Amtrak at $32 billion over the life of the bill.

The House incorporated several of our other recommendations, including updating the Amtrak Board to have better representation from riders and the national network as well as the Northeast Corridor. More importantly, it allows for the formation of more multi-state rail commissions like our partners the Southern Rail Commission, which has been the key to (almost!) restoring passenger service along the Gulf Coast, and provides funding for them to operate.

There is some opportunity to strengthen the authorities for the Federal Railroad Administration and the Surface Transportation Board to prevent the freight railroads from obstructing or interfering with that service.

8) A strong commitment to transit…

INVEST 2.0 provides over $21 billion for transit, a sizable increase over the current $13 billion program, and it also includes some funding for operations—a major win, as operations funding has typically been a no-go with federal funds. Funds from the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program and even the core Surface Transportation program can be used for transit operations. There’s also a new one-time competitive grant program to support capital and operations costs associated with addressing transit deserts through better, more frequent transit service.

Improving service frequency is a big focus of the bill. There is a new $100 million competitive grant program for transit agencies collaborating with state or local governments to increase bus frequency and ridership by redesigning urban streets to better move transit (and more people) in congested areas. There is also a change to the funding formula that prioritizes frequency.

9) But with opportunities for greater improvements on transit

While the bill makes some important changes and does slightly increase its share compared to highways, the bill does not hit T4America’s priorities of equalizing transit funding with highway funding, nor does it create long term support for keeping transit running. We will be once again turning to leaders on Capitol Hill to move these efforts forward. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia of Illinois has led the effort to invest in transit as strongly as we do highways, and we hope he uses this bill as an opportunity to push that effort forward.

READ: Letter of support for Rep. Johnson bill, signed by ~100 organizations (June 9, 2021)Download

On the operations side, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia is leading an effort to create a federal program for transit operating support. The Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act would create a new grant program available to all transit agencies, rural and urban, to increase service frequency so that people don’t have to wait so long for the bus; to provide additional hours of service so that those who don’t work regular hours can still get to their jobs; and to add new, frequent service in the region. We are proud supporters of that bill and we encourage you to tell your House rep to join Rep. Johnson as a sponsor.

Tell your representative to support a bill to increase funding for transit operations

Unsafe streets in marginalized communities lead to inequitable traffic enforcement

Equitable enforcement of traffic rules is a major national discussion. But under-discussed is the role dangerously-designed streets play in putting Black and brown people in a perilous position: break traffic law and risk interacting with police, or put themselves in harm’s way when navigating unsafe infrastructure. Here’s our recap on a recent House hearing on equitable enforcement of traffic rules.

A “slip lane” in Atlanta, GA, making street crossings much more dangerous.

Last week, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Subcommittee on Highways and Transit held a hearing on equity in traffic safety enforcement. The hearing mostly covered data on racial profiling in traffic stops and how to equip our law enforcement officers with tools to identify their implicit bias and learn how to manage it when conducting traffic stops.

While these topics are extremely important, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee doesn’t have jurisdiction over improving the relationship law enforcement has with communities of color. However, it does have jurisdiction over solutions to unsafe street design in these communities that lead to more traffic-related stops between law enforcement and people of color.

For example, take the story of Rodney Reese: a Black high schooler in Texas who was arrested and charged for “being a pedestrian in the roadway” as he walked home from work. Rodney had no choice but to walk in the street because the sidewalk was too icy to safely walk on. He spent a night in jail.

Racism and bias may have led these officers to arrest and charge a high schooler for walking home from work. But, the question that the subcommittee has jurisdiction over is why was this high schooler walking in the roadway in the first place and what can this committee do about it?

According to Smart Growth America’s report Dangerous by Design, Black Americans were 72 percent more likely to be struck and killed while walking compared to people who don’t identify as Black in the past decade. Black people are also much more likely to be stopped, ticketed, and arrested for jaywalking

Stories like Rodney’s are quite common in marginalized communities where underinvestment has led to unsafe, high-speed street design that make walking and biking all but impossible. Vulnerable communities are often put in an impossible predicament to break the law and put themselves at legal risk to get to work, school or a doctor’s appointment or choose another option that may not be as convenient, cost more money or time.

Safe street design benefits everyone, especially marginalized communities by making it easier to bike, walk, and access transit stops. This can reduce the number of traffic infractions and therefore the number of interactions communities have with law enforcement for traffic related stops. Transportation for America implores the committee to continue to have these conversations and focus on building marginalized communities back better by investing in them. Not only does investing in safe street design prevent communities from having unwanted interactions with law enforcement, it’s also better for economic development. Streets designed to accommodate (slow) drivers, people walking and biking, and transit riders creates thriving communities by attracting businesses and connecting communities to jobs.

Here are a few things the committee can do to improve equity for communities of color and begin to reverse underinvestment in safe streets infrastructure or Black and brown communities:

Require USDOT to collect locations of all collisions resulting in death or serious injury, highlighting those involving cyclists and pedestrians, and produce a detailed map of an annual High Injury Network and update the Fatality Analysis Reporting Systems (FARS) accordingly. Better data, and detailed maps of dangerous corridors can help communities target investments to improve safety, and in those communities most impacted by unsafe designs.
Identify changes to the process for compiling FARS data so that the release of annual data can occur in the half of each calendar year. FARS data is not available on a regular, predictable, schedule. This undermines its utility for the public and local DOTs.
Require the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to issue guidance to states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), instructing them not to set safety targets that would be higher than the existing level of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, as many states have routinely done under the current performance management system.
Require USDOT issue guidance for determining how investments impact racial and economic equity and to use this guidance as a criterion for discretionary grant programs;
Approve the Complete Streets Act of 2021, which creates state complete streets programs and provides funding and technical assistance to develop and construct projects, with a focus on equity and connections to jobs and services;

The INVEST Act, which passed the House in the 116th Congress, made great strides in moving the needle on these issues by incorporating a focus on safety throughout all federal programs and overhauling a broken system that allows states to increase pedestrian death without penalty. It also dedicates more funding to protect vulnerable communities and sets speed limits to prioritize safety over speed.

We want to see Congress build on the INVEST Act and are calling on the House and Senate to fundamentally reform our surface transportation. Continuing on a path of status quo will only exacerbate the inequities our most vulnerable communities face every day.

Everything we liked (and didn’t like) at Buttigieg’s Transportation Secretary confirmation hearing

Last Thursday, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg faced the Senate for questioning on his nomination to be Secretary of Transportation. We liked almost all of his answers, and we weren’t alone: Senator Tester said Buttigieg’s testimony was “refreshing.” Here’s what T4America liked and didn’t like from Buttigieg’s confirmation hearing.

Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg facing the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee as President Biden’s nominee to be Secretary of Transportation. Screen grab from C-SPAN.

✅ Complete Streets is a priority for Buttigieg

When answering a powerfully-worded question from Senator Schatz (D-HI), a cosponsor of the Complete Streets Act, Buttigieg confirmed his commitment to a Complete Streets approach. He even highlighted the Complete Streets projects that took place in South Bend. (Smart Growth America provided technical assistance to South Bend to pursue Complete Streets demonstration projects.)

“It’s very important to recognize the importance of roadways where pedestrians, bicycles, vehicles, any other mode can coexist peacefully. And that Complete Streets vision will continue to enjoy support from me if confirmed,” Buttgieg said.

✅ Our “autocentric view” is a problem

Doubling down on his commitment to Complete Streets, Buttigieg noted that transportation in the United States overwhelmingly prioritizes cars. “There are so many ways that people get around, and I think often we have an autocentric view that forgets historically all of the other different modes,” Buttigieg told Sen. Klobuchar (D-MN). “We want to make sure that every time we do a street design that it enables cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, and businesses and any other mode to coexist in a positive way. We should be putting funding behind that.”

✅ Addressing past damages is a priority

Transportation infrastructure—particularly urban highways that have demolished and divided communities of color—is sometimes a major roadblock to improving equity in this country. Buttigieg knows this and told senators so in his opening remarks. “I also recognize that at their worst, misguided policies and missed opportunities in transportation can reinforce racial and economic inequality, by dividing or isolating neighborhoods and undermining government’s basic role of empowering Americans to thrive,” Buttigieg said.

✅ Policy hasn’t kept up with automated vehicles

Automated vehicles (AVs) is one of the transportation technologies that often captures lawmakers’ imagination. But in response to Sen. Fischer (R-NE), Buttigieg acknowledged that the federal government has failed to provide the leadership necessary to ensure that AVs actually deliver the benefits they promise. “[AV technology] is advancing quickly and has the potential to be transformative, but in a lot of ways, policy hasn’t kept up,” Buttigieg said.

This couldn’t be more true. After investigating deaths from two separate AV crashes, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) billed the utter lack of federal safety performance standards as one of the causes for the fatalities.

But proactive federal policy is needed for more than just ensuring that AVs are safe. Policy is needed to ensure that AVs are equitable, accessible, and sustainable. That’s why we joined Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and other partners in creating tenets for AV policy.

✅ He supports passenger rail

Buttigieg said he’s the “second biggest enthusiast for passenger rail in this administration,” referring of course to President Biden, a long-time rider and fan of Amtrak, as the first. “Americans deserve the highest standard of passenger rail,” Buttigieg said.

When Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS)—a major supporter of restoring passenger rail to the Gulf Coast—asked Buttigieg if he’s a rail rider himself, Buttigieg said he enjoys short rail trips “and long ones too.” In light of Amtrak’s proposal to cut its long-distance network, this might signal Buttigieg’s support for those critical routes.

✅ The BUILD program should be easier to apply for

The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) offers a host of grant programs for cities and towns to construct and maintain transportation infrastructure. But the application process is often daunting for smaller entities. As mayor of a small city that wasn’t able to have “full-time staff managing federal relations,” Buttigieg told Sen. Wicker (R-MS) that making BUILD and INFRA grants easier for small and rural municipalities to apply for are one of his priorities.

“It’s very important to me that this process is user-friendly, that criteria are transparent, and that communities of every size, including rural communities and smaller communities, have every opportunity to access those funds,” Buttigieg said.

✅ Senators on both side of the aisle support Buttigieg

Buttigieg felt the love from both sides of the aisle during his confirmation hearing, with Sen. Tester (D-MT) going as far to say that Buttigieg’s testimony should serve as a model for other nominees facing Senate approval. Sen. Wicker (R-MS) listed Buttigieg’s accomplishments in his opening statement, praising his “impressive credentials that demonstrate his intellect and commitment to serving our nation.”

With slim Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, bipartisanship will be key to passing surface transportation authorization. But historically, infrastructure is one the areas where lawmakers bipartisanly agree to pass bad policy—rather than ruffling feathers and taking a hard look at what the federal government spends money on and why. (We blogged about it here.) It will take lots of work—like the herculean effort the House underwent this summer to pass a new kind of transportation bill—to make sure that the long-term transportation bill lawmakers must pass this year actually connects funding with the outcomes Americans want.

🚫 His climate answer only mentioned electric vehicles

When Sen. Schatz asked about Buttigieg’s approach to climate change, Buttigieg only discussed electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, and increased vehicle fuel efficiency as a solution. Yet it’s a fact that electric vehicles and improved fuel efficiency—while critical—aren’t enough to reduce transportation emissions on their own.

While we applaud Buttigieg’s support of President Biden’s “whole government” approach to addressing climate change (meaning that climate work isn’t confined to a single department like the EPA), we need Buttigieg to understand that USDOT needs to do more than invest in electric vehicles as a climate solution.

We like what we heard. Now let’s make sure it happens

Buttigieg might be one of the most promising new Secretaries of Transportation that we’ve seen, but we must hold him accountable to following through on these initiatives. Now is not the time to lay back: we have a lot of work to do to ensure that USDOT does what it can internally to connect transportation funding to the outcomes Americans want (like our three principles) and that Congress passes a long-term transportation bill that ends decades of broken, misguided policy.

How the Biden administration can make immediate strides on climate and racial equity

The spread of COVID-19 has sent the United States plummeting into an unprecedented national crisis, but it has also illuminated the path forward. Transportation for America teamed up with our sister organizations at Smart Growth America to identify immediate executive actions and long-term policy changes that the incoming Biden administration can implement to eliminate structural inequities and address catastrophic global climate change.

EDIT, December 2020: We updated the recommendations! Check out the full set of recommendations here and read our summary below.

Earlier this month, Transportation for America teamed up with our partners at Smart Growth America to send recommendations to the Biden transition team on executive actions and legislation. Read the full memo here, updated December 2020.

With years of federal advocacy and public service under our belts, all of us here can say this for certain: simply pumping more money into existing federal programs won’t help the United States recover from the COVID-19 crisis. In fact, taking that approach will just make our economy more unequal, lead to more pollution from transportation, and result in more expensive housing that still isn’t getting built where it’s most helpful. Money alone cannot rectify the structural inequities we are facing.

To truly unlock our economic potential in a fiscally responsible way, tackle climate change and promote racial equity—the three goals of our recommendations—we need a new playbook. We must reform and better utilize the vast quantities of direct spending, tax credits, loan programs, formula funds, and financing that already exist. And only through a holistic approach that connects transportation, housing, and infrastructure policy can we provide Americans with freedom of transportation choice, access to affordable housing, and healthy, resilient communities.

Our recommendations to the transition team are best summed up with two simple messages. One, do not overlook how housing, land use, and transportation are interrelated in determining household costs, access to opportunity, wealth accumulation, and how much emissions we produce. And secondly, climate change and equity must be addressed together—the best strategies to improve the built environment to address one challenge also address the other.

Smart growth is the affordable, equitable, and sustainable path to recovery and prosperity. Now is the time for change enabling us to build back better, and we are glad for the opportunity to provide these recommendations to the incoming presidential administration. Read the full list of recommendations.

Here are some highlights from Transportation for America’s recommendations for immediate executive actions—most of which stem from our three principles for transportation policy.

Reduce emissions from transportation by re-establishing the greenhouse gas (GHG) performance measure for transportation that the Trump administration repealed, with annual state ratings.
Require federal agencies to issue guidance on identifying communities with infrastructure that creates barriers to mobility (such as highways that slice through a community), measuring the degree of harm to that community, and providing incentives and prioritizing resources to address those disparities by removing infrastructure barriers or creating new connectivity.
Require the Federal Highway Administration to update the Highway Capacity Manual to improve standards for pedestrians and cyclists which are based on accurate measures of safety and the perception of safety, including the level of traffic stress and crossing delays as opposed to volume and capacity.
Help transportation agencies measure access to jobs and essential services by directing research funds to create a national Geographic Information System (GIS)-based resource that allows transportation agencies to measure current levels of access to jobs and services by all modes of travel and assess the impact of planned projects.
The Department of Transportation should issue guidance clarifying the appropriate use of the common transportation design standard known as level of service (LOS), taking into account the impacts on induced demand, climate change, equity, and health outcomes.
Make a statement of support for the existing national network of state-supported and long distance passenger rail routes routes as essential connections for people in smaller and rural communities.

If we want equitable smart cities, we need support from philanthropy

A close-up of the handlebars of a Lime electric scooter. The scooter has a small computer screen that reads "Scan to Ride". To the right of the screen is a QR code.

Everyone agrees that smart cities—places that deploy technology to deliver government services and improve quality of life—are the future. City leaders and staff are inundated with these new mobility products but have limited capacity to ensure that they are deployed in ways that lead to equitable and sustainable outcomes. Our director Beth Osborne explains why cities, states, and non-profit actors need philanthropic support to pursue policy research and projects that make equitable, sustainable smart cities a reality.

Close-up of the handlebars of a Lime e-scooter, with “Scan to Ride” written on the scooter’s small computer screen.

Technology holds great promise to help cities monitor and allocate limited public space in ways that ensure safe, equitable, affordable, and sustainable access to jobs and services for everybody, no matter their financial means or physical ability. That’s where we should be heading as a country.

We hear about the endless possibilities of new mobility technology—like flexible curb management tools and smartphone access to shared scooters, bikes, and cars—in the news and at transportation conferences. However, we know that technology can be deployed in ways that allocate these benefits only to those who can pay, or to the wealthiest neighborhoods, or in ways that benefit the technology provider more than the public. Historically, this has been the case. (Think: automobiles, broadband, and more.)

To date, the power has been in the hands of those who develop and sell technology. Most of these companies are trying to produce good results for cities and people. But to survive, they have to pay attention to their bottom line. Plus, businesses can only really support cities that have the capacity to explain what kind of technology they need, and are then able to effectively manage that product once deployed and ensure that it supports broad societal benefits, like equity and sustainability.

That capacity requires funding. Philanthropies are traditionally a powerful force for this support, ensuring that modernization and innovation are used to ways that connect to broad social goals. Philanthropy is already doing this in so many areas, from electric vehicle deployment, transit advocacy, housing affordability, criminal justice reform and more. However, they have been largely absent as cities and non-profits pursue policy research and innovations to make smart cities a reality.

We learned this the hard way. For the past four years, Transportation for America has hosted the Smart Cities Collaborative, a year-long learning cohort where city transportation officials learn from each others’ efforts to use new mobility technologies in order to improve their transportation networks. The Collaborative has been a success: we’ve brought together cities from across the country to discuss approaches to new mobility, curbside management, and city innovation, and have launched several useful resources like the Shared Micromobility Playbook.

However, funding the Collaborative has been difficult. We rely on a combination of fees paid by cash-strapped cities, sponsorship agreements from new mobility and technology companies, and our advocacy peers. While we are so appreciative of the support we received from city participants and our private sector partners, there was a limit to what we could provide Collaborative members with this funding.

It’s simple: there will never exist a world in which a 1:1 swap between philanthropic dollars and private sector dollars works. Private sector companies have their own priorities that rarely, if ever, line up with city government’s priorities. This is of no fault of the private sector companies. But it’s exactly why philanthropies need to provide funding for smart cities projects and research: philanthropic funding that doesn’t need to boost a company’s profit margins.

Our Smart Cities Collaborative, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s short-lived Smart City Challenge (the seed that inspired our Collaborative), and similar non-business projects are where cities, states, the federal government, advocates, and philanthropists need to focus their efforts. Philanthropy will be essential for cities to have the capacity to deploy these technologies in ways that promote equity and sustainability. Without them, the future will inevitably be shaped by shorter term private sector interests and as yet unknown long term outcomes of these interests.

Thriving Together: A springboard for equitable recovery & resilience in communities across America

In our work to inform the policy response to COVID-19 and how the pandemic is compounding housing, climate, and other crises, we’ve emphasized the need for policy makers to take a unified approach to these issues rather than treating each one separately. The problems are interconnected, and our solutions must be as well.

But a new collaborative effort from more than 100 people and organizations, including Transportation for America, takes that work even further. Thriving Together: A springboard for Equitable Recovery & Resilience in Communities Across America goes beyond the issues of transportation, land use, and our built environment to tackle the whole person and our whole society, creating a jumping off place—a springboard—that “shows how we can convert our immense loss from COVID-19 and other crises into renewal.”

The Deep Dive on Reliable Transportation (page 232) is a comprehensive look at how we ended up with inequities present in transportation today and what we can do in both the short and longer term to create a more equitable transportation system.

Download the report Read the two pager Learn more about the project

Thriving People and Places

Coronavirus will have huge impacts on transit systems—here’s how Congress should help

Fired up? Please take action and tell your member of Congress to support emergency assistance for transit agencies.

Congress and the president are considering ways to provide much-needed boosts to the economy due to the impacts of the novel coronavirus. But simply pouring money into the existing transportation program as a whole will fail to help the people who rely on transit to access the health care system and will have impacts on transit service that will last for years to come. Here are some ways Congress could provide targeted assistance to transit and the people that rely on it in the weeks and months ahead.

MTA New York City Transit sanitizes stations and subway cars. (Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

As local and state tax revenues cratered during the recession of 2008-2009, transit agencies were forced to make enormous cuts to service and lay off thousands of employees, which had devastating impacts on riders and communities. T4America covered the massive impacts across the country as millions of people were left stranded in the wake of these massive cuts. As just one example, MARTA in Atlanta eliminated somewhere around half of their bus service and train headways grew to 30 minutes at certain times of day. Even after the crisis, MARTA spent the better part of the decade recovering and slowly adding that lost service back, with little assistance from the federal government—as did hundreds or thousands of other transit agencies.

Heeding public health officials’ advice, including “social distancing,” is critical to slowing the spread of COVID-19 cases. But these essential practices also will bring unfortunate side effects: cancelled events, new work from home policies, and other ways of practicing social distancing will result in millions of transit trips not taken and profoundly affect transit agencies’ viability. Revenue from riders makes up a huge piece of transit agencies’ budgets, and transit ridership will drop across the country. At the same time, transit agencies are investing in extra cleaning supplies and increased cleaning protocols, leading to increased costs which exacerbate the budgetary pressure from reduced ridership and revenue.

The novel coronavirus will undoubtedly bring massive economic impacts on transit. If what happened in 2009 and 2010 repeats itself and Congress fails to take proper action, we will leave millions stranded without access to healthcare and other essential services, and not just in the short-term. Public transit service is and will continue to be vital and Congress must take strong action to support transit service—and ensure that transit will be robust and ready when this crisis is over.

We understand that this is a challenging time for all, and many sectors of our economy are in need of support. But we must ensure that investments made in transportation are targeted to the most impacted and most critical sectors, including public transportation. This will better address our needs today, and prepare our system for when this public health crisis subsides. Policymakers should consider these principles when developing transportation policy as economic stimulus.

1. Target funding to hardest hit transit agencies.

This is not a spread-the-peanut-butter exercise. Regions are going to be impacted in different ways, with some losing ridership to a much greater extent than others. Assistance should be appropriately targeted to the various needs of transit agencies. Sending more money to all transit agencies through the existing program is not targeted in this way and is not sufficient to address this problem.

2. Support transit agencies with operational assistance to avert service cuts or fare increases.

In the last recovery act in 2009, additional transit funding was given for capital investment. During this crisis, it will be necessary to invest in public transit operations to ensure agencies are able to continue providing their essential services, especially to those who rely on it to reach medical services, and health care workers who rely on it to get to work. It won’t do any good to keep giving transit agencies money to buy new buses or railcars if they can’t afford to run them each day from A to B. Transit agencies will need money to preserve service.

Agencies receive money each year from the highway trust fund, dictated by federal formulas. But those funds are for capital spending, not operating. Current law (49 USC 5307) prohibits the use of these dollars for operational expenses in communities over 200,000 in population and therefore cannot address the loss of funds at the farebox used to fund transit operations in our larger metro areas where transit provides the greatest number of rides.

3. Prioritize investments which address equity and access.

While loss of transit service is always an inconvenience, to those who depend on transit with no other option it can be particularly dangerous at this time. Those who rely on transit to reach medical care need to know that service will be there. And getting everyone who needs medical care to it early is essential to prevent a greater spread of this virus. In addition, there are scores of healthcare workers who will continue to need reliable transit service to get to their jobs caring for the sick.

While we encourage policymakers to consider these principles, we recommend the following specific policies to support public transit agencies and riders:

Responding to the immediate crisis:

Provide targeted funding for transit operating expenses. This should address revenue shortfalls as a result of lost ridership, as well as increased expenses due to more cleaning. Funding should be targeted to those agencies with the most demonstrated need.
Provide additional funding for purchasing personal protective equipment (PPE) (including gloves, antibacterial sanitizer, soap, etc).
Provide funding necessary to cover costs for employees who must be quarantined, and any overtime necessary to make up for reduced numbers of employees.

Sustaining essential service beyond the crisis:

Traditional funding formulas are based on previous year ridership. If ridership were to go down this year, that could not only impact current budgets, but it would reduce what agencies receive through their formulas for next year.

To protect impacted agencies from future cuts, Congress should create a hold harmless provision, or direct the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to use ridership numbers from a year previous to the crisis.

Rose Lanes get love from Portland City Council

The Portland City Council is moving forward with a plan to improve transit service through a series of targeted improvements to some of the city’s most delayed bus and streetcar corridors. Known as the Rose Lane Project, it’s designed to advance equity, reduce carbon emissions, and increase transit ridership with quick-build projects. It also offers lessons to other cities struggling with sluggish transits systems mired in a sea of cars.

Yesterday, the City of Roses (Portland, OR) unanimously adopted an ambitious plan to speed up transit service by freeing it from traffic and improve racial equity across the city. Aptly named the Rose Lane Project, the adoption of this plan follows high-profile changes in New York City and San Francisco that have closed entire streets to private vehicles in order to free riders from crippling traffic and open up space for pedestrians and cyclists.

But the Rose Lane project, while sharing similar goals, is different. Instead of closing a single street to vehicles, the city is launching a series of improvements to speed multiple bus lines and streetcars through the city with a variety of treatments, including but not limited to bus lanes. And it’ll all happen fast. The Rose Lane Project is designed to be implemented as pilot projects that can be deployed quickly with low-cost materials, evaluated and tweaked over time, and then made permanent if they’re successful.

Phase 1 consists of 29 separate projects from transit queue jumps to traffic light changes to bus lanes that will be implemented this year and next. Projects in Phase 2 will bring further, tailored street improvements to a network of high-priority transit corridors in 2021 and 2022.

The scale, timeline, and explicit focus on equity and climate change makes the Rose Lane Project unlike anything else being done in the U.S. though it is based in part on the success of Seattle in implementing transit priority and the resulting increase in transit ridership.

The city takes action

In many cities, a transit agency operates the transit system—hiring drivers, collecting fares, maintaining rail lines, etc.—while the city controls the street. A transit agency may request changes to traffic lights, bus stops, or lanes but it’s ultimately up to the city to actually implement those changes on public roadways. This divided responsibility can be a huge obstacle to change; political will, more than money, can become the limiting factor in whether or not transit is truly prioritized on the street. The same truth holds in efforts to dedicate more safe infrastructure for people walking and biking.

In Portland, the unanimous adoption of the Rose Lane Project by the city council sends a clear message: transit is our priority. When fully implemented, the Rose Lane Project will reduce travel times for hundreds of thousands of riders everyday, improve access to jobs and services across the entire city—particularly for low-income households and communities of color—and help the city reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by making transit a more attractive choice to more people. Ultimately the city hopes the Rose Lane Project will help it achieve a goal of 25 percent of trips in the city made by transit.

“The Rose Lane Project demonstrates how equity and climate are interconnected. My office developed this bold, transformative vision for transit with PBOT by centering racial equity—setting a goal to reduce commute times for communities of color—and in doing so we created a powerful tool that will advance our efforts to confront climate change,” said Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) Commissioner Chloe Eudaly. “The Rose Lane Project is a major step toward meeting our equity, climate, and transportation goals by making transit a more viable option for more Portlanders.”

PBOT has put together a full report on the Rose Lane Project that is chock full of easily digestible information and great graphics. Cities around the country should take note—inequality and climate change are issues that every community is dealing with and the Rose Lane Project offers a vision of a healthier, safer, more equitable transportation system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Access to a better future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need to prioritize the safety of those outside of vehicles

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

See the full interactive graph at ProPublica.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing the transportation paradigm, one project selection at a time.

Ringling Bridge in Sarasota, FL. (Image: Rich Schwartz, Flickr)

Thanks to support from the Kresge Foundation, Transportation for America helped several regions around the country take tangible steps toward aligning their spending with their policy goals using performance measures. We asked them about it…here’s what they said.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

If that mantra ever needed to be applied anywhere, it’s in the world of transportation investment decision making. The state and regional transportation agencies that make funding decisions often say they want to fund the projects that best align with their community’s goals—such as increasing access to jobs and opportunity, improving health, making more equitable investments, and ensuring a good state of repair, to name a few. But too often, their practices don’t line up with intent. That’s why it is noteworthy that some regions around the country are making real headway to better align their spending with their stated priorities.

In a previous post, we explored this idea of choosing transportation projects that actually match our priorities. But what does it look like in practice to match funding decisions to a goal like economic competitiveness? And how is this process changing the transportation funding paradigm?

From the horse’s mouth

Rather than speak for them, we asked some of the professionals we worked with about how this assistance helped them address the specific transportation goals that their community is focused on. Each community has different goals, and the focus of our work shifted accordingly with each community, but the principle is the same: measure what you want to manage.

Reevaluating the status quo:

Typically, regions prioritize projects using factors like political priorities and geographic distribution, but this approach rarely produces the best set of investments to accomplish a long-term vision with limited funding. By contrast, some of the regions we worked with have established measurable goals and scoring systems to rank potential projects based on those goals. Many common policy priorities like equity and quality of life have traditionally been difficult to measure, so this systematic approach is a game-changer.

“In reviewing our past planning efforts we realized that there was not always a great connection between the projects selected for funding and our long-range plan’s goals. We also had more project requests than funding. Identifying performance measures and targets allowed us to prioritize the projects that would best help achieve our plan’s goals and make the best use of limited resources. T4America helped us refine our scoring process to ensure it was meaningful and performance-based, understood by non-technical stakeholders, and easily implementable by MPO staff.”

– Dylan Mullenix, Assistant Director of the Des Moines Area MPO

“The Lake Charles region is currently updating its long-range metropolitan transportation plan and will soon be selecting priority projects to fund. The Transportation for America team gave us ideas to simplify the measures used in project selection, eliminate duplication, consider the cost-effectiveness of projects, and make our scoring criteria publicly available. These suggestions and examples from other MPOs will allow the region to better prioritize projects based on a clear vision moving forward.”

– Cheri L. Soileau, AICP, Lake Charles MPO Director

Creating equitable and affordable transportation:

Equity was a common thread throughout this work. Many regions consider equity a priority, but have trouble effectively applying it to funding decisions. We helped these regions elevate needed investments in disadvantaged communities to improve access to economic opportunities and essential services. Some regions also wanted to prioritize investments that address community affordability. For example, the Sarasota/Manatee MPO hopes to raise the priority of projects that make it easier to walk, bike, and take transit to food, medical, or education facilities to help reduce the costs associated with accessing those necessities.

“Our partnership with T4A changed the transportation planning conversation in our region by bringing new voices to the table, from health and social service providers to environmental scientists. Using the FHWA performance measures framework, we have gone beyond traffic management and turn lanes to consider affordable housing, access to services for disadvantaged neighborhoods, and advancing best practices. We are confident this will lead to project priorities that consider all modes and that better serve all users.”

– Leigh Holt, Strategic Planning Manager, Sarasota/Manatee MPO

Supporting people who want to walk and bike safely:

Projects that make it easier to walk and bike not only improve the health of residents by providing options for exercise, they also support local economies by contributing to a quality of life that attracts residents and tourists. We helped several regions determine how to use performance measures to elevate the investments that make it easier to walk and bike safely.

“During Transportation for America’s workshop, the team encouraged us to renew our initiatives in active transportation for healthier communities. Our agency had developed a metropolitan bike and pedestrian master plan; however, as a result of the push, we began the process of actually producing every project in that plan. These 57 miles of active transportation improvements will be in place within the next six years! Furthermore, we are now replicating the same award-winning process in a neighboring urban area to further the goal of healthier communities through active transportation across our region.”

– Matt Johns, Executive Director, Rapides Area Planning Commission

Ensuring economic competitiveness:

Many regions measure their economic success by looking at how projects would reduce traffic congestion. But traffic congestion goes up with good economies and down with bad; so while it may be an important transportation priority, congestion reduction is not a good proxy for economic strength. We helped several of the regions determine how to use performance measures to invest in the right projects for the long-term economic vitality of their regions—projects that will help draw a talented workforce, retain residents, and grow a tourist economy.

“The Roanoke Valley Transportation Planning Organization is working to make the region more economically competitive by identifying places where growth is desirable and sustainable because plans for future development enable multimodal connectivity and mobility. The technical assistance provided by T4A helped us better understand performance measures and how we can more directly achieve our transportation and economic development goals through targeted investments.”

– Cristina Finch, Director of Transportation, Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission.

These regions are able to make real change:

The six regions we worked with are already leading the way by seeking new ways of doing business. And thanks to Kresge’s support, we were able to introduce them to tools, approaches, and ways of thinking to help them do so. We are excited to see more innovative practices from these regions moving forward.

“The technical assistance provided by the Transportation for America team was more than a typical workshop—it opened the eyes of our local technical experts to a revolutionary way of thinking about transportation planning. We were taught how to better identify what problem we actually wanted to solve in order to avoid jumping to the usual prescribed solutions of cookie-cutter type thinking. In a way, the team provided a deeper validity and appreciation for REAL planning working in concert with engineering, and this is a necessity for better planning in an era when we truly cannot afford to “build our way out” of our problems.”

– Matt Johns, Executive Director, Rapides Area Planning Commission

Federal program that helps tackle health disparities threatened in ’18 budget

Congress is threatening to eliminate a small yet significant federal program housed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that helps local communities take concrete steps to prevent someone’s zip code from being the most powerful determinant in their long-term health.

Walking, biking, and access to transit are part of a suite of healthy choices promoted by T4America and our colleagues at the National Complete Streets Coalition. People who walk or bicycle more for transportation are shown to have lower rates of heart disease, diabetes and other conditions that can complicate or shorten lives. And the demand for more opportunities to safely walk and bicycle is at an all-time high, in both heartland towns and urban centers alike.

Scores of communities are eager to find ways to improve the health of their most vulnerable residents — the people most likely to suffer from poor health outcomes — and those less likely to have access to safe streets for walking or biking. They want to know how to steer more of their transportation dollars into projects that will bring significant health benefits and reduce these disparities.

The Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health program (REACH), a small program within the CDC, has helped these communities meet the demand for more active transportation projects, address the wide disparities in health from zip code to zip code, increase access to opportunities, and create a foundation of shared and sustainable prosperity.

REACH is an evidence-based program that directly tackles these health disparities and is the only community health program currently funded at the CDC.

Both the House and Senate Appropriations bills for next year (FY 2018) eliminate funding for this critical program. Please take a moment to send a message to your representatives and urge them to keep it going.

A group of more than 200 diverse organizations — including The National Complete Streets Coalition and Transportation for America — signed a letter urging Congress to provide the program with another $50 million round of funding.

These funds are helping a plethora of communities make healthy living a reality. (We produced a series of case studies that includes some of these communities here.) It equips them to tackle the risk factors for some of the most expensive and burdensome health conditions impacting racial and ethnic groups. Without these funds communities across the country will have an even harder path to reduce disparities like these cited by the CDC:

Non-Hispanic blacks have the highest rate of obesity (44 percent), followed by Mexican Americans (39 percent).
The rate of diagnosed diabetes is 18 percent higher among Asian Americans, 66 percent higher among Hispanic/Latinos, and 77 percent higher among non-Hispanic blacks compared to non-Hispanic whites.
American Indians and Alaskan Natives are 60 percent more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic whites and have the highest prevalence of diabetes, with a rate more than double that of non-Hispanic whites
The incidence rate of cervical cancer is 41% higher among non-Hispanic black women and 44% higher among Hispanic/Latino women compared to non-Hispanic white women.

And as shown by the National Complete Streets Coalition in their last Dangerous by Design report, people of color are significantly overrepresented in pedestrian deaths.

Solving these kinds of pernicious issues doesn’t happen overnight.

But the REACH program is investing directly in local community coalitions with multiple years of awards, providing the time and resources necessary to address the many root causes of racial and ethnic disparities and reverse the upward trend of chronic disease.

Help protect REACH. Congress must continue to fund REACH in FY18 at the same level of investment ($50.95 million) as was provided in FY 2017.

A few of the groups leading the effort have set up an easy page for sending a message here.

Take Action

New national survey examines how metro areas use performance measures to evaluate their spending

Thanks to action taken by Congress, metro areas will be required to use a data-driven process to measure the performance of their transportation spending. But some metro areas already go far beyond the modest new federal requirements. T4America’s new national survey of over 100 metro planning agencies examines the current state of the practice — and where it’s headed.

The federal transportation law enacted in 2012, MAP-21, ushered in a new era by requiring metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to start evaluating the performance of their transportation investments against a handful of federally required measures. (We’ve written about this just a bit over the last few years.)

View and download the full survey results here.

Some metro areas have been doing this for years, going far beyond the federal government’s modest new requirements (such as safety or condition of roads & bridges) to assess their transportation investments in terms of more ambitious goals like return on investment, public health and access to jobs. With the new suite of measures finalized by USDOT in early 2017, it’s no longer an option for MPOs now — it’s a requirement.

To find the answers to some of these key questions and establish a state of the practice, T4America conducted a national survey of 104 MPOs from 42 states in 2016. Our survey tried to assess:

How many MPOs are already using performance measures in some form?
How many are interested in going beyond the new modest federal measures?
What’s keeping them from doing more?
What other key goals and metrics are they interested in measuring?

Among a range of interesting findings, we discovered that the majority of the MPOs surveyed (75 percent) are already using performance measures in some fashion. However, there is significant room for improvement in how they use them — only 30 percent of all MPOs utilize performance measures to evaluate specific projects for inclusion in the fiscally constrained five-year plans that govern all short-term spending.

While most MPOs are focused on meeting the new federal requirements, two-thirds of all agencies surveyed also want to become national leaders in using performance measures — including many MPOs currently doing only the minimum or just getting started. When it comes to additional measures outside of MAP-21’s modest new requirements, nearly half of MPOs surveyed chose equity and/or health as one of the five additional goals they are interested in measuring and assessing.

View the full survey results here.

Apply for technical assistance from T4America

In addition to the survey, T4America is today announcing a new technical assistance program specifically designed to help MPOs successfully respond to federal, state and local requirements. Find out more about applying, including info on an upcoming webinar to explain more about the application process.

Learn more & apply

A highly cooperative spirit is taking root within the 16 cities in the Smart Cities Collaborative

Just a few blocks from the Capitol dome in Washington, DC, the 16 members of our Smart City Collaborative gathered together again two weeks ago to learn, share wisdom and find ways to collaborate on thoughtfully solving their transportation challenges with new and emerging technologies.

During the last in-person meeting in Minneapolis on the day after the election, we spent a good chunk of the time trying to help the cities back out a bit from the minutia of day-to-day, specific problems like, “which payment vendor should I use for X?” and “What technology do you use for Y?” and think more about the big picture problems they’re trying to solve. Existential questions like, “what kind of city do we want to be in ten years? How can technology help us get there?”

With the answers to those big picture questions firmly in mind and a spirit of collaboration already bearing fruit, we focused on three things during our second two-day meeting: Going in-depth on key issues with notable experts, discussing the action plans for the cities’ specific pilot projects, and a working session on specifically how to measure and quantify success.

One of the highlights of the first day was a terrific discussion about equity and accessibility in our changing digital world. The superb panel, led by Shin-pei Tsay from the Gehl Institute, discussed how technology is rapidly changing equity, accessibility and access to economic opportunity in cities — with an eye toward how Collaborative members can ensure that their projects help solve these challenges, rather than contributing further to the problem.

The first day’s panel discussion on how technology is transforming access to opportunities, with a focus on equity. From left, Shin-pei Tsay, Executive Director of the Gehl Institute, Anita Cozart, Senior Director at PolicyLink, Tatiana Peralta-Quirós, Transport Economist at the World Bank and Rani Narula-Woods, California Program Manager for the Shared-Use Mobility Center.

Members got to hear directly from those involved with other interesting pilot projects elsewhere, like Pittsburgh’s self-driving Uber pilot, driverless shuttles in Contra Costa County, and on-demand transit projects in Oakland, CA and Salem, OR.

We brought in over a dozen outside experts with deep knowledge on issues like performance measurement, data-sharing between cities and transportation network companies (TNCs like Uber and Lyft), modular contracting and flexible procurement, to name a few. City reps participated in intimate, small group discussions where they could ask questions and try to fill gaps in their knowledge.

Gabe Klein with CityFi, formerly the director of Chicago and DC’s transportation departments, walked a group through his experiences in procurement.

Within the three working groups that we created based on what the applying cities were most interested in —automated vehicles, shared mobility and data analytics — a key goal of the year-long collaborative is for each city to launch a pilot project. But how should cities measure and quantify the success or failure of these projects that they’re hoping to get off the ground? For example, for a city that’s trying to run a small, automated vehicle pilot project, what should they be measuring? And what data points can actually be measured?

Doing real-time voting on some proposed metrics for measuring the performance of the cities’ pilot projects.

These are tough nuts to crack, but we all made progress at finding answers — all while trying to keep our eyes on how these pilot projects can help cities get ever closer to their answer to the “what kind of city do we want to be in ten years?” question.

One of the most illuminating comments we heard from a participant was that the Collaborative is creating the opportunity to get out of the day-to-day — where they may have scores of other unrelated responsibilities — to come together with like-minded peers to think long and hard about this one topic or their pilot project in a focused way.

With so much uncertainty right now with regards to federal transportation policy under a new administration and a new Secretary of Transportation, cities will be best served by working together to solve these challenges and avoid producing a new generation of transportation haves and have-nots.

It’s been an incredibly productive few months so far, and we’re eager to see what continues to come out of these cities as they work to ensure that this monumental, epochal shift in transportation is harnessed to shape their cities into places that are more sustainable, equitable and accessible.

The Smart Cities Collaborative is supported by Sidewalk Labs.