Partner Spotlight Archives - Transportation For America

Visionary group in Montana tells us their rural transit success story

This group we visited with last week in Montana, Opportunity Link, received a welcome shot in the arm, announced just this morning: they received a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of the 2011 Sustainable Communities regional planning grant program. 468 applications requesting more than $500 million in funding were received by HUD, and only 56 communities and regions were selected for the grants.

If you ever doubt the need for public transit in rural areas, or need reaffirmation of the resilience and ingenuity of frontier America, make a trip to Havre, Montana (or second best, watch the short video below.) We had a chance to make that trip this week and, man, was it inspiring.

A group of us from T4America and the American Public Health Association traveled to Montana to meet with people working in health, transportation and local government in the state’s small cities and rural areas. They are vitally interested in the federal transportation bill because in many cases it literally could determine whether these places live, thrive or die.

One of those places is Havre, Montana, a town of about 10,000 roughly 30 miles from the Canadian border, nestled between two Native American reservations, Fort Belknap and Rocky Boy’s. There we met Barbara Stiffarm, the executive director of a scrappy organization called Opportunity Link. The aptly named group’s mission is to connect people in the isolated communities of north central Montana to jobs, job training, affordable housing, medical care and other services that help residents of small towns and reservations “achieve independence, prosperity and a better way of life.”

“We quickly discovered that we can’t do any of that without transportation service,” Stiffarm told us. Working with numerous local communities and the reservations, Opportunity Link has cobbled together federal resources, private grants and scant local funds to connect several different transportation services into an integrated network. To fill gaps in service, Opportunity Link two years ago led the creation of North Central Montana Transit.

NCMT is miraculous for a number of reasons.

First, it offers fixed-route service. Many rural transit services are “on demand” – covering the vast distances separating communities from employment, education and health care centers.

“Every day we cover an area about the size of the state Maryland,” said Jim Lyons, the director of NCMT. They started the service with modest expectations for ridership, but have been blown away by the unmet demand they discovered. Rather than riders in the low hundreds per month, they are instead into the thousands; one in ten is an elderly person who simply could not get to health care, activities and other services without it.

IMG_4340 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr.

The Dean of Montana State University-Northern shows off some of the seeds used to make the biodiesel for the NCMT buses during last week’s tour in Montana. They hope to use these seeds to help refuel trains passing through Havre from Seattle to Minneapolis.

Second, they also discovered they were being eaten alive by fuel costs, and they were disturbed by the effect that burning all that fuel had on their desire to be a “green” operation.

That led to an exciting research and development project with Montana State University-Northern to grow their own biodiesel fuel. The idea is to get local wheat growers to rotate in crops of an oil-seed plant known as camelina. A recent break-through in the local research effort has raised hopes that camelina, which has the advantage of being an extremely hardy, non-food crop, can produce biodiesel that can fuel buses as well as the freight trains that use Havre as a refueling stop between Seattle and Minneapolis. More exciting still, a by-product of that process could also be a component in jet fuel.

And all because an ingenious local group set out to connect people to opportunities through rural transit!

As inspiring as it was, an eye-opening aspect of our trip was to see just how vulnerable these communities are, and how large a role the federal transportation bill plays in their operation.

The local leaders and service providers we met in Montana are mindful that changes to programs being considered in Congress could strengthen such services, and lead to greater coordination and efficiencies, or throttle them altogether. As one tangible example, the HUD Sustainable Communities program that awarded Opportunity Link the $1.5 million grant today was axed last week in the budget for 2012. They also are deeply concerned that changes to programs such as transportation enhancements, now being considered in the Senate’s MAP-21 version of the bill, could leave them no way to fund the community projects that have been vital to economic development and safety.

Further changes would reduce the input that these communities have into how the state sets transportation priorities and allocates funding. The level of alarm was high, and it served to strengthen our commitment as a coalition to continue to emphasize the needs of rural and frontier America and push for measures that will help them, as the bill makes its way through the House and Senate.

T4 partners meet President Obama, talk about transportation and infrastructure

Three T4 America partners were invited to join us at the White House Monday to meet the President of the United States and talk about transportation funding, specifically the infrastructure portion of the President’s American Jobs Act. The President’s plan, which failed to make it to a final vote yesterday in the Senate, would have invested $60 billion into infrastructure.

White House staff contacted T4 America to invite a few of our local partners out there with boots on the ground working hard to get their local, state and congressional leaders to start making smart, solid investments in transportation to help boost the economy and get people back to work.

Brian Imus of Illinois PIRG, Scott Wolf of Grow Smart Rhode Island, and Arnold Weinfeld of the Michigan Municipal League (pictured, standing right) were invited guests of the President for his Monday working group meeting in the White House to talk about the urgent need for America to invest more dollars, wisely, in our aging transportation system.

Arnold Weinfeld got a chance to stand up at his front row table a few feet from the President and tell him the same thing that we highlighted on our blog last week, that fixing bridges and building transit and passenger rail are bipartisan issues in Michigan. Tired of waiting on Washington to act — similar to the President’s motivation for the jobs bill — Governor Rick Snyder has put forth an ambitious plan to invest in all kinds of transportation for the state.

Michigan citizens and local partners like the Michigan Municipal League or the Michigan Suburbs Alliance know that a successful future for Michigan hinges on making smart investments in transportation to keep people and goods moving quickly and safely, whether in a car over a repaired bridge, on foot to the corner store, or in a new light rail vehicle on the Woodward light rail line underway in Detroit.

We desperately need the fresh infusion of money into our deficient bridges and aging transit systems that the American Jobs Act would have provided. Unfortunately, the Senate failed to get the necessary 60 votes for cloture in the Senate to vote on the transportation portion of the American Jobs Act. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the road for transportation funding. Far from it.

Attention in the Senate will now turn to the long-term transportation bill that’s seemingly been just over the horizon for months now. The Environment and Public Works Committee is expected to release their part of the bill this afternoon, for markup next Wednesday.

Though we do need the kind of infusion that the jobs act would have provided to get things rolling today and put people to work, we really need the certainty of a long-term reauthorization bill, new policies and clear reforms to make sure that we make the best use of our transportation dollars.

Reconsidering how we measure housing affordability by including transportation costs

Americans have spent the last several decades moving farther and farther away from urban centers, in search of affordability. Rapidly growing communities ranging from the sunbelt cul-de-sacs of greater Phoenix to the exurban fringes of Northern Virginia have sold people on a lower cost of living. The decades of “drive-til-you-qualify” resulted in millions moving out for supposedly cheaper housing. Broadly speaking, we have been buying what they are selling. But was it actually more affordable?

New research from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, turns the conventional wisdom about affordable housing on its head. Rather than considering solely housing prices as a measure of affordability, CNT computed a formula that factors in transportation costs, yielding a very different portrait of affordability. They redefine true affordability as less than 45 percent of income for housing and transportation costs combined. (Typical affordability falls around 30 percent or less of income.) By this expanded measure, 48,000 communities deemed affordable by conventional metrics are actually unaffordable. The percentage of affordable communities drops from almost 70 percent by traditional measurements to just below 40 percent.

This release expands CNT’s previous work on this tool from just the biggest 52 metro areas to 337 metropolitan statistical areas across the U.S. So what does “location efficiency” mean?

While the concept of energy efficiency is a familiar term, locations can be efficient too. Compact neighborhoods with walkable streets, access to transit, and a wide variety of stores and services have high location efficiency. They require less time, money, and greenhouse gas emissions for residents to meet their everyday travel requirements.

The contrast between two communities – the Mt. Washington neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the Southern California suburb of Palmdale – provides a telling snapshot of affordability and “location efficiency.”

In Mt. Washington, perched above downtown Pittsburgh across the river, residents enjoy walkable streets, ample open space, a vibrant business district and close proximity to schools. Transit ridership is above average for the region, with 23 percent of workers using transit for the daily commute, and residents spend an average of $474 a month on transportation. The average combined housing and transportation cost, according to CNT’s formula, was 39 percent of income. In low-density Palmdale, the fastest growing city in Los Angeles County in 2009 but miles from the heart of L.A., only 4 percent of workers use public transportation for their daily commute and average transportation costs per month are nearly $900. According to CNT’s formula, average housing and transportation costs require 54 percent of income.

Palmdale, California, left, and Mt. Washington pictured with the blue areas showing places where housing + transportation costs total more than 45%. Screenshots from CNT.

Penny-wise and pound-foolish (or pound-fuelish) is how the report’s describes many Americans’ approach to affordability. So how can we increase people’s options, raise awareness of hidden transportation costs and encourage a broader view perspective on affordable housing?

CNT has three suggestions.

First, transportation costs should be as transparent as possible. A bill sponsored by Congressman Earl Blumenauer would do just that by requiring transportation costs to be disclosed in real estate transactions.

Second, future policies and investments in transportation should measure true affordability with this new yardstick. The Livable Communities Act, sponsored by Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, would move us in that direction.

And third, federal transportation law ought to provide more funding and incentives to increase transportation options and greater proximity between housing, transit and jobs. These changes must be included in the next reauthorization of the transportation bill, which Congress just extended to the end of 2010.

With low-income and impoverished residents increasingly concentrating outside of central cities in areas where transportation costs are much higher, we need to invest in the kinds of transportation options that will keep them from getting stranded when gas prices go up.

The good news is that many public officials get it. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has expressed his desire to broaden the criteria for transportation projects, and a new partnership between the Environmental Protection Agency, DOT and Housing and Urban Development is included in President Obama’s 2011 budget. As Elana Schor said on Streetsblog this morning, this data is “aimed at encouraging the Obama administration to update its measurement of affordability, a goal embraced by the heads of the three agencies participating in the inter-agency sustainability work.”

Ron Sims, deputy secretary at HUD, said the Center’s report “demands that we address the issue of transportation costs and the built environment so people can make a better decision about where they live and what they can afford.”

We echo that demand.