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In the third round of TIGER funding, the Obama administration has continued to demonstrate a strong commitment to bike and pedestrian projects.

Boundary Street in Beaufort, South Carolina will be transformed from a suburban arterial to a walkable, bikeable main street, thanks to a $12.6 million TIGER III grant. This project was one of 22 awarded funding in this round that will benefit cyclists and pedestrians. Photo: WSAV

Of the 46 projects chosen for funding, 22 incorporate some aspect of bike and pedestrian accessibility, and nine of them make cyclists or pedestrians the primary beneficiary, said Kartik Sribarra of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

Among the more important active transportation projects to win the nod from U.S. DOT in this round of funding is Chicago’s bike-share system. RTC also highlights Beaufort, South Carolina’s success in securing a $12.6 million grant to improve the walkability on a major thoroughfare.

Currently, the town’s main street, Boundary Street, is a visually unappealing, car-oriented suburban-style arterial. But TIGER III money will help convert the street into a landscaped, walkable, bikeable boulevard.

This project is the result of a great deal of planning and investment by the local community. According to U.S. DOT, the city of Beaufort has adopted a new land use plan and form-based codes, and they’ve approved a one-cent sales tax increase to pay for transportation projects.

TIGER III money will also provide for Main Street revitalization projects in Buffalo, New York; St. Albans, Vermont and American Falls, Idaho.

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St. Louis' Arch grounds will get better pedestrian connectivity across I-70, thanks to a $20 million TIGER grant. Image: NextSTL

If you live in Stamford, Connecticut and your walk to the train station gets safer next year, you can thank USDOT’s TIGER grant program. Or when your hometown of American Falls, Idaho suddenly gets complete streets downtown, accommodating people on foot, on bikes, on buses, in cars, and in wheelchairs, encouraging local shopping. Or when you realize that traffic congestion between Olympia and Tacoma, Washington has eased, not by adding lanes but by installing intelligent technology to manage traffic and encourage ridesharing.

All 46 of the TIGER III award grantees have been announced now, and there are sure to be more communities disappointed than excited, given that there were 828 applications totaling $14.1 billion and USDOT had only $511 million to give. The money went to 33 states and Puerto Rico. USDOT was careful to include many rural projects, though those tend to be the smallest grant awards. Twenty of the 46 projects are in rural areas, but they only amount to about 30 percent of the total outlay.

All in all, 48 percent of the projects fund roadwork, with about a quarter of those funds paying for complete streets treatments like the one in American Falls. Another 29 percent goes to transit – a far better shake for transit than generally comes of the normal Congressional appropriations process. Twelve percent went to ports, 10 percent for freight rail, and two percent for passenger rail.

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U.S. DOT is officially announcing the winners of the third round of TIGER grants tomorrow, but they give the news to members of Congress first so those members can brag about all the bacon they bring home. See below for a list of the grants we know about so far.

Chicago's bike-share program was one TIGER III winner. Photo: Peopling Places

Chicago’s Blue Line and bike-share are splitting a $20 million award. The Blue Line work will eliminate slow zones on 3.6 miles of deteriorated track between downtown and O’Hare Airport. The money will also help jumpstart Chicago’s first large-scale bike sharing program, set to launch in the spring with 3,000 bikes.

TIGER isn’t exclusively for non-automobile focused projects, but its focus on innovation and regional significance has led to significant funding for transit and active transportation. For example, in addition to the $20 million for the projects in Chicago, Illinois also netted $13.85 million for a regional multi-modal transportation center adjacent to the new Amtrak high-speed rail station in Alton — as well as roadwork on Illinois Route 83.

Below is the best compilation we’ve seen so far, courtesy of Larry Ehl at Transportation Issues Daily.

We’ll bring you the full list when it’s published tomorrow.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced yesterday that 32,885 people lost their lives on our nation’s roads in 2010. While a staggering toll, this represents the lowest total number of traffic fatalities since 1949. “We’re making historic progress when it comes to improving safety on our nation’s roadways,” said LaHood in a statement, also pointing out that the decrease in deaths came even as Americans are driving more [PDF].

Photo: The North Iowa Journal

The traffic crash and fatality rates in this country are indeed at historic lows, especially given the staggering amount of driving Americans do on a yearly basis. In 2005, the most recent year to have shown an increase in highway fatalities, there were 14.7 traffic deaths for every 100,000 U.S. residents. In 2010, that number had fallen to 10.7 deaths, a difference of approximately 10,000 fewer fatalities annually. (USDOT measures the death rate not by population but by vehicle miles traveled, also showing a dramatic improvement, from 1.5 deaths per million VMT to 1.1 over the same period. Interestingly, while total VMT rose in 2010, per-capita driving declined.)

The news was grimmer for people outside of a car than for drivers and passengers. Improved motor vehicle safety features were likely a factor in the lower fatality rate, according to the Boston Herald, but those same features mean little to non-occupants. After several progressively safer years, 2010 saw a 4.2 percent increase in pedestrian deaths—to 4,280, a difference of 171 human lives—and a whopping increase of about 11,000 nonfatal injuries. Bicycle deaths decreased 1.6 percent, but bike injury rates didn’t change at all. Clearly, safety gains for motorists have not extended to more vulnerable road users.

Furthermore, while it is certainly good news that traffic is claiming thousands fewer lives each year, 32,885 is a staggering number. It is roughly equivalent to 70 full jumbo jets crashing and leaving no survivors, or equal to the population of Juneau, AK or Dover, DE. There is enormous room for improvement: The fatality rate in the U.S. still pales beside leading countries like Japan (3.85 traffic deaths per 100,000) and Germany (4.5), which also happen to have much lower rates of driving than the U.S.

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You don’t need to look too hard to find signs that the ground is shifting when it comes to highway construction. Around the country, state DOTs are running out of money. Headlines ask “Are Freeways Doomed?” Overall vehicle miles traveled are down in the Pacific Northwest.

Multiple protests have been held in Portland in opposition to the CRC Bridge project, which Federal Transit Administration officials yesterday praised as "forward-leaning." Photo: Stop the CRC

But many state and regional transportation agencies continue to operate as if it were still the 1980s, when highway budgets were flush, gas was cheap and the destructive impacts of auto-centric planning were less well understood.

It’s especially discouraging to see those old-fashioned attitudes prevailing in greater Portland, which enjoys a reputation as the country’s most progressive transportation city. The fact that the $3-plus billion mega-bridge project known as the Columbia River Crossing remains a regional transportation priority is a testament to the pervasive grip of highway-building interests.

Just yesterday, this “highway boondoggle in disguise” passed another milestone when it was given environmental clearance from U.S. DOT, opening the way for land acquisition and construction. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced yesterday that the project has been granted a “record of decision,” a disappointing endorsement from an administration that has made “livability” a key issue.

Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff even praised the project as a break from carbon-intensive traditions, saying, “This is the type of forward-leaning project that will greatly benefit the entire region well into the future.”

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These numbers, from the Office of Management and Budget, indicate that the Highway Account of the Highway Trust fund is in better fiscal shape than previously thought. So why are senators still chasing after $12 billion? Source: OMB

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and his Finance Committee have been looking high and low for a $12 billion patch to fund the transportation reauthorization bill that passed the Senate EPW Committee a few weeks ago. According to Politico’s transportation reporters, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, has already rejected several of Baucus’s ideas.

But the question is not only, “How will we get the money?” It’s also, “How much money do we need?” The dollar amount the Senate is seeking could lavish more money than necessary on roads while leaving transit out in the cold.

The EPW Committee wants to hold transportation spending at current levels (plus inflation), which they estimate at $109 billion over two years. Receipts into the Highway Trust Fund (from gas taxes and other vehicle fees) aren’t expected to be sufficient to pay that bill. The Congressional Budget Office told the committee that the HTF is $12 billion short of the amount needed to fully fund the bill. That amount is destined just for highways, based on projections that the Mass Transit Account will be solvent through the end of 2013 – in fact, ending that year with a $1.5 billion balance.

But last month, the two top members of the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over transit, asked FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff for confirmation of those numbers [PDF]. Rogoff replied that he, in fact, found another set of numbers to be more accurate [PDF].

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Two weeks ago, every option for reconstructing the Tappan Zee Bridge posted on the state's project website showed both a bus line and a rail line. Now, all the documents showing transit across the bridge have disappeared. Image: Tappan Zee Bridge website, captured by Streetsblog

Call it the mystery of the missing transit. One of the state’s biggest transit projects, in the works for nearly a decade, was canceled overnight and no one will explain why, or even claim responsibility for the decision.

Two weeks ago, each of the four alternatives for replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge included a new Metro-North commuter rail line and some form of bus rapid transit. The design, which widened the highway but also included a major expansion of transit in Rockland and Westchester counties, was the product of nine years of study and a whopping 280 public meetings. The whole process was thoroughly documented, with information about each alternative — along with hundreds of pages generated by the environmental review process and public commentary — easily found on the state’s Tappan Zee Bridge website.

On October 11, the Federal Highway Administration and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office announced that the bridge project had been selected for expedited federal review. The project they promised to speed up, however, was vastly different from the one vetted over the course of nearly a decade. The new plan for the bridge promised to add space for car traffic but left the transit component to be completed at an unspecified future date. Transit advocates are skeptical that the commuter rail and BRT lines will ever see the light of day.

At the same time that transit was removed from the plan, the state expunged from the public record all information about the nine-year public process and the four design alternatives that included rail and bus lines. The Tappan Zee website no longer displays the documents it did two weeks ago, as blogger Cap’n Transit first noted. The endorsement of transit, the extensive environmental analysis, the history of public input — all of it gone, replaced by three short documents chronicling the brief history of the transit-free project.

So much for transparency. Kate Slevin, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said she couldn’t recall a single example of this kind of wholesale document scrubbing.

In addition to hiding the history of the Tappan Zee project, the state and federal agencies in charge won’t disclose how they reached the decision to build the bridge without transit.

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LaHood, flanked by NYC Transpo Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer, lauds the NACTO bike guide. Photo: Darren Flusche, League of American Bicyclists

If Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has anything to say about it, every transportation planner in the country should have a shiny new engineering guide on his or her bookshelf.

It’s been six months since the National Association of City Transportation Officials released the Urban Bikeways Design Guide in an online format. Yesterday, LaHood was among the first to hold the print edition in his very-excited hands, providing a ringing endorsement for its widespread adoption.

It would have been a bittersweet moment, coming only hours after LaHood told reporters that he would be a one-term transportation secretary – if the attendees had heard the news by then, which most of them hadn’t.

Before the most bike-friendly transportation secretary in U.S. history took the podium, another groundbreaking policymaker — Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City Transportation Commissioner — set the stage. Sadik-Khan is more than the architect of NYC’s next-gen bike infrastructure; she’s also the president of NACTO. So, she proudly raised a copy and called the guide a compendium of “everything you need to know to bring world-class bikeways to city streets.”

With American cities constantly struggling to implement cycling facilities that have long been the norm in Europe, NACTO created the guide to speed adoption of bicycling infrastructure by speaking directly to planners and engineers in their specialized technical lingo. By compiling a manual written by American city officials, for American city officials, Sadik-Khan said, the guide will give cash-strapped municipalities the certainty they need to view cycling facilities as proven traffic applications, not costly experiments. By putting all the engineering specs on paper, she added, it will help cities move beyond the rigid design standards that have limited bike infrastructure in the past.

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All the alternatives currently being studied for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement include both commuter rail and bus rapid transit. Advocates are concerned that the state may try to delay construction of the transit components, however. Image: Tappan Zee environmental review website

For nine years, the state of New York has been studying how to replace the aging Tappan Zee Bridge. The bridge, which is more than 50 years old, requires ever more expensive repairs to stay structurally sound and was never intended to carry the volume of traffic that pours over it every day. Since 2002, an extensive public process has led to the development of four alternative plans for the Tappan Zee and the I-287 corridor. Each of them would rebuild the bridge, widen the roadway and include both a new Metro-North commuter rail line and bus rapid transit service across the bridge.

Even after the extensive public process and environmental review, however, those transit components could end up on the scrap heap.

The Obama administration selected the Tappan Zee replacement today as one of 14 major infrastructure projects for federal fast-tracking. A report from Gannett’s Albany bureau refers to the project as “replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge, along with the option of adding bus rapid transit and passenger rail.” Gannett’s report suggests that the state may have decided to build the bridge with room for transit to be added later, rather than constructing the transit components at the same time as the roadway. This would run against the four alternatives that have already been vetted, all of which include transit in the initial construction of the bridge.

If Governor Andrew Cuomo is considering postponing the construction of the transit components, New Yorkers would be left with a major highway expansion that skirted the entire public review process. The governor’s office has not responded to Streetsblog’s inquiry about transit on the Tappan Zee.

Including transit on the bridge has run into some local political resistance lately. This July, Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino called for the removal of transit from the plans for the bridge in order to lower costs and speed up construction. As the Tri-State Transportation Campaign reported at the time, the bridge and highway components of the project are projected to cost $8.3 billion. Building the bridge with rail would add $6.7 billion, while the bus system would cost around $1 billion. Astorino’s office told Streetsblog that they hadn’t heard that the transit component had been postponed and that it was too early for any design to have been selected.

Transportation and environmental advocates called for Cuomo to commit to building transit at the same time as the highway is rebuilt, even if only the bus service is installed to start.

“If transit isn’t added now, we worry it never will be,” said Kate Slevin, Tri-State’s executive director.

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Last month Streetsblog asked whether President Obama would select transportation projects that reduce congestion, improve air quality, and create jobs when he picked several infrastructure investments, among those recommended by agency officials, to fast-track. The selection of these projects, intended to help spur short-term job creation, could avoid the mistakes of the 2009 stimulus program, which funneled billions to “shovel-ready” projects that will also promote sprawl. Leading up to the announcement, the president’s rhetoric seemed to indicate that the administration would opt for road maintenance and transit projects rather than newer, wider highways.

The Tappan Zee bridge overhaul is supposed to include transit facilities, but some fear that those may get dropped later on. Photo: SamuelWantman / Wikimedia

Today the administration announced its list of 14 projects, and at first glance, it seems like most of the transportation-related projects take transit, bicycling, and walking into consideration. Some of them will induce sprawl nonetheless, because they expand traffic capacity.

These projects won’t get more federal funds, but they will get federal help in expediting the process. The president promised that this fast-tracking won’t shortchange environmental reviews. The projects were highlighted by officials in several agencies and final selection was done by the White House.

Here’s the list of surface transportation-related projects, most of them recommended by the Department of Transportation:

Tappan Zee Bridge, New York: The bridge is rated structurally deficient as well as functionally obsolete, meaning that in addition to carrying more traffic than it was designed for, the structure is unsafe to carry vehicles. Constant repairs have made the bridge into a money pit, and a significant overhaul could produce long-term savings on maintenance. Notably, this project is not close to “shovel-ready” status, so its selection seems to indicate that the administration had long-term goals in mind, in addition to short-term job creation. There are plans to include a Bus Rapid Transit lane and a commuter rail line on the bridge, as well, but some advocates worry that all that widening could happen without the transit components coming through in the end.

Crenshaw/LAX, California: LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has become a champion for federal loan programs because of his zeal to expand transit in his city. The Crenshaw/LAX project is a cornerstone of his efforts and will provide a critical transit connection to the airport. The city has done a good job attracting federal interest and assistance, and the FTA is already helping them shorten the approval time for the project.

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