Streetsblog New York City

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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A powwow between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, and House Speaker John Boehner last night failed to yield a compromise that would put a budget in place before the government shuts down at midnight tonight. The failure of yet another attempt to negotiate makes a government shutdown all but inevitable.

Just a month ago, AASHTO sounded the warning that the transportation sector could lose up to $100 million a day in case of a shutdown. However, Congress’s extension of SAFETEA-LU through the end of the fiscal year (September 30) has put their minds at ease. Now, AASHTO spokesperson Tony Dorsey says spending for federal highway programs will continue unabated, despite a shutdown. “At this point,” Dorsey said, “we’re not anticipating any issues.” Still, he said, they’re hoping that “should there be a shutdown, it will be a very, very short one.”

But that’s not the whole story. According to a detailed DOT shutdown plan, the vast majority of the Federal Transit Administration would shut down, keeping only 54 out of 575 positions working. Already-awarded stimulus grants would continue to receive oversight and the Lower Manhattan Recovery Office would continue to function. The $270 million that the FTA normally remits to transit agencies every week would cease.

Jeff Rosenberg, government affairs director for the Amalgamated Transit Union, says the SAFETEA-LU extension only continues government’s authority to pay for transportation programs. But “if the FTA isn’t authorized to open the door,” he says, those payments will cease. That could be especially damaging for smaller metros that receive operating assistance, not just capital funds, from the feds. However, he’s hopeful that a potential shutdown would only last a couple of days and would just be “a blip on the screen.”

What else can you expect to happen if the government does shut down as of midnight tonight?

• At least 800,000 federal employees would be furloughed immediately. That would cause a massive drop in transit ridership, especially here in D.C., where Metro is predicting a five to 20 percent drop in case of a shutdown. Michael Perkins of Greater Greater Washington estimates that this would result in a loss for Metro of a quarter million dollars a day.
• Amtrak’s federal subsidies – up in the air for months now anyway as Congress debates whether to eliminate them, reduce them, or maintain them – will stop. However, Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman recently assured employees that the rail operator can keep going on ticket revenue alone in the short term.
• The Federal Highway Administration will stay open, with no positions furloughed, according to the DOT shutdown plan. The FHWA is funded with contract authority and has enough funds available to operate in that way for about a month.

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The National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Urban Bikeway Design Guide was 20 years in the making, and already it’s having an impact, says the organization’s Mia Birk.

Bringing together transportation officials from 20 major cities to discuss progress on bikeway designs in the U.S. produced quite a few “aha moments,” said Birk. For one, transportation officials learned that many of the bikeway innovations they had been adopting from Europe aren’t as innovative as they had thought.

For example, Birk said, 20 American cities use bike boxes, one of the design features that isn’t specifically endorsed by the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of Highway Transportation Officials’ design guide.

“It’s not like it’s some fringe thing anymore,” Birk said.

She added: “There’s a comfort in knowing that your colleagues are on the same wavelength.”

Conversations throughout the course of the NACTO guide development process also revealed that federal officials aren’t as unfriendly to new bike treatments as many city-level transportation officials had expected. Federal transportation officials have indicated that many of the 20 bike treatments recommended by NACTO are allowable within federal guidelines — while not explicitly endorsed — and therefore eligible for federal funding, Birk said.

“They’ve basically green-lighted a few of them a yellow-lighted a few others,” she said.

Birk described the conversations with federal transportation officials as “really effective and positive.”

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Better bicycling infrastructure could be coming to a city near you thanks to an initiative of the National Association of City Transportation Officials. NACTO’s Cities for Cycling committee today released its anticipated Bikeway Design Guide, a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in bicycle infrastructure that is intended to advance state and national policy. Created for a profession that prizes design standards, the document has the potential to spur widespread adoption of bike infrastructure that makes many more people feel safe riding on the street, leading to big increases in cycling for transportation, as well as gains in pedestrian safety.

The guide is the result of months of study by engineers, planners and academics from fifteen major U.S. cities. It offers comprehensive design instruction on the latest in cycling infrastructure innovations from Europe and stateside, such as bike boxes, bike signals and separated cycle tracks.

“NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide gives American planners and designers the tools they need to make cycling accessible to more people,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City transportation commissioner and president of NACTO. “These guidelines represent the state of the art and should be adopted as the new standards around the country.”

Planners hope their recommendations will be incorporated into the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials’ design guidelines. Design manuals by these standard-bearing organizations thus far ignore some of the cutting-edge bike treatments that have been adopted in cities like Portland and New York, as well as European cities. As we reported earlier this week, this makes funding and planning for these potentially life-saving projects difficult and time consuming, particularly for smaller cities, NACTO officials said.

In the meantime, Cities for Cycling is encouraging local communities to adopt its recommendations. Already, the states of Washington and Texas are looking to make NACTO’s standards official, sources say.

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Last week the Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s Michelle Ernst reported that an important funding stream for bike and pedestrian projects is currently stalled.

New York State DOT’s Transportation Enhancements Program, which is largely funded by the feds, normally distributes grants for bike and pedestrian projects every two to three years. As Ernst reports, however, it’s already been two and a half years since the state DOT last asked for applications, and there don’t seem to be any plans to start doing so in the near future.

UPDATE: The State DOT now says that they’ll be soliciting applications starting next spring. Since the last round of solicitations went out in early 2008, that’ll put the new round of TE grants a few months outside the three year bound.

That could lead to a delay accessing an important pool of federal money. The TE program has funded some of the most important livable streets projects in the city, such as the Ninth Avenue separated bike lane.

Greenways, pedestrian plazas, sidewalk extensions, protected bike lanes — these are the types of projects held up by delay at the state level. Via NYMTC, the region’s planning organization, here’s a list of the New York City projects that were funded in the last round of Transportation Enhancements:

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Via the League of American Bicyclists, new information is out about how much the feds are spending on bike-ped projects. While federal funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects is down a bit from last year’s all-time high, it still comes in at more than a billion dollars. A third of the money is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which begs the question of what will happen to bike-ped funding once the stimulus funds dry up. We got some foreshadowing last week of what might be in store for bike-ped funding if Republicans cut the transportation bill to the “core program.”

The League of American Bicyclists says we’re already getting a sense of what could happen, as the drop from last year to this year reflects the push to spend stimulus money quickly, followed by a cooler period. The League’s response to this year’s figure:

The $1 billion spent on biking and walking projects is a great and welcome step. It is being used to create miles of bicycling facilities, countless bike parking spaces, hundreds of safer routes to schools for children, recreational trails, and other needed projects. However, it is still a drop in the overall transportation-bucket. Bicycling and walking make up 12 percent of all trips and yet receive less than two percent of federal transportation funding. To put the billion dollars in perspective, the amount of federal money spent on bicycle and pedestrian projects, nation-wide, in FY 2010 is equal to the cost of just one bridge in the Port of Long Beach.

You can also see the FHWA funding breakdown by year, by program, and by state.

Federal funding for pedestrian and bicycle projects reached a new high last year, according to a report released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. In terms of dollars, federal investment in walking and biking more than doubled compared to the previous high, set in 2007, thanks largely to an infusion of $400 million in stimulus funds.

The share of all federal transportation spending devoted to bike-ped projects also rose to an unprecedented level -- all of two percent. Advocates for walking and biking applauded the trend while pointing out the potential for much greater federal commitment to active transportation.

"It continues to be an improvement, and it continues to be a tiny fraction of the money that's available to potentially be spent on biking and walking," said Andy Clarke of the League of American Bicyclists.

Subtracting the $400 million one-shot in stimulus funding, Clarke noted, yields a less impressive year-on-year increase. And part of the increase in reported bike-ped spending might also simply reflect better record keeping by state DOTs, as agencies document the construction of sidewalks and bike lanes as part of larger projects, according to Barbara McCann of the National Complete Streets Coalition.

The spending figures come from an update on the state of walking and biking that the feds release every five years. The original National Bicycling and Walking Study, released in 1994, set two major targets: to double walk and bike mode-share, from 7.9 percent of all trips to 15.8 percent; and to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities by 10 percent.

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The trade group representing private-sector transportation contractors is urging the Obama administration to change the way environmental reviews are conducted for infrastructure projects, proposing to favor "categorical exclusions" (CEs) from federal review rules over the lengthier process of measuring the environmental impact of construction work.

In a letter sent Friday to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which released new guidance on CEs [PDF] earlier this year, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) lamented that the existing law governing federal environmental reviews -- the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA -- is too vague on the circumstances that would require infrastructure project planners to pursue a quicker CE as opposed to the costlier option of a full-scale review.

As a result, ARTBA President T. Peter Ruane wrote, local planners often "opt for the more time consuming [environmental review] in order to avoid potential litigation at a later time." Legal challenges citing NEPA, filed by green advocates as well as their conservative critics, have delayed work on transportation projects of all stripes in recent years.

Ruane continued in his letter to the White House:

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Between 2001 and 2009, the share of trips that Americans made in cars dropped by more than four percent, with walking, bicycling and transit use picking up the slack, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Last year, 11.9 percent of all trips were on foot or by bike, while 4.2 percent of trips were on transit. Both figures signify major increases.

The National Household Travel Survey, the source of the new stats, is the gold-standard for transportation data. As Mobilizing the Region reported, while the Census only tracks how people get to work, the NHTS gathers data on all trips taken. It also distinguishes between, say, driving to a park-and-ride bus area and walking to the local bus stop.

The downside to the NHTS is how infrequently the survey is conducted, which makes it difficult to determine how much the 2009 data reflects a larger trend, and how much may be due to temporary changes brought on by fluctuating gas prices and the recession.

The high quality of NHTS data means that it can supplement NYC DOT's own numbers, which have shown a large rise in cycling over the same period. We've put in a request to the state DOT and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council to get access to city-level data once it becomes available. 

We tend to have a few good laughs when Randal O'Toole fires up his Cato computer and weighs in on transportation issues. It's hard to take seriously a man who thinks that having the government tax people to build something which it then gives away for free is the libertarian ideal.

But occasionally O'Toole provides an opportunity to discuss some interesting aspects of the transportation planning process and learn from his errors. And so we turn to his latest policy paper, which was released yesterday. Therein, he writes:

The Interstate Highway System accomplished all of this [construction of the system] without any subsidies. Federal highway user fees paid for 90 percent of the cost of the system, and state highway user fees covered virtually all of the remaining 10 percent.

This brings up an interesting question: What is a user fee? Common sense would suggest that a user fee is a fee paid by a user of something in order to use that something. A common example might be a train fare. When one wants to ride a train, one purchases a ticket. One doesn't purchase a ticket if one doesn't want to ride the train, and one doesn't ride the train without a ticket. A ticket is specifically meant to extract a fee from a potential user, that that user might then be allowed to use the train.

So do gas taxes count as highway user fees? Well, one might pay gas taxes even if one never uses highways. You pay the gas tax on gas used to drive down local roads or private driveways, or to power lawnmowers and tractors that never even see publicly-funded blacktop.

And one can use highways without ever paying gas taxes. Anyone able to obtain a vehicle powered by natural gas or electric batteries or canola oil can ride on the federal highway system for thousands of miles and never pay one cent to do so.

So gas taxes are not user fees. Indeed, the lack of actual user fees is one reason American highways suffer from severe congestion problems; when you give away something valuable for free -- like scarce highway space -- it ends up seriously over-consumed.

As a thought experiment, let's consider a world in which federal gas taxes functioned more like a user fee. That is, let's imagine that when drivers fill up, they pay a federal gas tax only on the gasoline consumed while driving on federal highways. That's still not really a user fee, but it's a little closer.

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