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Indianapolis rolls out the red carpet for transit

A Red Line bus stopped at a new station prior to launch.

More than a decade ago, local business and civic leaders in Indianapolis realized that for the city to remain competitive it needed to be better at moving people. Today, after an exhaustive planning process, changes to state law, and a successful local referendum where local voters raised their income taxes to invest in transit, the first major piece of Indianapolis’s transit upgrade is set to open.

This Labor Day weekend, the Red Line bus rapid transit (BRT) will start carrying riders across the city. It’s the first of three planned BRT lines in this midwestern city that, according to transit provider IndyGo, will usher in a “bold, new era of efficient, rider-focused” transit.

The Red Line is the culmination of years of work by current and former elected officials, countless residents and advocates, and business groups representing higher education, healthcare, and IT sectors, to name a few.

“The expansion of transit service in Indianapolis is the collective result from a tireless coalition advocating under one theme: connecting people to places,” Mark Fisher, chief policy officer at the Indy Chamber, told T4America. “It means making sure that our most underserved neighborhoods are as connected as our most established ones. The result is building toward a system for all, one that will boost economic benefits for both residents and businesses.”

Better transit is “key to luring employers, attracting young families and urban-oriented millennials looking for more affordable alternatives to pricey coastal cities, and drawing Indy-born college grads back home,” as we wrote a few years ago in an in-depth story about Indy’s ambitions.1

Backbone of better transit

The Red Line runs north to south for 13 miles, connecting intown neighborhoods with downtown Indianapolis, forming the spine of the improved transit system. One in every four people who work in the county are within walking distance (a half-mile) of the new route and it serves all of the major colleges in the area—that’s 133,000 college students. But this line won’t just serve well-to-do business commuters; about 20 percent of households along the Red Line earn below the poverty rate.

The new Red Line service will bring higher-quality service for residents compared to a traditional bus. Dedicated bus lanes that cover more than half of the route will keep buses moving as will new traffic signals that ban left turns at many intersections and prioritize bus travel. Riders will also pre-buy tickets at the station and can then board through any bus door to speed the boarding process. And new stations in the road median provide protection from the elements, real-time bus arrival information, and flush access with the floor of the bus allowing easier access for people in wheelchairs and with strollers or carts. The Red Line also features electric buses, making it the first all-electric BRT line in the United States.

The corridor was a logical route for the city’s first BRT line: buses along the Red Line route already accounted for about 15 percent of IndyGo’s boardings even though it only covers about one percent of its service area. The Red Line will greatly enhance service with buses running every 10-20 minutes every day; and this is only the first phase. Future phases will extend the line further north and south to reach even more people with high-quality transit.

Part of a system

While the Red Line will be the backbone of an improved transit network, it is not the first improvement that IndyGo has made nor will it be the last. Along with the launch of the Red Line—and funded in part by the same successful ballot referendum in 2016—a number of bus routes will be updated, and every bus route will now run seven days a week, with longer hours and more frequent buses. Many of these improvements began more than a year ago. After proceeds from the 2016 referendum started flowing, IndyGo identified which routes would not be changed with the Red Line rollout and they improved service on those routes as soon as possible. Those simple changes have already increased ridership.

IndyGo is also preparing to roll out a new payment system, MyKey, that will allow riders to use prepaid cards or their phones to pay the bus fare. MyKey will also cap fares to a maximum of $4.00 a day and $15.75 a week. Once riders hit that amount in the course of a day or week, subsequent rides will be free.

https://twitter.com/Indy_Austin/status/1164863518677639169?s=19

And of course there are also the two other BRT lines in the works. The Blue Line will connect some communities east of downtown with the airport to the west. The Purple Line will replace and improve one of the most popular routes in the IndyGo system that runs north from downtown and then east. While neither line has started construction yet, when complete, they will bring many of the same benefits of the Red Line—more service, greater accessibility, and ease of use—to even more communities.

The Red Line and other improvements have been a long time coming, but they’re just the first taste of better transit that will be coming to Indy over the next few years.

“IndyGo is ready to move the city forward and make transit practical for all Indianapolis residents,” said Bryan Luellen, IndyGo’s vice president of public affairs. “The Red Line is a mobility enhancement to the city, and by implementing a reliable transit network, we will contribute to the long-term development of surrounding communities.”

In Indy, better bus service is driving a better transportation system for everyone. With the Red Line’s bus lanes, Indy is quite literally rolling out the red carpet for transit.

Learn how three cities are using arts and culture to address their transportation challenges

Hear from local leaders in three communities who are using the arts and creative practices to address pressing transportation challenges. (Updated)

Dothan’s Artist in Residence, Cosby Hayes, captures the stories of residents living along a dangerous high-traffic corridor.

(Updated: 9/20/2018) Catch up with the recording of the webinar here.

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It’s been about a year since T4America kicked off the Cultural Corridor Consortium to equip three cities to use arts and culture to tackle entrenched transportation challenges and come up with more creative solutions. On Monday, September 17, we’ll feature project leaders from each of these three cities—Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Dothan, AL—who will share stories about their creative placemaking work.

On the hour-long webinar, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about the integral role that art, culture, and artists themselves have had in transforming typical community engagement processes and the design of streets in these communities. From hiring an artist-in-residence to lead community outreach for a highway corridor revitalization project in Dothan, AL to creating artistic interventions along Indianapolis’s new bus rapid transit lines to boost ridership, the 3C participants have found a myriad of ways to use the arts to bolster transportation projects.

Join us on the webinar at 2:00 p.m. EST, on Monday, September 17 to hear from local leaders about their projects’ successes, challenges, and next steps. It may even leave you inspired with ideas for how arts & culture can play a role in solving your own community’s unique transportation-related challenges.

Planning for a better future with arts and culture

With generous support from the Kresge Foundation, Transportation for America is helping three communities across the country use arts & culture as a vehicle to shape local transportation investments. So what has been happening in Dothan, AL; Indianapolis, IN; and Los Angeles, CA over the last few months?

Many of us are used to thinking about arts and culture as a dance performance at a theater, a museum exhibition, or mural across a building’s side. But arts and culture can extend far beyond the performance or physical structures we typically recognize as art. These three cities in Alabama, California, and Indiana are engaging with community members, building local capacity for civic engagement, and helping build bridges of collaboration by using arts and culture in transportation projects.

Dothan, Alabama

Dothan has been working to shift its culture of planning, transportation, and community engagement towards one that focuses on infrastructure for mobility and walkability. Bob Wilkerson, the city’s long-range planner, has been spearheading efforts to change the physical, cultural, and social landscape of Dothan, particularly along Highway 84, which connects Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine, Southeast Alabama Medical Center, and Dothan’s historic downtown.

Highway 84 is a suburban arterial road focused on moving cars as fast as possible, and lacks sidewalks, bike lanes, and crosswalks. The highway is an important corridor, yet it lacks even basic infrastructure that would allow people to walk or bike safely along the highway. In an effort to change the traditionally technocratic and top-down planning process, T4America supported Dothan’s first interactive community workshop this year in hopes of soliciting the input of residents that are typically left out of the planning process.

Dothan held their landmark community planning meeting at the Wiregrass Museum of Art (WMA)—a natural choice for the meeting’s location, as it’s been a welcoming place for people of all ages and backgrounds due to its signature educational programs for visitors from across the state. But WMA became more than just a meeting place; after the first community planning meeting, the City of Dothan and the museum formed an official partnership to pioneer a new culture in Dothan’s planning practices where the city prioritizes safety, accessibility, and the community’s unique character over just concrete and pavement.

Students from the Boys and Girls Club gather after a tour and art making class at the Wiregrass Museum of Art.

With T4America’s support, Dothan and WMA recently launched an artist-in-residence program and selected Cosby Hayes as their resident artist. Hayes will work closely with Dothan’s low-income communities to ensure their voices are included in city-led planning processes. Hayes will focus on using art as a means for social engagement and community building with the aim of building long-term and trusting relationships between Dothan and its lower-income communities. According to Wilkerson, “the formalization of a partnership between the city and WMA is a positive step forward in the development of a new approach to community building. Such partnerships will serve as strong and valuable assets in the future arena of funding procurement for public infrastructure.”

Los Angeles, California

T4America has partnered with LA Commons to support creative placemaking projects in Hyde Park, a 97 percent non-white neighborhood in southern Los Angeles known for its jazz, hip hop, and black cinema scene. By 2019, Hyde Park will be home to a stop on the Crenshaw/LAX light rail, which will connect Hyde Park to the city’s growing light rail system and the Los Angeles International Airport. Light rail will hopefully bring long-term benefits to Hyde Park residents, but in the meantime, the at-grade construction has brought loud and disruptive noises, unsightly messes, and led to the destruction of roads and sidewalks, which all pose threats to the community’s economic, physical, and emotional vitality. This construction has been especially disheartening to Hyde Park residents, as many in the community opposed the at-grade light rail construction and favored an underground alignment instead (which would have been less intrusive, but far more expensive).

In light of the disruptive construction, LA Commons is using arts & culture to foster ownership and pride among longtime residents, as well as a long-term economic development strategy for local businesses. As Karen Mack of LA Commons explains, “every neighborhood is fantastic and we just need artists to unleash the stories within them.”

Community leaders first began by collaboratively selecting artists to engage with the community. Despite the fact that artists from around the world applied for the position, the panel chose local artists from Hyde Park who could personally relate to and understand the community.
Hyde Park residents gathered at “The Heart of Hyde Park” free event to tell stories, write, and eat together to celebrate the existing community living in the neighborhood, share stories about the neighborhood, and to brainstorm ideas of what a better future for Hyde could look like.

Artists Moses Ball and Dezmond Crockett facilitated the Stories Summit where Hyde Park residents shared their experiences living, working, and growing up in the community. Mack says that the Summit helped “fill a hole in the heart of the community that needs to be healed.” The artists initially collaborated with youth, mentors, and other community members to create non-visual and temporary art, but the projects gained so much enthusiasm that the community is determined on creating permanent visual art pieces, too.

Permanent creative placemaking projects that are currently in the works include light pole medallions and a mural, as well as an ambitious 1.1-mile long installation called Destination Crenshaw, led by Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the architectural firm of Perkins + Will, LA Commons, and other community organizations. The project will culminate in an outdoor museum adjacent to the Crenshaw/LAX Line that will celebrate Hyde  Park’s rich Black identity.

Check out this video of youth working on the Hyde Park Mural from LA Commons.

Indianapolis

When it comes to transit, Indianapolis has had some inspiring recent successes—from passing a local transit ballot referendum in 2016, to securing $75 million in grant funding from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), to starting construction on an all-electric bus rapid transit (BRT) line through the city and county.

Today, a coalition of nonprofits and public agencies is working to ensure that all of Indy’s residents—independent of zip code—get the most out of the city’s investments in transit. With Indianapolis ranked as one of the most economically immobile metro areas in the country, there’s a strong desire to see BRT and improved bus service help address residents’ poor access to jobs, grocery stores, and community institutions.

An important component of improving access is the creative placemaking that was included in the Marion County Transit Plan. Building off of the city’s intensive outreach that led to successfully passing that transit plan, a cohort of artists have partnered with Transit Drives Indy and the Arts Council of Indianapolis to work with communities along the planned bus routes. The artists are primarily focused on using art to build excitement for and familiarity with IndyGo’s future Red and Purple BRT routes.

In order to create a culture of public transit ridership, the artists are working to engage communities along the planned Red and Purple lines through a multi-year creative placemaking program in advance of the routes’ construction, which starts this summer. Through storytelling, videography, signage, and other creative mediums, artists are working to promote public transit in even the most isolated and auto-dependent communities.

Each of the artists bring their own unique skills and experiences to each project. Big Car Collaborative is using wayfinding to highlight destinations, like schools, pharmacies, recreation centers, and grocery stores within a mile of the four Southside transit stops. Sapphire Theater Company (STC) is using visual and performance techniques to help people imagine themselves in alternative scenarios—since many of Indy’s residents have never ridden public transportation before. STC is using theatre to help residents act through the initial fear of sitting next to a stranger on the bus or being lost and not knowing if you’re heading in the right direction.

Purple Line artist, Wil Marquez of w/ Purpose, leads a workshop to make pinwheels as a tool to help communities think about how the upgraded transit system will improve their access to necessities and opportunities.

Julia Muney Moore, Director of Public Art at Indy’s Arts Council, notes that the selected artists all have diverse creative mediums and started out with varying degrees of experience in community-based arts. The artists met regularly during the development phase of their projects, which helped the artists learn from each other and build their capacity to work at the intersection of civic engagement, arts, and transportation.

Read more about what the artists are doing around the soon-to-be bus stops here.

Curious about what creative placemaking looks like ‘big-picture’?

This is not the first time that T4America has worked directly with cities interested in using art to produce better transportation projects. Three years ago, T4America teamed up with several other cities, as well as a Portland-based non-profit, the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), to help build arts-based engagement in the Jade and Division-Midway districts of Portland. Over a two-year period, more than 20 creative placemaking projects—focusing on issues like transportation, anti-displacement, economic development, and social justice—covered 23 neighborhoods in North, Northeast, and Southeast Portland. Check out this interactive placemaking map that was created in partnership with the Portland State University Geography Department.

National brain trust gathers to strategize around arts, culture and transportation

Last month, a group of twenty four transportation officials, engineers, planners, artists, policymakers, and advocates from around the country gathered together in Indianapolis to sweat and scheme about how to use arts and culture to build support for more equitable transportation infrastructure.

Twenty-four leaders, ArtPlace America and T4America gathered in Indy for a rare opportunity to talk transportation and creative placemaking.

Transportation for America (a program of Smart Growth America) and ArtPlace America co-hosted this working group, which was graciously hosted by Big Car Collaborative and the Harrison Center for the Arts, two of many incredible organizations working at the intersection of arts, culture, and community development in Indy.

We chose Indianapolis partly because Indy voters approved a 0.25 percent income tax hike back in November 2016 to drastically improve bus service. The new tax will raise more than $54 million annually for the construction of three bus rapid transit lines, new buses, increased route frequency and new sidewalks and bus shelters. But the devil is in the details, and Indy-based transportation, community development and arts organizations and individuals are keen on ensuring that these new investments serve existing residents by centering community input through arts and culture. Local organizations like Transit Drives Indy, LISC, House Poem, Big Car, IndyGo, and others have invested in creative placemaking practices to tackle the role of transportation in improving access and quality of life for everyone in the Indianapolis region. (T4A will also be working closely with Transit Drives Indy over the coming year as part of the Cultural Corridor Consortium.)

Geoff Anderson, President of Smart Growth America, welcomes the working group.

During our time in Indianapolis, the working group visited a few sites including a complete streets project at Maple Crossing, part of Great Places 2020, and Big Car’s Artist & Public Life Residency, an artists’ housing and community land trust development. We also heard from leaders of creative placemaking projects around the country; working group participants Amanda Newman, Joseph Kunkel, Alan Nakagawa, and Peter Svarzbein shared stories from their roles as the creative instigators behind incredible arts-driven transportation projects in Takoma Park, MD, Kewa Pueblo, NM, Los Angeles, CA, and El Paso, TX, respectively.

We ended our time together by breaking into four groups — federal, state and regional, local municipal, and local advocacy — to brainstorm specific ideas and initiatives to further support the adoption of arts and cultural strategies as crucial to solving challenges within the transportation sector.

A storefront in the Maple Crossing corridor where Harrison Center for the Arts is fostering arts programming that engages the local community.

Several themes emerged as the working group participants reflected on our team’s ongoing research:

The need to define “community engagement”

Considering how arts and culture can help transportation agencies better engage communities is just one, narrow aspect of how creative work can help produce better transit infrastructure. There are also varying degrees and definitions of community engagement. While to some it may conjure images of an inaccessible public sector official sitting behind a desk while community members yell at them, others see community engagement as a more significant power shift where transit planning is led by residents themselves. Many working group members agreed that approaching transportation planning through arts and culture helps us go beyond the cursory or surface-level community engagement that is all too common.

Leading with equity and inclusion

The inclusion of arts and cultural strategies doesn’t automatically lead to transportation projects that serve everyone fairly or reflect the diversity of all stakeholders. Equity must be part of the DNA of any project. One participant identified the need to be clear about what ethnic and socioeconomic communities a project is intended to serve and what kinds of cultural heritage the arts and transit project would lift up: If the neighborhood is predominantly African American, yet the arts presented are culturally European, what message does this send regarding the project’s audience? Another participant suggested that because some communities have experienced a history of disinvestment — notably communities of color, immigrant communities, and lower- or mixed-income communities — an equitable approach to transportation investment will actually require disproportionate investment to level the playing field.

Making a stronger argument for how arts and culture impact key transportation priorities: safety, congestion, schedule, and cost

The transportation field operates with these four core considerations, and participants noted that we must effectively demonstrate how arts and culture impact these concerns to be taken seriously. Others felt that the inclusion of arts and cultural approaches should and could actually help shift which considerations are important and what transportation professionals actually evaluate as success, moving away from impersonal quantitative metrics to a more holistic picture that includes the quality of experience. Yet, other participants prioritized the importance of continuing to identify the key traditional transportation stakeholders who need to understand and advocate for the impact of creative placemaking, and create tools that can empower these allies.

Changing arts and culture from being a “nice to have” to a “need to have”

Many in this field have been working for decades to build beautiful public art at transit stops and on bus and train lines. However, our group noted that an area for growth is the opportunity to impress upon transportation leaders that apart from this more visible form of the arts, arts and culture can play a vital role in the actual transportation planning processes, implementation, policymaking, and more.

Making better use of a variety of forms of expertise, including lived experience, technical knowledge, and political power in our planning, design, and maintenance of transit infrastructure

We spent a lot of time discussing the different barriers to better integrating cultural approaches to transportation. For example, engineers may not feel comfortable with or be encouraged to communicate transparently with residents, and residents may feel unmotivated to share their experiences after past histories of being negatively impacted or disrupted by new transportation projects. Participants discussed how to overcome these kinds of barriers, articulating that this kind of synergy is required to get us to better community outcomes and that arts and culture can help lead the way.

Stay tuned for the release this fall of our Arts, Culture and Transportation Field Scan — an examination of creative placemaking in practice across the country by T4A’s Arts and Culture team, commissioned by ArtPlace America — which includes deeper exploration of the ideas discussed above. Sign up for our newsletter here to receive ongoing updates.

This post was written by Mallory Nezam for T4America and Danya Sherman from ArtPlace America.

Working group participants:

  • Geoff Anderson, Smart Growth America
  • Chris Appleton, Wonderroot
  • Emiko Atherton, National Complete Streets Coalition
  • Scott Bogren, Community Transportation Association of America
  • Rochelle Carpenter, Nashville Metropolitan Planning Organization
  • Stephanie Gidigbi, Natural Resources Defense Council
  • Tedd Grain, Local Initiatives Support Corporation Indianapolis
  • Neil Greenberg, Detroit Department of Transportation
  • Susie Hagie, Colorado Department of Transportation
  • Sabina Haque, Artist
  • Scott Hercik, Appalachian Regional Commission
  • Joseph Kunkel, Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative
  • Joung Lee, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials
  • Dana Lucero, Oregon Metro
  • Alan Nakagawa, Los Angeles Department of Transportation
  • Amanda Newman, Health for America, Artist
  • Peter Svarzbein, Artist
  • Anthony Taylor, Major Taylor Bicycling Club of Minnesota
  • Shin-Pei Tsay, Gehl Institute
  • Sarita Turner, PolicyLink & Transportation Equity Caucus
  • Jim Walker, Big Car
  • Patricia Walsh, Americans for the Arts
  • Orson Watson, Consultant
  • Sara Zimmerman, Safe Routes to School

About Transportation for America’s Arts & Culture Initiative

In 2016, T4A began its arts and culture initiative with the launch of The Scenic Route, an interactive creative placemaking resource for transportation professionals. More recently, T4A launched the Cultural Corridor Consortium, a grant making and technical assistance program that supports communities to use arts and culture to solve local transportation challenges. T4A is currently producing a field scan in collaboration with ArtPlace America examining the impact of arts and culture on transportation projects. T4A is a leader in the national creative placemaking movement, which seeks to support and institutionalize the role of artists in contributing to community development projects, especially in advancing smart and equitable transportation solutions.

About ArtPlace America’s Research Strategies

ArtPlace Research Strategies seek to understand both the processes undertaken and the outcomes achieved by creative placemaking practice.  By looking deeply into the activities and learnings surfaced in both the National Creative Placemaking Fund and Community Development Investments program, we bring the arts and cultural work happening in communities of all sizes and contexts together with an analysis of key trends and measures of success in community development practice. Rather than attempting to develop a single approach or system for evaluating creative placemaking project impacts – which vary widely depending on local context, stated goals, and partners – ArtPlace research products are intended more broadly to support practitioners and organizations interested in taking up creative placemaking work. Our partnership with Transportation for America is part of a broader research initiative that we refer to as the Translating Outcomes initiative.

Announcing the winners of our three creative placemaking grants

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

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

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

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

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

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

City of Dothan / Dothan, AL

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

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

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

LA Commons / Los Angeles, CA

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

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

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

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

Transit Drives Indy / Indianapolis, IN

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s budget will hurt local communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Billions in transit measures approved Tuesday — unpacking the 2016 election results

Though we’ll be waiting to see where the federal chips land with President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration and the congressional committee changes, Tuesday night’s biggest transportation news was the fact that local voters across the country approved scores of ballot measures that raise new local money for transportation improvements.

Transpo Vote 2016

View the results on the slate of measures we were tracking here.

Representing more than $150 billion of the more than $200 billion in local transportation measures on Tuesday’s ballots, residents of Los Angeles and Seattle approved measures that will make enormous decades-long expansions in local and regional transit. In L.A.’s case, an overwhelming number of voters (nearly 70 percent) said “YES” to investing more of their tax dollars in public transit, approving Measure M to add a half-cent to the sales tax and extending 2009’s Measure R half-cent transit tax for perpetuity.

In an election where President-elect Trump played heavily to economic concerns, the residents of Indianapolis — enabled by legislation actually signed by VP-elect Pence — voted to increase their income taxes to improve and expand their historically subpar bus service.

Indy’s plan will create new connections and dramatically improve service for current customers, while also starting the buildout of an impressive bus rapid transit network to connect yet more neighborhoods and people to opportunity. In Raleigh (Wake County), voters approved a half-cent sales tax for building out the regional transit network. Planned service, including 20 miles of new bus rapid transit routes and new commuter rail, is expected to quadruple transit ridership in the county in the next ten years.

It’s worth noting that local leaders from both Indy and Raleigh spent a year in the Transportation Innovation Academy we conducted with TransitCenter back in 2015, laying much of the groundwork for these successful campaigns.

Transportation innovation academy denver group

2015’s Transportation Innovation Academy class of Raleigh, Indy and Nashville.

In Atlanta, the city residents within Fulton County approved a half-cent tax for MARTA, their transit system, to raise $2.5 billion to fund subway extensions, hefty improvements in bus service, new light rail on the Beltline project which will eventually encircle the city with transit, a walking/biking trail and linear parks, and improvements to bike and pedestrian connections near stations and bus stops.

The federal level

As for the incoming presidential administration, President-elect Trump’s 100-day plan includes an infrastructure push, which “leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years. It is revenue neutral.” In his acceptance speech last night, he said, “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”

There’s no clear roadmap of what’s to come in January 2017, or what any Trump-backed infrastructure package would look like. According to this piece in Yahoo News, there’s an indication that “Trump’s plan would rely heavily on private funding, with the government encouraging investment through a tax credit that would raise the return to investors and lower the cost of borrowing to states and municipalities that would oversee the projects.”

Stay tuned for more information over the next few weeks, and don’t miss Thursday’s livestream discussion at 12 p.m. Central time on Facebook Live. If you weren’t able to tune in, you can view the full video of the livestream here: https://www.facebook.com/transportationforamerica/videos/10157670655470117/

11/11 Addendum: Here’s the Director’s Note from T4America Director James Corless in our post-election newsletter:

Without a doubt, the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential race was a surprise. But there are similarly surprising — and encouraging — trends in Tuesday’s local elections that illustrate part of the path forward for cities and towns eager to continue making smart transportation investments.

Indianapolis, covered above, is a great example.

Deep in the heart of a state that went solidly for President-elect Trump and also contributed the Vice President-elect to the ticket, the residents of a large county that includes a wide spectrum of incomes voted to increase their own taxes for transit. And the improved and expanded transit service will pay dividends first and foremost to the lower-income Marion County residents that depend on the current service or would benefit the most from better connections to jobs and opportunity.

As we move forward and look for ways to build bridges and unify our communities after an unusually divisive national election, it’s important to find common ground and ways to work together to make our communities the best they can be. Indy’s strong local coalition included the Indy Chamber and numerous faith-based groups and churches. That’s a good roadmap for coming together to make the investments we need to build prosperous local economies and ensure that everyone can connect to opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After city council action, Indy voters will decide on expanding and improving regional transit this November

Indianapolis took another big step forward this week in their ongoing efforts to expand and improve transit service across the city and region. Monday night, the Indianapolis City-County Council voted to place a measure on this November’s ballot to allow voters to decide whether or not to raise new funding for transit service.

If approved, the measure would allow IndyGo, the city’s transit agency, to dramatically expand and improve public transportation service, tripling the number of residents and doubling the number of jobs within a five-minute walk from frequent transit service. It will also extend the hours of service for transit, making it a viable choice for more workers. This base of new funding will also support the start of building out the city’s visionary network of bus-rapid transit (BRT) lines.

Indy profile featuredRead more about Indy’s long-term plan and their journey to this point in our can-do profile: “Action by the Indiana legislature in early 2014 cleared the way for metro Indianapolis counties to have a long-awaited vote on funding a much-expanded public transportation network, with a major emphasis on bus rapid transit. With that legislative battle behind them, the broad Indy coalition is working toward a November 2016 ballot measure to fund the first phase of their ambitious Indy Connect transportation plan.”

With the council’s vote now completed, voters in Marion County will decide on supporting a 0.25% increase in income taxes — a tax of about $100 for a resident earning $42,000 a year — specifically for transit. This additional revenue source will provide an additional $56 million a year for IndyGo.

Improving transit service has been a top priority for Indianapolis’s business community and many of the city’s elected, civic and faith-based leaders, who recognize that investing in transportation options is vital both for connecting low-income workers to economic opportunity and for the competition for talented workers and new businesses.

“It’s…a growth issue; employers and younger workers are moving to more walkable areas served by transit. Rapid transit also attracts people and investment,” Indy Chamber President Michael Huber said in a statement after the council approved the measure.

As it happened, on the day that the city council vote took place, T4America Director James Corless was an invited guest at the Indy Chamber’s quarterly policy breakfast, speaking about the challenges facing mid-sized cities like Indy and affirming the region’s plans to invest in transit to help stay competitive.

And that night, James got to watch the Indianapolis City-County Council debate the measure and ultimately vote to put it on this November’s ballot:

The Indy Business Journal took a look at what lies ahead for the campaign to win at the ballot this Fall:

Now comes a months-long campaign to convince voters to vote “yes.”

…“We feel very comfortable heading into November that if we’re able to get our message out and speak to the different reasons people would support transit, polling does show we have a path for success,” said Mark Fisher, Indy Chamber’s vice president of government relations and policy development, to a room full of business leaders and government officials.

Fisher and a handful of other local leaders were supported and encouraged over the last year by the Transportation Innovation Academy, a program convened by Transportation for America and TransitCenter last year to train local leaders from three mid-sized regions on the critical role transit can play in their cities. The Indy Chamber convened a diverse team of community leaders that participated in the yearlong program, and today, we’re so proud to see participants in the academy from Indy playing key roles in building community support for the ambitious vision for new transit service.

Though ballot measures are common in other parts of the country, it is a new tool for this region. A first step for regional transit champions was winning approval from legislators in 2014 to allow the local tax measure to go on the ballot. If successful, this will be the first time Indianapolis raises dedicated funding for public transportation through a ballot measure.

Along with a handful of other regions, we will be watching Indianapolis carefully this November.

Massachusetts event highlights the growing trend of states moving to enable more local transportation funding

“Let the voters decide.” It’s a mantra we hear all the time in politics, but not quite as much in transportation. Yet that’s starting to change, as nearly a dozen states have taken steps to empower local communities with new or enhanced taxing authority for transportation over the last few years, putting the question directly in the hands of voters.

Update: (5:23 p.m.) WAMC radio story about the briefing is at the bottom of this post.

Like in Utah, where legislature moved in 2015 to increase the state’s gas tax, tie it to inflation, and then provide individual counties with the ability to go to the ballot to increase sales taxes to raise yet more dollars to invest in their local transportation priorities. Voters approved the 0.25% sales tax increase in ten of the 17 counties where it was on the ballot last November. And in Virginia, state legislators in 2014 created a new regional funding mechanism and boosted sales taxes in the state’s two biggest metro areas (Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads) explicitly and only for transportation projects.

This growing movement of states taking action to empower local communities and put questions in the hands of the voters was the hot topic at a legislative briefing in the Massachusetts state capitol this morning, sponsored by a host of organizations including Transportation for Massachusetts and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.

MA policy breakfast james corless mayor ballard 2

From left, Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll, MAPC executive director Marc Draisen, Former Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard, T4A Director James Corless (speaking), Pioneer Valley Planning Commission executive director Tim Brennan and Kristina Egan from Transportation for Massachusetts at this morning’s breakfast in the MA state capitol.

The briefing was in support of S1474 and H2698, bills in the Massachusetts legislature known as “enabling legislation” that would allow cities, towns or groups of cities new authority to raise one of four different sources of local taxes explicitly for local transportation projects.

tracking state policy funding featuredTracking state policy & funding

We are closely tracking this piece of state legislation and scores of others as part of our new resource on state transportation policy & funding. Visit our refreshed state policy bill tracker to see current information about the states attempting to raise new state or local funding in 2016, states attempting to reform how those dollars are spent, and states taking unfortunate steps in the wrong direction on policy.

T4America Director James Corless kicked off the discussion speaking to his own experience with ballot measures in California. “There is no better way of rebuilding the transportation brand with voters than asking them to tax themselves for projects and then delivering those projects and making good on that promise,” he explained.

In Indiana, the legislature acted in 2014 to change state law and allow metro Indianapolis counties to have a long-awaited vote on raising income taxes to fund an ambitious new public transportation network built around bus rapid transit.

Former Indy Mayor Greg Ballard, who told the Indy Star that he’d “been to the Statehouse more on [Indy’s enabling legislation] than any other issue,” was shared a local perspective this morning on how important it is for local cities to have more of a hand in deciding their own future and staying competitive.

“This is all about attracting talent…the local option transportation tax is a critical tool for mayors because, let’s face it, mayors know best what their most pressing transportation problems are,” Mayor Ballard said.

“When I became mayor we had one transit line on a map. We had no bigger, regional vision. What our local option tax has done is allow us to think big. So we now want to take seven new transit lines to the voters, and the local option tax made it possible to embrace such an ambitious vision. People used to move for a job now they move for a place – that’s why transportation and quality life is critical to make your economy competitive.”

The leaders of Massachusetts’ cities and towns are eager to put the question to voters. Marc Draisen, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in the Boston metro area, said, “This bill sets a high bar — you have to let local voters decide on their own future…if they don’t like it, they will reject it.”

And the Mayor of Salem, Kim Driscoll, said that as things stand now without the legislation, it’s an uphill battle for cities like hers to invest in what they most need to stay competitive.

“The ability to connect people to places is critical. But for a place like Salem we simply don’t have the tools to invest in the projects that can make that happen,” she said. “This bill would unlock great ideas in the communities that really want it”

T4America director James Corless reminded everyone that the success of local cities and towns are intrinsic to the state’s economic prosperity.

“The best ideas are coming from cities and towns; empowering communities and promoting innovation is essential to a strong future.”

Updated 5:23 p.m. — WAMC Northeast Public Radio did a story about this morning’s briefing. Read or listen to the story here. An excerpt:

State Senator Ben Downing is sponsoring a bill to enable a community or group of municipalities to enact a tax to finance local transportation projects.

“This is a way to control much more directly how we raise and how we spend money for transportation,” Downing said. “It’s also a way to guarantee that the dollars that are raised will stay in the community where they are raised.”

…Transportation for America Director James Corless says since 2013 10 states have passed similar legislation. “In part they realize Congress is not going to come to their rescue anymore and increasingly even state capitals are broke,” said Corless.

—

This story is part of the work of T4America’s START Network — State Transportation Advocacy, Research & Training —  for state elected leaders and advocates working on similar state issues.

Find out more and join today.

START logo t4 feature web

Seven metropolitan areas selected to participate in yearlong transportation training academy

Continuing T4America’s dedication to cultivating local transportation expertise and knowledge, we’re proud to announce the selection of seven local groups of metropolitan leaders to participate in a new yearlong training academy focused on performance measurement to better assess the impacts and benefits of transportation spending.

This 2016 Transportation Leadership Academy is the second such training program for local leaders created by T4America in as many years. (Our first academy was created in partnership with TransitCenter in 2015. -Ed.)

What is performance measurement?

Performance measurement — more carefully measuring and quantifying the multiple benefits of transportation spending decisions to ensure that every dollar is aligned with the public’s goals and brings the greatest return possible for citizens — is an emerging practice that forward-looking metropolitan areas of all sizes are beginning to use.

The transportation law passed in 2012 (MAP-21) created a nascent system for states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to measure the performance of their investments against federally-required measures. Some metro areas were doing this for years before MAP-21 passed; others are now trying to determine how to incorporate this new system into their process of creating plans, selecting projects, and measuring the effectiveness of each transportation dollar that gets spent. This yearlong training program will provide these local leaders with tools and support for this endeavor.

The academy is particularly timely considering that the U.S. Department of Transportation is working to finalize a new set of transportation performance measure procedures and regulations — possibly as soon as this year — which we’ve been writing about here regularly.

Why performance measures?

“It’s never easy to raise money to invest in transportation, and more than ever before, citizens want to know how the decisions are being made to spend their money,” said Transportation for America Director James Corless in our press release today. “A more accountable system that sets tangible goals with input from the community, chooses transportation projects that will help the community meet those goals, and then measures the outcomes in a feedback loop will be essential to rebuild public confidence in transportation agencies and for ensuring that we get the best bang for the buck going forward,” Corless said.

This program, created in partnership with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), will educate these seven teams made up of local business, civic, elected leaders, and transportation professionals, prepare them to act on opportunities within their communities and plug them into a dynamic national network of like-minded leaders throughout the country.

The yearlong academy will consist of in-person workshops with participants from all seven regions — Boston, MA; Cleveland, OH; Des Moines, IA; Indianapolis, IN; Lee County, FL; Seattle, WA; and South Bend, IN — ongoing technical assistance throughout the year, regular online training sessions, and expert analysis of their plans and progress on deploying performance measures.

What the participants had to say

“The benefit of being selected for this is program allows Central Indiana to have access to best practices in the industry as they’re being developed,” said Anna Gremling, executive director of the Indianapolis MPO, in their official release today. “Our team will use what we learn through this process to assist in the development of the 2045 Long Range Transportation Plan that will begin in mid-2016.”

“This is the future of transportation in an era of aging infrastructure and limited revenue – continually measuring the performance of the transportation network to ensure we’re making the smartest investments possible,” Des Moines Area MPO Executive Director Todd Ashby said. “We are thrilled to be included in cutting-edge thinking on the best practices in this field.”

“Our entire team is honored to be selected by Transportation for America for this first-ever transportation leadership program, particularly with groups from such a diverse cross-section of the country,” said Brian Hamman, Lee County Commissioner and Chairman of the Lee County MPO. “The knowledge this team will gain, and the national network we’ll create with other forward-thinking leaders, will serve Lee County’s transportation efforts well into the future.”

City leaders from Indy, Raleigh and Nashville get inspired by the secrets to Denver’s transit success

Delegations of city leaders from Nashville, Raleigh and Indianapolis wrapped up the latest two-day Transportation Innovation Academy workshop in Denver last week, where they learned firsthand about the years of hard work that went into Denver’s economic development plan to vastly expand the city’s transportation options, including new buses, light rail and commuter rail.

The three delegations underneath the new train shed on the platform at Denver Union Station last week.

The three delegations underneath the new train shed on the platform at Denver Union Station last week.

The Transportation Innovation Academy is a joint project of Transportation for America and TransitCenter.

Transportation Innovation Academy with logos 2The three delegations saw the tangible fruit of Denver’s successful transit investments first laid out by their FasTracks plan in the early 2000s, and they learned how Denver went about the monumental task of building support and raising the funding required to make it all happen.

Analyzing Denver’s success so closely provided participants an opportunity to evaluate their own ongoing city and/or regional campaign efforts, and all were clearly struck by just how much work is plowed into the earth before you taste the fruits of success. It’s do-able and the benefits are sizable, but the task is not easy or quick. The participants know they have a challenge on their hands, but they were encouraged to see how Denver made it all happen and are taking imminently practical lessons back home to help build their coalitions and engage supporters back home.

From the very first discussion, the academy participants learned about the unique factors in Denver’s success. One factor was education — Denver succeeded in their ballot campaign by throwing out assumptions about who would and would not support transit. Polling and focus groups revealed who support Denver’s efforts and why. Women over 60 and suburban drivers — groups often assumed to be neutral to or against transit — became key supporters. On the other hand, it could not be assumed that transit riders would support the plan.

In the end, leaders from these three cities saw the possibilities of reaching out to key constituencies who haven’t been engaged in their efforts so far.

Denver Union Station transportation innovation academyDenver Union Station transportation innovation academy 2

With years of actual construction behind them at this point, participants also experienced Denver’s story in a tangible way. They ooh’ed and aah’ed inside the jewel of the new system — the redeveloped Union Station in downtown — took a ride along a new light rail line, and toured a mixed income housing development constructed by MetroWest Housing Solutions — the former city public housing authority which the City of Lakewood has reimagined and reconstituted as an opportunistic community developer. That project and the surrounding 40W Arts District are using arts and creative design to engage the community and build support for new projects. The delegates learned that one of the most vocal opponents to the arts district and development quickly changed his tune when the city sponsored a mural on his industrial building.

Denver light rail transportation innovation academy

A key to all of this success is the way Denver’s regional leaders stayed together as a region throughout the first failed ballot measure for transit, the successful FasTracks ballot measure and the subsequent drop in anticipated revenues brought on by the recession that made implementation a challenge.

Mayor Bob Murphy, mayor of the suburban city of Lakewood and past chair of the Metro Mayors Caucus, showed how that cooperative forum among mayors — from Denver, major suburbs, and even towns as small as 500 in population — builds cohesion. Cities in the region don’t try to poach jobs and industries from neighboring cities, but work collectively at economic development across the region. “Sometimes we are competitors,” Murphy said, “but we are [ultimately] colleagues.”

The leaders from Indy, Nashville and Raleigh will meet in Nashville for the last session of this year’s Academy in December, where they’ll build their own action plans for campaigns in their regions, while also learning more about Nashville’s growth and development, its challenges in building bus rapid transit and how they’re moving forward despite a few setbacks.

While only these three regions are participating this year, they’re emblematic of a burgeoning group of mid-sized U.S. cities that are either in the midst of or planning new transit service to meet the demand and help them stay competitive in the race for talent.

This post was written by Michael Russell with contributions from Dan Levine and Stephen Lee Davis.

Indy’s “more is better” approach to transportation leads to new all-electric carsharing service

BlueIndy, a new all-electric carsharing service in Indianapolis launching today, is evidence of Mayor Greg Ballard’s open-minded approach to transportation innovations to improve options in the city for residents.

Blue Indy

This brand new system is a cross between a bikesharing service (cars can go one-way between numerous locations), a service like Zipcar (the parking spots are reserved) and Car2Go (smaller compact cars for one-way use) with one major exception: All of the cars are 100% electric and charge via small hubs installed next to each parking spot that are wired into the electric grid. In addition to keeping the fleet charged, anyone with an EV can also pay a small membership and hourly fee to charge their own cars at the hubs scattered around downtown.

Blue Indy MapThe system is launching with 50 vehicles and 25 charging stations (doubling as the reservable parking spots) around the city, with a plan to soon expand up to 500 electric cars and 200 stations. The city is paying $6 million in dollars earmarked for infrastructure projects, with the French company that owns the service investing somewhere over $40 million.

The new system ties into two of Mayor Ballard’s key goals: to improve energy security by reducing dependence on foreign oil and to provide innovative new mobility options for Indianapolis residents. BlueIndy comes several years after the opening of the economically successful Cultural Trail through the city, closely on the heels of the launch of the Pacers bikesharing system, and in the midst of the city’s effort to dramatically expand and improve public transportation.

It was a long time coming, but now Indianapolis has a new option for getting around their city, and a range of travel options are one of the things most coveted by the younger, mobile workforce that Indy is desperate to retain (and attract) as part of their economic development goals.

As Time Money wrote today, “Without knowing any better, it would be reasonable to assume that a cutting-edge program like this would first appear in a city that already stands out for green initiatives and electric car adoption.” While some cities (Washington, D.C, Seattle and others) are known for a booming number of transportation startups disrupting entrenched systems due to favorable regulatory environments, BlueIndy is a testament to what can happen in other perhaps less likely cities that have civic leadership committed to improving transportation options for their residents (and often visitors) by any means necessary.

Whether by raising new money to expand and improve a transit system that hasn’t kept pace with the growth of the city, by building a downtown walking and biking path that’s the envy of other cities, or encouraging new mobility companies like BlueIndy or Car2Go to set up shop, Indy’s “more is better” approach is already reaping economic dividends.

Mobility is changing incredibly fast and cities that open themselves up to these exciting changes will be much better positioned to reap the rewards. It’s encouraging to see a place like Indianapolis on the list of places stepping forward into this future of new, different, exciting mobility options. Regardless of how well BlueIndy fares going forward, this step is one they’ll be glad they took for years to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

family-cultural-trail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will Congress reward the ambitious places that are seizing their future with both hands?

Transportation Innovation Academy with logos 2The three mid-sized regions participating in this week’s Transportation Innovation Academy in Indianapolis are a refreshing reminder that local communities – particularly a growing wave of mid-size cities — are seizing their future with both hands and planning to tax themselves to help make ambitious transportation plans a reality. Yet even the most ambitious cities can’t do it alone, and if Congress fails to find a way to put the nation’s transportation fund on stable footing, it will jeopardize even the most homegrown, can-do plans to stay economically competitive.

Following up on the first session of this yearlong academy, sponsored by both T4America and TransitCenter, that began back in March, 21 representatives from these three similar-sized cities — Indianapolis, Raleigh, and Nashville — are reuniting in Indianapolis today and tomorrow to learn from experts and from each other about how to make their ambitious transit expansion plans a reality.

Follow along today and tomorrow (May 14-15 on twitter by following @T4America, @TransitCtr, and the hashtag #TranspoAcademy. The participants will be sharing some of the helpful nuggets of info they’re hearing throughout the two-day workshop.

With Infrastructure Week events happening here in DC all week (#RebuildRenew), it’s a good reality check to hear about these forward-looking plans bubbling up from the grassroots in cities far away from Capitol Hill.

So what’s on tap in Indy that’s worth sharing with the other business and civic leaders from Raleigh and Nashville this week?

Indianapolis

Indy profile featured

Action by the Indiana legislature in early 2014 cleared the way for metro Indianapolis counties to have a long-awaited vote on funding a much-expanded public transportation network, with a major emphasis on bus rapid transit. With that legislative battle behind them, the broad Indy coalition is working toward a November 2016 ballot measure to fund the first phase of their ambitious Indy Connect transportation plan.

Read the full profile.

While the particulars vary from place to place, Indy isn’t all that different than Nashville and Raleigh. All three cities have various groups of leaders who have coalesced around the notion that big investments in transit are crucial to their long-term economic prosperity and competitiveness.

As the task force concluded in Indianapolis in the story above, a well-rounded investment in a multimodal transportation network in Indy is the long-term plan with the highest return-on-investment. Though all are in different stages of the process, all three are making plans to tax themselves and/or raise local revenue that they are hoping to pair with additional investment from a reliable federal partner.

But will the feds continue to be a reliable partner?

We’ve spent a lot of time here focusing on the trend of states raising new transportation funds over the last few years, and some have mistaken that to mean that states are ready to go it alone. The truth is far from it. While all of these states are moving to address growing needs and declining revenues, they’re absolutely counting on the feds to continue their historic role as a partner. And shouldn’t those efforts be rewarded, rather than using it as an excuse to pass the buck down to states or localities?

In a story detailed in our longer “can-do” Indy profile, Indy is counting on the feds to support their efforts to get started with their bus rapid transit network.

The Red Line won’t get off the ground without a grant from the Federal Transit Administration, and if Congress fails to keep the nation’s trust fund solvent this summer and pass an annual appropriations bill with robust funding for infrastructure, neither will happen. Not only is Indy hopefully raising their own local funds, they’re also leveraging other investments to support the corridor and help it be as successful as possible — like prioritizing their federal block grants for community development into the soon-to-be Red Line corridor.

Red Line Indy slide

Indy, Raleigh, Nashville, and dozens of other cities and regions have been putting their own skin in the game as they make their bets on smart transportation investments. Yet Congress has shown no sign of either settling on a long-term funding source or coming up with an authorization proposal that lasts more than a couple of years. (Or a couple of months!)

Infrastructure Week, happening now, is a great time to hear from leaders of all stripes about the importance of investing in our nation’s infrastructure, but it can feel a little vague or hard to wrap your head around. Which infrastructure? What kind of infrastructure? To what end?

Hearing more about these very specific plans in Raleigh, Nashville and Indianapolis is a great way to bring the point of Infrastructure Week to a specific, understandable, local focus. For these three cities, transit = continued economic prosperity.

Mark Fisher, vice president of government relations and policy development at the Indy Chamber, made this connection clear in the Chamber’s press release for today’s event. “Other regions are using transit to attract talent and investment, connect workers to jobs and spark new development. We must move forward or we will continue to fall behind,” he said.

Hopefully the leaders on Capitol Hill will take note of the things happening in Indianapolis this week — and in Nashville and Raleigh and countless others — and finally come up with the fortitude required help our local economies prosper.

Ongoing training academy brings together key leaders from three ambitious regions

Twenty-one local leaders representing three regions with ambitious plans to invest in public transportation will be reuniting in Indianapolis this week to continue the first yearlong Transportation Innovation Academy, sponsored by T4America and TransitCenter.

Transportation Innovation Academy with logos

(This is a slightly updated version of the post we published in conjunction with the first workshop in Raleigh in early March that kicked off the Academy. – Ed.)

Similarly sized regions of 1 million-plus, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Raleigh all have notable plans to expand their transportation systems with additional bus rapid transit or rail service. In partnership with TransitCenter, T4America has created a new yearlong academy for a select group of key leaders from each region that was selected to participate. The academy is intended to share knowledge and best practices, visit cities that have inspiring success stories, and help develop and catalyze the local leadership necessary to turn these ambitious visions into reality.

All 21 participants (seven from each region) will be in Indianapolis on Thursday and Friday this week for the second of three two-day workshops with experts in the field and leaders from other cities with similar experiences. Each of the three cities are hosting an academy workshop, focusing on the particular specifics of that city while also learning valuable lessons that are applicable back home. The participants will also take a trip together to a fourth region that already has tasted the kind of success that these leaders would love to replicate.

Would you like to follow along and hear some of the great insights participants are picking up in this week’s Indianapolis workshop? Follow @t4america, @TransitCtr and the hashtag #TranspoAcademy on Thursday May 14 and Friday May 15.

Key business leaders from each region are part of each group, along with mayors and city/county council members, real estate pros, housing industry experts and local advocates.

The diverse group of members, assembled by each region’s team lead, recognizes the fact that making any big plan to invest in a new transit line or system requires buy-in from more than just a mayor and/or a few citizen groups. There has to be a shared vision with support from a wide range of civic players. In some regions, there might be a huge university presence. In others, it might be a big medical institution that anchors the local economy.

In all cases, getting everyone to the table and building a vision that everyone can share in are keys to success.

Transportation Innovation Academy Raleigh 3 Transportation Innovation Academy Raleigh 2 Transportation Innovation Academy Raleigh 1

In Indianapolis, the host of this week’s workshop, action by the Indiana legislature and Governor Mike Pence cleared the way for metro Indianapolis counties to vote on funding a much-expanded public transportation network, with a major emphasis on bus rapid transit. Civic, elected and business leaders had been hard at work since 2009 producing an ambitious and inspiring IndyConnect plan, “the most comprehensive transportation plan — created with the most public input — our region has ever seen,” according to Mayor Greg Ballard in the foreword to our Innovative MPO report. Now the hard part comes as they build public and political will and decide what to include on a November 2016 ballot measure.

While transit expansion has more support in the region’s core, local leaders acknowledge they have an uphill battle in some suburban counties more skeptical of the merits of transit. Mayor Ballard and the diverse group of Indy businesses (including higher education, healthcare and IT industries) supporting IndyConnect understand how important this measure is for helping Indy be economically competitive in the future. Local leaders hope to position their city to attract young families and to lure recent college grads back home to Indy. And a strong regional public transit system is lies at the core of their economic strategy.

“Supported by a strong business community, an ambitious heartland city wins the ability to let citizens decide their own transportation future.” Read our detailed “can-do” profile of Indianapolis.

After watching the region’s two other counties approve ballot measure to raise funds for a regional transit system originally envisioned by all three counties, the hosts of the first workshop in March in Raleigh (Wake County) hope to join the other two core metro counties in beginning a new regional rail transit system.

Adjoining Durham and Orange counties approved half-cent sales taxes in 2011 and 2012 to fund transit operations, improved bus service and a regional light rail line. Wake County Commissioners, meanwhile, had not allowed a question to raise funds for a regional transit system to go to the ballot. In fact, a handful of commissioners actively prevented the issue going forward, often stifling debate at times.

That could all change in 2015, as more than half of the county board was replaced last November. Four new supportive members replaced four who had consistently been on the other side of the issue, clearing the way for a potential ballot measure in Wake County.  Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane, who helped kick things off in the workshop this morning, has long supported a regional plan for transit.

Wake County is one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. and the county’s population is due to double by 2035. Yet this rapidly growing community with a notable high-tech, research, government and major university employers is one of the few major metro regions lacking a significant transit system. Just like Indianapolis, they will be crafting their plan and building consensus in 2015 as they shoot for a vote in 2016.

In Nashville, local advocates and elected leaders are still smarting from the setback on last year’s effort to kick-start a bus rapid-transit network with a line that would have connected neighborhoods and major employment centers along an east-west route through the city.

Inspired by watching and learning from some of their neighbors’ mistakes, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce chose transit as a top priority six years ago, second only to improving public education. Local leaders there, including the recently departed Mayor Karl Dean, wanted to get out in front of the issue, rather than waiting 10 years after gridlock has overtaken the booming region. The business community and the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization have both been a key part of crafting the plan to make bus rapid transit a reality in Nashville, and members of the MPO, the Chamber, a and several businesses are all represented in their academy group.

Along with TransitCenter, we’re excited to see what the year will bring for these 21 participants and the up-and-coming regions that they represent. We’re going to have much more on these three cities this year, so stay tuned.

New training academy brings together key leaders from three ambitious regions

Twenty-one local leaders representing three regions with ambitious plans to invest in public transportation gathered today in Raleigh, NC, to kick off the first yearlong Transportation Innovation Academy, sponsored by T4America and TransitCenter.

Transportation Innovation Academy with logos

Similarly sized regions of 1 million-plus, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Raleigh all have notable plans to expand their transportation systems with additional bus rapid transit or rail service. In partnership with TransitCenter, T4America has created a new yearlong academy for a select group of key leaders from each region that was selected to participate. The academy is intended to share knowledge and best practices, visit cities that have inspiring success stories, and help develop and catalyze the local leadership necessary to turn these ambitious visions into reality.

Sheila Ogle of Ogle Enterprises (Raleigh), left, Shane Douglas of Collier International (Nashville) and Juan Gonzalez of KeyBank Indiana (Indy) go through an exercise led by Jarrett Walker (@humantransit) where teams design a transit network for a fictional city with a set budget — one way to experience the real-life trade-offs that transit planners and cities have to make.

Sheila Ogle of Ogle Enterprises (Raleigh), left, Shane Douglas of Collier International (Nashville) and Juan Gonzalez of KeyBank Indiana (Indy) go through an exercise led by Jarrett Walker (@humantransit) where teams design a transit network for a fictional city with a set budget — one way to experience the real-life trade-offs that transit planners and cities have to make.

All 21 participants (seven from each region) are in Raleigh this week for a two-day workshop with experts in the field and leaders from other cities with similar experiences. Each of the three cities will host an academy workshop, focusing on the particular specifics of that city while also learning valuable lessons that are applicable back home. The participants will also take a trip together to a fourth region that already has tasted the kind of success that these leaders would love to replicate.

Key business leaders from each region are part of each group, along with mayors and city/county council members, real estate pros, housing industry experts and local advocates.

The diverse group of members, assembled by each region’s team lead, recognizes the fact that making any big plan to invest in a new transit line or system requires buy-in from more than just a mayor and/or a few citizen groups. There has to be a shared vision with support from a wide range of civic players. In some regions, there might be a huge university presence. In others, it might be a big medical institution that anchors the local economy.

In all cases, getting everyone to the table and building a vision that everyone can share in are keys to success.

Transportation Innovation Academy Raleigh 3 Transportation Innovation Academy Raleigh 2 Transportation Innovation Academy Raleigh 1

In Indianapolis, action by the Indiana legislature and Governor Mike Pence cleared the way for metro Indianapolis counties to vote on funding a much-expanded public transportation network, with a major emphasis on bus rapid transit. Civic, elected and business leaders had been hard at work since 2009 producing an ambitious and inspiring IndyConnect plan, “the most comprehensive transportation plan — created with the most public input — our region has ever seen,” according to Mayor Greg Ballard in the foreword to our Innovative MPO report. Now the hard part comes as they build public and political will and decide what to include on a November 2016 ballot measure that would raise revenue from changes to local income taxes — a challenging revenue mechanism to say the least.

While transit expansion has more support in the region’s core, local leaders acknowledge they have an uphill battle in some suburban counties more skeptical of the merits of transit. Mayor Ballard and the diverse group of Indy businesses (including a booming healthcare industry) supporting IndyConnect understand how important this measure is for helping Indy be economically competitive in the future. Local leaders hope to position their city to attract young families who think Chicago is too expensive and to lure recent college grads back home to Indy. And a strong regional public transit system is lies at the core of their economic strategy.

After watching the region’s two other counties approve ballot measure to raise funds for a regional transit system originally envisioned by all three counties, the hosts of this week’s workshop in Raleigh (Wake County) hope to join the other two core metro counties in beginning a new regional rail transit system.

Adjoining Durham and Orange counties approved half-cent sales taxes in 2011 and 2012 to fund transit operations, improved bus service and a regional light rail line. Wake County Commissioners, meanwhile, had not allowed a question to raise funds for a regional transit system to go to the ballot. In fact, a handful of commissioners actively prevented the issue going forward, often stifling debate at times.

That could all change in 2015, as more than half of the county board was replaced last November. Four new supportive members replaced four who had consistently been on the other side of the issue, clearing the way for a potential ballot measure in Wake County.  Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane, who helped kick things off in the workshop this morning, has long supported a regional plan for transit.

Wake County is one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. and the county’s population is due to double by 2035. Yet this rapidly growing community with a notable high-tech, research, government and major university employers is one of the few major metro regions lacking a significant transit system. Just like Indianapolis, they will be crafting their plan and building consensus in 2015 as they shoot for a vote in 2016.

In Nashville, local advocates and elected leaders are still smarting from the setback on last year’s effort to kick-start a bus rapid-transit network with a line that would have connected neighborhoods and major employment centers along an east-west route through the city.

Inspired by watching and learning from some of their neighbors’ mistakes, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce chose transit as a top priority six years ago, second only to improving public education. Local leaders there, including the recently departed Mayor Karl Dean, wanted to get out in front of the issue, rather than waiting 10 years after gridlock has overtaken the booming region. The business community and the Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization have both been a key part of crafting the plan to make bus rapid transit a reality in Nashville, and members of the MPO, the Chamber, a and several businesses are all represented in their academy group.

Along with TransitCenter, we’re excited to see what the year will bring for these 21 participants and the up-and-coming regions that they represent.  We’re going to have much more on these three cities this year, so stay tuned.

15 issues to watch in ’15, Part II: Places

It’s a challenge to craft a list of only five states, regions and cities that have important or notable things happening this year. Whether states attempting to raise transportation revenue this year, states changing key policies and continuing to innovate how they choose or build transportation projects, or local communities going to voters to raise money for new projects, there’s no shortage of places worth watching this year. Here are five that rose to the top, but tell us what you think we missed, in your area or elsewhere.

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

START stacked T4 feature

Places

1. Minnesota

If we released a list this time last year, Minnesota might have appeared on that one as well. Though a broad coalition (Move MN) formed to rally support from the public and lawmakers for raising transportation revenues, the DFL majority in both chambers did not pass a transportation funding package in 2014. DFL Gov. Mark Dayton, running for reelection, seemed hesitant to support raising any taxes, though he routinely acknowledged that Minnesota needed to invest in their aging transportation network. Late in the election, he introduced his 2015 legislative plan to raise revenue: a new 6.5 percent wholesale tax on gasoline, in addition to a variety of other fee increases.

Gov. Dayton won re-election, but the Minnesota House flipped back to a GOP majority, providing a new challenge for his plan in the legislature. Though Move MN built an impressively broad coalition, they weren’t able to secure support from the statewide chamber and a few other key groups that represent Minnesota businesses. Gov. Dayton has already been lobbying those groups in 2015 to support his plan that would raise over $6 billion over the next decade.

Republicans in control of the House have issued their plan that would raise no new taxes but allocate $750 million over the next four years via various internal accounting maneuvers. (Great comparison of the two plans here.) With two legislative chambers split between the parties but a growing public call for something to be done to invest infrastructure, Minnesota will be a critical battleground to watch this year. If Congress fails to find a funding solution to keep the nation’s trust fund from going bankrupt this Spring, Minnesota — and states facing a shortfall — could be hit by a double whammy if they’re not prepared to act on their own.

2. Utah

While there had been some noise over the last year in Utah about the need to raise new transportation revenue, there was no concrete legislation introduced or seriously discussed in 2014. In late 2014, Governor Herbert suggested he was open to raising the gas tax in 2015, which was “a proposition [speaker-elect Greg] Hughes doesn’t see getting very far” in the upcoming legislative session, according to the Deseret News. At the time, Rep. Hughes did suggest that “House Republicans do want to look what he sees as an outdated formula for calculating the state’s 24.5-cent per gallon gas tax.” But just a few weeks ago, news broke that a deal could be closer than previously thought. An article in the Salt Lake Tribune last week broke the news that the state’s GOP caucus endorsed the idea of raising transportation taxes, but also overhauling the funding system — which could mean a revenue source that will rise with inflation.

“We have talked about concepts now for two years,” House Transportation Committee Chairman Johnny Anderson, R-Taylorsville, told a forum of the Utah Highway Users Association. “Know that the work is about to be done” to raise tax for transportation. …Anderson said the House GOP Caucus last month endorsed not only transportation-tax hikes, but also the idea to “dump our antiquated” tax system for one that automatically keeps up with inflation and makes those now escaping gas tax contribute.

The Utah legislature is somewhat unique — their trust of the Utah DOT runs so high that they often appropriate significant general funds to transportation projects. Utah could also prove to be a significant bellwether for other GOP-controlled state legislatures to follow. Utah’s session begins January 28, so we’ll soon find out if this proposition has legs.

3. Illinois

Incoming Illinois Republican Governor Bruce Rauner faces significant challenges, but some of his first moves have a lot of advocates hopeful about positive changes that could come in 2015. Just a few years removed from a governor going to jail and a patronage hiring scandal at state agencies, Illinois is also in one of the worst fiscal messes in the country, brought on by billions in unfunded pensions, decreased tax revenue, and repeated downgrades to the state’s credit rating.

As the Governor and the legislature collaborate on a budget and craft a new capital plan for infrastructure investment, the fiscal crisis facing the state provides an interesting opportunity for Gov. Rauner, who ran as a reformer and a prudent fiscal manager on his business bona fides. With the state billions in debt and confidence in IDOT incredibly low, overhauling the system and moving towards a new system for measuring the performance of the state’s transportation spending could be the only way to restore public trust — essential for raising any new money for transportation.

Possibly hinting at a move in this direction, Gov. Rauner appointed Randy Blankenhorn from the Chicago MPO (CMAP) to head the state DOT, an appointment which could help bring the issue of performance measures into the debate. “There’s always hyperbole and optimism when you have a changing of the guard. But I sincerely believe that we have a chance to right Illinois’ ship with Gov. Rauner and Randy Blankenhorn,” said Peter Skosey with the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) and the T4 Advisory Board. As part of his transition team on transportation, Gov. Rauner also brought in MarySue Barrett from MPC, one of the leading advocates in the entire state for a performance-based transportation system.

With these pieces in place, it’s possible that discussing a way to restore credibility and create a new transparent mechanism for distributing any new transportation funds could be central in the debate in Illinois in 2015, which makes this an important state to watch.

4. Indianapolis, Indiana

It was a huge victory when the Indiana legislature and Governor Pence approved a long-sought bill in March 2014 that finally gives metro Indianapolis counties the right to vote on funding a much-expanded public transportation network, with a major emphasis on bus rapid transit. Civic, elected and business leaders had been hard at work since 2009 producing an ambitious and inspiring IndyConnect plan, “the most comprehensive transportation plan — created with the most public input — our region has ever seen,” according to Mayor Greg Ballard in the foreword to our Innovative MPO report. Now the hard part comes as they build public and political will and decide what to include on a November 2016 ballot measure that would raise revenue from changes to local income taxes — a challenging revenue mechanism to say the least.

While transit expansion has more support in the region’s core, local leaders acknowledge they have an uphill battle in some suburban counties more skeptical of the merits of transit. Mayor Ballard and the diverse group of Indy businesses (including a booming healthcare industry) supporting IndyConnect understand how important this measure is for helping Indy be economically competitive in the future. Indy likely won’t be supplanting Chicago as the big city of choice in the Midwest, but there’s a desire among local leaders for Indy to be the city that can attract young families who think Chicago is too expensive; or luring recent college grads back home to Indy. And a strong regional public transit system is lies at the very core of their economic strategy.

Though Indianapolis counties won’t vote on the transportation plan until 2016, some of the most important work will be done in 2015 as they continue their model efforts to build consensus in urban and suburban areas alike on a plan to take to the ballot.

5. Raleigh, North Carolina

After watching the Triangle region’s two other counties approve ballot measure to raise funds for a regional transit system originally envisioned by all three counties, Raleigh could finally be joining the party due to a big shakeup in their county’s Board of Commissioners in 2014.

Durham and Orange counties approved half-cent sales taxes in 2011 and 2012 respectively to fund transit operations, improved bus service and a regional light rail line. Although it contains the biggest city in the region (Raleigh), the Wake County Commissioners hadn’t allowed a question to raise funds for a regional transit system to go to the ballot. In fact, a handful of commissioners actively prevented the issue going forward, often stifling debate at times.

That could all change in 2015, as more than half of the county board was replaced last November. Four new supportive members were elected to the county board, replacing four who had consistently been on the other side of the issue, clearing the way for a potential ballot measure in Wake County.  It’s worth noting that the mayor of Raleigh, Nancy McFarlane, has long been a supporter of a regional plan for transit, and she joined with other mayors and T4America a year ago to meet with USDOT Sec. Foxx on the importance of passenger rail.

Wake County is one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. and the county’s population is due to double by 2035. Yet this rapidly growing community with a notable high-tech, research, government and major university employment base is one of the few major metro regions that lacks a significant transit system. Just like Indianapolis, they will be crafting their plan and building consensus in 2015 as they shoot for a vote in 2016. Though the issue has support on the county board now, there will be a public debate and votes worth watching in 2015.

Indiana Governor signs bill allowing Indianapolis to vote on transit ballot measures

In a huge victory for citizens and the local business community, Indiana  Gov. Mike Pence (R) Wednesday signed a long-sought bill giving metro Indianapolis counties the right to vote on funding a much-expanded public transportation network, including bus rapid transit.

(We wrote about this same bill passing the legislature earlier this week in a post looking at how states were helping or hurting local efforts to improve their transportation networks.) – Ed.

“Our capital city is a world class destination and needs a world class transit system,” said Governor Mike Pence in his statement shortly after signing the bill allowing the six metro Indy counties to hold referendums to let voters decide whether to build a transit system using mostly income-tax revenue. After at least three attempts by boosters over the last few years to get a bill approved, Governor Pence signed the bill late yesterday afternoon

For three years, Indy leaders asked the state legislature to give them the ability and control to ask their own voters if an improved regional transportation network was something worth a few dollars more each year in additional income taxes — something that Indiana counties cannot do without permission of the state. Local mayors, county executives, citizens and many in the local business community have been clamoring for an improved transit network — including rapid bus corridors — for years to help keep Indy competitive. They just wanted their chance to make the case to the voters and let the citizens of metro Indy make their decision.

Gov. Pence apparently heard the message:

“I am a firm believer in local control and the collective wisdom of the people of Indiana.  Decisions on economic development and quality of life are best made at the local level. Whether local business tax reform or mass transit, I trust local leaders and residents to make the right decisions for their communities.”

This was certainly a big victory for the business community, and an issue on which Indy Mayor Greg Ballard had lobbied hard, telling the Indy Star that he’d “been to the Statehouse more on this than any other issue.”

“This marks a significant step forward for the growth of Indy and the rest of Central Indiana,” said Mayor Ballard in his statement yesterday afternoon. In many ways, though, the hard work is really just beginning. While the state has indeed empowered the five metro Indianapolis counties to take the question to the ballot, that might not happen before 2015, and will require a huge effort to coordinate between the different counties and make the case to voters.

“Today is a day for Indy to celebrate but not the day to declare victory. There is still much work to be done,” Mayor Ballard said.

The Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Organization was delighted by the news as well.

“Our region’s leaders have worked diligently on this bill for years, and it’s a major milestone for transit in Central Indiana,” said Sean Northrup of the Indy MPO. “It’s not the finish line but it takes us one major step closer. The bill requires specific proposals, so we’ll continue to refine the Indy Connect plan and we’re looking forward to our next round of public input meetings this spring.”

Learn more about the Indy Connect plan here, and watch their video below.

Locals encountering help or hindrance from states on their transportation plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by CTAFlickr photo by John Greenfield /photos/24858199@N00/10090187245/
Current conditions on Ashland in Chicago, and rendering of the new planned center-running BRT for the corridor. Does one of these streets look safer for pedestrians than the other?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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