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How should we grade America’s transportation systems?

Measures of accessibility -- like the number of jobs in metro Minneapolis within a 20-minute morning drive -- can assess transportation systems without leading to the conclusion that highways and sprawl are the answer. Image: University of Minnesota

The big, headline-grabbing transportation metric right now is the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report, which holds up the lack of congestion as the ultimate sign of a well-functioning transportation system. By that measure, cities like Kansas City, Phoenix, and Detroit — where car commutes can be free-flowing but tend to cover long distances — come out looking great, while large metros that do a better job of providing non-automotive transportation options — like Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York — look like failures.

But TTI’s narrow focus on congestion has come under increasingly intense scrutiny in recent years, with critics pointing out that it is used to justify road-widening projects that purport to reduce congestion but mainly serve to encourage sprawl and lengthen commutes.

A study recently released by the University of Minnesota presents an interesting alternative to the TTI’s metrics. UMN Transportation Engineering Professor David Levinson recently analyzed metropolitan commuting according to a very different criterion: accessibility, or “the ease of reaching desired destinations.”

Levinson attempted to improve on the TTI report by tracking the time it takes for people in the 51 largest U.S. metro areas to reach jobs. His findings stand in stark contrast to the TTI’s report. Large metros like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Chicago offered the greatest number of jobs within a 10-minute car commute, Levinson found.

While TTI’s methodology penalizes cities for locating homes and businesses close together, because that increases congestion, in Levinson’s analysis, higher concentrations of destinations are rewarded for helping to reduce travel times.

“There are two ways for cities to improve accessibility—by making transportation faster and more direct or increasing the density of activities, such as locating jobs closer together and closer to workers,” Levinson writes.

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Friday's panel at the Bipartisan Policy Center. From left: Moderator Jeffrey Shane; Doug Foy, former head of Massachusetts' Office of Commonwealth Development; Janet Kavinoky of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Ryan Holeywell of Governing Magazine; Pete Ruane of the American Road and Transportation Builders Association; and David Traynham of The Boeing Company. Photo: Tanya Snyder

If I’ve learned one thing from all the meetings about transportation I’ve covered, it’s this: There is no progress without a solution on funding.

Every conversation about infrastructure turns on the question of how to pay for it. As the power of the gas tax declines, can it be restored or replaced? Does the political will exist?

Friday’s post-election debrief at the Bipartisan Policy Center was no exception. Judging by the first half of the forum, you’d think that the entire transportation program hangs in the balance of that one open question. And it might.

So let’s start with that:

Will the 113th Congress solve the funding crisis?

Joshua Schank of the Eno Center for Transportation opened the session by saying it’s easy to be optimistic about the future when the recent past has been so dismal. All participants agreed that U.S. DOT needs to focus on finding a sustainable funding source for transportation. Last year, the House proposed a 33 percent cut to keep spending in line with transportation revenues; Pete Ruane, president and CEO of the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, said the potential cut could be as high as 57 percent in 2014 if Congress doesn’t create new revenue sources.

David Traynham, a policy analyst at Boeing, said the new Transportation Secretary (if there is one) should make that his or her “signature issue,” the way distracted driving is Ray LaHood’s signature issue.

Though many people believe that an eventual switch to a mileage-based funding system is inevitable (though still politically toxic), the gas tax is still the most obvious solution – a “no-brainer,” according to Jeff Shane, former undersecretary of transportation under President Bush. But no matter what happens with the gas tax, said Doug Foy, who ran Mitt Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development in Massachusetts, the country needs to relax its prohibitions on tolling. Under current law, only new lanes can be tolled, and only in a handful of places. That’s a big problem to Foy and others who believe that maintaining existing infrastructure is a far more pressing mandate than building new capacity.

“Take a state like Rhode Island,” Foy said. “I-95 is falling into ruin. It is literally coming apart at the seams… Rhode Island can’t afford to rebuild that road in place, let alone make it any bigger. If that road is not tolled, it will not be rebuilt.” He said federal support is far too low to take it on.

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One state's plan for Transportation Alternatives: Utah will use some of its $6.4 million for Recreational Trails and Safe Routes to School, give some to metro areas, and spend the rest on any type of surface transportation they want. Image courtesy of UDOT

The current transportation law dealt a few hard knocks to bicycling and walking programs. One big one was the restructuring of the Transportation Enhancements program into something called Transportation Alternatives, which has to fund more types of projects with less money.

The idea is that each state’s TA money will get split in half. Fifty percent gets allocated to Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and Transportation Management Areas (TMAs) based on population. Let’s call that the “Local 50.” Then the state gets the other half – the “State 50” – and is supposed to distribute it via a competitive grant process.

Local 50: It’s not quite 50

The first thing to know is that even the Local 50 isn’t always entirely under local control. The Local 50 gets distributed according to population to whatever entity represents each area. For large metro areas and sometimes even small urbanized areas, there’s an MPO or TMA in charge. But for rural areas, sometimes it’s just the state that run things.

President Obama signed MAP-21 nearly five months ago, but states are still trying to figure out what it all means. Photo: Fastlane

Take Michigan, for example. The state is looking to get $26 million in Transportation Alternatives funds. Of that, $2.9 million comes off the top for Recreational Trails, a separate program with its own money (raised from off-road vehicle fees) that’s administered by the Department of Natural Resources, not MDOT.

That leaves $11.6 million each for the Local 50 and the State 50 in Michigan.

About $6.5 million of the Local 50 will go to the TMAs in jurisdictions of more than 200,000 people. But the rest of the money — over $5 million from that supposedly “Local” 50 — goes to the state to distribute.

That’s before you even get to the half that the state is supposed to control.

This is how the Cardin-Cochran amendment is being interpreted on the ground. The amendment was a creative and hard-fought way to make sure that some TA money actually went to the sorts of projects the old Transportation Enhancements program used to fund – primarily bike and pedestrian infrastructure, plus some safety education.

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Darren Flusche is the policy director of the League of American Bicyclists.

Should the performance of this street…

…be measured like this road?

Under the new federal transportation bill, known as MAP-21, the performance of these two roads could be measured the same way — even though one is a bustling business district, and the other is an interstate highway. (Example provided by Transportation for America.)

MAP-21 expands the scope of the National Highway System by 60,000 lane-miles; now it will include many streets, called “primary arterials,” that don’t feel like highways at all. At the same time, the law directs U.S. DOT to set up performance measures for the $22 billion National Highway Performance Program – the largest transportation program under the new law – that will ultimately reward and penalize states for reaching or failing to meet these targets.

So, unless the performance measures are set appropriately, state DOTs will treat many streets that cut through neighborhoods essentially the same way they treat interstate highways: prioritizing speed over other factors. (Jonathan Maus at BikePortland has investigated what this could mean for his city, where he says local transportation leaders will have “much less leeway and independence to do innovative designs and to make changes to the streetscape without a potentially onerous process of seeking federal approval.”)

Which streets will that affect in your state? You can find the primary arterial routes that will be added to the NHS on the Federal Highway Administration’s website.

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Yesterday’s election made history on many different fronts: gay marriage, immigration, consumer protection, and more. But America also voted to maintain essentially the same balance of power in Washington that has brought about so much gridlock. In the transportation arena, that gridlock meant three years of dithering on a national bill and, ultimately, a new law that failed to make many of the reforms needed to help the country build a greener, safer, 21st century transportation system.

Republicans hung on to their primacy in the House of Representatives and the Democrats maintained control of the Senate and the White House. This Congress, which closely resembles the last one but is tilted a little more toward the Democrats, has less than two years until the current transportation law expires.

With his newly-won second term, will President Obama be emboldened to fight for increased revenues for transportation and infrastructure in order to resolve the paralysis over spending? Will he take action on climate change, as environmentalists are urging him to do?

As Steve Kretzmann of Oil Change International wrote this morning, “The top candidate backed by the fossil fuel industry – big oil, gas and coal – just lost the election.” Mitt Romney raised more than six times as much money from these industries as Obama, and his loss is a sign their message failed to resonate with Americans.

Whether that verdict translates into bolder action in Obama’s second term remains to be seen. Other lingering questions: Will Ray LaHood really leave, as he said he would, or might he stick around at least for another year or two, as some insiders speculate? Will a somewhat chastened Republican Party be more willing to compromise on legislation in the next session?

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After a rousing opening speech from NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood took the stage at the “Designing Cities” conference of the National Association of City Transportation Officials yesterday. Streetsblog stringer Dani Simons was there and briefed us on the highlights.

U.S. DOT chief Ray LaHood says cities are the incubators of innovation. Photo: NYCDOT via AN Blog

LaHood said:

American cities and towns should get a leg up on using federal funds to make streets safer for biking and walking, thanks to rules enacted yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration.

Projects like this pedestrian bridge in Austin, Texas, which are built by local agencies, will get a boost from new FHWA rules. Photo: National Transportation Enhancements Clearinghouse/R.E. Martin

MAP-21, the current transportation law, was passed hurriedly enough that not all the i’s could be dotted and t’s could be crossed — and some of those details simply aren’t the business of Congress to work out. It’s up to U.S. DOT to put a finer point on many of the provisions in the bill. The agency is still struggling with a lot of them and has, admirably, opened the door to significant public input to help them put meat on MAP-21′s bones.

Some of the details came out yesterday, with FHWA’s guidance on the Transportation Alternatives program, which replaced the popular Transportation Enhancements program as a major funding source for bicycle and pedestrian projects.

America Bikes was quick with its analysis of the pros and cons of the new rules, and chief among the good news is that the guidance preserves local control over bike/ped funds by denying states eligibility for TA funds.

The disappointing provisions in MAP-21 haven’t gone away. TA money still gets split down the middle, with half going to cities and towns and the other half going to the states. And state DOTs can still have the option of either running a competitive grant program with their half of the funds, or “flexing” their entire portion to whatever they want. But states can no longer apply to their own grant programs, clearing the way for greater local access to these funds.

“If you make a contest with your own rules, and you apply to it, who’s going to win?” said Mary Lauran Hall, spokesperson for America Bikes.

Primarily, the rule means that if a state decides to use its TA funds on bike and pedestrian infrastructure, local agencies will have a greater say in how the funds get spent. But it won’t just prevent state bike/ped projects from competing against city bike/ped projects. One of the most disappointing changes in MAP-21 was that states can now spend TA funds on environmental mitigation for road building. Those tend to be big, expensive projects that can elbow crosswalks and bike lanes out of the running. This rule seemingly negates that option, unless the state finds a local agency to sponsor the environmental mitigation project.

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Phineas Baxandall is a senior analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

It’s now common knowledge that annual changes in the volume of driving no longer follow the old patterns.

For 60 years, the amount of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) rose steadily. Predicting more driving miles next year was like predicting that the sun would rise or that computer chips would be faster. The only direction seemed to be up.

Then, after 2004, per-capita VMT fell 6 percent, which has led to a decline in total VMT since 2007.

The most recent data are from July, traditionally America’s biggest month for driving. In July 2012, Americans clocked over 258 billion miles behind the wheel, a billion fewer miles than the previous July despite a slightly stronger economy and cheaper gasoline. In fact, you’d need to go back to 2002 to find a July when Americans drove fewer miles than July 2012.

Has America’s long increase in driving turned a corner or just taken a prolonged pause? The answer matters a lot. Consider four scenarios:

Graph: Phineas Baxandall, U.S. PIRG

1. If the volume of annual vehicle miles traveled switches back to the average rate of increase between 1987 and 2005, then by 2025 VMT will be 27 percent greater than the 2012 level.
2. If VMT changes at the average rate it sustained over the entire period between 1987 to 2012, then it will grow by almost 19 percent by 2025.
3. If instead VMT changes at the average rate that has prevailed since 2004, then the number of miles driven will fall 2.3 percent by 2025.
4. And if VMT changes at the average rate that has prevailed since 2007, then VMT would fall off by almost 8 percent by 2025.

Table: Phineas Baxandall, U.S. PIRG

The difference spanning these scenarios amounts to over a trillion vehicle miles per year. How we decide to invest in transportation should be very different, depending on which scenario we are planning for – especially since the roads, railways and other infrastructure we build today will be with us long past 2025. Continuing to build new highways at the current pace might arguably make some sense if driving were to return to pre-2005 rates of growth. But those outlays indisputably would be a colossal waste if more recent trends prevail.

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Who wins and who loses when political wheeling and dealing takes the place of sound decision-making on transportation? Graphic: CAP

Transportation reauthorizations have typically not been a time for major discussions about national policy goals. They’ve been a time for getting while the getting’s good, a time for deal-making and pork and a lot of back-room transactions to make sure every member of Congress could go home and talk about how much federal money they were bringing home.

If MAP-21 accomplished anything it was to change that conversation. It eliminated earmarks – no small feat, as the previous transportation bill, 2005′s SAFETEA-LU, was one of the most heavily-earmarked pieces of legislation ever. MAP-21 also eliminated funding formulas, which used to hold up every bill for at least a year or two as Congress members tried to manipulate the numbers to benefit their states. And the bill also eliminated the “equity bonus” program, which ate up 22 percent of transportation funding in 2010 and was, at its heart, the exact opposite of everything reformers are seeking in the transportation bill. The explicit purpose of the equity bonus program was to reallocate billions of dollars to where the money was not needed — and it was the biggest funding program by far in SAFETEA-LU, accounting for nearly $10 billion in 2010.

Unfortunately, although MAP-21 eliminated these inefficient calculations, it froze in place the funding levels that politicians arrived at through this wheeling and dealing. The new law based state-by-state allocations on the share of the total pie each state got in 2009 – and that share was determined by how well the state fared in flawed funding formulas and the equity bonus program.

Donna Cooper and John Griffith at the Center for American Progress just published a report called “Highway Robbery,” lamenting the fact that the equity bonus isn’t truly dead – its legacy still haunts our transportation funding system.

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It’s October 1, the start of the federal government’s fiscal year 2013, and the MAP-21 transportation law officially takes effect today. The law was signed July 6 but got a three-month grace period to let U.S. DOT set guidance and give states a little time to get ready for the new requirements — things like setting up grant programs to distribute bike/ped funding to local communities (though they can also just squander that money).

The Virginia DOT has applied for a TIFIA loan to help build its $1.7 billion replacement of Route 460, southeast of Richmond, to address all this terrible congestion. Photo: Flickr/Doug Kerr

The TIFIA loan program can make about $7.5 billion in federal loans this year — up from $1.2 billion last year, and a stepping stone on the way to an even greater level of lending next year. States are already jockeying to borrow. Of the 11 letters of interest U.S. DOT has received from transportation departments seeking TIFIA credit assistance, all are for roads and bridges, except one for an aviation project. There’s nothing for transit, as far as I can tell, especially since Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration has stripped the transit component from New York’s Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project. Cuomo is seeking between $2.4 and $2.9 billion for the bridge.

This is what experts warned about when TIFIA funding became first-come, first-served: Simple road projects with plans already on the shelf will be easy to submit, whereas transit projects could take longer to apply for.

Though there’s reason for concern over the scuttling of TIFIA project selection criteria regarding anything but the ability to pay back the loan, Ray LaHood wrote in a blog entry last week, “Submitting a Letter of Interest is no guarantee of DOT approval. Once all applications are in, they will be held to strict standards.” And since a project’s place in line is determined by the date of the application, not the letter of interest, these 11 projects might not be winners. Congress will get a full report on the status of the applications at the end of this calendar year.

Although today marks MAP-21′s big debut, there are still dozens of elements of the bill that won’t take effect for years. For example, at the end of this year, FHWA will issue guidance to states that the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices — the street design guidebook that is increasingly out of step with America’s leading city transportation departments — “should not be considered a substitute for engineering judgment.” Changes to environmental review requirements made as part of Congress’s push to “streamline” project delivery will be official next January, with different kinds of projects getting exempted from review at different points over the next few years [PDF].

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