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Transportation and extreme heat

A man in jeans and a white t-shirt walks along the side of a wide, sunny street

The following post was written by Mehr Mukhtar and London Weier.

Recent record-breaking temperatures demonstrate that we can no longer rely on old design approaches to meet the needs of our communities. Transportation infrastructure is no exception. Extreme heat can cause road surfaces to buckle and rail tracks to warp, leading to significant travel disruptions and safety concerns for commuters.

A man in jeans and a white t-shirt walks along the side of a wide, sunny street
(Luke van Zyl on Unsplash)

The heatwaves this past summer, where temperatures soared to record highs in the eastern and western parts of the US, starkly highlighted the vulnerability of our transportation infrastructure designed to meet the demands of past climate trends, not the trends we see today.

Sweltering heat has pushed transportation infrastructure, from roadways to railroads, to the brink, potentially leaving thousands of travelers stranded in the aftermath. Extreme heat has already caused major damage and disruptions, from planes being unable to take off in Phoenix to pavement buckling in Minnesota. Amtrak, too, recently witnessed service disruptions across the Northeast Corridor, and WMATA announced widespread delays in service. Asphalt and metal rails can expand and buckle under high temperatures, creating potentially unsafe travel circumstances. This results in delays caused by the need to reduce speed levels of train cars in the heat, brought about by the need to reduce speed levels of train cars in the heat, impacting travel plans for commuters. Extreme heat and other climate change induced weather events, such as rising sea levels, are poised to drastically increase the costs of maintaining, repairing, and replacing transportation infrastructure—at a time when the nation is already behind on roadway maintenance and repair.

Transportation infrastructure can also exacerbate the effects of extreme heat on our communities. The urban heat island effect, which occurs in urbanized areas, is partly caused by the large amounts of heat-absorbing materials found in buildings and roads. The impacts can make these heat events drastically more extreme, with pavement reaching temperatures of 160° F when the outdoor temperature breaches 100° F.

Community impacts

The impact of heat waves is not limited only to infrastructure. During the heatwaves this past June, over 30 million people were subjected to extreme heat advisories and their deadly effects as treacherously hot conditions persisted across the country. People walking, biking, or utilizing public transit are especially vulnerable to the health risks associated with extreme heat.

Imagine a bus user, navigating their typical commute on a record hot day where temperatures are breaking 100° F. The five-minute walk to the bus stop in the sweltering heat causes sweat droplets to form as soon as they leave their home. The sunlight bounces off surrounding buildings and structures, creating an almost blinding light, and fatigue sets in immediately. These conditions, exacerbated by the delay of a bus, or non-shaded shelters, can spiral into emergencies, such as heat exhaustion or heat stroke.

Often referred to as the ‘silent killer,’ extreme heat has profound health risks due to its effect on the body’s ability to regulate internal temperature. Health impacts of extreme heat disproportionately harm low-income communities and communities of color, as emphasized in a recent video released by Smart Growth America on the disparate burden of extreme heat experienced by communities in Atlanta. Low-income neighbors and communities of color more often lack trees, shade, and natural landscapes that can reduce the urban heat island effect. For some, a hot day means driving instead of taking transit, but for others, that option is nonexistent, and they are forced to endure the high temperatures out of necessity. Communities can use tools, such as the CDC’s Health and Heat Tracker, to determine if they are more vulnerable to extreme heat and develop their own heat preparedness plans (advice for decision makers on how to develop a heat preparedness plan can be found here).

At a recent congressional briefing on extreme heat resilience for community well-being co-hosted by the American Public Health Association and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, experts brought these impacts to the attention of federal legislators. At the core of Markey’s opening statement was the sentiment that “prevention is preferable to cure,” highlighting the importance of both responding to climate change-induced warming and reducing carbon emissions in order to avoid exacerbating climate conditions. It is clear that we will continue to contend with increased and more intense heatwaves in the future, requiring governments, community leaders and planners, and residents to urgently develop a vision for adapting to, and preparing for, a changing environment.

Resilience in the face of extreme heat

The impacts of extreme heat can threaten urban infrastructure that was not built to withstand such extreme weather events. Just as we created these conditions, we also have the opportunity to create environments that protect communities from the dangers of climate change and extreme heat.

With transportation policies and investments encouraging highways and sprawling development, communities have to drive further away to access the jobs and services they need to get to, causing more emissions to be generated. In combating extreme heat, a necessary strategy is measuring and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) within the transportation sector is one way to help combat the impacts of extreme heat. With transportation policies and investments encouraging highways and sprawling development, communities have to drive further away to access the jobs and services they need to get to, causing more emissions to be generated. Tackling car-oriented design can play a significant role in not only reducing emissions but also mitigating the negative outcomes associated with extreme heat.

Other ways that we can address extreme heat in urbanized areas are heat mitigation and heat management. Heat mitigation seeks to reduce heat in our cities by changing the design of built environments. These initiatives might include incorporating more tree shade and native vegetation or using different building materials like more permeable and reflective pavements.

Heat management protects those in our communities when extreme heat can not be avoided. Management strategies could include improving bus shelters, establishing cooling centers, and creating heat preparedness plans. Approaching heat management with smart growth policies—like prioritizing location-efficiency, improving conventional zoning and land-use regulations, and adapting existing infrastructure—can drastically enhance effective response capabilities.

Additionally, our federal government should direct current and future investments toward building more resilient infrastructure. When government agencies, such as the Federal Highway Administration, set standards for materials used in new builds to be greener and better able to withstand high temperatures, they will ensure that taxpayer dollars are used to build a future that is sustainable and livable for all of the nation’s residents.

Solutions to the extreme heat crisis require bipartisan support to ensure that protections are enshrined in legislation and our built environments’ standards. Urbanized areas need to improve their resilience to extreme heat, especially our transportation system, to help ensure residents can safely travel to where they need to go, regardless of the temperature.

Don’t blame the snow, blame our roads: Why it’s so difficult to travel in winter weather

Pedestrians attempt to cross the street next to a pile of snow blocking a one-way lane

Every year, winter storms highlight the failings of our car-first approach to infrastructure. And as climate change worsens, the need for change intensifies. Cities and states must do more to make sure people are able to access the goods and services they need regardless of weather conditions.

Pedestrians attempt to cross the street next to a pile of snow blocking a one-way lane
Pedestrians navigate snow removal. Photo by Joe Flood, National Weather Service, via Flickr.

During winter storms, millions have no choice but to to drive in dangerous conditions because they have no other, or no safer, option. Without a better way to get to work, purchase food, or access other necessary resources, people must drive in bad weather or in sloppy road conditions, a factor in nearly half a million crashes and more than 2,000 deaths on our roadways every winter. Millions more get stuck because sidewalks, steps, and crosswalks are the last places to get cleared of snow.

People who live in rural areas experience this problem severely, as increasing distances from work, school, and services and the lack of other transportation options requires them to drive further to access what they need. In bad weather, rural residents can find themselves driving in particularly treacherous conditions on roads often overlooked in favor of busier interstates or nearby highways or roads in need of repair. Those without cars, or without key winter weather features like four-wheel drive, can be completely cut off from the goods and services they need.

And that brings us to the additional risk, beyond crashing, that people face in winter weather conditions: getting trapped, as was the case in early January when Virginia-area commuters found themselves nearly stationary on I-95 for over 24 hours. Other high profile incidents occurred in Atlanta, Texas, Raleigh, even Buffalo (even earlier this week abroad in Greece and Turkey). In these severe examples of the danger of winter travel, the state DOTs described the difficulty of keeping up with the intense snowfall and icy conditions. As climate change worsens, DOTs will find it increasingly difficult to prepare for snow and manage snow removal, especially if roadways continue to widen and destinations continue to spread further apart.

Places with good public transit and ample sidewalks well connected to destinations are more resilient when snow starts to fall, as residents have other options to avoid risky car travel. But even then, those municipalities tend to prioritize car travel at the expense of these other forms of transport, so necessary snow removal for sidewalks, bus routes, and bike lanes is often delayed or entirely forgotten while high-speed, high-volume roadways are always taken care of first. (Or in the case of most cities, sidewalk snow removal is left entirely up to residents, something that some cities are reconsidering.)

Snow does help illuminate how existing road space could be reallocated, showing how much road space is often devoted to vehicles unnecessarily, instead of making walking and biking safer. The photo on the left shows the typical layout of an intersection in Petworth, Washington, DC. On the right, a second photo shows how much space could be devoted to wider sidewalks and safer crossings without affecting vehicle movement. Photos courtesy of Steve Davis.

Even when bike lanes and sidewalks get snow removal treatment in communities (i.e. using traditional plows to clear protected bike lanes and bus stop sidewalk extensions), there is an inherent risk of the infrastructure being damaged. By ignoring these other modes of transport and failing to maintain them properly, even multimodal cities can ultimately force more drivers onto dangerous roads as residents lose their access to safer options.

It goes beyond bike lanes and bus routes. Many bus stops lack shelters, forcing people waiting for their bus to stand in the storm. Shelters that do exist aren’t prioritized for snow removal, and leaving removal up to third parties can further complicate the process. In DC, for example, the bus shelter advertising concessionaire is supposed to clear the shelters, meaning the city has to contact a third party to get the snow removed. This makes removal inconsistent, so it’s more difficult for bus riders to count on their stop being well-maintained. 

Newer modes in cities, like bikeshare and micromobility systems, face their own challenges in winter weather. Bikeshare stations and other micromobility vehicles can be buried in snow from snow plows and sidewalk snow clearing efforts—not to mention that when bikeshare stations run on solar power, their solar panels have to be kept clear from snow as well. 

Snowy sidewalks are a constant dilemma, as many municipalities leave snow removal on public sidewalks up to the adjacent residences, leading to patchwork removal at best. This is a particular problem for people who use wheelchairs, walkers, or strollers, who rely on well-maintained sidewalks to get around.

The problems revealed by snowfall aren’t isolated to severe weather conditions. Year round, speedy car travel is prioritized over the safety of drivers and pedestrians. People who cannot drive have few other options for travel, and those that can drive are finding themselves driving more and more, on roadways in need of attention and repair. Climate resilience is necessary outside of winter months as well. In places facing extreme heat, providing shade could be an important way to serve the people who aren’t in personal vehicles.

To tackle these concerns, states and municipalities must prioritize, both in their investments and operations, other forms of transportation beyond car travel, so that more people can travel safely and conveniently to access goods and services in dangerous weather. They also need to address land use, as sprawl continues to pull people further away from the services they need, lengthening trips at the same time that climate change worsens travel conditions for everyone.

Senate Republicans’ small funding proposal is a roadmap to nowhere

Last week, Senate Republicans released an infrastructure proposal in response to President Biden’s American Jobs Plan. Not only did Republicans cut public transit funding by $7 billion, but they missed the mark on the policy, pumping billions into the existing—and broken—federal transportation program. Here’s our take. 

More of the same? No thanks. South Walton Boulevard in Bentonville, Arkansas, a fairly typical arterial state highway.

The pun in the headline is intended. Last week, Senate Republicans released a $586 billion “framework to improve the nation’s infrastructure” called the “Republican Roadmap.” As our director Beth Osborne noted, last Congress, the House passed legislation to fund all surface transportation programs at $494 billion over five years and the Senate passed $287 billion for highways alone. Considering that, this is quite a modest bump in funding.

But this is not our focus. Other people will talk more about the amount of money in this proposal, while to us, the money doesn’t matter as much as the policy. And Republicans got the policy wrong by seemingly failing to change anything about it, pumping billions into making our transportation problems worse—while severely cutting transit funding. 

Even though we like the broad strokes released by the Biden administration on its infrastructure proposal—which we covered in-depth here—we’re not committed until we see the details. But we’re not even excited about the Republicans’ blurbs. Here’s our take. 

Less public transit and passenger rail funding and no policy change

The Republican proposal provides substantially less transit and passenger rail funding than the Biden administration proposal, offering $61 billion and $20 billion respectively where President Biden proposed $85 billion and $80 billion. Even worse, Republicans  included annual federal transportation funding in their $586 billion proposal, and ultimately cut public transit funding by $7 billion. 

Yet the problem is not funding. If the money was being proposed to better purposes, we would support less funding. But here,  Republicans propose to cut transit and pump $299 billion for roads and bridges in the same way we always have—the way that has produced unsafe roads especially for low income people and Black, indigenous, and other people of color; a huge maintenance backlog; ever-increasing congestion; and lack of access to economic opportunity without multiple cars per household.

Worse still, these funds only support maintenance and capital projects, not operating costs that would enable transit agencies to run more frequent buses and trains. (Some senators criticized this at last week’s Banking hearing.) 

Another warning sign in the Republicans’ proposal is the emphasis on “partner[ing] with spending from state and local governments.” Currently, the federal transportation program limits federal transit funding from covering no more than 50 percent of a project’s cost, though 40 percent has been more common in recent years—while highway funding can cover up to 80 percent of a project’s cost—even 90 percent in some limited cases—forcing states and local governments to choose between costly transit projects and virtually free highway projects. 

Fees for electric vehicles, but no change to the gas tax 

In this proposal, Senate Republicans are ready and willing to levy user fees on electric vehicles in order to raise revenue for the highway trust fund. This fund is currently filled by another user fee—the gas tax—even though the gas tax is no longer able to cover trust fund expenditures on its own, requiring increasingly large influxes of general funds to stay afloat. This is because increasing fuel efficiency means that drivers are using less gas and because the gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, despite inflation. 

We believe that both electric vehicles (EVs) and internal combustion engine vehicles should pay into the highway trust fund. But we don’t see the value of levying a tax on electric vehicles while failing to raise the gas tax. 

In addition, there’s no funding in this proposal for charging infrastructure that supports electric vehicle deployment. Without widespread charging infrastructure across the country—something members of our new coalition, CHARGE, know is critical to getting more EVs on the road—we don’t even raise much revenue from an EV user fee. 

No focus on maintenance or safety 

Republicans propose spending $299 billion on roads and bridges, but wouldn’t require that states use those funds on maintenance. As we found in our report Repair Priorities, states still spend just as much on expansion as repair—states spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion between 2009-2014 even as road conditions continued to deteriorate. That’s because the federal government doesn’t require states to spend their highway funding on maintenance before expansion—and the Republican proposal wouldn’t do so either. 

This past year has been particularly deadly on American roads, with deaths increasing by 24 percent despite fewer miles driven, according to the National Safety Council. Yet the Republican Roadmap doesn’t include any funding for street design changes that would improve safety. It merely proposes $13 billion for federal agencies focused mostly on design to protect vehicle occupants and convincing pedestrians to wear neon when they cross the street. 

Credit is not real money

Anyone who’s ever swiped a Visa knows that credit is (sadly) not real money. Yet Republicans try to pass credit off as real bucks in this proposal, noting that federal funding should encourage “the utilization of financing tools.” 

When “financing tools” get mentioned, they’re rarely for highway projects, which the federal government usually covers for states almost in full. They are for transit and rail projects, signaling that investing in transit and rail is not a priority by making states and local governments pay for them by themselves.

Also, as Center for American Progress infrastructure expert Kevin DeGood pointed out in this expertly-crafted Twitter thread, “creative financing” doesn’t make a project cost less, and the hurdle to infrastructure projects isn’t lack of access to credit, but lack of revenue. 

No new vision for the transportation program—just the broken status quo

The Republican Roadmap is heavy with goals, arguing that this funding will improve quality of life, boost our economy, help us weather natural disasters, and more.

But as we’ve learned through decades of the same-old federal transportation program and the 2009 Recovery Act, you don’t get different outcomes by doing nothing differently. We can’t hope that more money will solve our problems if we don’t change how we spend that money.

The current federal transportation program is broken. It pumps billions into highway expansions that make congestion, emissions, safety, and equitable access to the economy worse. So why don’t we change the program to deliver the outcomes we want? 

Road and public transit maintenance create more jobs than building new highways

With Congress charged with passing a long-term transportation law this year, many hope that increased infrastructure spending will create more jobs. We have to remember that not all infrastructure spending is equal: road and public transit maintenance projects actually create more jobs than highway expansion projects.

Maintaining public transit in Chicago.

The first goal of transportation infrastructure investment is getting people and goods where they need to go. When that investment is part of a package to jumpstart the economy, an important secondary goal is creating new jobs. But in the past, Congress has failed to require states to pick the best investments to do this, partially due to the misconception that spending funds on big highway expansion projects creates a lot of jobs. Dollar-for-dollar, it doesn’t.

Take the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA). Between 2009 and 2010, ARRA gave states $26 billion to spend on surface transportation capital projects and $8.4 billion for public transportation capital projects, as we wrote in our joint report with Smart Growth America analyzing this bill last year. States were required to report how they spent that money, and how many jobs they created with it.

Because of that requirement, we know that every ARRA dollar spent on public transportation produced 70 percent more job hours than an ARRA dollar spent on highways. Transit preventive maintenance produced the most jobs out of the main categories for ARRA transit spending, including rail car purchase and rehabilitation, transit infrastructure, and bus purchase and rehabilitation. 

Similarly, road repair produces 16 percent more jobs per dollar than new road construction, according to 2009 research from Smart Growth America and the University of Utah. This makes sense: maintenance jobs are open to more kinds of workers, spend less money on equipment and more on wages, and spend less time on plans and permits. Meanwhile, new capacity projects require more funding for buying costly property, which has little or no stimulative or reinvestment value, as we wrote in our joint recommendations for any and all COVID-19 relief packages with Smart Growth America. 

Unfortunately, we can’t know if investments in transit maintenance or transit operations (the costs of running a transit agency, as opposed to the costs to construct or maintain transit infrastructure) produce more jobs, because ARRA forbade states from spending funds on operations. But we do know that transit operations funding often goes straight to employees’ wages. 

Prioritizing funds on roadway and public transit maintenance is also popular with voters. In a March 2020 poll conducted by Transportation for America and several partners, 79 percent of respondents said that they want to focus federal funding on fixing roads and public transit. 

With current long-term transportation policy expiring in September—at the same time our economy is struggling to recover from an unprecedented pandemic—Congress has an opportunity to create the most new jobs and finally rebuild our “crumbling infrastructure.” All by simply increasing funding for transit maintenance and requiring that states fix-it-first: maintain their existing roadways before building new ones. 

If we want an infrastructure stimulus, there are valuable lessons to learn from 2009

While there are enormous needs for relief and support all across the economy, the president and many congressional leaders have indicated that they want infrastructure to be a major part of a future stimulus bill. If Congress does intend to use infrastructure spending to create jobs and support recovery, their own effort in 2009 has some clear lessons they should learn from.

As we tried to claw our way out of the Great Recession a decade ago, Congress gave states billions in new funding for transportation capital projects in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or better known as the stimulus. With a COVID-19 recession all but certain, America will need another stimulus. To help Congress and the public learn from our last attempt to create jobs and support economic recovery through infrastructure investments, our short new report provides six lessons and six recommendations from our deep experience evaluating the Recovery Act over 10 years ago.

Read the full report

 

Because the purpose of the Recovery Act was to create jobs, states were required to report how they spent that money, and how many jobs they created with it. Which means we have good data to use, based on state-reported documentation of how they spent ARRA money, and how many jobs their stimulus-funded projects created.

Did states take advantage of the flexibility given to them by Congress to invest in ways that would create the maximum number of jobs? Did Congress select programs for funding that were well-suited to the primary task of job-creation? The two biggest overall lessons gleaned from our review are: 

  1. The Recovery Act was meant to create jobs above all else, but that was not how we targeted or governed the infrastructure spending.
  2. In an attempt to do things quickly, Congress defaulted to existing programs that were poorly tailored to the tasks at hand.

As our Repair Priorities report showed, even with the extra $26 billion for surface transportation kicked in all at once, the country’s roads still got worse, not better.  That’s because our federal transportation program gives states billions each year without even the most basic requirement for them to repair what they have before building anything new. The 2009 stimulus was no different. Set free of any obligation to address their repair needs first with stimulus dollars, scores of states failed to prioritize repair with their ARRA funds, choosing new construction instead. Eleven states spent less than half of their money on repair, and nine of those states had worse roads in 2017 than in 2009.

This failure of stewardship was also a missed opportunity to have the greatest impact on creating jobs. A wide variety of other research consistently finds that on average, road repair produces 16 percent more jobs per dollar than new road construction. This makes sense considering the fact that new roadways and roadway expansions usually require right-of-way acquisition, which creates very few jobs (and no construction jobs), as well as more planning and environmental review, which also creates just a few jobs. Repair also takes care of an existing asset, saving money in the long run. Expansion creates a pricey new liability.

If Congress is interested in having the greatest impact, requiring repair with any stimulus dollars first is possibly the single best way to maximize the impact.

The second would be to invest heavily in transit, including repair. In this analysis we found that an ARRA dollar spent on public transportation produced 70 percent more job hours than an ARRA dollar spent on highways. Each mode showed clear differences in jobs produced per dollar: Transit preventive maintenance had by far the highest direct job-per-dollar result for transit, followed by rail car purchase and rehabilitation, infrastructure, and bus purchase and rehabilitation.

The CARES Act addressed enormous, immediate needs across the country by providing emergency support for transit operations. Without that kind of support, transit service might not survive to continue carrying essential workers to their jobs, and certainly won’t be around to help fuel an economic recovery.

As Congress and the nation debate the next phase of stimulus, we can and should benefit from the lessons we learned from the last stimulus. Some kinds of spending create more jobs, faster, than others. Limiting spending to capital only (and leaving out operations as ARRA mostly did) not only eliminates one of the most productive forms of spending, but it also creates future costs and slows the speed of economic recovery. 

We should direct federal infrastructure dollars to the types of projects that create what we need. In the face of unprecedented unemployment, that means projects which create the most jobs the fastest, and those that connect people to as much economic opportunity as possible. 

This will mean public transit—especially operations and repair—and road repair. 

Lessons are of little use if we don’t learn from them. We hope Congress takes note of their own history here with any potential infrastructure recovery package.

Message from the director

For those of you who were involved in implementing Recovery Act programs, engaged in advocacy on the stimulus, or worked to analyze how those billions were spent in some way, we also want to hear what you learned. Hear about the report briefly from Beth Osborne, the director of our Transportation for America program, who also has some questions for those of you who experienced the stimulus firsthand—and then share what you learned.

Building a better stimulus package: here’s how

With the $2 trillion rescue plan approved, Congress is already eyeing another COVID-19 relief and recovery package later this month. Based in part on what we learned from the 2009 stimulus, Transportation for America contributed infrastructure proposals to Smart Growth America’s detailed recommendations for economic stabilization and recovery. We must ensure that any further stimulus empowers communities to be economically prosperous, socially equitable, and environmentally sustainable. 

After passing the largest stimulus in United States history last week—$2 trillion, with $25 billion in aid for transit agencies and $1 billion for passenger rail—members of Congress know that more is needed to protect the country from the immediate and long-term impacts of COVID-19, and plan to work on another stimulus later this month. 

With the economy crumbling and millions of Americans’ lives at risk, the U.S. can’t afford to waste this opportunity for relief. We can’t squander our money on programs that fail to create the most new jobs or build lasting economic prosperity. It’s critical that this funding go to investments that give all Americans the opportunity to live in places that are healthy, prosperous, and resilient.

As part of Smart Growth America, we contributed to a new short SGA report outlining 20 recommendations for any economic recovery package that will boost our economy and give Americans equitable, accessible, safe and low carbon transportation options into the future. Here’s a summary of the transportation-related recommendations —read the full list here. 

Invest in projects that create the most jobs: that means maintenance, not expansion

Road or bridge repair and maintenance projects actually create more jobs than building new capacity. One reason is that with a new roadway project, a huge share of the cost goes toward buying property—an activity that has little to no stimulative or reinvestment value while also creating future liabilities (new roads) in the process. Meanwhile, maintenance projects spend money faster, are open to more kinds of workers, spend less money on equipment and more on wages, and spend less time on plans and permits. In fact, roadway maintenance creates 16 percent more jobs per dollar compared to roadway expansion.

And luckily, the U.S. is swimming with potential roadway maintenance projects, as found in our report Repair Priorities. It would be a win-win to require states to actually make progress on our repair backlog—something too few states did with 2009’s stimulus. Doing so would create the most jobs while finally addressing our “crumbling” infrastructure—instead of just using that rhetoric to approve new money that then gets spent on new roads. 

Give transit and passenger rail operating support, not just capital funds

The limited federal funds that public transportation receives are only for maintenance and construction. With ridership plummeting and costs for cleaning vehicles and protecting personnel skyrocketing—as well as the fallout from a rapidly contracting economy—transit and passenger rail need operating support now more than ever. 

The $25 billion for transit and $1 billion for passenger rail Congress provided in last week’s stimulus is a great start. But with TransitCenter estimating COVID-19-related losses to transit agencies between $26 and $38 billion, and Amtrak experiencing unprecedented drops in ridership, both public transportation and passenger rail will still need more. Congress should increase the amount of emergency operating funding in the next stimulus, and target transit agencies that need it the most. 

Expand transit and passenger rail

An economic stimulus is a rare and powerful opportunity to invest in the infrastructure that has the most potential to reduce our carbon emissions, increase access to opportunities, and make our country more equitable. But the focus of any stimulus package should be creating the most jobs per dollar, and capital funding for transit and rail creates far more jobs than road projects, according to research on the 2009 stimulus. 

Public dollars devoted to making capital improvements to public transportation systems also support thousands of manufacturing jobs, in communities small and large, in nearly every state across the country. Every $1 billion invested in public transit creates more than 50,000 jobs and economic returns of $3.7 billion over 20 years. The supply chain for public transportation touches every corner of the country and employs thousands of Americans who produce tracks, seats, windows, communications equipment, wheels, and everything else in between.

T4America has other specific recommendations for how to increase funding for expanding transit and passenger rail—including increasing the federal share of projects to 80 percent (the same as roadways). You can check those out here. 

Final thoughts

Infrastructure will be an obvious topic for any stimulus, but we need a more comprehensive solution. Smart Growth America’s proposals for housing and community development are focused on the highest-returning investments that can also give more Americans a shot at opportunity. Check out the full list here, and stay tuned for ways that you can help us get these recommendations to Capitol Hill. To get updates, subscribe to T4America’s email list and follow us on Twitter. 

House principles could finally connect transportation spending to tangible outcomes

Transportation for America and the National Complete Streets Coalition released this statement regarding the principles for infrastructure released today by the House majority of the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee:

The new transportation policy framework released today by the House majority and Chairman Peter DeFazio could finally represent a long-awaited step toward aligning the billions we spend on transportation with the outcomes people care about: fixing crumbling infrastructure, prioritizing saving people’s lives on our roadways, and connecting people to jobs and daily necessities. For the last 40 years, lawmakers have largely focused on pouring more money into a broken federal program that fails to hold states accountable for maintaining our infrastructure, produces more congestion, makes safety secondary, and fails to affordably and efficiently connect us to the things we need. It’s high time to stop spending billions on a broken system, and these principles would be a transformative guide as Congress crafts a transportation law to serve the country’s greatest needs.

These structural changes to core formula programs are the highest priority, particularly:

1. Fix it first. For decades, presidents, governors, and members of Congress have decried our crumbling infrastructure with increasingly dire warnings. However, funding has gone to fund expansions that we can’t pay for rather than focusing on repair needs. Taking a fix it first approach will deliver on the age-old promise to fix what is crumbling.

2. Safety over speed through Complete Streets. Since the beginning of the highway program, the priority has been to move vehicles quickly, creating unnecessary danger on roads in cities and towns, especially for those outside of a vehicle. Implementing Complete Streets policies is an essential tool in prioritizing the safe movement of all road users, and stemming the current increase in non-motorized deaths. A forthcoming bill that focuses on Complete Streets and other safety improvements within the transportation formula funds would be a huge step in the right direction.

3. Access to jobs and services. The point of transportation is to get people where they need to go. Since the dawn of the modern highway era, we have used vehicle speed as a poor proxy for access to jobs and important services like healthcare, education, public services, and grocery stores. The way we build roads and design communities to achieve high vehicle speed often requires longer trips and makes shorter walking or bicycling trips unsafe, unpleasant, or impossible. Having transportation agencies consider how well the system connects people to the things they need whether they travel by car, transit, bike or foot would be a game changer.

We are also happy to see a focus on retrofitting vulnerable infrastructure to prepare for inevitable natural disasters, funding public transportation and getting transit projects done more quickly, and putting real funding into the country’s passenger rail network. These changes, along with proposals to address safety and access for all users, would have a very positive impact on providing economic opportunity to more people and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

As the proposal moves from an outline to full legislative draft, we will watch with interest to see how the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee chooses to craft the program to fund projects of regional and national significance to support community investments. We are also interested to learn whether the committee believes a 80/20 split between highways and transit is still warranted considering that nearly a third of the program is paid for with general funds instead of user fees.

As long-time advocates for structural reform to the transportation program, we’re cautiously optimistic that the House majority can translate this framework into policies that are tied to clear outcomes and will leave the status quo behind.

Three things we learned from talking about maintenance this week

Last week was “maintenance week” at T4America, a week spent focusing on our first new principle for transportation investment to prioritize repair and commit to reducing the repair backlog by half. After a Twitter chat on Wednesday, on Thursday we joined a briefing on Capitol Hill for congressional staffers focused on the issue.

The new Future of Transportation Caucus chaired by Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Jesús “Chuy” García, and Mark Takano held a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday to hear firsthand from three state transportation officials about the importance of shifting the federal transportation program to focus on maintenance first. Here are three quick things we learned.

It’s hard to get people to focus on maintenance—much less get excited about it

Although there was a strong turnout of staffers, there were far fewer than our recent briefing on climate and transportation, reminding us yet again that maintenance is never sexy and it’s hard to get people excited about it—much less make it a fundamental organizing principle of the federal transportation program.

Even if you do get people together to talk about maintenance, it’s a struggle to keep the spotlight on the issue. Even in this setting, ostensibly focused 100 percent on discussing the importance and mechanics of prioritizing maintenance, when the floor was opened up to questions, many immediately turned to funding. “Do you think that a vehicle miles traveled tax would be easier to implement than raising the gas tax?” one staffer asked.

Unfortunately, this was not the last question about money. T4America director Beth Osborne tried to remind everyone that this is precisely backwards from how we should be doing business with the federal transportation program.

“Federal transportation policy is unlike anything else because we start things off by talking about money, not what we’ll do with it. States don’t do this. No one wants to talk about outcomes. It’s time to tell voters what we’ll do with their money before we talk about needing more of it,” she said.

Absent useful data, politics will always determine spending, and politicians want to cut ribbons more than anything else

Ed Sniffen with the Hawaii DOT shared a story about how they transformed the agency to focus on maintenance and started a new asset management program, which is just a fancy way to say that they started tracking the conditions of their assets and using data to prioritize funding.

As they started this shift, Sniffen said that the long-time promised projects that had been on the books for years were some of the biggest obstacles to a new approach focused on preserving and stewarding the things they had spent billions over decades investing their state’s wealth into. “We didn’t have an asset management program, so those who complained the most got their roads fixed,” he said. “But we changed that so data controls everything. Costs and benefits now matter.”

Current Mississippi DOT Commissioner Dick Hall shared that when he was once on the legislative side years ago, he also had a hard time fully grasping why the state couldn’t afford to both radically expand and also prioritize maintenance. To this day, when it comes to grasping why maintenance needs to be the top priority, “for some reason I can’t seem to explain it to members of our legislature. But the members of the rotary club get it.” When he explains why the lion’s share of state transportation money is now going to repair, the public gets it. But the elected leaders still want their ribbon cuttings.

Better data and clear priorities can help ensure that funds are better spent.

States won’t do it on their own — the federal government needs to be the one to make repair a priority

The conventional wisdom about state DOTs is that they have two priorities when it comes to transportation funding. More funding, and limitless flexibility to spend it however they want. And that was largely the deal struck by Congress with the influential state DOT lobbyists in MAP-21 in 2012 and the FAST Act in 2015: in exchange for a weak system of performance measures, states got even more flexibility for spending slightly more money however they wish.

So it was striking to hear state transportation officials practically begging the staffers in the room to make maintenance and repair a concrete, binding federal priority. When asked about the difficulty of selling a maintenance-first approach to elected leaders in his state, Commissioner Hall explained how internal political pressure so often leads to states spending money they urgently need for repair on new capacity projects. They’ve finally made some progress in Mississippi on making repair their number one priority, but he had a crystal-clear answer for the attendees at the briefing:

“If you want us to prioritize maintenance, then you’re going to have to tell us ‘you gotta do it!'”

The question remains: will Congress heed this request and render this debate moot in state transportation agencies across the country? Or will they allow states to continue buying things they can’t afford to maintain and then just return to Congress and beg for more money down the road?

That choice is in Congress’ hands.

Stay tuned next week for our “safety over speed” week, starting on Monday, November 4th. We’ll be diving deep into our second principle on why safety has to be the overriding consideration when it comes to street and road design.

Our three policy recommendations for cutting the maintenance backlog in half

Yesterday we discussed our first of three new principles and outcomes for transportation investment: “Prioritize repair.” But how? Today we’re taking a quick look at three policy recommendations Congress should consider implementing to help reduce the maintenance backlog by half.

It’s Maintenance Week! This week we’ll be exploring our first principle for transportation investment, prioritize maintenance, in-depth. On Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. EST, we’re hosting a tweet chat using the hashtag #FixItFirst. We’re also holding a briefing on Capitol Hill with the Future of Transportation Caucus and an evening salon for journalists And stay tuned for more blog posts!

For decades, presidents, governors, and members of Congress from both parties have decried our crumbling roadyway infrastructure, sounding increasingly dire warnings. Yet Congress has repeatedly failed to require states to actually repair that infrastructure before creating new financial liabilities in the form of new roads and bridges. As a result, the percentage of our roads in poor condition nationwide has increased from 14 percent in 2009 to 20 percent in 2018. 

Expanding the system while ignoring basic maintenance is a recipe for disaster. With the Highway Trust Fund approaching insolvency (or already there, technically) and our maintenance needs continuing to grow, it is time to direct federal investment toward preserving the system we have before adding to it. (Not only is this smart, but it’s incredibly doable: we already spend over $40 billion every year on roadways, much of which is spent on expansion.

Transportation for America believes that Congress needs to set a concrete goal of cutting the maintenance backlog in half. We can do this by prioritizing highway formula dollars for maintenance, and creating new programs and accountability measures for expansion. Let’s get a little wonky:

Prioritize highway formula dollars for maintenance

Every year, states receive over $40 billion through highway formulas. Federal law gives the states flexibility in how they spend these dollars, with maintenance being an “eligible” expense. There’s a big difference between maintenance being an “eligible” use of federal dollars, and actually prioritizing maintenance with those dollars. As we’ve outlined in the past, states are rewarded with more money for building new capacity at the expense of their repair needs. Congress should give power to the existing asset management requirements by requiring that maintenance be prioritized within the National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) and the Surface Transportation Block Grant Program (STBG). Parallel language should be put in place for bridges. 

Check out our suggestive legislative language for achieving this. 

Create a competitive program for new highway capacity

Here’s a big idea. Rather than letting states choose whether or not to prioritize repair with their formula dollars (i.e, dollars awarded based on lane-miles, population, amount of driving), Congress should consider dedicating today’s formula funding to maintenance, and then provide a new, special pot of funds for new projects or major replacement projects that have regional or national significance—more like the way we have set up the transit program. 

In the transit capital program, transit projects have to apply for funding and demonstrate that they advance national and local goals, including environmental benefits and economic development. On top of that, project sponsors also have to prove that they have the resources to operate and maintain their new transit line or system without shortchanging the rest of their system. We don’t have any such standard for new highway projects—we don’t even ask states if they’ll be able to afford what they’re building, we just let them come back to Congress in a few years and ask for more money.  

Creating a competitive program for new highway capacity would ensure that new roads advance national and local goals and, similar to the transit program, Congress should require a plan for covering maintenance costs. It’s borderline astonishing that we allow states to build assets that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars without having to provide any plan for covering long-term maintenance costs.

This new program should cover up to 50 percent of the capital cost for the project with federal funds, just as the federal government does for new transit projects.

Improve highway performance measures

In MAP-21, the surface transportation authorization that passed in 2012 and expired in 2014, Congress made a deal with the states: They gave states far more discretion over spending in exchange for a weak, opaque system of accountability in which states are required to set targets for transportation safety, state of repair, and traffic movement. However, after seven years, those targets are very hard for the public to find. (They’re hard for US to find sometimes!) The public can’t hold their state accountable for meeting their targets if they don’t even know what they are. 

States can also set these targets however they want. It is within their discretion to spend all of their money on expansion and set a target for roadway and bridge conditions to get much, much worse. If states miss their self-set targets, there are only minor penalties imposed. 

Congress should require real accountability in the next reauthorization bill: 

  • Make performance measure targets user friendly and connect them to funding decisions. Congress should require that the Secretary make all targets public, easily searchable, and comparable across states. Currently the only targets available on FHWA’s webpage are safety targets and to find them, you have to download and decipher 55 separate, 60-page long, complicated documents. Further, USDOT should require that states and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) make clear how projects prioritized for funding address national priorities and how their performance management program informed their project selection process.
  • Prioritize formula funding for repair (see #1 above). 
  • Create rewards for the states which set ambitious targets and meet them. As Repair Priorities showed, some states are doing a good job with maintaining their system, and they should be rewarded. Funding for new capacity projects should first go to states with a track record for good asset management. Competitive grant programs, except those for safety, should prioritize project sponsors with a good record for asset management. 

It’s time for Congress to actually set a goal for repairing our infrastructure

We shouldn’t build new roads before fixing the ones we have. But that’s not how the federal transportation program is designed. Despite funding boosts, our backlog of maintenance needs have only increased because there is no requirement that federal funds be spent on repair.

The concept of fixing what you have before buying something new—when it comes to really expensive things—is pretty intuitive for most people. You should probably repair your leaky roof before building a new addition. You’d likely buff out that dent in the car you already own instead of buying a brand new one. 

But what’s obvious to everyone is not obvious to lawmakers. Under our current federal transportation law, states are allowed to spend federal funding on building new (and often unnecessary) roads before fixing decaying ones, all without providing a plan for how they will maintain these new roads in the future. 

This leads to massive and unsustainable fiscal problems. 

According to our report Repair Priorities that we co-authored with Taxpayers for Common Sense, states spent $21.4 billion on average on road repair annually and $21.3 billion annually on road expansion between 2009-2014. These investments in expansion don’t just redirect funds away from much needed investments in repair; they continually grow our annual spending need, widening the gap. Every new lane-mile of road costs approximately $24,000 per year just to preserve in a state of good repair—to say nothing of the long-term lifecycle costs and required eventual major rehabilitation projects in the future. By expanding roads—and neglecting the ones we have—we are borrowing against the future while letting our existing assets wither.

Yet lawmakers insist that the reason why our transportation infrastructure is crumbling is not how we (poorly) spend our money, but the amount of it. “We need more money,” they say. “It doesn’t matter how it’s spent!”

These cries for more money echo throughout Capitol Hill every five to six years when surface transportation funding needs to be reauthorized. I described this Groundhog Day-esque phenomenon in our blog post announcing our three new principles for transportation investment:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to  “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program.  And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble.  And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

As the current transportation law, the FAST Act, expires next year, it’s time to do something different. We simply can’t afford to waste billions of dollars every single year. 

That is why we urge Congress to make a hard and fast commitment to cutting our maintenance backlog in half. We don’t want Congress to create some new federal program to achieve a state of good repair, or authorize more transportation funding. Simply setting a goal for our current dollars would be a sea change. 

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, Congress can tell us what the right target should be. 

But they should have to tell us precisely where we will be in addressing our state of repair when this bill expires in five or so years, not just how much money will have been spent. Until then, we believe cutting the maintenance backlog in half is an achievable goal and we expect Congress to finally tie federal funding to their rhetoric. 

Read our three policy recommendations for cutting the maintenance backlog in half.

Rural areas desperately need a transportation overhaul, too

People disparage rural areas with the term “flyover country,” but our federal transportation program currently treats rural areas even worse—as “driveover” country. If Congress adopts Transportation for America’s three new policy principles, transportation investments could truly help rural areas prosper. 

A focus on speed rather than safety and access would result in telling Erwin, TN that they need to widen this road and get rid of the crosswalks. Federal transportation policy doesn’t work for rural America.

This week, we released our three guiding principles and three outcomes we expect from any new investment in transportation. These ideas will start to fix our broken system and improve safety and access to opportunity for all—including rural areas. 

When I was a small town mayor in Mississippi, I fought transportation policy that treated our town like it was “driveover” or “drive-through” country. Our transportation program makes it far easier for rural communities to build highways—which residents can use to drive far away for jobs, schools, education, and other services—than it does to help rural places invest in their vital town centers. 

What the federal government doesn’t realize about rural areas is that they are not comprised of empty towns and open fields that need to be driven through as fast as possible. In reality, rural areas are dotted with countless walkable town and community centers.

In some rural areas, these walkable places are the center of commerce and activity for that town. But unfortunately, in too many rural areas, thanks to federal transportation policy that prioritizes new highway construction and roads designed primarily for speed—no matter their context—these once-thriving walkable places have been hollowed out, with jobs and services now located far away.

Our three principles would improve life in rural areas by finally treating rural areas as places to be, not places to drive away from. 

Maintenance

When I was mayor of Meridian, Mississippi, the state had 12,000 bridges that were structurally deficient. This hammers rural places especially hard. If a bridge needs to be shut down—or even worse, collapses—some areas might lose their only quick connection, and then people can’t get to their doctors, produce can’t get to market, and students can’t get to the community college. Without these bridges, rural areas are isolated. 

Unfortunately, the current federal transportation law allows states to kick the proverbial maintenance can down the crumbling road. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble. (Something Mississippi did for many years, though their state DOT has recently made a drastic about-face, a story Mississippi DOT Commissioner Dick Hall outlined in our press briefing for Repair Priorities.)

That’s why our third principle, “prioritize maintenance,” would require states to fix these structurally deficient bridges before building new roads or bridges they can’t afford to maintain. It would ensure that rural places will not be stranded. 

Speed

Oftentimes, the main street of a rural community is a state highway that passes right through the heart of downtown. Because of federal design standards and a focus on the speed of travel above all other priorities, the main street is unsafe and unattractive for people to bike and walk in a very small urban grid, and it’s terrible for the local economy. 

Main streets shouldn’t be highways that get people through communities. They should be arteries that bring people in. Walkable main streets in rural areas can and should be a huge driver of economic development for a small town, generating a large, prosperous tax base in a very small area. 

In West Jefferson, NC, by prioritizing safety and access over speed, 10 new businesses opened along Jefferson Avenue—adding 55 new jobs— and the number of visitors to downtown increased by 14 percent. Four-way stop signs, crosswalks, and upgraded sidewalks were added—anathema to our broken system where speed is the top priority.

That’s why our second principle, “design for safety over speed,” would prioritize designing main streets to serve their intended functions, not as unsafe highways for speeding traffic right through a town center. Any road embedded in an urban grid where people walk and bike, where businesses or homes are located, and where an outside portion of the county’s economic base is located—like in countless rural downtowns—should never be designed for deadly highway speeds. 

Access

When state DOTs build new transportation infrastructure, they might share how wide the shoulders are going to be or brag about how much a new road will speed traffic up, but they never tell the public how transportation projects will make their lives better. That’s because improving people’s access to destinations is not how we measure success. We “measure” success by how fast vehicles are traveling, with no measurement of what destinations you can actually reach. 

Bentonville, AR’s downtown is a place to bring people to and connect to nearby neighborhoods, not to speed cars through on their way somewhere else.

Put another way, traveling for 15 minutes at 40 mph and going 10 miles is preferred to traveling for 15 minutes at 20 mph and only going five miles, for absolutely no good reason at all. If every daily need in a small town is a 15-minute drive at 20 mph, what’s the point of building a brand new road on the edge of town that can speed you along at 40 or 50 mph?

This focus on speed results in orienting every transportation project—whether in a big city or a small town—around the goal of moving cars as fast as possible, telling everyone who wants to live in vibrant small towns that the needs of their automobiles come first.

Rural areas also have higher percentages of elderly, low income, and disabled people, presenting greater challenges to connectivity and transportation infrastructure. But when access is truly prioritized—meaning that transportation projects are chosen by how they improve people’s lives by improving their access to daily destinations, no matter how they travel—everybody benefits. 

That’s why our third principle is “connect people to jobs and services.” Improving access means that instead of making a road wider for cars to drive just a little bit faster, a jurisdiction might instead build a crosswalk in a rural downtown, or add a new road to the street grid, because those investments would do far more to better connect more people to more destinations.

The goal of connecting people to the things they need—which is fundamental to the purpose of transportation—is currently missing from the federal transportation program, and this affects rural areas just like it does any big coastal city 

By making access the goal, designing local streets for safer, slower speeds, and ensuring that maintenance is more than just talking point politicians use to get more money to spend, we can improve the lives of people all across the country. 

America’s rural areas are filled with wonderful small towns and vibrant communities. It’s time for our federal transportation policy to build them up rather than pave them over. 

Click on any image below to learn more about our brand new principles or download a sharable card

Explaining our three principles for transportation investment

Today, T4America is releasing a new set of three concrete, measurable principles for transportation investment.

Last week we explained why T4America is no longer advocating for more money for the federal transportation program and why we need a clear set of explicit goals for the federal program. Today, we’re rolling out our new principles, which are clear, simple, and measurable. You’ll find them incorporated into the “platform” section of our website and we’ll be using them to evaluate every single proposal in the months and years ahead: whether a standalone infrastructure plan or the forthcoming proposals for reauthorizing the nation’s surface transportation law that expires in 2020. 

It’s time to stop spending billions with an unclear purpose for diminishing, marginal returns. We believe these three goals will help finally move us in the right direction.

#1 Prioritize maintenance

The process is inevitable as it is predictable every time the process of transportation reauthorization comes up. We’re stuck in a groundhog day with an infinite loop. Here’s how it goes:

Every interest group, every legislator, every witness before a congressional committee talks about the need to  “repair our crumbling roads and bridges.” On cue, congressional leaders call for more money for the federal transportation program.  And then no one makes any changes to policy to guarantee that this increased funding will actually be prioritized toward reaching a state of good repair. In fact, as we found in Repair Priorities, Congress has gone aggressively in the opposite direction by allowing states to do whatever they wish with the increase in funding. Many times, states use this money to build new infrastructure while letting their existing assets crumble.  And then the same actors are back before Congress, talking about the need for more money to repair their “crumbling” infrastructure. Rinse and repeat.

Our first principle is not about creating some new federal program to achieve a  state of good repair. And it’s not about how much money is needed to repair our infrastructure, either. Our principle is simply a commitment to the American people that the maintenance backlog is cut in half. This would be a sea change. 

Congress can organize the program in any number of ways to cut the backlog in half. And if cutting the backlog in half over six years is the wrong target, let Congress tell us what the right target should be. But tell us exactly where we will be in addressing state of repair after this bill expires, not how much money will be spent. Until then, we believe half is right and we expect Congress to finally tie the program to their rhetoric. 

#2 Design for safety over speed

When we talk about safety, we typically talk about reducing drunk driving, wearing seat belts, and wearing helmets on motorcycles. In recent years, thanks to leadership from former US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood, distracted driving was brought up to equal importance as these areas. 

Yet what has been largely ignored is the role of speed itself in making our roadways completely unsafe for everyone outside of a motor vehicle. Speed isn’t always necessarily deadly. The way to make a high speed roadway safe is by separating opposing traffic; removing conflict points, like driveways and cross streets, and separating or removing cyclists and pedestrians. That’s called a limited-access highway. But we’ve tried to design for similar speeds on our arterial roadways in existing communities while retaining all the points of conflict that make those speeds deadly. 

Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people who were walking on streets all across the United States, reaching levels in 2017 not seen since 1990. When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking. Our sister organization, the National Complete Streets Coalition, found in their report Dangerous by Design that most cyclist and pedestrian crashes occur on these arterial roadways in our urban and suburban areas—roads designed for high speed but without removing conflicts. If we want these roads to be safe, they either need to become limited-access highways (unlikely, expensive and damaging for the local context) or they need to be designed for lower speeds with lower speed limits.

We have to take this seriously. The NTSB issued a landmark study in 2017 about how speed is the #1 culprit in traffic fatalities, and that scores of crashes would not have been fatal at lower speeds. Currently we only track whether someone was driving over the speed limit. We don’t track whether the speed limit was inappropriately high. In fact, numerous local governments across the country are in arguments with states on who has the authority to lower speed limits. It’s time to determine and report when speed was a cause of a crash. It’s time to give local governments the authority to lower speeds to make a street appropriate for its surroundings. And engineers should design roadways in support of slower, safer speeds. 

#3 Connect people to jobs and services by prioritizing accessibility

Fundamental to our transportation system (and the hundreds of billions of dollars we invest in it) is that it should provide people with access to jobs and services. This access is essential to an efficient economy, to ensuring that people can make a living and provide for their families, and to providing employers with reliable access to talent. 

Our current federal transportation program uses a poor proxy for measuring access to jobs and services. Transportation agencies measure the speed of vehicle movement along observed portions of roadways and assume that if those vehicles can move quickly, then all trips must be smooth and short. That kind of measurement has resulted in a system that values  a 40-minute commute to work in free-flowing traffic over a 20-minute commute in some congestion.

As it turns out, to make vehicles move quickly means building limited access roadways or widening roads and spreading out all destinations, making trips longer and biking or walking dangerous. So even though vehicles are traveling at high speed, people may not reach their destinations any faster because everything is more spread out. This is particularly true of pedestrians and cyclists, who once may have had to travel across short blocks, now have to cross long distances designed for cars, thanks to the limited-access changes that cut off local streets and eliminate shorter trips.

The technology has finally caught up.  We can now understand, quickly and affordably, how well the transportation system connects people to the things they need. Thanks to aggregated GPS data, we can know where homes and likely destinations are located. We also have congestion data and real-time transit arrival information. With this data, we can accurately calculate how easily people can access the things that they need and how various proposed transportation investments would improve or worsen it.

Some states, particularly Virginia and Hawaii, have already started scoring potential projects under consideration for funding based on the extent to which they improve access to jobs and services. Massachusetts and Utah are investigating doing the same. Congress should follow their lead.

As Congress considers the next surface transportation policy bill, they should ensure that these destination access data are available nationwide. Congress should also update performance measures to replace 1950s proxy measures like speed of travel with accurate, updated 21st century measures. People don’t talk about the average speed of a trip: they talk about how long it took. We should evaluate transportation projects and the overall system the same way.  

By the end of this next reauthorization cycle, the federal transportation program should be reoriented from a program focused on the fluidity of vehicle movement to one that prioritizes and measures access to jobs and services.

Go more in-depth on our principles here, and read our specific policy proposals for reauthorization here. 

Federal transportation policy is undermining any progress on climate

The conversation on climate change tends to focus on a few big things—electric vehicles, renewable energy, putting a price on carbon. But no matter how much progress we make on those fronts, Democrats and Republicans remain deeply committed to antiquated policy that undermines any action we take on climate change: spending billions to build new highways, encouraging more and more driving.

Transportation accounts for the largest share of carbon emissions in the U.S., and those emissions are rising—even as other sectors have improved. As federal policy and funding encourages more and wider highways, people live further away from the things they need and the places they go. We’re driving further and further every year just to get where we need to go. Emissions have risen despite increases in fuel efficiency standards and the adoption of electric vehicles. Despite an admirable 35 percent increase in the overall fuel efficiency of our vehicle fleet from 1990-2016, emissions still rose by 21 percent. Why was that? Because the total amount of miles traveled increased by 50 percent in that same period.

Simply put, we’ll never achieve ambitious climate targets if we don’t reduce driving.

We don’t have a money problem, we have a policy problem

Politicians (and the media) love to bemoan our “crumbling roads and bridges.” That must mean we need more money to fix them, right? Here’s a secret: most of the billions we spend every year on our infrastructure never go to repair. Despite the rhetoric, there is nothing in federal law that requires states to repair the roads we already have, so most federal money goes to building more highways. That’s a problem that more money won’t solve.

Even the National Academy of Sciences, through the Transportation Research Board, has called for massively increasing highway spending to as much as $70 billion annually to accommodate (or encourage, as it were) an additional 1.25 trillion miles of driving each year—blatantly ignoring what this would do to our emissions.

California, Hawaii, and Minnesota have all found that even with a fleet of electric vehicles, they will still fail to reach their aggressive climate targets without an accompanying effort to reduce driving.

A better federal policy would be to invest more in climate-friendly transportation options like transit, walking, and biking, and to stop stacking the deck so that local communities have to choose between easy money for a highway or an uphill slog for transit cash. While we guarantee states over $40 billion annually for highways, only $2.6 billion is available for new or expanded public transit, and this funding is not guaranteed. Further, while the federal government will cover 80 percent of the cost of a highway project, it will only pay for up to 50 percent of the cost of a transit project.

With limited funding for transit and the national rail network and federal dollars for walking and biking overwhelmed by the billions spent on highways, federal policy is designed to keep us in our cars. Further, highway funding is distributed by Congress to states based on how much fuel is burned. The more gas is burned in a state, the more money states get to spend on highways. It should hardly be surprising that this has forced people to drive more over the past decade while making the climate impacts of transportation worse.

When you consider U.S. transportation policy in light of the existential crisis that climate change poses, it starts to look pretty asinine.

Access to a better future

Getting where you need to go shouldn’t always require a car, but we’ve designed our communities to prioritize car travel over everything else. With nearly half of all car trips three miles or less, many trips could be easily traversed by foot, bicycle, or transit. But the way we build roads to prioritize high-speed driving makes shorter walking, bicycling, or transit trips unsafe, unpleasant, or impossible.

It’s time that we stop prioritizing expansion over maintenance. It’s time for a paradigm shift. Cars certainly have a place in our transportation system, but our climate simply cannot sustain a system that rewards more and more driving. Our communities would be happier, healthier, safer, and more equitable if we built them for people instead of cars.

If we can retire this system that has doubled the country’s amount of driving in just a little over 30 years, we could build a transportation system that would improve access to the places that people need to go and reduce our emissions at the same time. We drove ourselves into this mess; now we’ll have to drive a little less to find our way out of it.

Join us for a Twitter chat about transportation & climate change on Wednesday, September 18 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. @T4America and our cohosts will lead the conversation with a series of questions over the course of an hour. Use #BeyondEVs to tweet you answers.

There’s a reason why Missouri voters twice rejected gas tax increases

A truck painting lane markings on a two-lane road in Missouri.

Missouri spends more of its transportation budget on building new roads than maintaining its existing roads—23 percent of which are in poor condition. If it did a better job prioritizing maintenance, perhaps it wouldn’t need to ask taxpayers for a bailout. 

A truck painting lane markings on a two-lane road in Missouri.

A truck painting lane markings on a two-lane road in Missouri. Photo by MoDOT.

The state of Missouri gets over $1 billion a year from the federal government to support their highway needs. They match that with another $1.5 billion in state transportation funding for a total of $2.5 billion in spending a year. 

This large sum is what they have to cover the maintenance and upkeep of 77,000 miles of roadway. At ~$24,000 a mile per year to keep a new road in good condition, that means the state has somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.85 billion in baseline maintenance needs for its existing system each year. Of those miles of roadway, 23 percent are in poor condition. (Their repair costs could be much higher: to restore bad roads to good condition costs more than the $24k per lane-mile figure for keeping new roads in good repair.)

The bottom line is that Missouri has a lot of built-in, predictable costs that they need to cover and a pretty deep well of existing transportation funding. But Missouri, along with 20 other states across the country, is actually spending more money on building new roads than on maintaining the ones they already have. According to their own reporting, Missouri is spending 31 percent of their federal funding on new roads while spending only 20 percent on repair of existing roadways. (Note that Missouri’s largest metropolitan area, St. Louis, is heralded for having the least traffic congestion in the country, which makes you wonder why the state feels the need to widen roads.) 

After spending more money on expansion than repair, Missouri cries poverty and asks its taxpayers for more money. Perhaps it’s no surprise that voters have said no to them—twice. Should a bank loan you money to expand your deck while your roof is leaking?

Now the state is selling bonds to cover the cost of replacing rural bridges—an important investment. But one has to wonder, how many bridges and roads could they have already replaced with existing funds if those funds were prioritized to maintaining existing infrastructure before building the next shiny new highway or adding more lanes somewhere? At the very least, shouldn’t taxpayers expect as much money to go into highway maintenance as into expansion? 

Unfortunately, neglecting repair while spending more money on building new roads is perfectly legal and permissible under the federal transportation program. Congress is just fine with Missouri neglecting needed repairs and increasing their overall need by adding more lanes, and as a result, Missouri is not alone. 

This lack of accountability and clear priorities is why Missouri’s roads—and other roads, bridges, and transit systems in poor condition across the country—won’t be fixed by simply spending more money. In spite of unprecedented high levels of transportation funding, including from the Recovery Act, roadway conditions nationally have deteriorated over the last 10 years. Even if we double nationwide transportation spending, there is no guarantee that roads will improve in Missouri or elsewhere without a change to the underlying policies. This is why every conversation about transportation policy that begins and ends with money just isn’t good enough right now.

Missouri is fortunate to have powerful members of Congress that are uniquely positioned to change and improve policy. We can require states receiving federal money to maintain roads before building new ones. They could also require it of themselves.

Prioritizing repair is common sense. We cannot afford to waste any more time and money.  

Read more about Missouri and 20 other states making the same mistake in our report Repair Priorities. 

Are we creating assets or liabilities?


New roads are often considered new assets, but by ignoring repair many states have let those assets become liabilities—as our upcoming Repair Priorities report shows.

Building new infrastructure is sexy—it’s a tangible sign of progress and officials get to cut ribbons. Policymakers often talk about new roads as economic “assets,” but they are more truthfully classified as liabilities, bringing decades of baked-in maintenance costs. Without a regular commitment to upkeep, these liabilities can break the bank.

As Repair Priorities 2019 will show next week, we have a lot of liabilities on our hands.

Look for the full report in your inbox on Tuesday, May 14. Then join us for a webinar on Wednesday, May 15 where we’ll dig into how states are spending their existing money, hear directly from a number of state DOT officials, and discuss our recommendations for fixing this looming financial crisis.

Register for the webinar

Not all states are in the same situation. Many states make responsible decisions to invest the majority of their money in repair. Other states are borderline irresponsible, spending vastly more on expanding new roads—and creating new liabilities—even as their existing system falls into disrepair. Much of this money comes directly from the federal government with little to no direction about how those funds should be spent.

In the midst of ongoing talk about a purported infrastructure plan—notably, all the talk is about funding levels, not what we want it to actually accomplish—and as Congress begins crafting a long-term replacement for the expiring FAST Act, Repair Priorities will be a wake up call.

More funding won’t fix our infrastructure problem without a serious change in priorities.

Register for the webinar next Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT.

Senator Cardin introduces bill to prioritize repair of bridges and roads

Whether one looks at our interactive tool mapping the nation’s deficient bridges, or the more recent Smart Growth America study on the sorry condition of our roads, there’s plenty of evidence that we’re spending limited transportation dollars to build things we can’t afford to maintain — all while our existing infrastructure cracks and rusts and crumbles due to deferred maintenance.

One member of the influential Senate Committee drafting the transportation bill introduced legislation aimed at making repair and maintenance of existing infrastructure a higher priority.

The Preservation and Renewal of Federal-Aid Highways Act, introduced by Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, would require the Secretary of Transportation to establish “state of good repair standards” for highways receiving federal funding and set repair guidelines for states.

The bill would also require states to use an “asset management process” to develop their own targets for highway preservation and renewal and would consolidate several existing federal programs into a System Preservation and Renewal Program fund. (Asset management is just a fancy way of describing a program designed to keep tabs on the condition of roads and bridges to ensure repairs are made in the most timely and cost-effective fashion. -Ed.)

Cardin’s office cited the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2009 grade of “D-” for the nation’s highways as an impetus for the legislation.

“Investing in our nation’s highways and infrastructure has been one the best federal investments we have ever made,” Cardin said in a statement released earlier today. “Our nation’s highways are critical to growing our economy, and repairing and maintaining their quality is required to ensure the lasting efficiency and safety of our nation’s highways and bridges.”

Clear priorities for repair and maintenance are long overdue. A truly reformed federal program combines preserving what we already have while laying the groundwork for a 21st century transportation system with an array of options and real accountability. Cardin’s measure is an essential step toward fixing and restoring trust in the current program.

Cardin’s approach also saves money, a key selling-point when disputes over domestic spending color much of the debate in Washington. For every $1 spent on road repair today, we save between $6 and $14 that would have been spent if we had allowed the same road to deteriorate into poor condition. The Obama administration’s broad outline for a transportation bill also included strong state-of-good repair standards.

Click to enlarge this graphic on the benefits of repairing — and the cost of neglecting — infrastructure.

States’ underinvestment in road repair signals need for tough federal standards

Consider a couple of eye-popping statistics:

From 2004-2008, states spent 57 percent of available highway dollars to add a little over 1 percent to our already vast highway network, and only 43 percent to maintain the other 99 percent of highway lanes.

Keeping our existing highway network in “good” condition would require spending $43 billion a year over the next 20 years, well over the total, combined amount spent today on new construction and preservation.

Those are two of the findings in a report out today from Smart Growth America and Taxpayers for Common Sense, Repair Priorities: Transportation spending strategies to save taxpayer dollars and improve roads. The report examines road conditions and spending priorities in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and found that, as a result of their spending decisions, road conditions in many states are getting worse and costs for taxpayers are going up.

The short version: We’ve spent 60 years building highways, the bill for their maintenance is coming due – and it’s a doozy! Left to their own volition, the states are not doing the job. As Grace Crunican, the former DOT head for Oregon, said during the media telebriefing on the report, “There’s a lot of political pressure to put money into new projects. … We’ve got to find the discipline” to keep our roads properly maintained, she said.

It’s time for Washington to fix it. States have to be held to high standards, and the money they receive should be tied to accountability on that score. The share of money that is walled off for maintenance and that can’t be siphoned off for “sexy” – Crunican’s word – pet political projects has to be much larger than it is now.

Congress is currently in the process of drafting a new transportation bill, and lawmakers need to keep a laser-like focus on the repair and rehabilitation of American’s existing roads and bridges. We cannot build a 21st century transportation system until we take care of what we built in the 20th.

You can find more information about this new SGA and Taxpayers’ report, including a state-by-state map, here.

Smart Growth America contributed to this post.