texas Archives - Transportation For America

El Paso’s Transnational Trolley: How art can help imagine creative transportation solutions

What begun as a sort of arts-driven guerilla marketing campaign for the fictional return of a historic streetcar in the border communities of El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is becoming a reality, a demonstration of the power of art to capture the imagination of a community and help them look at old problems in different ways and imagine creative solutions.

This story is part of arts and culture month at T4America & Smart Growth America, where we’re telling a handful of stories about how arts and culture are essential to building better transportation projects and stronger communities. It’s adapted from a longer case study that will be featured in Transportation for America and ArtPlace America’s upcoming field scan on arts, culture and transportation.

Unlike San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico, which are separated by 20 miles, El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico sit immediately adjacent to one another, separated only by the width of the Rio Grande River and the international border between the United States and Mexico. Until 1846, El Paso was in fact part of Juárez and Mexico, and the two independent cities today form the world’s largest binational metroplex, with thousands of daily crossings by foot, car, and bus; billions of dollars of trade; and five border crossings connecting the two cities and region. For generations, residents on both sides of the border have crossed frequently for work, school, recreation, and to visit family; more than 80 percent of El Pasoans identify as Latinx.

Until it was closed down in 1974, these border crossings were facilitated in part by an international streetcar system that connected the downtowns of both cities. As in many American cities, the streetcar system ran President’s Conference Committee (PCC) streetcars, with a sleek Art Deco design that was introduced after the Great Depression to lure new car owners back onto public transportation.

The iconic streetcars and stories of their transnational past served as the inspiration for Peter Svarzbein’s Masters of Fine Arts thesis project at New York’s School for Visual Arts. In 2012 Mr. Svarzbein, a native of El Paso, created the El Paso Transnational Trolley, which could be described as part performance art, part guerrilla marketing, part visual art installation, and part fake advertising campaign. The project began with a series of wheatpaste posters advertising the return of the El Paso-Juárez streetcar, and continued with the deployment of Alex the Trolley Conductor, a new mascot and spokesperson for the alleged new service. Alex appeared at Comic Cons, public parks, conferences, and other public spaces to promote the return of the streetcar, while additional advertisements appeared across El Paso, sparking curiosity and excitement for the assumed real project.

Eventually, Svarzbein admitted that the project was a graduate thesis masquerading as a streetcar launch, but rather than graduating and moving on, he decided to move back home to El Paso.

When Svarzbein learned that the City of El Paso planned to sell the historic PCC streetcars, he lobbied the city to cancel the sale, and instead return the streetcars to the streets of El Paso. Thanks to the region’s dry climate, the streetcars have remained in relatively good shape for the past four decades even though they’ve been stored in the open desert at the edge of El Paso.

After gathering thousands of signatures in support of the project and with the strong backing of the City of El Paso and Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Commissioner Ted Haughton, the El Paso trolley won a $97 million grant from TxDOT. It is now slated to begin service in El Paso in 2018. The third phase of the project will include a connection to the Medical Center of the Americas, while the second will include the much anticipated transnational connection to Juárez.

In one of the most surprising twists in this long tale, shortly after this funding was awarded, Svarzbein rode the wave of public support for the once-fictional project to win a seat on El Paso’s City Council.

Svarzbein’s approach as an artist transformed the discussion. The project’s website quotes artist Guillermo Goméz-Peña: “An artist thinks differently, imagines a better world, and tries to render it in surprising ways. And this becomes a way for his/her audiences to experience the possibilities of freedom that they can’t find in reality.”

Clearly, Svarzbein credits his creative campaign with helping to get the project off the ground and building the community support needed to win funding, claiming that “there is a sort of responsibility that artists have to imagine and speak about a future that may not be able to be voiced by a large amount of people in the present. I felt that sort of responsibility. If I couldn’t change the debate, at least I could sort of write a love letter to the place that raised me.”

This story is another example of how transportation professionals are exploring new, creative, and contextually-specific approaches to planning and building transportation projects. They are collaborating with artists and the community in new ways to transform transportation systems into powerful tools to help people access opportunity, drive economic development, improve health and safety, and build the civic and social capital that binds communities together.

This project is just one of the many case studies that will be featured in our upcoming field scan on arts, culture and transportation, commissioned by ArtPlace America. The field scan is intended to examine the ways in which arts and culture are helping to solve transportation challenges while engaging the community in a more inclusive process.

Stay tuned for more about arts and culture during the entire month of September.

Virginia launches program to remove politics from transportation investment decisions

This week Virginia DOT released a list of recommended projects across the state, the result of a new process to objectively screen and score transportation projects based on their anticipated benefits.

It may not sound like big news that a state has carefully measured the results it expects from billions of dollars in capital investments. Unfortunately, nearly all states rely instead on byzantine funding formulas and decades-old project lists, rather than measurable return-on-investment, to award funds for highway and transit projects. That means that this common sense change is a big one for the transportation system.

“This new law [HB 2 passed in 2014] is revolutionizing the way transportation projects are selected,” said Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) in a statement on the release of the project scoring results. “Political wish lists of the past are replaced with a data-driven process that is objective and transparent, making the best use of renewed state funding.”

Fiscal year 2017 project applications and results of the analysis are mapped by location on the HB2 projects page.

It is not just the selection process itself that is novel; Virginia is also opening up its process to public review in a way that few states have. With its consumer-friendly website, virginiahb2.org, the DOT explains the process, eligible projects, and scoring factors used in ranking projects. This week, the list of recommended projects and their scores were also put online. The public will have opportunities to weigh in on the recommended projects before the final project list is approved by the Commonwealth Transportation Board in June.

Some of the top projects, based on total benefits, were adding high occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes along the I-66 corridor in Fairfax County; widening I-64 in Hampton Roads; extending Virginia Railway Express commuter rail service to Haymarket; and adding a second entrance to the Ballston Metro station. The number-one ranked project—the project with the greatest benefit per cost—is a small, locally requested road improvement project at the elementary school in the town of Altavista.

The new objective scoring process is the result of key reform bills passed by the general assembly: HB2, passed unanimously by the general assembly in 2014 and HB1887 passed last year. These bills instructed VDOT and the Commonwealth Transportation Board to create a new process to rank projects of all types, in each region of the state, on five key measures: economic development, safety, accessibility, congestion mitigation, and environmental impact. State funds are awarded to both statewide priorities and local needs that have the highest measurable benefits. We cover both bills in more detail in two Capital Ideas reports.

“We must ensure that every step we take is measured by its return on investment,” said House Speaker William Howell in 2013 prior to HB 2’s introduction. “Resources are too scarce and taxpayer dollars too precious to be thrown away on poorly planned transportation projects. Projects should have clearly defined goals and metrics that can be measured in an objective fashion. A ‘good idea’ is not good enough anymore.”

Virginia’s new process is part of a growing trend. As legislators throughout the country look for ways to get the maximum benefit out of ever-more-limited transportation funds and build trust and accountability in the way the dollars are spent, many are looking to new ways to measure project benefits and prioritize needs. Massachusetts’ Project Selection Advisory Council is developing a new process for ranking projects in that state. Louisiana and Texas each passed new laws last year to add score and select transportation projects.

Virginia’s political leadership deserves great credit for taking on this common sense reform and placing the public benefit in front of short-term political gains.

As many states close out their legislative sessions, the latest intel on state transportation funding

As we near the midpoint of the year and some state legislatures wrap up their sessions or approach recess, it’s a good time to take a look at where a few states stand on their efforts to raise new transportation funding.

In the only state to raise new money since our last update, Nebraska’s legislature passed and then overrode Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto (30-16) of a 6-cents-per-gallon gas tax increase, to be phased in over the next four years. The additional tax will annually bring in $25 million for state roads and $51 million to be distributed to cities and counties when fully implemented.

Follow state transportation funding updates for every state as they happen with T4America’s state funding tracker.

A handful of states have been searching for ways to improve transparency and accountability as a first step to raising new funding. In Louisiana, the House and Senate unanimously passed a bill in May that reforms the way the state DOT prioritizes and selects highway projects in an effort to provide greater transparency to the process. This strong piece of legislation was introduced and advanced by a member of T4A’s state advocacy network (START), House Speaker Pro Tempore Walt Leger.

(We hope to go into more detail soon on this trend of states either reforming their project selection process or expanding the use of performance measures, so stay tuned for that. -Ed.)

Additional bills that would raise gas and general sales taxes to fund transportation projects have cleared committee, though a bill to raise the state sales tax by one cent to fund major projects just fell short of the two-thirds majority it needed to pass the House last week.

Some other states are still active in their legislative sessions with transportation funding proposals on the docket, while a handful of others have failed to pass a package during this session.

California’s Senate is considering a bill that would hike the state gas tax by 10-cents-per-gallon (and the diesel tax by 12-cents-per-gallon), increase the vehicle tax to 1 percent of the value of the vehicle, increase registration fees by $35, and add a new $100 annual fee on electric vehicles.

Projections show the bill would bring in more than $4 billion annually. The bill has been cleared out of multiple senate committees. It requires a two-thirds supermajority to pass.

Just a year after Texas voters overwhelmingly approved a separate measure to set aside a portion of oil and gas royalties explicitly for highways, legislators in Texas have reached a deal that will direct a greater share of future state sales tax revenue to transportation. Specifically, $2.5 billion of the state sales tax revenue will be reserved for transportation, so long as overall sales tax receipts are at least $28 billion (approximately the collections this year). Additionally, 35% of revenue growth from taxes on vehicle sales and rentals will be set aside for transportation beginning in 2020, netting $250 million to $350 million annually.

The House and Senate have both passed the bill, and now it will need approval from Texas voters in November.

In Delaware, Gov. Markell is urging legislators to pass a $25 million annual increase in transportation funding through increased vehicle fees.

Minnesota’s legislature adjourned without reaching an agreement on how to increase funding for transportation and passed a status-quo budget instead. But with a special legislative session looming, there’s a possibility that legislators will have another opportunity to reach an agreement on new funding.

Similarly, Missouri failed to pass a transportation funding measure. The legislature had debated a 2-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase, but adjourned without passing the measure. According to that state’s DOT, legislators must come up with new state funding in their next session or the state will not have adequate money to match federal transportation dollars, leaving federal money on the table.

In Oregon, legislative negotiations over new transportation funding seem to have ground to a halt.

But Oregon is on the leading edge of testing a new mechanism for funding transportation that could serve as a model for the rest of the country, shifting away from a per-gallon tax to a tax on miles traveled. This month the state started enrolling 5,000 drivers into its new (voluntary for now) road usage charge program called OReGO. The new road usage charge program officially began Tuesday.

Michigan ballot measure to raise transportation & education funds goes down by a large margin

A Michigan bill that would have raised new money and overhauled how the state pays for transportation was defeated by huge margin Tuesday with 80 percent of voters rejecting the complicated proposal.

The bill would have eliminated the state’s fuel sales tax and raised the tax on wholesale gasoline sales to 41.7 cents per gallon (or 14.9 percent of a gallon of fuel’s base value, whichever is higher). This maneuver would have ensured that the entirety of the wholesale gas tax would have gone to transportation, compared to the current gas sales which does not.

To compensate for the loss of gasoline sales tax revenues currently going to municipalities and schools, the bill increased the sales tax on everything else statewide from six to seven percent and allocated the additional revenues to schools, local municipalities, and a tax break for low-income families.

The proposal would have also increased vehicle registration fees, commercial truck registration fees and would have instated a fee on electric vehicles.

While certainly disappointing to the supporters in Michigan, it reinforces the same lesson we’ve shared here regularly: transportation-related ballot measures have the best chance of passage when they are simple, specific and transparent about the money that will be raised and exactly where and how it will be spent. Voters have proven over and over again that they’ll support transportation ballot measures — if they meet some of those basic qualifications. Michigan’s measure surely suffered from the complexity and from the combination of education and transportation funding together into one proposal.

Some of the states still in play in 2015

Though there have been no new statewide funding packages passed since our last update here, other states are trying to bring transparency to the process of selecting transportation projects. Texas’s HB 20 tasks the TxDOT with creating “a performance-based planning and programming process” that would evaluate which transportation projects receive state money. Similarly, Louisiana’s HB 742 would require the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development to rank projects according to a series of measures that highlight which projects are most vital to the state.

Also in Louisiana, the House’s tax committee approved two funding bills. The first would raise the state’s sales tax by one cent, with the proceeds going towards 16 designated transportation projects. The second bill would increase the gas tax ten cents, from 20 cents per gallon to 30.

The Missouri Senate gave initial approval to a 1.5-cents-per-gallon gas tax increase (3.5 cents per gallon for diesel). The state’s gas tax has been 17.3 cents per gallon since 1992. The bill stills needs one more vote in the Senate before going to the House. There are only two weeks left in the state’s legislative session and it is unclear whether they will vote on the bill before then.

In Minnesota, where we recently documented the state’s prevalence of structurally deficient bridges, both the House and the Senate have passed transportation-funding bills, but the two differ greatly. The Senate proposal raises new funds via a gas tax increase and a Twin Cities regional sales tax increase. The House’s version mostly shifts dollars around or borrows funds for transportation. The issue has been pushed aside as legislators must also hash out a state budget before the May 18^th deadline.

State Farm is moving to concentrate thousands of employees in locations near transit

State Farm, one of the country’s largest insurance companies, is betting big on transit in three cities by building or expanding regional hubs on sites with good access to public transportation, reflecting a clear strategy to attract and retain talent who increasingly want to live and work in locations connected by transit.

A State Farm Insurance executive told a crowd in Tempe, AZ, that the company’s decision to build a huge new hub there was directly tied to the nearby availability of light rail and other transportation options that are attractive to recruiting talent.

“We’re designing these workplaces to be the future of State Farm,” chief operating officer Michael Tipsord said at an Arizona State University event. “We’re creating a live-work-play environment that will give employees easy access to their work from the neighboring communities.”

The new hub in Tempe will give State Farm enough space to expand their Phoenix-area workforce from 4,500 to more than 8,000, and will be a ten-minute walk from a Valley Light Rail stop right by Sun Devil stadium at the edge of the Arizona State University campus.

tempe state farm google map location

In Atlanta, State Farm is at the center of an enormous 2.2-million-square-foot development at Perimeter Center, already one of the biggest job hubs in the entire metro region, located immediately adjacent to a MARTA heavy rail station. State Farm’s plan to lease more than 500,000 square feet in a larger development has been making waves in economic development circles in Atlanta. They’re planning to hire another 3,000 employees to augment the 5,000 already in metro Atlanta, bringing new jobs to this region as well.

It’s likely to be part of consolidating workers presently at other sites in far-flung Atlanta suburbs that State Farm has already sold. In a region with notoriously bad traffic and jobs scattered all over the metro area, it’s hard to overstate the significance for Atlanta.

Atlanta State Farm Master plan state farm atlanta hq rendering

North of Dallas in Richardson, TX, State Farm is building a new hub from scratch on the main north-south light rail line that will anchor an enormous new mixed-use development. This site, with room to expand further, is so close to the light rail stop that the executives could probably hit golf balls off the roof of the new buildings and hit the tracks. And at over 2 million square feet of office space, the Dallas Business Journal called it “the largest lease in North Texas history.”

dallas state farm google map location

State Farm is just one of many companies coming to the realization that a key part of recruiting and retaining talented workers is having convenient access to public transportation and being better integrated into nearby communities rather than isolated in a 1970’s style office park.

Though plenty of companies are still located in those office parks and will continue to be, other notable employers are looking to move to the kinds of locations more in demand by their workforce.

Just last week, Marriott hotels, a major employer in the Washington, DC, region, announced they’ll be looking for a new headquarters in the area when the lease expires on their existing suburban campus. And one of the most important things they’ll be looking for in a new HQ as they try to keep up in the race for attracting talent?

“I think it’s essential we be accessible to Metro and that limits the options. I think as with many other things our younger folks are more inclined to be Metro-accessible and more urban,” chief executive Arne M. Sorenson told the Washington Post.

Expect more news like this in the coming months and years as more companies realize that locating in vibrant, walkable areas with good transit options are not only good for business, it’s critical for the companies trying to stay competitive.

Texas looks to voters to ensure billions for highway funding

Facing a population and economic boom sufficient to give Texas seven out of the top 15 fastest growing cities, state legislators are looking to voters to direct more revenue to build more highways, but without raising new fees or taxes.

Credit: Lotus Carroll on Flickr

Texas has responded to the boom by building toll roads, wider highways, and some mass transit options in a few cities, but the state DOT and many state legislators feel that Texas isn’t building what they need to serve the 1,500 new residents moving there everyday — and they’re on the lookout for more money.

Texas currently has what they call a “rainy day” fund replenished with revenue generated from gas and oil drilling taxes and fees. The fund has been used in the past to help fill budget gaps and avoid budget cuts during economic slumps.

The legislature has placed a measure on this November’s ballot (Proposition 1) amending the state constitution to divert half of these funds for the next ten years to a State Highway Fund, to be used exclusively for highway construction, repair, and maintenance. This fund could not be used for toll roads.

Texas’ gas tax is currently set at 20 cents per gallon and was last raised in 1991. The coalition urging its passage says that Proposition 1 will raise an estimated $1.7 billion within the first year.

Both Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott and his Democratic opponent Wendy Davis are supporting the measure while campaigning for office. Organized support comes from Move Texas Forward, Texas Future, Transportation Advocates of Texas, and a broad range of trade associations, chambers of commerce, and other advocacy groups across the state.

Directing a portion of money generated by the very thing driving Texas’ economic boom right now (oil and gas) into the transportation network seems rational. However, it would be even smarter to leave those dollars flexible enough to address pressing needs in the transportation network wherever they arise, not just on the highway system. With several large and growing metropolitan areas, the state is going to need to invest in trains, bus lines, freight projects, passenger rail to connect cities, and local street networks as well.

The Houston Chronicle describes opposition to the proposal as “token and largely unorganized.” President of the Houston Property Rights Association, Barry Klein, hoped for a defeat so it “would force transportation official to confront their spending demands, possibly leaving the state better off when it comes to prioritizing projects.”

For more on important ballot measures to watch this Nov. 4, visit our Transportation Vote 2014 page.

To better serve the states and localities stepping up to try and raise revenue to invest wisely in transportation, we are hosting the Capital Ideas Conference in Denver, Colorado on November 13-14 shortly after this year’s election. If you’ve been working on a transportation measure as part of a funding campaign, working to overcome a legislative impasse, or defending a key legislative win, this conference will offer a detailed, interactive curriculum of best practices, campaign tactics, innovative policies, and peer-to-peer collaboration to help your initiative succeed.

Choosing where to invest transportation dollars in Houston

I-45 in Houston unusually empty after Hurricane Ike. From Flickr user codydildy

We wanted to highlight this piece from Reuters’ Infrastructure Summit — especially an appearance by T4 America Partner The Citizens’ Transportation Coalition. Chairwoman Robin Holzer and the CTC have been working hard to bring attention to one of the most wasteful projects receiving money from the stimulus, using it as one more example to show how “the federal transportation funding system is broken, it’s just broken.”

(Our good friends at Streetsblog just beat us to the punch and posted the story, so we’ll summarize and point you there.)

While bridges crumble and roadways crack, and the poor state of our infrastructure far outweighs the amount of money we intend to spend on maintaining what we already have, we’re sending $181 million in stimulus funds to Houston to build a section of a new outer loop highway (the outer outer outer outer loop, to be completely correct.)

In the piece, Robin Holzer discusses the waste of building an unneeded new highway — but more pointedly, how spending scarce federal funds on an unnecessary project will keep Houston from spending money where the investment (or repair) is needed the most.

From Ben Fried’s post on Streetsblog:

Reuters just wrapped up a two-day “Infrastructure Summit” and published a great collection of stories about the state of transportation policy in the U.S. I especially like this piece, featuring Robin Holzer of the Houston-based Citizens’ Transportation Coalition, who does a great job illustrating some of the major deficiencies that the federal stimulus bill failed to address:

Under the current system that U.S. President Barack Obama has maintained, at least for now, the U.S. government will pay as much as 80 percent of the multibillion dollar cost of a proposed 180-mile ring road around Houston — its fourth such loop — even though it serves a thinly populated rural area.

In contrast, an expansion of the city’s light-rail system is only eligible for getting 50 percent of the cost paid by the federal government, she said.

Yet more than 147,000 people live within a half-mile of the ten stations on the light rail system, Holzer said.