transit Archives - Page 8 of 10 - Transportation For America

A stirring persuasion for deciding to vote for transit: seeing it built next door

One of the most powerful avenues for persuading a skeptical community to invest in transit is to see it successfully implemented nearby — whether in the community or neighborhood right next door, or a city and region a few hours away. This trend is illustrated in two of this year’s Transportation Vote 2012 ballot measures through two very different stories in Virginia and North Carolina.

In the tidewater region along the Virginia coast, discussions ramped up in the 1980s and 90s about a light rail system connecting the neighboring cities of Norfolk — a little more inland — and Virginia Beach on the Atlantic Ocean, mostly via an underutilized Norfolk Southern railroad corridor that runs in a neat, straight line from Norfolk all the way to the beach.

In 1999, an attempt was made to pass a referendum on the potential light rail system in the City of Virginia Beach, but voters rejected it. Perhaps as a result of the controversy or simple issue fatigue after talking about it the concept for more than a decade, the Virginia Beach city council washed their hands of the whole affair and passed a resolution affirming that the city would have nothing to do with the future construction of the light rail system for ten years.

That setback didn’t stop the project in its tracks.

Norfolk decided to forge ahead on their own with a system spanning the core of their mostly linear city along the Elizabeth River. And in summer of 2011, The Tide — the first light rail system in Virginia — opened to huge crowds and daily ridership exceeding projections.

Crowds of people took rides during the Grand Opening of The Tide in Norfolk, Virginia. Newtown Road Station. Photo by D. Allen Covey, VDOT

Down the road in nearby Virginia Beach, citizens there finally got to move beyond renderings and promises and meetings and see a brand new working light rail system through the center of their neighboring city just a few miles away. Perhaps they bemoaned the perpetual traffic congestion on I-264 between the two cities and wistfully thought about how nice it would be to hop on a train at the beach and get to the downtown mall or the Tides baseball park right on the river in Norfolk.

But most powerfully, the idea of rail transit in their community was no longer an abstraction; a figment of some planner’s or city councilperson’s imagination. There it was, dropping off students by the thousands at Norfolk State and winding right through a newly rebuilt MacArthur Square and park by the mall every day with shiny new passenger vehicles on the way to the burgeoning hospital complex on the west side of town.

A year and a half later, it’s easy to understand how Virginia Beach voters went to the polls Tuesday and gave a hearty “me too!” to the Tide system. Though it was a nonbinding resolution directing the city council that still has the final say on moving forward, 62 percent of voters supported the measure. And in no small part because of the case study of success just a few miles west.

MacArthur Square in the center of Norfolk before, and how it looks after tearing down an old office building and creating a stop and a new park across from the downtown mall. First photo from Bing Maps, second photo by Steve Earley, the Virginian-Pilot

North Carolina Research Triangle

Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte are just a few hours apart on Interstates 85 and 40 and about the same size in population (1.7 million) yet Charlotte has done far more to invest in rail transit in the last decade, with more to come. (Though acknowledging the differences: Charlotte is a metro anchored by a central city and the more spread-out Triangle region is composed of the large and small cities of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary and the suburban Research Triangle Park.)

After the better part of two decades of discussion and study, Charlotte’s new Lynx Blue Line opened in 2007 and is a popular line running south from downtown to “uptown” Charlotte that has stimulated a wealth of new development along the way. According to our friends over the Center for Transit-Oriented Development, the Blue Line has catalyzed more than 10 million square feet of new housing, retail and office development along the corridor.

Simliar plans have been discussed in the Raleigh-Durham metro area for almost as long, but with four cities in three different counties trying to agree on a single region-wide plan, they’ve certainly had a harder time making it happen.

Perhaps prodded along by the success of the Blue Line down the road in rival Charlotte, Durham approved a half-cent sales tax last year to fund transit operations and a regional light rail line toward Chapel Hill, and Orange County (Chapel Hill) approved their half-cent tax to do the same just this week on Tuesday.

Rendering of a station in Durham courtesy of Triangle Transit

Unfortunately, the third partner in the region, Wake County (Raleigh), decided not to put a sales tax on the ballot this fall, so as of yet, there’s no truly regional commitment to building rail transit.

Leaders of similar sized cities and regions know that investing in transit, the signals it sends to employers, and the kind of growth that it can stimulate are key to continuing to attract a smart workforce. In a similar story about Nashville, Ralph Schulz, president of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, told the Nashville Ledger that “the lack of a mass transit system costs the area about one in five businesses considering relocating here.” (In that story you’ll see that Nashville Mayor Karl Dean knows it too and is a tireless advocate for investing in more transit.)

With Charlotte signing on the dotted line with the Federal Transit Administration just a few weeks ago to move ahead on a 9-mile expansion to the Blue Line that will reach northward to UNC-Charlotte, the bar has been raised in the region which the Triangle most closely identifies as their competition for jobs and workers.

While they’re two-thirds of the way to a regional system with Orange and Durham approving the tax, unlike Norfolk’s story, the utility of a Chapel Hill-Durham line will be incredibly limited without including lines into Wake County to connect the thousands of jobs in the Research Triangle Park and downtown Raleigh with Durham.

But every trip that a Triangle leader or citizen takes down the road to Charlotte will be a powerful reminder that successful new rail transit in a similar still-sprawling southern city is a downpayment on future growth that reaps dividends in shorter commutes, more access to jobs and neighborhoods, and an increase in the type of walkable neighborhoods that are so heavily in demand these days.

On an optimistic note, if a booming suburban city in the South with jobs scattered across the region like Raleigh can find a way forward with more transit, there’s hope for many other similar regions.

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Though these regions have voted to tax themselves to invest in transit and make their vision for the future a reality, they can’t do it alone. They need a strong federal partner to come through and help leverage those local dollars into tracks in the ground one day.

Tuesday’s vote: Strong support for more transportation options nationwide

They say all politics is local. Well, that goes double for transportation.

During a federal election season that saw the presidential candidates making only the barest mention of our teetering system for funding transportation infrastructure, local voters took transit funding into their own hands in more than two-dozen locales Tuesday. Most of the measures that included public transportation and a more balanced set of transportation options appear to have passed – or in the case of California, came achingly close to the required two-thirds majority. (Read The Transport Politic for a great summary of important measures. -Ed.)

According to the Center for Transportation Excellence election tracker, 14 of the 20 measures whose ballots have been tabulated at this point passed, a 70 percent rate. And in two of the “losses”, the funding proposal actually won 65 percent of the vote. Despite continued doubts on the economy, voters confronted with a well-presented plan to fix or improve local transportation networks generally said “yes” to slightly higher taxes. Up until yesterday, 2012 had seen 33 of 39 such measures pass, for an 85 percent pass rate.

One of the most closely watched votes Tuesday was Measure J in Los Angeles, where voters were asked to extend their 2008 transit tax another 30 years out to 2069. It was an ambitious scheme to build more of the expansive rail and rapid bus network faster by taking larger upfront loans over the next several years. The longer repayment stream was necessary in order to be able to sell long-term bonds in the coming years. Outside observers thought it was a heavy lift to get voters to approve another transit tax just four years after passing Measure R, but Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and others felt that Angelenos are impatient to get the transportation options they’re seeking sooner.

Metro Board member Richard Katz, Los Angeles Mayor and Metro Board Chair Antonio Villaraigosa, Metro Board member and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky earlier this year celebrating the new Expo Line light rail, funded in part by 2008’s Measure R. Photo by Metro Library and Archives.

Apparently they were right: The measure won 64.7 percent of the vote. Unfortunately, that’s just shy of the two-thirds required for revenue measures in California. (Notably, only 2.3 million Angelenos voted this year versus the 3.3 million who voted in 2008, when LA’s breakthrough sales tax for transportation, Measure R, passed with 67.8%.) A similar fate befell Alameda County, across the bay from San Francisco, where a half-cent sales tax would have helped improve local bus service and build a BART extension to Livermore. It’s likely to fail despite also receiving a strong majority of support — over 65.5 percent. (That vote is still too close to call and might not be decided for a few days, though it is still trailing. -Ed.)

Transportation issues played a significant role in a few mayoral races, as well. In Honolulu, the election became a referendum on construction of the $5.26 billion light rail line voters approved in 2008 (and which is already under construction today.) There, rail supporter Kirk Caldwell, the former city managing director, bested former Gov. Ben Cayetano, who came out of retirement to stop the rail project. Caldwell, who said he will “do rail better”, came from behind to win 54 percent of the vote to Cayetano’s 46 percent.

In Portland, OR, Charlie Hales – a longtime rail and streetcar proponent – beat state Rep. Jefferson Smith with 62 percent of the vote. In San Diego, U.S. Rep. Bob Filner, a Democrat, beat city council member Carl DeMaio in a race in which both candidates passionately embraced complete streets and safer conditions for walking and biking. And in Troy, MI, Mayor Janice Daniels, who rejected federal funding for a transit center in 2011, was recalled.

In other key votes, a few jurisdictions voted to join the transit party begun by neighboring communities. In Orange County, NC, home of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina, third city in the Research Triangle formed with Raleigh and Durham, voters approved a sales tax expected to raise $661 million for upgraded bus service and light rail to connect to Durham. Partly prodded by in-state rival Charlotte, which has seen multiple benefits from its own rail line, Durham County approved a half-cent sales tax for those purposes last year. Now it remains to be seen whether Raleigh will complete the triangle.

Rendering of a future light rail/Amtrak station in the Triangle Transit System in Durham, courtesy of Triangle Transit

Inspired by the success of light rail in neighboring Norfolk, voters in Virginia Beach approved an advisory measure in support of extending it to their city and, potentially, waterfront. The city council will make the ultimate decision whether to go forward. Elsewhere in Virginia, the D.C. “suburb” of Arlington approved a $32 million bond issue for transit, roads, bike, and pedestrian projects, with half going toward improvements related to the Metro rail service in Arlington. In Michigan, where four jurisdictions – Kalamazoo, Muskegon and Eaton and Ogemaw counties – passed transit levies, the Grand Rapids suburb of Walker overwhelmingly rejected withdrawing from the regional transit system.

In South Carolina, voters in Richland County – home of the state capital, Columbia – passed a penny sales tax to would widen and build roads, expand bus service and extend miles of sidewalks, bike lanes and trails. It passed with 54 percent and will be collected for 22 years.

Bucking the trend, voters in Clark County, WA – across the Columbia River from Portland – appear to have rejected a proposal to fund transit service on the proposed Columbia River Crossing, a controversial, multibillion-dollar bridge and freeway project connecting Vancouver, WA to Portland. That loss likely wasn’t just about transit — transit-supporters such as Mayor Tim Leavitt of Vancouver and the Clark County Chamber of Commerce opposed the sales tax measure, claiming there were other ways to fund operations and maintenance of proposed transit improvements. (This vote is still too close to call, though the measure is currently losing. -Ed.)

A couple of the ballot failures were nonetheless winners in the “worth a try” category. Memphis city leaders sought a one-cent per gallon gas tax to raise money to expand eight bus routes and build a downtown trolley, but were rebuffed. In Houston, transit advocates sought to end the practice of diverting a quarter of the one-cent transit sales tax to local roads. Voters confused by the fact that a “for Metro” vote continued the diversion and effectively ends light rail expansion, overwhelmingly approved it.

So many localities ponying up their share for expanded transportation options has led some to argue that the feds can shrink from their commitment to fund infrastructure. But ask any of the local communities that have just taxed themselves to improve transportation options and you’ll quickly hear that it’s not an either/or proposition.

Local communities have a vision for a 21st century transportation system that provides affordable options for every resident. They’re willing to tax themselves to get there, but they can’t do it alone. Stay tuned in the next several days for our take on what seems likely to change – or not – at the federal level as a result of election 2012.

Telling only half the story of congestion, travel time and the quality of our metro areas

A popular study on traffic and congestion in our metropolitan areas is widely cited by the national, state and local media with every annual release, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. Far from it. That’s because measuring congestion while ignoring the actual time and distance spent commuting is a poor measure of what residents’ actually experience on a day-to-day basis.

The popular and oft-cited Texas Transportation Institute’s annual Urban Mobility Report isn’t an incorrect metric, it just tells half of the story. For starters, let’s consider two metros that appear to be ranked pretty close together in the latest report out today. Atlanta and Chicago appear to both be pretty miserable in regards to congestion, right? According to the 2012 Travel Time Index (pdf), they’re near the top with TTI scores of 1.24 and 1.25 respectively, and tied for seventh in yearly delay per commuter. (In 2009, Chicago’s TTI was 1.43 – 23% worse than Atlanta’s 1.35.)

That must mean that the commute is just as bad in both of these areas, right? Well, no.

These statistics are from 2007, due to a limitation with how we can break down the TTI data.

Take an informal poll of your friends and co-workers: Who wouldn’t agree that a 35-minute commute is better than a 57-minute commute? Then why do we rely on measuring performance in a way that says the exact opposite? The TTI is almost the exact same for these two metros now, yet Chicago commuters had an average travel time of almost twenty minutes less than their counterparts in Atlanta a few years ago. That’s because TTI focuses only on how fast we can drive at peak while ignoring how far apart the destinations are in these two places.

In Chicago, the average trip to work is 35.6 minutes – 38% less time than the 57.4 minutes it takes Atlantans to drive to work. A major reason for the better highway performance in Chicago is that drivers do not have to travel as far as drivers in Atlanta – 13.5 miles compared with 21.6 miles. The amount of time it takes to go somewhere isn?t just about speed, that’s only half of it — it?s influenced both by how fast you travel and the distance you have to travel. Chicago and Atlanta are different places, so what about comparing an apple to an apple?

Denver, Colorado (8th worst TTI in 2012) has experienced a rebirth in its city core in the last decade or two, with residents flocking to new apartments and homes in the city center and close-in neighborhoods, attracted in part by the huge investment in regional transit. More people live near transit today in Denver than years ago, and with accompanying investments in new housing and jobs near transit and in more walkable neighborhoods, that means more people have shorter trips to get to work each day. Yet TTI shows that commuting in Denver is far worse in 2007 than it was 25 years ago. (TTI in 2012 is 1.27)

Look at the average travel time in 2007 in Denver compared to 25 years ago — it’s about the same. Rush hour delays have almost tripled, but the travel time without traffic (a good proxy for the average length of trips) actually decreased by almost ten minutes. Destinations are closer. Residents have more options. Commuters take shorter trips.

Denver downtown construction near light rail. Creative Commons Flickr photo by vxla ***

Relying solely on TTI to try and measure congestion and travel time in your city is like measuring only measuring two dimensions of a three-dimensional object. Like measuring the length and height of a new couch for your living room while ignoring the depth. The couch is 48 inches tall, but without measuring the depth, do you have any idea if it’ll fit through your front door?

This gets at the core problem with TTI — when cities and regions (or the USDOT) rely solely on TTI as the single measure of congestion and make all their decisions about future transportation investments based on only part of the whole picture, regions prioritize projects to reduce TTI or shave a few seconds off of rush hour delay.

Legislators, the Federal Highway Administration, state DOTs, and newspapers all use the Travel Time Index to measure highway performance. Then we spend millions or billions to build projects that lower this number, but we rarely get to work in less time.

As the nation shifts to a performance-based transportation system — beginning under MAP-21 — it is key that the first national performance measures get this right. Any national performance measure needs to allow communities to consider both factors — speed and distance.

There’s probably a handful of federal, state or local legislators looking at the headlines in their local newspaper today about congestion in their metro region. Maybe they’re saying “we’ve got to do something about this!” We need to do “something” — they’re right! But accurately measuring the problem is the only way to find an appropriate solution.

Let’s start there.

With cities and suburbs clamoring to build new transit systems, a new book showcases creative financing approaches for getting them built

This new free guidebook from Transportation for America is designed to help community leaders across the country meet the demand for transit by raising money to build and operate it outside of the traditional federal funding sources.

Download the full guidebook (10.8mb pdf)

Find out more about the guidebook in the resources area.

The demand for public transportation service is at its highest point in 50 years.The causes are many: rising gas prices, an increasingly urbanized population, growing numbers of seniors, and the preferences of the “millennial” generation. These factors and more are contributing to soaring ridership on existing transit routes. And more communities today are looking for funds to build and operate rail and bus lines than ever before.

Yet a combination of ideological gridlock in Congress, dwindling federal gas tax revenues, and the elimination of earmarks have made the traditional approaches to building transit much more challenging. But despite these obstacles, many communities are finding creative ways to move ahead. From Tucson to Charlotte, communities across the country are rounding up funding from sources outside of the traditional federal funding sources to build tomorrow’s transportation system today.

Growing public interest in transit is leading many communities to look for ways to create or expand their transit systems, but as more communities apply for money from a shrinking piece of the pie, the already over-subscribed traditional federal programs for transit won’t be able to fund every project seeking assistance. To make the money go further, the New Starts transit program, the main source of funding for new transit systems, has recently covered one-half of project costs, down from 80 percent in the past, with some projects getting as little as one-third of their required total.

Even with this policy in effect the waiting list grows longer every year.

But all is not lost. There are ways to pay for new transit investments without waiting so long, and a growing number of communities are pursuing them. But doing so requires more sophistication in the art of project finance than has been needed in the past.

Someday—soon, we hope—the federal government may respond to the high level of demand for new transit investments by increasing funding available to communities. Those of us who aspire to provide these options for people in our communities must continue to work toward that goal. In the meantime, though, we can demonstrate the depth of the need and the strength of our desire by finding our own creative ways to make these projects happen.

This new guidebook is a first step toward that goal. We’ll be posting excerpts and stories here in the coming days, but you can download the full book today.

Top Left: Photo courtesy of the Metro Library and Archives, top right: Flickr photo by the Seattle DOT, bottom right: Flickr photo by Andrew Bossi, bottom left: Flickr photo by Steven Vance

Is metro Atlanta vote a bellwether for transportation funding?

Flickr photo of Atlanta’s “Spaghetti Junction” by Felicity Green

In my best grandpa voice: Way back in 19 and 96, as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I wrote a series of stories under the heading “Gridshock” that laid out the traffic hell facing metro Atlanta absent something resembling a plan. At the time, the Georgia DOT was wrapping up its $3 billion “Freeing the Freeways” paving bonanza, and the last planned extension of MARTA rapid rail was winding down.

Meanwhile, metro Atlanta was sprawling out of control, spreading out in all directions and in ways that ensured that options other than lengthening car commutes would be hard to provide. At the same time, the metastasizing traffic was far out-pacing the existing and projected highway funding, and the region was facing a collision with the Clean Air Act that would put federal dollars on hold for several years.

Fast forward to 2012. After three tries in the Legislature to win the right to vote on a regional sales tax for transportation and two years of a mandated political process to develop a project list, metro Atlanta voters July 31 finally had a say over a bold transportation spending plan.

The result: Still no plan. Two-thirds of the voters rejected the Transportation Local Option Sales Tax – or T-SPLOST – which would have put $7.2 billion toward 157 projects throughout the 10-county region, evenly split between highways and transit. It was a serious blow to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, whose leaders led the battle to get the right to have a regional vote, and to politician-supporters such as Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. (His City of Atlanta voters, though, comprised the only jurisdiction to approve the measure.)

But is it a bellwether for transportation votes in other states and metros? The short answer, most likely, is “no”. To be sure, many were following it nationally. The vote came on the heels of MAP-21, a federal bill that seems to presage a shrinking federal role in transportation funding, at least for the near term. Many wondered: Will metro regions and localities be able to make up the gap and bootstrap their way out of congestion and mobility woes?

Like most ballot measures, the Atlanta vote failed for its own peculiar reasons. The Legislature had ensured an uphill battle by mandating the vote be held during the primary election, rather than the November general election. The vast majority of contested races were in Republican districts in the suburbs. The Republican primaries drew an anti-tax electorate to the polls, while residents in the core, who tend to be less tax-averse, had fewer reasons to turn out.

The vote also bore out what we heard in focus groups there last year: Georgia voters are especially negative about their government. Polls and exit interviews showed that many were mistrustful of Georgia DOT on the heels of outrage over the decision to continue tolls on Georgia 400 after the promised sunset. MARTA, too, has been under the cloud of a long fiscal crisis as a result of the economic slump and depressed sales tax revenues.

Many voters also complained of a sense that the project list was a goodie bag for various political interests and not a cohesive plan to address well-articulated needs. The Legislature-mandated process almost assured that outcome. It called for creating a 21-member “regional roundtable” made up of a mayor and county commissioner from each of the region’s ten counties, plus the mayor of Atlanta. While the “pro” campaign pitched the project list as a solution to congestion, the list struck many voters as a collection of pet local projects that did not necessarily add up to a thought-through plan.

Was this an anti-transit — or anti-transit rider — vote? Certainly, some of that sentiment exists. But remember there was plenty of money in this for road building too. As someone who lived in and wrote about the region for many years, I think the other reasons offered here had far more to do with the loss than the public transportation components did. Atlanta is made up of thousands of newer and younger residents who do not carry the baggage of race-based, anti-transit battles of previous decades. Most of them just want a system that works, regardless of mode, and they want efficiency and accountability in their operation.

Are there generalized lessons to be taken from the Atlanta experience? Two important ones:

First, regional votes in places without a tradition of regional institutions and decision-making are an extremely heavy lift. In our focus groups, the idea of a regional solution held a lot of appeal. But in reality, voters were being asked to send a lot of their money to a “regional” approach with unclear lines of accountability. The money would have gone to GDOT, MARTA, the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and to local jurisdictions throughout 10 counties.

But with money spread all over the place, where did the buck actually stop? They were being asked to trust, not just their local electeds, but government writ large. In this day and time, with this electorate, that may have just been too much to ask.

And second, important though it is, a project list is not necessarily a plan. The Atlanta proponents understood that the 70 percent of transportation tax measures that pass nationwide almost always have a clearly articulated list of promised projects. Given the legislature-mandated process and the resulting list of 157 projects, voters perceived the T-SPLOST as a grab bag of pet projects, offered with a plethora of justifications.

If you can’t sum up the rationale for the plan in a couple of lines, and point to an elected official or body that is ultimately responsible, you are going to have a tough time. Again, our polling and focus group work, as well as lessons gathered from many of our members during ballot fights, bear this out.

So where does this leave metro Atlanta? Two follow-up pieces are worth reading. In one, longtime Atlanta columnist Maria Saporta – a devoted regionalist – suggests it’s time for the core to go it alone. (The piece also includes a very interesting map of the voting results, included below.) And in the other, Georgia Sierra Club President Colleen Kiernan recaps what happened, and suggests the Club’s “strange bedfellows” alliance with the Tea Party may offer a way forward.

Update: Also worth reading is this hopeful editorial in Creative Loafing encouraging those Atlantans that supported the measure to imagine a path forward together, similar to Maria Saporta’s suggestion of the core “going it alone.”

Graphic of the vote by precinct, provided by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

Atlanta transportation vote: “You pay it one way or another”

It took three tries in the Georgia legislature for metro Atlanta to win the right to vote itself a regional sales tax to fix its transportation woes, and another two years of a grinding political process to come up with a list of 157 highway and transit projects that just might do the trick. Now comes the really hard part: Convincing the voters likely to show up for the July 31 primary election to vote for it.

A piece in the New York Times today lays out what is at stake:

For more than a decade [ed. note: make that two decades], Atlanta has been among the fastest-growing regions in the country, but the road and rail system in a state that ranks 49th in per capita transportation spending just could not keep up. Hourlong commutes are common, and more than 80 percent of commuters drive alone. … The approach is also an attempt to thread the political needle in an era when the recession and smaller-government sentiment have made any effort at new public spending, especially one with the word “tax” attached, a Sisyphean task.

A Sunday piece by the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Ariel Hart noted that, without the sales tax revenue, the region is likely to be so strapped for transpo cash that tolls are the only real option. As a consternated voter told her: “I guess you pay it one way or another.”

A nice overview today by Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt noted that, “An odd coalition of opponents has come together including the local Sierra Club, the DeKalb County NAACP and the Tea Party Patriots.” Coalition might be too strong a word; these groups aren’t actually working together, but they each have their reasons.

The Sierra Club feels that a few big highway projects, including an old bugaboo known as the Northern Arc (of a defunct proposed “Outer Perimeter”), make it a deal killer. They hope that Atlanta could follow in the footsteps of Seattle, where voters turned down a highway and transit referendum only to approve a transit-only measure the next year. Supporters of this month’s project list argue that the convoluted process for getting a vote almost certainly requires another trip through the legislature and a couple years’ delay, with very uncertain political prospects after that.

The DeKalb NAACP feels the county got short-changed by getting a rapid bus line rather than rail, among other concerns. And the Tea Party folks actually prefer a regional gas tax over a sales tax. While that might be a more responsible position than a reflexive “no taxes” stance, there are several problems. One is that the gas tax would have to be fairly stiff to raise the same amount of money as a penny sales tax. The other is that gas taxes are even less popular than sales taxes.

The biggest hurdle supporters face is the likely composition of the electorate, in a low turnout primary race where most of the contested races are among suburban Republicans. Support is strongest in the urban core within the I-285 beltway, but there are fewer reasons for those voters to go to the polls than in the farther-flung suburbs. At the same time, though, many of those suburban voters face some of the worst traffic, because their communities grew up almost overnight and the infrastructure has hardly kept pace. In a couple of weeks we’ll know whether they think a penny sales tax would truly, as the campaign ads say, “Untie Atlanta”.

This photo accompanied the New York Times July 16 piece on Atlanta's regional transportation vote.

Saving a transit system and turning the tide for the future of a mid-sized city

Last month, the citizens of Baton Rouge, LA, voted to raise their taxes to preserve and expand their struggling bus system. The landmark measure will nearly double transit funding — saving the system from meltdown while laying the groundwork for dramatically improved service.

To pass it, churches, faith-based groups and local organizers teamed up with businesses and institutions. As we’ve seen in similar local measures, they won by explaining exactly what taxpayer money would buy, building a diverse coalition and getting out the vote.

This in-depth story is part of our Transportation Vote 2012 coverage. Communities across the country are preparing to vote on the people, plans and projects that will set the tone for transportation progress in the months and years to come. These are the places that will provide the energy, innovation and inspiration for the next national vision for transportation. Transportation Vote 2012 will help educate voters, advocates and candidates and keep abreast of transportation-related issues as they unfold.

A crisis point

Even before the prolonged fiscal crisis hitting governments everywhere, Baton Rouge’s Capital Area Transit System (CATS) struggled to do more with less. Over the last few years, service had degraded to the point that the wait for a bus exceeded 75 minutes and average rides were over two hours long. The system was saved repeatedly only by last-ditch city budget shuffles, creative grants and even private donations.

The biggest recent blow came when Louisiana State University backed out of the CATS system after years of student complaints and contracted with a new (more expensive) private operator. That meant a loss of $2.4 million from the CATS annual budget.

In 2010, a parish-wide tax to support the transit system failed at the ballot box, in part because large parts of the parish (same as counties in other states) don’t use or have access to the service. When projections came in that the transit agency would be so far in the red they’d have to shut down in summer 2011, it became painfully clear that something major needed to be done.

After cobbling together grants and funding to make it through 2011, the mayor appointed a Blue Ribbon Commission to make recommendations not only to save the service, but to create something much better. But the first job was to save the system, as Rev. Raymond Jetson, the chair of that commission, told the Baton Rouge Advocate: “Before there can be a robust transit system, before you can do novel things like light rail between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and before you can have street cars from downtown to LSU, you have to have a backbone to the system,” he said. “And that backbone is a quality bus system.”

The commission learned that Baton Rouge was the largest city of its size in the country to have a transit system without a dedicated revenue source, subsisting on annual local government appropriations.

But before putting a funding measure to voters, the commission recommended significant reforms to the composition of the transit board and an end to the ability of the Metro Council to veto the board’s decisions. “Governance reform and long term accountability … helped separate it from the previous failed measures,” said Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge, a broad, multi-racial, faith-based coalition of institutions backing the measure.

Photo courtesy of Frank McMains, www.frankmcmains.com

So how did they do it?

Coalition building

The first step was to build the core coalition that would push this measure to victory.

Enter Together Baton Rouge, a relatively new organization of churches, faith-based groups, social workers, and university students and groups. Together Baton Rouge led the way as the grassroots behind the measure, coordinating call banks, get-out-the-vote rallies, more than 120 educational “transit academies” and door-to-door canvassing of tens of thousands of homes by hundreds of volunteers. (Note that LSU students chose to get actively involved even though CATS was no longer the provider of their transit service on campus.)

They began with three informational meetings with 300-400 people each, where “community members told other community members why things were bad and what the new plan was,” said Bagert.

“We asked two questions on the sign-in card: ‘Do you want to be part of a voter outreach campaign?’ and, ‘Are you part of an organization and would you be willing to organize one of these sessions?’ We built a strong base of people that wanted to help do outreach and educate their fellow community members.”

Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge

In part because of the groundwork of the Blue Ribbon Commission and other partnerships, the Baton Rouge Area Chamber got on board along with other business groups. Hotels and hospitals, whose leaders realized how much of their workforce depended on CATS each day, joined in.

Colletta Barrett, vice president of missions for Our Lady of the Lake hospital system told the Advocate that 10 percent of OLOL’s staff, or 400 people, use CATS.

It is imperative, she said, that a transit system is available to move people from North Baton Rouge to the medical corridor in the southern part of the parish.“It’s unacceptable that it takes an hour and 45 minutes to get to this side of town,” she said. “We have told our employees that we have an individual social responsibility to take care of each other.”

And:

Ralph Ney, hotel general manager for Embassy Suites [hotel], said about 15 percent of his workforce uses CATS to get to work, which sometimes results in his employees being late.

“It’s difficult to hire and maintain employees who don’t have transportation,” said Ney, who was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission. “It’s evolved to where a lot of our employees don’t even take the bus because they can’t get to work on time, so they’re riding bikes or catching rides.”

A key part of the coalition was the Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX), a T4 America partner and non-profit that helps Louisiana communities with planning issues and addressing complex problems with effective, forward-thinking, implementable solutions. They became involved through their CONNECT initiative to build a diverse coalition across the New Orleans to Baton Rouge super region to advocate for smarter housing and transportation investments. The CONNECT initiative concluded that one of the critical pieces for regional connectivity is a viable, robust transit system serving the metro area. This was also strongly recommended in the new comprehensive plan for Baton Rouge, called FutureBR.

CPEX worked with many of the former members of the Blue Ribbon Commission to create the Baton Rouge Transit Coalition, a diverse set of partners who provided information, resources and conducted educational outreach to the Baton Rouge community. They hosted numerous outreach meetings, advocated for the changes to CATS governance in the state house, created a website that became a clearinghouse for facts and research during the campaign, and worked closely with the Baton Rouge Area Chamber to solicit support from the business community — in addition to being a strong part of the grassroots effort led primarily by Together Baton Rouge.

In the end, the boosters of the transit measure had built a coalition that had strong grassroots, wide reach, and a diverse range of interests. Without the participation of any one of the core coalition members — Together Baton Rouge’s grassroots and trusted community members, CPEX and their coalition of transit boosters and others, and the area Chamber and the business community — the effort would not have had the same success.

Trusted messengers — and message

Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge summed up this strategy simply: “We let the community leaders be out front leading the way. Not professionals, not paid staff, not elected officials, not transit officials.”

“One of the strengths of this effort was that the plan was created by community leaders and many of the important people were already behind the plan,” said Rachel DiResto of CPEX. “It certainly took some effort to get new folks on board, but the important pillars were already on board. We didn’t need to convince them.”

For the message, especially in the key districts with heavy transit usage and service, the campaign kept it very basic. “Save our system.” They noted that Baton Rouge was the only city of its size without a decent transit system, and talked about the people who depend on it each day: Perhaps the nurse who cares for your mother at the hospital, or your neighbor or friend. The campaign steered clear of some of the typical statistics in transit campaigns about reducing traffic congestion, gas prices or environmental impacts.

The above story about the hospital and hotel workers shows how the advocates built a larger, inclusive narrative and a vision for the community’s future. The events were filled with personal stories and made the impact of the system (and the potential impacts of not having it or having it improved) clear to everyone, regardless of who they were, where they lived, or whether or not they rode CATS.

Success wasn’t due to being the smartest person in the room armed with the most data and facts. It was about making the impacts real and relatable through powerful stories helping people realize the bonds and impacts of community.

“Outreach, outreach, outreach”

To deliver that message, Together Baton Rouge and the coalition held an insanely ambitious number of community outreach sessions they called “transit academies” or “civic academies” in churches, community centers and other venues. In the four-month campaign leading up to the April 21 vote, they hosted 120 of these sessions.

“Anywhere anyone wanted to hear more, we did a presentation,” said DiResto of CPEX. “And it paid off with more people who hadn’t been active voters showing up at the polls for a special election.”

Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge

These meetings were largely targeted to areas and precincts where support and heavy turnout would be needed to shift the outcome of the vote. “The diversity of those meetings was a huge plus,” DiResto said. “People who would never ride CATS were sitting in the same meetings with those who ride it every day. And their stories really impacted the former.”

The Advocate told one such story, about Fred Skelton, a 70-year-old Baton Rouge homeowner who had never ridden a CATS bus before. But during one community meeting he said he would be “first in line at his voting precinct to support” the 10-year, 10.6-mill property tax. The reason, he said, is because before his mother died, she used to stay at a nursing home where he’d visit her. When he visited, he said, he remembered frequently seeing groups of employees waiting for the bus.

“Those people who were waiting for the bus are the people who were taking care of my mother,” he said. “If we shut down the transit system, who will take care of those people?”

Strategic precinct targeting

Resources are always limited in a campaign, and therefore best deployed where they can make the most impact. The overall strategy — change minds of people on the fence, increase support from typically opposed groups, or focus primarily on the base — determines where resources should be targeted.

One of the biggest differences between this successful measure and the recent failed measure in 2010 was the use of more strategic targeting of resources in key precincts. Though the campaign did deploy some resources in suburban areas with small amounts of service, mostly to blunt opposition, the brunt of their efforts focused on getting out the vote in their strongest precincts.

Canvassing team. Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge

“We did detailed analysis of the electorate,” said Bagert of Together Baton Rouge. “We referred to the recent failed measure for background, which helped analyze the lay of the land. We focused our direct energy on turning out the strongest [most supportive] precincts, leaving out voters that had no voting history in the last 4 years. We tried to get 10 percent of the 2008 presidential election voters to vote for the measure.”

As a result of this strategy, the campaign was well poised to bounce back and succeed when The Advocate threw a curveball late in the game and editorialized against the transit tax, which likely cost the campaign a significant amount of support in precincts with already low support or people and groups that were undecided.

Making the benefits tangible and measurable

Whether it is the federal program or a local ballot measure, voters need to know what our dollars are really “buying” at the end of the day. Are they going to fix our bridges? How will they better connect workers with jobs, make their lives eaier, save them money?

On this count, the coalition in Baton Rouge did an admirable job of making this crystal clear — backed in large part by the commission recommendations that had large buy-in from day one. In every meeting they offered a list of promised CATS improvements:

CATS promises the following changes if the tax passes:

Decreased average wait times for buses from 75 minutes to 15 minutes.

Eight new express and limited stop lines, serving the airport, universities, mall and other areas.

GPS tracking on the entire fleet, with exact arrival times accessible on cellphones.

New shelters, benches and signage at bus stops.

Expanded service to high-demand areas and increased routes, from 19 to 37.

Three new transfer centers operating in a grid system to replace the outdated route system that leads all buses back to Florida Boulevard.

A foundation for Bus Rapid Transit, a system in which buses get their own right-of-way lanes.

The ambitiousness of the promised changes was part of the success. Given the (somewhat unfair) perception that CATS was a poorly governed money drain, simply offering up a plan to pour money into CATS and hope for the best was not going to fly. People had to be inspired to believe that things actually would get better.

Similar specificity and transparency, including a long-range map of projects, helped win 67 percent of the vote for Measure R in Los Angeles. Supporters in Atlanta hope that a pre-approved list of transit and road projects will help convince voters to support a regional sales tax this July. The Baton Rouge formula – specific improvements, accountability reforms and relentless grassroots engagement – could offer a path to similar success.

Wrapping it up

The transit ballot measure was approved on April 21 in Baton Rouge, 54 percent to 46 percent and the municipality of Baker, 58 percent to 42 percent. In Zachary, a more suburban area with little service, it was rejected, 79 percent to 21 percent. Early returns showed the measure losing with only 40 percent support, but “then the precincts we had worked came in and voted in historic levels, supporting the measure at around 90 percent in those key precincts,” according to Bagert. “The key was really getting strong vote in supportive precincts.”

The story isn’t over, however.

The governance reforms for CATS, including changing the Metro Council’s veto power, are still passing through the state legislature. (The council’s veto power over changes in fares, routes, schedules and other operations was cited by the Blue Ribbon Commission as a key factor crippling the transit system.) The board nominating process will also change so that 13 different groups that have a stake in transit system (hospitals, businesses, etc.) can nominate members to the board.

Though some groups that were opposed are considering some legal challenges to the tax itself, the Baton Rouge story shows us a great success story of how a community rallied around their important transit system, fought to save it and improve it, and built a winning campaign to do exactly that.

Advice for others

Facing a ballot measure in your area? Planning one? Here are four last smart pieces of advice to take with you from Rachel DiResto from the Center for Planning Excellence.

Bring core partners to the table early and find your champions who have to be willing to speak well to various audiences and who are willing to expend time and energy for your cause;
Frequent communication with other partners is critical to maximize resources and not duplicate efforts;
Focus on the voter outcome – grassroots advocacy is essential – target those folks who are supportive and mobilize them to show up to vote instead of spending all of your energy combatting those opposed.
Frequent outreach to different sectors – know your message for various audiences

The election day team for Mid City. Photo courtesy of Together Baton Rouge

Excited? Encouraged? Learn something that you didn’t know before? Let us know in the comments.

Our sincere thanks go out to Broderick Bagert of Together Baton Rouge and Rachel DiResto and Lacy Strohschein of the Center for Planning Excellence for their time and information for the behind-the-scenes story of their success. And also to Rebekah Allen of the Advocate, whose solid reporting on the issue for the last few years was invaluable for understanding and background, as well as the source of valuable quotes.

Follow all Transportation Vote 2012 coverage here.

House committee ignores broad opposition, decimates transit funding anyway

Hours after receiving over 5,000 letters and phone calls from individuals across the country and a letter signed by more than 600 groups from an unbelievably broad spectrum, the House Ways and Means Committee ignored that broad, bipartisan opposition and went full speed ahead with their unprecedented plan to kill dedicated transit funding.

The Ways and Means Committee, which is responsible for writing the funding portion of the bill, approved their financing plan along almost party lines this morning, 20-17. (Two GOP reps voted against the bill.)

This plan attacks three decades of successful investments in mass transit by ending the historic guarantee for dedicated funding for public transportation — originally started under President Ronald Reagan almost 30 years ago — placing every public transportation system in immediate peril and leaving millions of riders already faced with service cuts and fare increases out in the cold.

The proposal would take away the 2.86 cents out of the total 18.4 cent motor fuel tax currently directed into the transit account of the Highway Trust Fund and redirect that 2.86 cents into highway spending. Transit would no longer have a guaranteed and protected funding source, instead becoming subject to yearly appropriations fights and the need to find offsets for funding — all while highway spending continues to be guaranteed with protected funds for half a decade at a time.

In just 12 hours after hearing the initial news, we gathered signatures from more than 600 groups, notable individuals and elected officials.

More than 75 national organizations signed the letter — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AARP, the American Public Transportation Association, the National Rural Assembly, American Society of Civil Engineers, LOCUS (real estate developers), National Association of Counties— and a huge list of other individuals and state & local groups, including the governors of Oregon and Washington, several state DOTs, state and local Chambers of Commerce, and hundreds of state and local organizations nationwide.

Unfortunately, the committee chose to ignore this broad opposition — including opposition from other groups like the conservative Club for Growth and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) — and went ahead with their short-sighted plan.

The markup wasn’t quite as contentious as yesterday’s in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, though it was about 16 hours shorter. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, with several years of experience on the transportation committee under his belt, took it as his job to educate his fellow members on this finance-focused committee about transportation — many of whom may not have ever taken up the transportation financing portion before due to how rarely it comes up.

Rep. Blumenauer noted that for 30 years, having a Trust Fund in place — a mechanism with some degree of certainty — has been crucial for transit agencies’ “ability to make multiple year commitments that allow them to operate with some degree of certainty.” (For more specific comments, check this Streetsblog Capitol Hill summary of the markup.)

This Ways and Means bill now moves to the House floor, along with the more substantial portion marked up yesterday by the transportation committee. That floor process could begin as early as late next week, but more likely the week of the 13th.

Massive letter opposing House leadership attack on transit sent to Capitol Hill

As we mentioned yesterday, House Leadership and the Ways and Means Committee this week proposed an unprecedented attack on public transportation funding.

This morning we sent this letter (below) to the Ways and Means Committee and the entire House of Representatives in strong opposition to this House leadership plan to end a 30-year precedent of providing dedicated funding for public transportation from the federal fuel tax.

In less than 12 hours, we gathered signatures from more than 600 groups, notable individuals and elected officials. More than 75 national organizations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AARP, the American Public Transportation Association, the National Rural Assembly, American Society of Civil Engineers, LOCUS (real estate developers), National Association of Counties— and a huge list of other individuals and state & local groups, including the governors of Oregon and Washington, several state DOTs, state and local Chambers of Commerce, and hundreds of state and local organizations nationwide.

Read the full letter here, where you can see the full list of all groups that signed.

Although Ways and Means markup is about to begin this morning, ~~there’s still time to contact your House rep and let them know that you stand against this raid on transit funding~~.

—

Dear Chairman Camp and Ranking Member Levin:

For the past thirty years, Congress has provided dedicated funding for highway and transit programs through an excise tax on gasoline dedicated to the Highway Trust Fund. This funding structure has successfully provided highway and transit programs with secure, dedicated revenues and budgetary firewalls dating back to the Reagan administration. The success of this approach is without question: The Trust Fund has been critical to our nation’s ability to build an efficient and multimodal transportation system. With record transit ridership, now is not the time to eliminate guaranteed funding for our nation’s public transportation systems, which saved Americans close to $19 billion in congestion costs in 2009. For the first time in thirty years, the pending legislation H.R. 3864, the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Financing Act, removes the certainty of a continued revenue source for our transit systems as well as the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Program.

Specifically, we are deeply concerned about the provision in H.R. 3864 that would terminate funding from the excise tax on gasoline and replace it with the Alternative Transportation Account. In place of gasoline tax revenues, the legislation would provide a one-time $40 billion transfer of General Fund revenues to the Alternative Transportation Account. Not only is this level of funding insufficient to fully fund the proposed authorized levels for the Alternative Transportation Account, but it would subject transit and CMAQ funding to the annual appropriations process. This change will make it impossible for public transit systems across the country to plan for the future. It will also make it impossible for the FTA to honor grant agreements.

In addition, this legislation does not make clear how the $40 billion in General Fund revenues will be offset in the U.S. budget. As a result of this funding gap, we are concerned that the $40 billion general revenue transfer may not occur leaving transit programs out in the cold.

We strongly encourage the Committee to reject H.R. 3864 and work to continue to fund highway and transit programs through dedicated funding.

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.

With Congress in limbo, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder puts promising transportation ideas on the table

More state and local officials are coming to grips with the fact that they cannot wait for Washington to act on infrastructure investment and repair. After two years of short-term extensions, a new transportation bill may or may not happen in the next six months. From a vantage point closer to their constituents, local leaders of all political stripes see the need for more immediate solutions — and know that the potential impact on the economy is too important to be ignored because of partisan squabbles.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (pictured at right), a Republican elected in 2010, is one of those leaders. And his new $1 billion blueprint for the state’s infrastructure, released earlier this week, does a commendable job of ditching ideological gestures in favor of common sense.

One of the more ground-shifting components of Snyder’s plan is his preference for rapid bus service in the Detroit area to complement and expand on the Woodward light-rail line already in the pipeline. As the Detroit Free Press discussed in an editorial this morning, it is likely that some will dismiss bus service as inferior to rail. That distinction is for Michiganders to decide, but Snyder’s willingness to consider a medley of transportation options should induce a healthy discussion.

He’s also willing to discuss revenue, which remains the most major hold-up in Congress. Under Snyder’s proposal, voters would get to decide at the local level whether to raise vehicle license fees by $40. Allowing for local debate and deliberation would likely increase the chances of new revenue being secured.

Snyder would also shift Michigan’s current gas tax to a levy as percent of the price per gallon, rather than a flat fee, a shift that is expected to increase overall receipts.

The additional revenue from both of these measures would fund road repair and public transportation, including enhanced bus and rail service in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs.

Now that Snyder has outlined his preferences, it is up the state legislature to make the next move. As the Free Press put it:

The governor has not solved southeast Michigan’s transportation problems. But in laying out a practical plan for providing — and paying for — rapid transit service, he has given leaders a road map to a better transportation future.

Photo courtesy of AnnArbor.com

Transit benefit once again slated to be cut in half — tell Congress to move

Last November, we posted an action alert on the potential for millions of Americans to see the cost of their commute suddenly rise. Congress wisely chose to extend to $230 per month tax benefit for transit as part of the 2010 package extending the Bush tax cuts, continuing transit parity with the $230 deduction available for parking. Before that parity was put in place, the federal government was effectively subsidizing employees who drive alone to work — picking winners and losers rather than leveling the playing field for all travel options.

The clock is now ticking once again, and absent Congressional action, the $230 per month benefit will revert back to $120 per month on December 31. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) have introduced legislation to make the benefit permanent.

Tell your member of Congress that you support parity for all travel modes. Commuter Benefits Work For Us, an advocacy coalition supporting the Schumer-McGovern legislation, makes it easy for you to let your representatives know where you stand.

It’s a matter of fairness — and Congress needs to move.

Today is the “Don’t X Out Public Transportation” day of action

15 events around the country today are highlighting the devastating impact of the House’s initial transportation proposal that would cut to public transportation funding by 35 percent.

As we reported last week, today is the “Don’t X Out Public Transportation” day of action to highlight the crippling impacts of the proposed 35 percent cut to public transit. The events are being held in more than 20 cities in cooperation with the American Public Transportation Association and a number of key partners to let Congress know that deep cuts mean Americans losing their jobs or their ability to get to their jobs, as well as groceries and essential services.

These kind of cuts are the last thing Washington ought to be talking about in a fragile economy.

Supporters of today’s action are encouraged to wear red in support of public transit, and some agencies are going one step further — painting large red X’s on the the side of buses with routes threatened by cuts. Check out these photos of Xs being painted on buses belonging to the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Association below.

You can find more information about today’s events around the country at supporttransit.org. Looking for a rally near you? Go here to find the full list of cities hosting events.

At 11 a.m. eastern time, members of the media and other interested parties are invited to call into a telebriefing featuring APTA President William Miller; Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union; John Robert Smith, T4 America co-chair and president and CEO of Reconnecting America; and others.

Photos courtesy of the American Public Transportation Association.

“Passengers” documentary features diverse voices on transportation

A newly-released documentary available both on radio and online surveys a variety of Americans about their perspectives on the nation’s public transportation system.

“Passengers,” as the program was dubbed, aired on WAMU (D.C.’s NPR affiliate), a number of public radio stations in most major U.S. markets and nationwide on NPR World and NPR’s Sirius XM satellite, and interested listeners can also access the segments for free and download via iTunes and podcast. The four half-hour installments were written and produced for radio by David Freudberg of Humankind.

The series is inspired in its inclusion of a diversity of transportation voices — transit authority heads, labor, chambers of commerce, advocates and students who rely on public transportation services daily.

“You can look at almost any transportation project, and you can point to development that happened because of that,” said Natalie English, senior vice president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, describing to Freudberg how smart investment in transit options can do more for economic growth in some cases than a traditional highway or road project.

Others spoke of how crucial access to transit was to their daily lives.

“I live check by check, day by day, and, you know, and I depend on the public transportation. I depend on this to get me to where I’m going,” a male passenger of Boston’s T system told Freudberg.

The four parts of the series are as follows:

Part One looks at a Virginia man who accepted his county’s car-free challenge for one month; it also interviews both drivers about the price of gas and bus riders in low-income neighborhoods.
Part Two looks at the convergence between the business community and environmentalists over the widespread benefits of public transportation — “Bankers and the Sierra Club on the same side,” as Freudberg put it.
Part Three looks at the impact of public transit on climate change compared to the impact of a car. Transportation for America Director James Corless was interviewed for this segment, along with the president of AAA.
And, Part Four examines where receipts from the federal gas tax end up, as well as weighing arguments for and against high-speed rail.

Access all four parts here.

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.

Seniors and transit report generates widespread coverage and discussion

Last week, we released Aging in Place, Stuck without Options, documenting the more than 15.5 million Americans 65 years and older who, by 2015, will live in places with poor or non-existent public transportation.

The report ranked metro areas according to the percentage of seniors projected to face poor transit access, and asked: How do 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?

The discussions we saw in the comments of blog posts and newspaper articles were very interesting. It’s an immediately relatable story, because almost everyone has a parent or grandparent currently dealing with or facing the prospect of getting older and staying mobile.

Accommodating seniors who want to age in place — most of them do — will be a challenge for our nation’s transportation system. But there is a lot that we can do. We can increase funding for bus routes, paratransit, vanpools and ridesharing. We can provide incentives for community non-profits to operate their own systems. We can encourage states to involve seniors more intimately in the planning process and ensure officials are still able to “flex” federal dollars for transit projects. We can also prioritize “complete streets” that meet the needs of all users, including older Americans on foot, in wheelchairs or on their way to a transit stop.

All of these ideas can — and should — be folded into the next transportation bill currently being drafted in Congress.

The report generated widespread coverage and discussion. In response to the report’s findings, the San Francisco Bay Area gave itself a pat on the back for its top rank, with the San Francisco Chronicle referring to the region as “a good place to retire the car keys,” while the Kansas City Star reacted to its region’s poor ranking. The Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money offered a nice summation of the report’s overall findings.

Some argued that our recommendation to meet seniors where they are is backwards. Rather than extending transit out, they said, we ought to encourage older adults to move to places that already have robust transportation systems. Tanya Snyder surveyed both sides of the debate, which also played out in the comments section and on Twitter, at Streetsblog Capitol Hill:

Those recommendations might help geographically isolated seniors reach services, but is it really the responsibility of the taxpayer to subsidize the decisions people have made to live in places that explicitly reject transit accessibility? Should those inefficient, low-density, sprawling areas be retrofitted with transit now that their populations are aging?

Cristina Martin Firvida, who works on these issues for AARP, said helping seniors marooned in those areas helps everybody. And besides, the suburbs were built through federal policies encouraging outward development after the second world war, she said – it’s not just that one person built a house on top of a mountain and then demanded that taxpayer-subsidized transit come to them. “The suburbs is where our economy and our entire society has moved to since the fifties,” Firvida said.

No one took more umbrage with our report and conclusions than the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole, whose response to the growing mobility needs of America’s seniors was a glib: “So what?” While O’Toole is dismissive of the desire for greater options, AARP’s research found that public transportation use among older Americans increased by 40 percent since 2001 (see graphic below). And this is despite the fact that many live in areas with spotty and less-than-reliable service to begin with. T4’s David Goldberg responded to O’Toole last week.

You can still check out the full report and see how your area ranked here.

Nassau County Executive to privatize Long Island Bus system

In April, the Long Island Bus system in Nassau County, New York was on the verge of cutting bus service in half until a funding deal between state and local officials halted the reductions with an $8.6 million cash infusion. Now, with the temporary lifeline slated to end in December, Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano has announced his intention to privatize the system by 2012.

Under the deal, privately-owned Veolia Transportation would begin operating the 48 Long Island bus lines, which serve an average of 100,000 riders daily. Long Island Bus is one of the largest suburban bus systems in the country, according to Transportation Nation.

This week’s announcement was not a surprise, as Mangano has made his intention to privatize the system known for some months. Mangano ran for office and won on an aggressive anti-tax platform, steadfastly opposing new revenues and refusing to meet the requested financial commitments to the Long Island Bus system requested by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. In a press release announcing the deal today, he described the New York MTA as a “bloated bureaucracy.”

Veolia officials say they can run the system at three quarters of Long Island Bus’ current operating budget of $141 million, and Mangano has estimated savings of between $2 and $4 million a year. But the math, according to the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, just doesn’t add up. Privatization in other parts of the country has often resulted in higher costs to the county and reduced services, wrote TSTC’s Stephen Higashide:

For example, last year Veolia received a local subsidy of $77 million to operate Phoenix’s bus system, and provided 1.9 million hours of service. By contrast, Nassau County contributed only $9.1 million to LI Bus (with the MTA paying another $25 million) and received 1.2 million hours of service.

The contract requires approval from the County Legislature and the state-run Nassau Interim Finance Authority.

U.S. mayors say no to new revenue for transportation without reform

A supermajority of America’s mayors surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors are clamoring for a reorientation in our nation’s transportation policy toward fixing what we have and investing in new options.

Ninety-eight percent of mayors identified affordable, reliable transit as crucial to their city’s recovery and growth, according to a survey of 176 mayors unveiled this week by Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed (right) on behalf of the Conference.

Commanding majorities favor an increase in the federal gasoline tax, but only if more funding is allocated to transit, biking and walking, and local governments are given greater discretion over project selection. Eighty-percent said new highway projects should be a low priority, preferring to focus on repairing and maintaining what we have. Federal financing tools like Build America Bonds or the TIFIA programs receive the support of 75 percent of mayors.

The mayors also agree with T4 America that finding new revenue sources for a larger transportation bill without changing any policies is a non-starter. Just 7 percent of respondents said they would support a gas tax increase without a shift in priorities.

The mayors are in good company — 51 percent of voters in last year’s Smart Growth America poll identified “maintaining and repairing roads, highways, freeways and bridges” as their top priority, compared to 16 percent who chose expanding and building new infrastructure.

While the focus of the mayors’ attention is on the needs of metropolitan areas, most if not all of their policy preferences — increased local decision-making to meet local needs, reforms to the program, a broader array of travel options and a focus on fixing what’s already built — certainly apply equally to rural areas as well.

George J. Pierson, President and CEO of survey sponsor Parsons Brinckerhoff, put the results in perspective, noting that U.S. invests about two percent of GDP in infrastructure, compared to five percent in Europe and nine percent in China. He said:

When mayors in the United States speak to their need to improve the quality of roads and transit systems in their cities, they are responding to a public need in a way that will arm their cities for success in global competition.

You can read more about the survey at Streetsblog or the U.S. Conference of Mayors website.

Photo: U.S. Conference of Mayors

America’s infrastructure woes signal “life in the slow lane”

The dichotomy between anti-spending sentiment — which a majority of Americans identify with on a conceptual if not programmatic level — and the persistence of pressing infrastructure needs that require real money is the theme of a lengthy piece in this week’s print edition of The Economist, a publication known for its fiscally conservative bent.

Perhaps it takes a penny-pinching persuasion from the across the pond to put our infrastructure shortfalls in perspective. The U.S. has considerably larger highways than most of Europe, yet we spend more time in traffic. Domestic engineers give our roads and bridges failing grades, and the World Economic Forum ranks our infrastructure system 23rd worldwide. We spend dramatically less per capita on infrastructure than many developed European countries, and certainly far less than booming China.

The U.S. also lags behind other wealthy nations in passenger rail service, the magazine notes. Even our fastest and most dependable line, the Northeast Corridor’s Acela, “averages a sluggish 70 miles per hour between Washington and Boston,” while the French TGV from Paris to Lyon “runs at an average speed of 140mph.”

“All of this is puzzling,” they opine, noting that the U.S. remains the world’s largest economy, with its richest citizens. Large public works projects are part of our DNA, dating back to our nation’s founding and the continental railroad. The Economist continues:

Between 1956 and 1992 America constructed the interstate system, among the largest public-works projects in history, which criss-crossed the continent with nearly 50,000 miles of motorways.

Furthermore, the Economist argues, our current system for spending transportation dollars “tends not to reward the prudent”:

A state using road-pricing to limit travel and congestion would be punished for its efforts with reduced funding, whereas one that built highways it could not afford to maintain would receive a larger allocation.

By way of solutions, the magazine points out that we will “need to spend a lot more” on infrastructure and identify new revenue sources. A higher gas tax may not be politically viable in today’s climate, but it could be later. Some have also floated a tax on vehicle miles traveled. And, the National Infrastructure Bank supported by President Obama and others offers some promise as well.

At the state and local level transport budgets will remain tight while unemployment is high. With luck, this pressure could spark a wave of innovative planning focused on improving the return on infrastructure spending. The question in Washington, apart from how to escape the city on traffic-choked Friday afternoons, is whether political leaders are capable of building on these ideas.

High gas prices are fueling demand for broader transportation options

The higher gas prices become, the more likely people are to start looking for alternatives. And the shift has already begun.

Demand for mass transit is surging everywhere — from Nashville, Tennessee to Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Terre Haute, Indiana to Pasadena, California. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell is encouraging his constituents to bike, walk or carpool at least once every two weeks. And, residents in Peoria and central Illinois started coordinating ridesharing schedules online.

In that same vein, the Las Cruces Sun-News, one of the largest newspapers in New Mexico, encouraged readers to consider new options in an editorial this week, opining:

The economic decision to choose public transportation over one’s personal vehicle could turn into a positive for all concerned.

People who’ve never tried it may actually like it. And if a bus is going where they’re going? Yes, they’ll be more likely to continue using that mode of transportation. It beats paying almost $4 a gallon for gasoline, especially when the personal vehicle gets about 15 miles per almost $4.

Gas prices at or above $4 a gallon generate the need for 670 million additional passenger trips on transit systems, resulting in more than 10.8 billion trips per year, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

Bicycling has become a popular alternative, with new riders benefiting from recent investment in bike facilities and programs. Mirroring the increased demand for transit in 2008, biking increased 15 percent nationwide and 23 percent in the 31 largest bike-friendly cities that year, with a similar uptick occurring today, according to Peopleforbikes.org.

Last time gas prices topped $4 and demand for transit surged, cities with well-established public transit systems like New York and Boston saw increases in transit usage of 5 percent of more, while some of the biggest increases in demand came in areas less associated with transit, like the Southwest. But these are many of the same communities that lack the capacity for a large surge in ridership.

Often lost in the discussion is the fact that many people are stuck without realistic alternatives to pain at the pump: streets too dangerous to walk or bike, destinations too far away, no available transit service, no easy options.

Most of the talk in Washington has focused on the supply side of the gas prices equation — speculation, domestic drilling and the like. But a real-world shift in demand is happening right before our eyes. With the nation’s comprehensive surface transportation bill overdue for renewal, this ought to lend greater urgency to the need for robust investment in an array of options to ensure no one gets stranded or left behind.