partner Archives - Transportation For America

House transportation spending bill takes unprecedented steps to increase access to opportunity for all Americans

Transportation for America, PolicyLink, and The Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights applaud the House Appropriations Committee for directing the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) to measure how transportation investments will connect all Americans to opportunity and essential daily needs such as jobs, schools, healthcare, food and others.

For immediate release
May 26, 2016

Our organizations thank Representatives Waters, Carson, Ellison, Grijalva, and Quigley for their leadership in including this important provision in the 2017 House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) Appropriations report that passed the House Appropriations Committee yesterday.

“Connecting people to opportunities is one of the primary reasons we build transportation infrastructure, plain and simple,” said Transportation for America Director James Corless. “It’s incredibly encouraging to see the House Appropriations Committee recognize the fact that transportation isn’t an end in itself. To determine if we’re building the right things in the right places, it’s critical that we measure — and improve — the access people have to opportunities. Jobs, healthcare, schools, grocery stores full of healthy food — it’s critical that the streets and transit systems we invest in give as many people as possible more affordable access to all of these things.”

“Each day, millions of Americans — particularly low-income communities and communities of color — struggle to access the resources they need to thrive, simply because they have no transportation to get them where they need to go,” said PolicyLink President and CEO, Angela Glover Blackwell. “By calling on USDOT to work with communities to measure how well we are connecting people to opportunity, Congressional leaders have taken a key step toward equipping local leaders with the equity-focused data they need to reimagine and build a more just transportation system.”

“We are encouraged that the House Appropriations Committee has acknowledged the importance of measuring how our transportation investments stack up in terms of connecting our communities to opportunity, and the Department of Transportation must take up the charge to establish an accessibility performance measure without delay,” said Nancy Zirkin, Executive Vice President of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Without access to transportation, our communities lack the ability to connect to all of the things that they need to sustain their families, including jobs, child care, and affordable housing. With access to transportation, our communities have a world of opportunity opened up to them. The Department of Transportation should leave no stone unturned in ensuring that dollars spent on transportation are being used in the smartest way possible to connect our communities to opportunity.”

The report accompanying this bill encourages the Secretary of Transportation, in coordination with the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration, “to establish an accessibility performance measure to be available to states, metropolitan planning organizations, and transit agencies to assess the degree to which the transportation system, including public transportation, provides multimodal connections to economic opportunities, including job concentration areas, health care services, child care services, and education and workforce training services, particularly for disadvantaged populations.”

USDOT is in the middle of an ongoing process to establish a new series of performance measures for transportation spending — resulting in a new system that will require states and metro areas to measure the impact of their transportation dollars. But the measures developed so far have been limited to metrics like road and bridge conditions, safety and congestion, among others — failing to consider whether or not investments give all people better access to what they need each day.

Do the projects proposed by state and local transportation agencies divide communities or knit them back together? This new accessibility measure will direct USDOT to find ways to measure the answer to questions like that.

The House THUD Appropriations bill, in its current form, also provides robust funding for the Federal Transit Administration’s capital investment program and has strong funding for the important TIGER multimodal discretionary grant program. Both of these programs are essential to helping communities throughout the country build cost-effective multimodal transportation systems that can help connect all residents to opportunity.

Our organizations look forward to working with House leadership as the bill moves forward to ensure USDOT, states and local leaders have the resources needed to successfully build and measure our transportation investments to ensure that all Americans have access to basic needs and economic opportunities.

For more information, contact:
Steve Davis
Director of Communications
202-971-3902
steve.davis@t4america.org

Examining the progress made — and still needed — in communities across the country

Reconnecting America today released a trove of data measuring access, walkability, affordability and livability in an ambitious report dubbed Are We There Yet? Creating Complete Communities for 21st Century America.

Though not (yet) in common parlance, some planners and advocates have used “complete communities” to connote neighborhoods that offer access to jobs, a range of housing types and costs and transportation options that begin and end with a safe walking trip.

This report analyzes 366 metro areas to identify where they have complete communities, as well as “opportunity areas” that have the bones that can be fleshed out as complete communities. Amassing a wealth of indicator statistics, the report then gives every region a letter grade in four areas: Living, Working, Moving and Thriving.

For “living”, the authors looked at indicators such as how many homes were within easy reach of a rail line or bus rapid transit, how many were living in “opportunity areas”, etc. Similarly, “working” statistics examined how many jobs are within reach of transit and walkable neighborhoods, and how densely jobs are concentrated. “Moving” looks at how robust the transit network is and how safe or dangerous the streets are for people on foot, among other indicators. And “thriving” assesses health measures, such as asthma and obesity rates and the prevalence of food deserts and fast food outlets.

Under this grading system, among regions over 3 million, New York and San Francisco each get straight A’s. Riverside, CA, gets all D’s, while Atlanta and Dallas each get a C and three Ds. Valedictorians among those 500,000 to 3 million include Portland and San Jose, while Richmond and Greenville, SC join the remedial class.

While the letter grades offer easy comparisons and potential bragging rights, it is the aggregation of all these indicators in one place that makes the report interesting and valuable to those looking to make – and track – progress in their own communities.

Update on Raquel Nelson: petition delivered to Cobb County

UPDATE below. More than 5,200 of you signed our petition to push for freedom for the Atlanta mother who was charged in her son’s death when he was killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing a street in front of their apartment complex. Raquel Nelson is due back in court next week, but we wanted to let you know — especially those of you who signed that petition — that we were able to deliver that petition to the Cobb County Solicitor’s Office a few weeks ago.

With the help of a terrific partner group in Atlanta called PEDS, we had the petition delivered to the Solicitor’s office. Sally Flocks, the executive director, and Liz Coyle with PEDS were kind enough to take a trip out to Cobb County to deliver your names in person.

Unfortunately, Solicitor General Barry Morgan refused to take a few moments to meet with PEDS, a well-respected group in Atlanta, to accept the petition and hear a little more about the underlying problem of streets that aren’t safe for people on foot or bike.

Here is a few notable thoughts from Sally Flocks and PEDS about delivering the petition.

Solicitor General Barry Morgan’s refusal to meet with representatives of PEDS to accept the Transportation for America petition disappointed us. By meeting with us, Morgan could have learned why members of Transportation for America – as well as over 5,000 petitioners, believe Raquel Nelson should be pardoned of all charges. When we arrived in Marietta, the receptionist would not allow us to enter Morgan’s office to hand the petition to his assistant. Instead, she came to the receptionist’s desk to pick up the petition we had handed him.

On our way to the Solicitor General’s office, we drove by the Marietta [bus] Transfer Center (pictured below), where fences block access to the street for over ¼ mile. The closest signalized intersections are over a half mile apart. Victory Drive intersects South Marietta Parkway between the signalized intersections, which means it’s legal for pedestrians to cross anywhere they want. Yet “no pedestrian” signs have been installed to discourage pedestrians from crossing a high-speed five-lane street.

If I could wave a magic wand, the Solicitor General would have joined me for a bus ride to visit the location where Raquel Nelson and her family had attempted to cross the street. To catch a bus back to his office, we would have had to cross the street. Perhaps then the Solicitor General would understood why Cobb County needs to stop treating pedestrians as second class citizens.

Well said, Sally. We especially want to recognize all of you who added your names to this petition. Though we wish we could have gotten that meeting and bus ride with the Solicitor General and put your names directly in his hand, you can be sure that the calls and emails and petitions that have flooded into that office in the last few months have made a significant difference in this case, and helped to publicize the larger issues at hand nationally.

We can’t thank you enough for your support. We’ll continue to keep tabs on this story in the coming weeks.

UPDATED 10/24/11 2:30 p.m.: The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that her second trial is starting tomorrow. It also includes that apt nugget to describe her situation:

With interviews on ABC’s Good Morning America and news outlets CNN, Reuters and the BBC covering her initial trial and sentencing, Nelson became the face of public transit users and perpetual pedestrians whom a sprawling suburbia has left behind.

Ensuring economic prosperity for the future by investing in transportation

We’ve fallen behind the world on investing in transportation and our physical infrastructure, but Building America’s Future lays out a clear path forward to help restore America’s prominence and lay a strong foundation for our economic future.

Falling Apart and Falling Behind lays out the economic challenges posed by our ailing infrastructure, provides a comparative look at the smart investments being made by our international competitors, and suggests a series of recommendations for crafting new innovative transportation policies in the U.S. This report frames the state of our infrastructure in terms of the new economic realities of the 21st-century economy and presents the challenges we currently face.

America’s railroads — once the fastest and most comprehensive in the world — opened up the interior of the country but America truly forged its status as a world economic superpower in the decades following World War II as our booming country awash with wealth embarked upon building new infrastructure, airports and an interstate system that was the envy of the world.

There was a time when we led the world in the very real physical infrastructure that drives economic success in our cities and states but those days are behind us as we’re failing not only to build the next generation of transportation systems, but failing to even properly maintain our past investments to ensure they continue serving us and our economy.

The last great vision for transportation our country rallied behind was a national interstate system laid out in the 1950s, but we’ve been rudderless for the last 20 years since completing that system with no grand vision. While we’ve been treading water and spinning our wheels, other countries have been investing the kind of money we once did in their transportation systems, positioning them to succeed for years to come.

This report from BAF is a concise summary of the problem we face and the perhaps obvious solution staring us in the face: If we want to continue leading the world in economic dominance, we’ve got to lead the world in investing in our transportation networks — and casting a vision for the next 50 years of investment.

Read the report here, and you can see an interview with two of the BAF co-chairs, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Ed Rendell yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Tell your story: 15.5 million seniors will have poor or non-existent transit access in 2015. How will it affect you?

By 2015, more than 15.5 million Americans 65 and older will live in communities where public transportation service is poor or non-existent. That number will continue to grow rapidly as the baby boom generation “ages in place” in suburbs and exurbs with few mobility options for those who do not drive.

How will we address the shrinking mobility options of baby boomers who wish to stay in their homes and “age in place?” What happens when people in the largest generation in American history outlive their ability to drive for everything?

We want to know how the lack of transit access or other options affects you. Whether you’re a senior or have a parent or grandparent getting older in places with poor transportation options, we want to hear real stories of how this will affect real people in the coming years. We’re partnering with AARP to gather stories about how you or someone you know is or will be affected by the lack of transportation options.

Share your story with AARP today, which is joining with T4 America to gather compelling stories to share with Congress.

With Congress set to introduce a transportation bill that will determine how to spend our transportation money for the next 6 years, we need to make it clear to Congress how their decisions will impact real people.

Debunking some myths about the gas tax in a new report

A new report out today contains some fascinating facts about the federal gas tax – a subject sure to be of great contention as this new Congress tries to decide whether to raise it and how best to spend it.

Did you know, for example, that the original tax on gasoline was imposed to help reduce the federal budget deficit during the Hoover administration, and wasn’t dedicated to highways until creation of the interstate highway program in 1956 — and that that exclusive dedication only lasted until 1973? And did you know that the “interstate” highways are used far more for local travel than for long-distance travel? According to the report, two of every three miles driven are on urban segments of the system.

These are just two of the interesting findings in “Do Roads Pay for Themselves? Setting the Record Straight on Transportation Funding,” from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Since World War II, the authors calculate, the amount of money spent on roads has exceeded the amount raised through gasoline taxes by $600 billion, “representing a massive transfer of general government funds to highways.” Only about half the cost of road construction and maintenance is covered by gas taxes today, the report says, and this will only get worse as cars become more fuel efficient and gas tax receipts plateau.

The point, made here again as it has been by the U.S. General Accounting Office and many others elsewhere, is that every form of transportation is subsidized. Given that fact, and because no one mode of travel meets every person’s needs in every community, the authors conclude: “America should invest in transportation projects that bring the greatest net benefits to the greatest number of people, regardless of how they are paid for.”

Debunking the congestion index used to justify the policies that keep us stuck in traffic

Interstate 24 Traffic Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

The cycle is familiar by now. A study tells us what we all know: our roads are congested. We pour billions into new roads and lanes to “reduce congestion.” Then the study comes out two years later and just as before, our roads are still congested. There’s a call for new roads, new roads open up, we drive further and further, congestion goes up. Rinse and repeat.

Every two years, nearly every major media outlet in the country reports on a “congestion index” study that ranks metro areas and cities by their relative amount of traffic congestion. But a significant new report from CEOs for Cities suggests that there’s a fundamental flaw in that study from the Texas Transportation Institute, and by failing to accurately measure congestion or pinpoint what is producing it in our cities, we’re failing to truly understand the problem.

And when you don’t understand the problem, how can you ever really fix it?

Noah Kazis at Streetsblog most succinctly describes how the TTI study fails to see the whole picture:

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

The reason why we find ourselves in this situation is because our current federal transportation policies virtually guarantee it. There’s no financial incentive for anyone to measure congestion accurately or improve it — states just get a big load of federal transportation money with few strings attached. Congestion doesn’t get better in large part because states and metro areas aren’t required to reduce congestion or try to shorten or reduce trips with their federal money.

If a state wants to spend some of their federal money on a new comprehensive metro transit system to provide drivers some relief by giving them an additional option as well as taking cars off the road, the process takes years longer and is far more complex. What state, given the choice, would choose to invest in projects that take 4 times longer to get approved and require more local money to build? (Transit projects have about 50% of the cost paid by the federal government, highways get around 80%.)

As this new study demonstrates, the lack of proper metrics to measure success (or mostly failure) is emblematic of the need for reform.

If the ultimate point is to make smart transportation policy, we need to look at a lot of different factors that affect people’s lives. Fixating solely on interstate throughput, while failing to offer other travel and living options, has led our state departments of transportation to invest billions to create a result that is choking the lives out of our regions and isn’t making life better for the vast majority of commuters.

The good news is that places that are attempting to reduce trips and congestion by investing in diverse transportation options are actually showing progress. Regions that have been aggressively investing in additional travel options, eliminating trips, reducing trip length, creating more places to live close to jobs or more effectively managing demand have seen their congestion numbers get better, according to the CEOs for Cities report.

All of this is just one more giant sign pointing to the need for a truly reformed transportation program that can more accurately measure the problems we face, prescribe solutions that will work, and get out of the way as we unleash those solutions on the traffic that is killing our productivity and choking our regions while we motor along at 10 mph with no other option.