los angeles Archives - Transportation For America

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.

—

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.

Wrapping up an amazing year with the 16 cities in our Smart Cities Collaborative

A few weeks ago, leaders from 16 cities met in Los Angeles for the last of four meetings in our inaugural yearlong Smart Cities Collaborative.

Automated vehicles are testing without drivers as we speak on the streets in several cities. Five separate bikesharing companies that don’t require docks launched in Seattle and Washington, DC (and several other cities) this summer. New toll roads have started dynamically pricing their rates to ensure free flowing traffic. Transit ridership is down slightly in many major metro areas as they’re struggling to adapt their services to a world where anyone can hail a ride with their smartphone. But all of those cars are also adding up — clogging curb spaces and making traffic even worse, according to recent research from UC Davis.

We’re in the midst of the most dramatic shift in urban transportation since the advent of the interstate system. And for more than a year now, transportation leaders from 16 cities — ranging in size from small suburban communities all the way up to Los Angeles — have been gathering together to find ways to collaboratively tackle these challenges and harness all of these changing technologies to enable better, safer, more equitable cities.

At it’s core, that’s what the “Smart Cities” moniker is really about.

But that term is tricky. It’s a clever marketing term that means little, or worse, means something different to everyone. In this meeting (and our last meeting in Miami), we started discussing what makes a city “smart.” Inspired in part by how smart growth was codified and defined by the movement, but also more recently by cities like Seattle who released their groundbreaking New Mobility Playbook earlier this year.

Like Seattle, we started with the premise that “smart” cities are those that guide themselves by a set of core values. These values inform the foundation of their work and how they approach challenges and opportunities as they come along. People-Oriented. Entrepreneurial. Connected. Equitable. Those were some of the values we started with and through these long conversations we developed a much better sense of what each of these values meant to our participants, which values are the most important, and some of the actions cities can take to illustrate their commitment to them.

One of the other realities facing cities is that they don’t always control all of the policy levers required to take those actions and shape this technological transportation revolution.

With many state legislative sessions ramping up in the beginning of 2018, we talked about the specific policies that could or should be developed at the state level so these cities can harness new and emerging technologies in service of their residents. What authorities do cities need to test out new pricing or tolling projects on roads controlled by their states? How can procurement processes be changed to be more flexible and adaptive? How do motor vehicle codes need to be updated or adapted to test and deploy automated vehicles?

Much of that conversation centered on how cities can drive the discussion and lead at the state level on those policies that will have the largest impact on our cities. Keynote speaker Seleta Reynolds, the head of the LA Department of Transportation, reminded the participants that, no matter what policy levers are controlled by the state, cities still have an enormous amount of leverage — if they’re willing to work together and think outside of the box.

“We’re cities — we move markets,” Reynolds said. “If we’re all together and we’re pushing together, we can get the change we seek. But we can’t get it in the ways we’ve normally been accustomed to doing business. …It’s not enough for us to say it or to state our principles. We have to find ways to nudge the markets in the ways we have at our disposal.”

After the last day of the convening, we gathered up the whole crew and headed over the LA Arts District where the LACoMotion event was taking place later that week.

Transdev invited our participants to take a ride in their new autonomous EasyMile EZ10 shuttle. While the route was fairly simple — traveling back and forth in a straight line — it was a stirring reminder of how quickly these new technologies will be on our roads and how much there is to do to prepare.

Throughout the course of this year, it has been powerful to see the collaborative spirit that started on a cold morning in Minneapolis on the day after last November’s election continue to grow. These cities have realized that, unlike USDOT’s Smart City Challenge where they were all hiding their applications from one another in the quest for the winner-take-all prize of $50 million, working together with other cities is actually the most powerful recipe for success.

We’ll have more to share about that as we conclude the year with a few reflections before the end of 2017, so stay tuned.

Stories You May Have Missed – Week of August 10th

Stories You May Have Missed

As a valued member, Transportation for America is dedicated to providing you pertinent information. This includes news articles to inform your work. Check out a list of stories you may have missed last week.

President “Trump says he may not work with Dems on infrastructure” but still expects bipartisan support for any plan his administration proposes. (The Hill)
“Self-driving cars could transform jobs held by 1 in 9 U.S. workers” (Marketwatch)
“Salt Lake City seeks major transit improvements, but money could be a roadblock.” (Salt Lake Tribune)
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says that New York will actively consider congestion pricing in New York City. (NY Times)
The Washington Post looks at the transit renaissance going on in Los Angeles (Washington Post)

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.

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.

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.

U.S. communities step up, hoping a strong federal commitment to infrastructure will follow

Is the era of massive, transformational infrastructure investment over? Or are we merely in a transitional phase as the gas tax loses its former power and we debate both new revenue sources and even more importantly, new priorities, for the next generation of transportation investment?

One thing is certain: as Congress is finally close to passing a transportation bill more than 953 days after it first expired, many cities and communities have charged ahead with more “fine-grained” approaches to transportation funding and construction. These cities and regions have a sharp understanding that the choices made about infrastructure today affect their economies for years to come and are taking steps to make those needed investments today.

But will they be enough without the strong federal partner we’ve had for the last 50 years leading the way?

That remains to be seen, according to this compelling new report from the Urban Land Institute out yesterday, which lays out the state of infrastructure investment here and around the world. But it also points out innovative ways to take the situation we have — flat-lined federal investment and no likely windfall of cash for large scale infrastructure anytime soon — and do all we can with the dollars we have to build the system that will carry us deep into the 21st century.

One key change ULI suggests we might see is one we’ve been pushing for from day one at T4 America — and also in the current House/Senate conference: measuring the performance of the dollars we spend to see if they’re helping us meet our goals, and holding states accountable if they don’t. “Ironically, fiscal constraints finally may compel some better results,” they say, “figuring out what matters most, and what will get the best bang for the buck, becomes even more urgent.”

The report is a good overview of the state of our country’s infrastructure, how we fund it, and the challenges we’re currently facing right now — all of which are things we’ve all heard regularly. There’s been no shortage of reports and calls to action and reminders of the sorry state of our country’s infrastructure over the last few years. Which is why the most exciting parts of this report chronicle all the different ways that states, cities and local communities are stepping out on their own, raising funds from innovative sources, casting their own vision for transportation, and hoping that the federal government will soon again reaffirm its commitment as a strong financial partner.

As we’re fond of pointing out, when there’s transparency and accountability for exactly what transportation dollars are going to buy — this new transit line, that new busway, this new bridge project — transportation ballot measures pass close to 70 percent of the time, even when voters are taxing themselves. Check out this graphic from the report on transportation ballot measures.

Click to enlarge.

There’s also a great section on Measure R and America Fast Forward, Los Angeles’ innovative plan to build 30 years of transit projects in 10 years. Two-thirds of L.A. voters approved a 30-year sales tax as a dedicated funding stream for the program that will also be used to leverage what they hope will be loans and low-cost financing from the federal government. This L.A. story, just like so many others of innovation highlighted in the report, are indeed examples of innovation, but examples that urgently need federal help and partnership to truly succeed. They’re stepping up with innovation and local funding, but they can’t go it alone.

Let’s hope that Congress passes a strong transportation bill soon and affirms a new role for the federal government in both supporting and rewarding the kind of innovation highlighted in this report that’s beginning to bubble up around the country.

Read the full report here.

LA residents rally for transit, jobs and an economic boost for region

Thousands rallied last Friday at the Los Angeles City Hall in support of the jobs that could be created by a visionary program to fast track a slate of planned public transportation projects — if the federal government will do what’s necessary to help a metro area that’s helping itself.

At the rally, Transportation for America’s deputy director Lea Schuster stood shoulder-to-shoulder with prominent labor leaders and California lawmakers to tell Washington to help speed up the 30/10 Plan – a plan to build 12 major local transit projects in 10 years rather than 30. The plan would spur economic growth and protect the environment, create 166,000 jobs, ease congestion, and reduce air pollution and dependency on oil.

LA Labor Rally Denny: Lea Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

Move LA’s Denny Zane speaks at the podium, flanked on his right by T4 deputy director Lea Schuster, holding the Move LA banner touting the 30/10 plan for the LA metro area.

If Congress establishes the programs needed to move 30/10 forward, cities and regions around the country that have local transportation tax measures could receive up-front loans from the federal government to speed the construction of vital public transportation projects and programs. Fast-tracking the projects and speeding up the timetable would save millions in escalating material costs, while creating thousands of new jobs in the short run. Guaranteed and preapproved local tax revenues would then be used to repay the loans.

In the case of Los Angeles, voters approved a measure at the ballot box (Measure R) to tax themselves for 30 years to pay for transportation. Implementing 30/10 would allow them to get the money up front to build 12 projects over 10 years and pay back the loans over 30 years.

Speakers supporting the effort to establish the federal lending programs included Senator Barbara Boxer, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, LA County Federation of Labor leader Maria Elena Durazo, and Move LA’s Denny Zane.

All the speakers cited 30/10 as a job creating and environmentally progressive transportation model for the rest of the country. As Senator Boxer said, “We know if we do embrace this notion of 30/10, we will create thousands of good-paying union jobs and we will reduce our billion-dollar-a-day addiction to foreign oil.”

LA area Representatives Jane Harman and Judy Chu both stated their support for the initiative with Jane Harman declaring, “30/10”’ will be my number one priority in Congress. And LA labor leader Richard Slawson hailed it as “our stimulus package.”

As roads, freeways and bridges have grown increasingly congested and fallen into a state of disrepair and federal transportation funds have become scarce, taxpayers in communities across the country have voted to tax themselves to raise money for long-term transportation programs to expand public transportation and fix aging infrastructure — proving again that Americans will increase their own taxes to pay for transportation if they know what their taxes are buying.

As with 30/10, well-planned transportation programs can provide the immediate economic stimulus needed to put people back to work and provide safe, clean, and affordable transportation options.

As Denny Zane, Executive Director of Move LA and one of the founders of the 30/10 Plan stated, getting the legislation needed to establish the federal lending programs to provide the upfront loans will take a national effort, a national coalition, and national leaders. He cited the success of Transportation for America and its leadership in putting together a coalition of more than 500 organizations and elected officials fighting for federal transportation reform as performing the “type of work that we need” and being the campaign that will “help put the votes together” to establish the programs to ensure that the 30/10 Plan and other initiatives like it become a reality.