Photo: Rally for Roads

The House of Representatives is back in town, and its members still don’t have a transportation bill. In fact, they probably won’t have one for weeks. But two groups holding conferences in Washington this week would be more than happy to help them out in the meantime.

First, the League of American Bicyclists kicks off its annual National Bike Summit tomorrow. Wednesday’s program will feature a welcome speech delivered by secretary of transportation and noted bicycle commuter Ray LaHood. (Streetsblog will be covering the Bike Summit all week long.)

In a twist that probably can’t be considered purely coincidental, tomorrow will also see the highway construction industry hold its second annual Rally for Roads on the National Mall.

The Hill reports that the Rally for Roads will be attended by a litany of House transportation committee members, including Chairman John Mica, ranking member Nick Rahall, and highway subcommittee chair John Duncan. A few congressmen will make appearances at both events, including Reps. Peter DeFazio and Tom Petri, both of whom have voiced their support for bike-ped and transit programs in the House.

With the fate of the House transportation bill still undecided, both groups are hoping to win key battles over federal funding. Bike advocates will be looking to protect the programs that keep streets safe for cyclists and pedestrians, which would be eliminated under the most recent House propsal. The road builders will be looking for looser regulations on labor and environmental review, but they will also be seeking more money — money they stand to gain if bike-ped and transit programs are de-funded.

Highway builders have long been an imposing lobbying force in Washington. But rather than using their influence to promote sustainable development or multimodalism, their chief objective is usually to get the government to spend as much money as possible on highway ingredients — steel, asphalt, cement, and so on. Though they certainly don’t reflect all of America’s transportation needs, especially for cities, highway builders’ voices are often the loudest to be heard — and just as often the only ones to whom Congress listens.

However, as we saw when the House threatened to cut off dedicated funding for transit, the highway builders are not the only voice in the debate anymore.

Each span of the new Tappan Zee Bridge would be as wide as the current bridge, leaving room for future administrations to convert eight traffic lanes into ten or more lanes. Click to enlarge.

The Cuomo administration’s plan for the new Tappan Zee Bridge, described in yesterday’s draft environmental impact statement, is more than a missed opportunity to provide New Yorkers with faster and greener commutes using transit. It also foreshadows a potential environmental disaster, as the state prepares to spend huge sums on a span that can funnel much more traffic than the current bridge.

The new Tappan Zee will be more than twice as wide as the existing one. While the state government says the new bridge will carry the same amount of traffic as today’s bridge, the designs in the DEIS include enough pavement to carry far more cars, which could lead to more pollution and more sprawl, and will certainly incur hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary spending. The one silver lining is that a more transit-friendly administration could use the extra space to add bus rapid transit service in the future.

Together, the two spans of the proposed Tappan Zee Bridge would measure a full 183 feet across, while the current bridge is 91 feet wide. Where the current bridge has seven travel lanes, the new bridge will have eight. A shared bicycle/pedestrian path adds a few more feet. But the lion’s share of additional asphalt comes from the addition of wide shoulders bracketing the traffic lanes in each direction, and an additional “emergency access” lane in each direction.

The reason to make the bridge so incredibly wide, according to the DEIS, is to ensure that either span on its own can carry as many cars as the current bridge, in case one span has to close for whatever reason. “In the event that an incident or extreme event would require the closure of one structure, the second structure could remain open to traffic,” reads the DEIS. “To provide adequate capacity for such short-term traffic operations, each of two road decks would need a minimum width of 87 feet to provide for a minimum of seven temporary highway lanes, shoulders, and an adequate buffer for two-way traffic operations.”

The extra lanes are an extraordinary concession to the automobile, predicated on the idea that we should build roadways so that even a rare disaster won’t cause any reduction in traffic capacity.

Building each span with the full capacity of the existing bridge — up to 14 total lanes, if need be — is incredibly costly. A back-of-the-envelope calculation by Streetsblog based on the state’s 2006 financial numbers puts the cost of the emergency access lanes at around $825 million, or about one-sixth of the entire project budget.

Emergency lanes are unheard of on even the newest bridges. On the Port Authority’s planned Goethals Bridge replacement, Minnesota’s I-35 Bridge over the Mississippi River, Oregon’s proposed Columbia River Crossing, and California’s new Bay Bridge, no such emergency access lanes exist, only shoulders.

The DEIS suggests that the “emergency access” lanes won’t be set in stone: “The additional width, however, could be converted to HOV or BRT lanes in the future if appropriate studies deemed this corridor and alignment appropriate. If this conversion did take place in the future, emergency access could revert back to the use of the full shoulders.”

In other words, the space set aside for “emergency access” is primed to be converted into extra capacity: The only question is whether that will end up being used for buses or for cars. If a future administration wanted to run bus rapid transit across the Tappan Zee, the emergency lanes would provide space to do so. However, if a future administration instead caved in to motorists complaining of congestion and opened up the space to private automobiles, even carpoolers, the result would be more driving and more of the pollution and sprawl that comes with it.

There’s a long history of state DOTs taking spare room on highways and converting it into traffic lanes. Private vehicles have been allowed onto shoulders, sometimes only during rush hour, in Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington, Hawaii, Florida, and Minnesota, according to the Federal Highway Administration. The ability to turn “emergency lanes” into traffic lanes might be too tempting for New York State DOT to pass up. Quite recently, NYS DOT gave in to political pressure and let carpoolers use the bus lane on the Staten Island Expressway.

The State DOT has not replied to Streetsblog inquiries about the emergency lanes.

The problem with Cuomo’s Tappan Zee blueprint isn’t just that it preserves the transit-free status quo. Under the Cuomo plan, New York might be left with a bridge that’s ten lanes or wider, where it used to have a seven-lane bridge — a major commitment to continued car dependence. A future with no new transit is bad enough — Cuomo is also poised to spend huge sums on a project that could easily generate more traffic and sprawl.

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.”

It’s true that the project does include a transit component. About $800 million will be spent on light rail through this corridor between Portland and suburban Vancouver, Washington. But project opponents like David Osborn, head of the community group Stop the CRC, point out that a much greater share of the money will be spent widening the highway to 10 lanes and adding a number of interchanges. This is fundamentally at odds with Portland’s professed emphasis on environmental stewardship and sustainability, Osborn told Streetsblog in April.

“If we build transportation infrastructure that supports single-occupancy-vehicles, it will increase low-density sprawl,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of opposition to this project in the community.”

Joe Cortright, a consultant with Impresa and one of the project’s most vocal opponents, says he is disappointed but not surprised by the U.S. DOT announcement. “This has been clearly in the pipeline for some time,” he said. “It reflects kind of the internal consensus of the state DOTs.”

But he added that the federal government has yet to award the CRC any funding — and the project plan assumes a $1.2 billion contribution from the federal government. Nor has either state DOT committed any money, he said. He added that legal challenges to the environmental impact statement were likely forthcoming.

So the fight certainly isn’t over yet in Portland.

Workers redeck the Gowanus Expressway. Plans to overhaul the road completely were cancelled due to budget shortfalls. Photo: NYS DOT

The state Department of Transportation announced yesterday the cancellation of plans to rebuild 5.3 miles of the BQE and the Gowanus Expressway. It wasn’t a new round of freeway revolts that killed these projects but the state’s busted transportation budget.

“The economic downturn has affected all areas of government and Transportation is not an exception; recent projections show insufficient funds to meet our infrastructure needs,” reads the official notice of the projects’ demise in the Federal Register. “The cost of the alternatives being evaluated do not fall within NYSDOT’s funding constraints.”

This marks a decided change of tone from the state DOT, which until very recently was calling the repairs “critical needs” for public safety, as the New York Post reported today. Together, the two projects could have cost between $2.3 billion for rehab work alone and $35 billion for the most expensive tunnel alternatives, according to NYSDOT’s estimates.

At Streetsblog, we’re not going to shed tears about a major highway project being cancelled or delayed, especially not while transit is being stripped off the Tappan Zee Bridge and the MTA is being forced to put necessary repairs onto straphangers’ credit cards. But it’s interesting that in the absence of any political will to put a price on driving, even infrastructure projects designed to benefit motor vehicles, are falling by the wayside.

Not that New Yorkers won’t still be paying for the BQE. Even without the reconstruction projects, these are expensive roads. The ongoing redecking of just the Gowanus — meant only to be an interim solution — costs around $680 million, according to the state. Canceling the major rehab could end up costing much more in the end if expensive upkeep stretches on for decades, though it would let the state kick the can down the road during a time of fiscal duress.

The situation would be different if new tolls were on the table. Putting a price on the BQE would require federal approval, but Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has expressed a clear willingness to allow tolls on interstate highways where appropriate. Had tolls been on the table for the BQE and Gowanus, there would have been any number of different outcomes possible.

By reducing traffic, tolling the BQE and Gowanus would also reduce maintenance costs. If the tolls were set high enough, the lighter traffic load might even make engineers and politicians more comfortable with fewer lanes on the highways, cutting costs even more. A free road for drivers is an expensive road for taxpayers.

Tolls wouldn’t just cut costs, of course; they would also raise revenue. If the state wanted the toll to be a strict user fee, it could reinvest the revenue into the two highways. That might be enough for a cheaper tunnel option; a 1996 RPA report estimated the cost of a Gowanus tunnel at between $1.5 and $2.5 billion ($2.2 to $3.6 billion in 2011 dollars). That alternative, which would open up new land for development and knit neighborhoods back together, had widespread community support.

The toll revenue need not be used only for a highway project, especially if the tolls are already saving the highway system money. Investing some of the toll revenue in rail freight infrastructure could be a win-win, helping take heavy trucks off the busy expressways and cutting maintenance costs even further (it wouldn’t hurt to restore two-way tolling on the Verrazano, either). Bay Ridge commuters might prefer spending the money on the Triboro RX circumferential subway line rather than the Gowanus. Staten Islanders might prefer new light rail lines connecting them to New Jersey and the ferry.

Once tolls are part of the conversation, there are a lot of options for the BQE and Gowanus. Without them, we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

Then a man named Ned Holmes came to the rescue. A real estate developer, Texas DOT commissioner and prominent businessman, Holmes “found” the $350 million in unbudgeted money needed to move the project forward another 15 miles in its relentless, multi-decade march into the Houston region’s last natural grasslands.

TxDOT Commissioner Ned Holmes presented Judge Ed Emmett with the "prestigious Road Hand award," in January honoring those "who have given their time, energy and vision to help improve transportation throughout the state." Both Holmes and Emmett have been instrumental in building the Grand Parkway, the city's third outerbelt. Photo: Edemmett.com

In many ways Ned Holmes fits the profile of the government officials that have pushed this project forward in the past: He’s a real estate developer occupying a public office that gives him enormous power to shape the built environment.

In his public life, Holmes is a well-known pillar of the Texas conservative establishment. According to the Texas Secretary of State, he is the director of the Houston Baptist University, Associated Republicans of Texas, the Greater Houston Chamber of Commerce, the Greater Houston Partnership and the Governor’s Business Council.

In his business activities, however, Holmes keeps a lower profile. He made a fortune in banking, but he identifies himself as a real estate developer, the head of Parkway Investments.

As for what Parkway Investments does exactly, it’s hard to know. The company has no website. There is no public record of properties developed. Holmes declined to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to email queries. But he did respond through a TxDOT employee, who said Holmes does not stand to profit in any of his business ventures from the completion of the $5.2 billion Grand Parkway.

But the company certainly has a record for actively supporting local politicians. In 2004 alone, Parkway Investments donated $174,000 to a variety of candidates, making Holmes one of the single biggest political donors in the state.

According to data maintained by Texans for Public Justice, Holmes has been a big supporter of Texas Governor Rick Perry. In fact, Holmes donated $192,000 to Rick Perry before the governor appointed him to TxDOT’s powerful Texas Transportation Commission in 2007. (Rick Perry has given 15 appointed positions to individuals who have donated more than $200,000 to his campaigns, according to TPJ.)

In addition to Parkway Investments, Holmes is the CEO, founder or principal of more than a dozen limited partnerships, corporations and associations, according to the Texas Secretary of State. Many of these ventures are equally enigmatic: two bear the cryptic names “NH-10.6″ and “NH-5.” An email inquiry to Holmes about the purpose of the companies went unanswered.

Because those companies are not publicly traded, Holmes is under no obligation to disclose their activities. The ambiguous nature of these ventures does, however, make it difficult to ascertain whether he is avoiding conflicts of interest as an appointed government official in a leading decision-making role at an agency with a roughly $20 billion annual budget.

I-290 in Houston. The answer to transportation problems in Houston has always been highways and, in some cases, that's thanks to developers who have profited from those highways. Photo: Citizens Transportation Commission

Meanwhile, in his free time, Holmes has taken an extracurricular interest in the future of transportation. He is the founder and director of the little-known Transportation Transformation Group. Known as the T2 Group for short, this group might be described as the Tea Party’s answer to Transportation for America, although with an annual budget of only about $130,000, of a dramatically smaller scope.

On its website, T2′s priorities read like a page out of the House GOP playbook (the website applauds Chairman John Mica’s six-year reauthorization plan, that would have trimmed overall spending by 33 percent and eliminated dedicated funding for bike and pedestrian projects).

Officials broke ground on Segment E of the Grand Parkway in September despite a legal challenge by the Sierra Club. Photo: KUHF News

While Holmes fights to enact his vision of a car-based transportation system nationally, the Grand Parkway serves as a sort of local preview in his hometown of Houston.

This spring, leaders in Harris County had thrown up their hands. The county simply could not afford to finance the Grand Parkway. It looked like sprawl interests in Houston had their limits after all.

Then came an interesting chain of events:

1. TxDOT agreed to assume responsibility for the project (the whole 180-mile project, not just the 15 miles known as Segment E that are next in line to be built) despite its dire financial straits.
2. ExxonMobil announced its intention to move its North American headquarters to 1,800 acres bordering the proposed Segment E, from its current location 10 miles closer to the city.
3. Ned Holmes scoured TxDOT’s books for any available money. With construction costs down during the recession, he was able to scrounge up some $350 million in savings that could be diverted to the Grand Parkway.

Shortly after the decision was handed down, West Houston Association, a suburban development group, applauded Holmes’ “leadership.”

Meanwhile, your average Houston-area resident might see it differently. According to the 2011 Houston Area Survey by Rice University, a “high proportion of Harris County residents are seeking a more urban lifestyle.” A plurality, or 45 percent, of all Harris County residents said “they would prefer instead to live in an area with a mix of developments, including homes, shops and restaurants.”

Jay Crossley of the smart growth advocacy group Houston Tomorrow said he is not aware of a single public statement made in support of Segment E outside of suburban developers and their political allies. He believes public opinion about transportation is evolving and that eventually Texas leadership will be forced to follow suit.

Just last year, TxDOT underwent an independent audit. The report identified a “trust issue” between members of the public and TxDOT leadership. “Over recent years, TxDOT has been subject to increasing criticism from the public, from the Legislature, from community leaders and others,” the report stated. The Texas Legislature, however, failed to pass comprehensive TxDOT reform.

“I’m optimistic that the better voices will prevail eventually,” said Crossley. “The people of Houston are beyond this, the elected officials are still invested. How much do they have to destroy before the elected officials catch up, is sorta the sad part.”

With help from real estate interests, Houston has built the country's fourth-largest city around the automobile. Photo: Michael Stravato/AP

But an enduring feature of the current policy predicament is that once federal funding is in the hands of state DOTs, they more or less have a blank check, and the merit of any given transportation project often matters less than who’s boosting it. In no state is this more apparent than Texas. And no Texas transportation project has been bought-and-paid-for so unabashedly as the Grand Parkway.

The Grand Parkway is Houston’s $5.2 billion, 180-mile third outerbelt. This September, Texas DOT broke ground on the newest segment of the highway, funded in part with money from the 2009 stimulus package. Constructed piecemeal over decades through largely undeveloped land outside one of the nation’s fastest growing cities, the Grand Parkway is a pointed demonstration of how a state can fritter away billions in federal transportation funds for the benefit of a small group of well-connected people.

In April, when Streetsblog interviewed Billy Burge, head of the pro-highway, non-profit Grand Parkway Association, he conceded that the outerbelt’s latest expansion — Segment E, through the Katy Prairie — wasn’t even intended to handle increased traffic. He was pretty clear that the project was about enabling the development of rural land into large-lot, detached single-family homes. “You can call it sprawl, or you can call it quality of life,” he said.

But Burge didn’t mention that before becoming head of the Grand Parkway Association, he had cashed in on that growth as a developer. Or that, thanks to a special Texas regulation, the Grand Parkway Association had been granted quasi-governmental powers. That’s just how it goes in Texas, where the businessmen fund the politicians, the politicians appoint the businessmen to public office, and the office holders funnel taxpayer funds to projects that enrich their business interests.

The Grand Parkway was first conceived as a futuristic, pie-in-the-sky, long-term vision in the 1960s, when magic highway delusions reached their apex in America. But the plan was largely forgotten by the time Billy Burge Jr. and Bob Lanier, both major landowners along the corridor, teamed up to resurrect it in 1984.

At the time, Lanier, who would go on to become Houston’s mayor, owned 1,700 acres along the proposed Parkway. He was also the head of the Texas State Highway Commission, the five-member decision making arm of Texas DOT.

Burge was serving as the head of Metro, Houston’s transit authority. He was also the developer of Cinco Ranch, a five-square-mile master-planned community that is now home to 11,000 people. The first segment of the Grand Parkway directly bisected Burge’s development.

A model home in Burge's Cinco Ranch, five square miles of sprawl the Grand Parkway helped enable, with help from its developer. Photo: Cincoranch.com

The pair worked in partnership with the Grand Parkway Association — basically an interest group formed to ensure the highway’s completion. Together they raised money for feasibility studies and offered to donate the land for the first section of the highway, if the state would finance the project, according to the Houston Press. At the time, the Grand Parkway Association counted some of the region’s biggest real estate magnates among its members, including Walter Mischer Jr., developer of 120,000 homes in the Houston region.

Funding for construction was secured by Ed Emmett, a state rep who was also working as the paid director of a non-profit pro-suburban development group called the North Houston Association. (He resigned from that position after local advocates alleged conflict of interest.) During his time in the state legislature, Emmett had previously helped win approval for the special Texas law that lets non-profit groups solicit donations to pay for engineering and the acquisition of rights-of-way for state highway projects. The law enabled the creation of the Grand Parkway Association.

In the decades that followed, both Lanier and Burge continued to use their positions of authority over taxpayer funds to advance this controversial project, even as they were directly profiting from those decisions.

As a member of the State Highway Commission, Lanier voted six times to advance the Grand Parkway, but then abstained from the vote for the segment of the highway that went directly though his own land, according to the Houston Chronicle.

In 1989, while serving as head of the Metro board, Lanier set aside 25 percent of the agency’s one cent sales tax revenues for “general mobility projects,” diverting about $180 million annually. With Burge also still sitting and voting on the board of Metro, Lanier diverted $4.5 million from the transit fund’s coffers to help further design work on the Grand Parkway.

The massive highway has not moved forward without resistance. The latest skirmish revolved around Segment E, a $460 million, 15.2-mile section through the Katy Prairie. This expansion phase carries an added bit of drama, because it will bisect a beloved wildlife refuge and one of the country’s last remaining tall-grass prairies. Environmental and sustainability advocates fought tooth and nail to keep the project from moving forward.

Ground was broken on the project in September. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club is still fighting the Army Corps of Engineers in court to prevent construction. The battle over Segment E is likely lost, concedes Jay Crossley at the local think tank Houston Tomorrow. The freeway fight will resume over section F.

For a while, it had looked like Houston Tomorrow, the Sierra Club and hundreds of citizens who wrote to express their opposition to the plan [PDF] would prevail. Because Texas is, well, broke. The state is $315 billion shy of what it needs to keep its existing transportation system in good order, according to a recent article in the Houston Chronicle.

But just when it seemed sensible policy would win out over Houston’s good-old-boy network of suburban real estate moguls, another high-profile developer stepped up to the plate. That man’s name is Ned Holmes.

Streetsblog will continue this tale of Texas transportation woe in a second post. Stay tuned.

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.

“This raises concerns that the state may be missing a once in a lifetime opportunity to reduce traffic and greenhouse gas emissions and create a transit backbone for future development in the Hudson Valley.” Slevin noted that past promises to add transit to bridges at a later date — a similar pledge was made for the George Washington Bridge — rarely materialized.

“Clearly, the Tappan Zee Bridge needs replacing — and the sooner, the better. But let’s not forget that a key reason for the bridge’s poor condition is overuse, partly because there are few attractive mass transit alternatives to driving,” added Dan Hendrick, the communications director for the New York League of Conservation Voters. “Commuters and local residents have been calling for mass transit to be added to the bridge for decades, and bus rapid transit represents exactly the kind of smart, sustainable infrastructure investments that will help New York’s environment and economy. We strongly encourage the Obama and Cuomo administrations to sharpen their pencils and ensure that bus rapid transit keeps pace with the roadway replacement on the new Tappan Zee Bridge.”

According to the state’s own website, the transit components are included in order to “help minimize corridor travel delay, reduce travel times, provide travel choices, improve local and regional mobility, foster economic growth and improve air quality.”

Added Slevin: “Since 2002, hundreds of residents, civic leaders, and local elected officials have worked together to develop a list of alternatives for a bridge replacement. There has consistently been support for transit to be included as part of the project, which is why all five options currently being studied in the state environmental review (except the ‘No Build’ alternative) include transit. None of those alternatives studied by the State Department of Transportation included a bridge replacement without a transit component.”

Streetsblog Capitol Hill reported earlier today that the Obama fast-track process seems to favor road maintenance and transit projects rather than wider highways, and that it won’t skirt environmental reviews. If the Tappan Zee project includes a transit component, it’s a good fit for such a program. If Cuomo decides to drop transit, however, the Tappan Zee will be exactly the kind of sprawl-generating boondoggle that Obama is trying to avoid.

“This is about survival,” said MoDOT spokesman Jorma Duran. “This is about making sure our roads and bridges continue to be maintained and operable.”

Drastic times call for drastic measures. And outdated gas tax rates, state operating shortfalls and a lack of forethought are combining to create a crisis for state DOTs in Missouri and beyond. In the last two years, Virginia DOT let go of 1,000 employees and New York DOT eliminated 100 positions.

The Virginia Department of Transportation made 1,000 layoffs in 2009, the biggest reduction in the history of the agency. Photo: Richmond Times-Dispatch

“We just ran out of money,” Reta Busher, VDOT’s chief financial officer, told the Richmond Times Dispatch.

State transportation agencies are adjusting to a “new reality,” said John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. And there will be widely felt impacts.

“It’s terrible,” he said. “Because of these economic crises, you’ll see projects put off. States will not do as much as they recognize is absolutely essential.” Horsley said the most vulnerable employees are rural maintenance crews. And those job losses are likely to have a painful ripple effect across already recession-battered states, he said.

“If you go to rural Missouri and just about any rural place, the state maintenance facility is one of the most important employers,” Horsley said. “That’s a real blow to rural economies all over Missouri. Those paychecks were very important to those regions.”

How did states get into this mess? Well, stagnant gas taxes are a big part of it. States depend on gas taxes — federal and their own — for an average of 24 percent of their budgets, according to Smart Growth America. But since the gas tax was last raised in 1993, inflation and greater fuel efficiency have greatly diminished its purchasing power. In addition, many states have not had the political gumption to take on gas tax hikes themselves (Georgia and Connecticut being a few notable exceptions).

Rising fuel prices have also forced gas tax receipts downward, as consumers curb nonessential driving. Where in headier times, states might have subsidized their transportation agencies out of the general fund, few states are in the financial position to do so at the current time.

To make matters worse, many states have been pouring their increasingly scarce transportation resources into projects of dubious merit.

According to a report by the Brookings Institution, states do a poor job ensuring their transportation investments are strategically targeted to aid economic growth. Transportation investments are not properly coordinated with land use considerations. States were also found to be underinvesting in maintenance, a recipe for long-term financial disaster.

“States face challenges because they spend their (now-declining) transportation dollars poorly,” the report noted. “By failing to join up transportation up with other policy areas—such as housing, land use, energy—states are diminishing the power of their interventions and reducing the return on their investments.”

Missouri has been spending about $1.2 billion annually on highway construction. In the new economic reality, MoDOT’s budget will be reduced to about $600 million annually. The cuts will leave the agency with just enough money to maintain its current system and meet its required federal match — 20 percent of the project costs, said Duran.

Part of the reason for the sudden flurry of job cuts in Missouri was the expiration of a bond-funded surge in transportation funding beginning in 2004. In a report called “Falling Off a Cliff” [PDF], MoDOT noted that declining state revenues and increased construction costs were part of the problem, as well.

These same problems are plaguing DOTs across the country. It’s difficult to know where the next shoe will drop. Ohio Department of Transportation Director Jerry Wray told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in February that without an increase in revenues “We will not be able to match federal funds; we will have a difficult time maintaining our existing system.” According to some reports, New Jersey seems to be headed in the same direction.

If environmental and social justifications for pursuing smart growth strategies haven’t been enough to encourage states to change course, maybe a fiscal mandate will.

But at least in Missouri, the funding crisis means that new construction is off the table, Duran said. Pedestrians and cyclists will be among the biggest losers as the state reverts from construction to maintenance mode, said Brent Hugh, of the Missouri Bicycle and Pedestrian Federation.

“The last thing we need is a lot of new roads and big freeways in Missouri,” Hugh said. “But we need to maintain what we have. We need to add bike lanes and sidewalks.”

In a paper to be published soon in the American Economic Review, two University of Toronto professors have added to the body of evidence showing that highway and road expansion increases traffic by increasing demand. On the flip side, they show that transit expansion doesn’t help cure congestion either.

We’ll spare you the calculus in the report. Here’s the upshot: “Roads cause traffic.”

Duranton and Turner: If you build it, you will sit in traffic on it. Photo: Arch and the Environment

Professors Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner analyzed travel data from hundreds of metro areas in the U.S., resulting in what they call the most comprehensive dataset ever assembled on the traffic impacts of road construction. They write:

For interstate highways in metropolitan areas we find that VKT [vehicle kilometers traveled] increases one for one with interstate highways, confirming the “fundamental law of highway congestion” suggested by Anthony Downs (1962; 1992). We also uncover suggestive evidence that this law may extend beyond interstate highways to a broad class of major urban roads, a “fundamental law of road congestion”. These results suggest that increased provision of interstate highways and major urban roads is unlikely to relieve congestion of these roads.

Duranton and Turner say building more roads results in more driving for a number of reasons: People drive more when there are more roads to drive on, commercial driving and trucking increases with the number of roads, and, to a lesser extent, people migrate to areas with lots of roads. Given that new capacity just increases driving, they find that “a new lane kilometer of roadway diverts little traffic from other roads.”

Given the huge amount of time consumed by driving (the average American household spent nearly three hours per day in a car in 2001), the authors note that “the costs of congestion are large.” Considering the economic value of time spent doing anything but sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, that becomes an economic problem of the first order.

“Transportation accounts for about one dollar in five that Americans spend,” Turner said in an interview with Streetsblog. “The interstate highway system eats up on the order of two dollars of every $100 of every market transaction in the United States. That’s a huge part of the economy and a huge part of people’s lives. Understanding how that works is really important; you don’t want to make mistakes on something that important. You don’t want to build roads and have them not deliver the effects that you expect them to.”

The implications for this research are significant, especially as Congress considers whether to integrate performance measures into federal transportation spending decisions. These findings make a strong case that Congress should not allocate too many scarce resources to road expansion when that’s not a real solution for congestion.

Duranton and Turner say that metropolitan areas tend to get new roads regardless of whether or not the prevailing level of traffic warrants expansion. They urge the establishment of transportation policies based on their findings and the data they compiled, rather than the “claims of advocacy groups”:

Unfortunately, there is currently little empirical basis for accepting or rejecting the claims by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association that “adding highway capacity is key to helping to reduce traffic congestion”, or of the American Public Transit Association that without new investment in public transit, highways will become so congested that they “will no longer work”. Our results do not support either of these claims.

They didn’t find that transit reduces congestion. But that doesn’t mean that metro areas shouldn’t build transit as a way to maximize the efficiency of their transportation networks, they say. Turner said transit is a good way to get more “person-miles” out of roads. But more buses and trains won’t reduce congestion, he added, because regardless of how many drivers switch to transit, other drivers will fill the vacuum.

“If you think about the result that we’re finding for roads – if you add a little bit of capacity, someone uses it, right?” Turner said. “So there are all these people out there waiting to take trips as soon as there’s space on the roads. So if somebody stays home, or if you add capacity to the road, there’s somebody there waiting to use that space. Well you should expect the same thing to happen if somebody gets out of their car and gets on the bus, it’s bringing up a little bit more room on the roads, and there’s somebody out there waiting to use it.”

Still, Turner says transit plays a vital role in maximizing the value of our transportation networks. “Transportation infrastructure is just so expensive,” he said. It’s important to use it efficiently.

The researchers didn’t discern between light rail, commuter rail, and buses. Turner said he feels that buses allow cities to move just as many people with a much cheaper infrastructure network, but there are passionate arguments on both sides of the bus vs. rail debate, and the authors don’t choose one over the other in their paper. In fact, they only have one significant policy recommendation:

These findings suggest that both road capacity expansions and extensions to public transit are not appropriate policies with which to combat traffic congestion. This leaves congestion pricing as the main candidate tool to curb traffic congestion.

“The menu of policy responses to congestion is not really that long,” Turner said in our interview. “You’ve got building more roads, building more transit, and congestion pricing, and if you’d like you can put smart growth on there. We looked at two of those really carefully and found that they didn’t perform as advertised. So if you’re thinking about these things purely as responses to congestion, it doesn’t look like they work. There is some evidence that congestion taxes work. So if you were going to pick one of these things to go for, that would be it.”

They’re working on research now to investigate the impacts of smart growth on traffic.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said mayors want investment in transit and active transportation -- not highway expansion.

“Mayors are on the front lines of building livable and sustainable communities,” Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said this morning at the National Press Club. “We are where hope meets the street.”

He was talking about a new survey of 176 mayors showing that 93 percent of mayors want greater control over federal transportation dollars, which normally flow through the states, shortchanging metro areas.

In the words of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which sponsored the survey:

Metropolitan areas account for 86 percent of employment, 90 percent of wage income, and over the next 20 years, 94 percent of the nation’s economic growth, but they are saddled with the nation’s worst traffic jams, its oldest roads and bridges, and transit systems at capacity. Simply put, these areas are receiving significantly less in federal transportation investments than would reflect their role and importance to the nation’s economy.

With greater control over transportation resources, the mayors made it clear that they would have far different priorities than the states that usually hold the power. Specifically, mayors say they would invest in maintaining – not expanding – roads and bridges. Eighty percent say highway expansion should be a low priority. Mayor Reed said:

The reverse is true for public transit. Mayors identified the need to grow public transit capacity and operating assistance to meet the escalating demand for more public transit, rather than just simply maintaining what is already in place, and we know the sustainable attributes of public transit as well.

Three-fifths of the mayors also said the lack of funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects was a key issue. “These aren’t gimmicks anymore,” said Reed. “They’re part of a having a high quality of life in the cities where we live.”

The mayors also made clear they wouldn’t favor a gas tax increase if transportation funds were allocated in the traditional way, but that 70 percent would support it if a share of the funding were allocated directly to local governments, and with more money going to bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

Mayor Reed said the disconnect between state and local governments is essentially a tension between the needs of rural and urban areas. “There is a dominance of the rural parts of the state that I think creates a bit of imbalance from the economic reality,” he said. He called it “old-school politics.”

“I spent 11 years in the Georgia general assembly,” he said.”Anytime I needed to get an important bill I knew I would be in the car for a couple of hours going to see some chairman of a committee who was in Tallapoosa or Houston County or some other part of the state because there was a dominance there.”

“Now I like rural folks as much as anybody,” he went on, “but the fact of the matter is when you look at how our dollars are deployed at the state level they’re deployed in a fashion that is inconsistent with where jobs are and where the economy is created.” That was fine was the U.S. was the world’s incomparable economic superpower, but we need to be more thoughtful with our spending these days, he said.

Reed made clear that both parties in Washington are responsible for the economy and for job creation, and there’s never been a better time to invest in infrastructure. He urged politicians to broaden the conversation about deficit reduction to include the one area with historically bipartisan support: infrastructure investment as a catalyst for growth.

Six in ten mayors said they’d had projects delayed or canceled because of Washington’s failure to pass a transportation reauthorization. Reed said it had been a “disaster” for planning. He said that although he’d rather see a six-year bill, he’d support a two-year bill as a marked improvement over the status quo of constant short-term extensions.

This $500 million project would have saved the average commuter a scant 36 seconds while decimating rural areas and creating more traffic in Charleston. Photo: Post and Courier

In an 8-0 decision late last week, Charleston County officials voted against an eight-mile highway bypass that was sure to induce sprawl and promote car-dependence. (Streetsblog covered the proposed Mark Clark Expressway, a plan to extend I-526, in a series of stories this February.)

Local media sources have reported that it might be possible for the state to continue the project without the county’s permission, under the terms of the contract between SCDOT and Charleston County. And it’s still not clear if the county will be forced to reimburse the state for the $12 million already spent on planning.

Advocates for a more livable Charleston still have a huge reason to celebrate. Josh Martin of the Coastal Conservation League called the decision “a truly amazing testament to the power of community organizing and smart growth advocacy.”

The League has been working for six years to educate the public about the negative environmental, social and financial impacts of the project. The group even developed an alternative plan to expand and redesign several intersections and corridors in lieu of the highway project.

“It’s been a long road but it’s well worth the wait,” said Martin, who added that the decision represents a “paradigm shift” in transportation planning.

County Council members didn’t just reject SCDOT’s “preferred alternative,” the eight-mile, at-grade highway plan. Perhaps more encouraging, said Martin, they went further, voting 5-3 against building a highway in any form. Given that position, Martin is confident the highway plan is off the table.

When the Coastal Conservation League began its campaign, the group looked across the country for examples of proposed highway projects that were overturned by a public action in recent years. But the last round of successful attempts to stop freeway construction happened a generation ago.

“Now we can become a case study,” said Martin.

Martin credited a “comprehensive” opposition effort aided by citizen activists. In the weeks leading up the to vote, opponents drafted letters to the editor, appealed directly to council members, even passed resolutions in neighboring jurisdictions opposing the project.

Perhaps the most critical development, however, came when the project’s draft environmental impact statement was released, showing the project would save the average user just 36 seconds of travel time.

“The question became do we want to spend a half billion dollars on a piece of infrastructure that would in essence yield 30 seconds of relief?” said Martin. “People are saying, ‘you know, we just cannot continue to plan and implement infrastructure in this regard.’”

Costing at least a cold $3 billion, the CRC project and its ten freeway lanes could bankrupt the Portland region's road budget while undermining its progress on sustainable transportation. Image: Spencer Boomhower

The Columbia River Crossing is a mega-project by any standard. A bridge replacement, a highway widening, and light rail project wrapped into one, the CRC is a proposal to span the distance between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. With a $3.2 billion price tag — by conservative estimates — it would be the largest public works project the region has ever undertaken.

Any project of the CRC’s transformative scope raises a great many questions. For starters, is it worth the investment? Can the region afford it? Will it promote a healthy environment? Will it induce sprawl?

In the five years since project engineers began honing their plan, more and more local observers have become adamant that it fails on all counts. “It’s a disaster of a project, really,” said Jonathan Maus of Bike Portland. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” But while governors are killing worthy transit and rail projects left and right, this fantastically expensive sprawl generator still has a pulse.

The full length of the project is five miles. Image: Columbia River Crossing

Planning efforts alone for the Columbia River Crossing have thus far consumed $110 million. After all that expense and all those meetings, local observers say there’s still little agreement about what form it should take — or whether it should move forward at all.

The project is intended to reduce congestion on Interstate 5 between Portland and suburban Vancouver, which, officials say, backs up for six hours daily. Their plan is to expand the interstate from six to 10 lanes, demolish the existing drawbridge and build a replacement.

But $3+ billion is a lot of money to spend on a five-mile stretch of roadway, particularly when the Portland region is facing a $6 billion road budget shortfall by 2030. And at least one analysis has said the actual fiscal damage could be a lot worse.

Financial questions aside, the project runs contrary to the values of sustainability and walkability on which Portland has built its reputation, says David Osborn of the grassroots opposition group Stop the CRC. According to Osborn, the CRC typifies the kind of single-occupancy-vehicle infrastructure that the region has expressly rejected.

“We’re known for and really value alternative transportation,” Osborn said. “That’s the kind of transportation solutions that our region is looking for — transportation infrastructure that favors small, walkable communities. Building freeways doesn’t create that kind of community.”

Earlier this year, Stop the CRC held a poster contest and invited the public to take part. A month prior to that, local activist Spencer Boomhower produced a powerful video arguing that the project is wasteful and ill-conceived.

Opponents point out that the majority of the cost is dedicated to increasing car capacity on I-5. Of the total cost, only about $800 million would be used for the bridge replacement, with another $600 million going to light rail. Much of the remaining $1.8 billion would be spent expanding interchanges.

“This is a freeway expansion project,” said Osborn. “It is often kind of guised as a bridge.”

And many recognize the CRC for what it is. The original plan was for expanding I-5 to 12 lanes, but planners pared it back following public outcry. Local bike advocates aren’t sold on it, even though the project is slated to include bike and pedestrian facilities under the new bridge. The regional Bicycle Transportation Alliance withdrew its support two years ago, accusing sponsors of “vastly overstating” the benefit to bicyclists and pedestrians.

Seen at a CRC opposition rally in 2009. Photo: Portland Transport

Commissioners from Clark County refused to vote in favor of the design, despite the urging of supporters. The local paper summarized one commissioner’s position as such: You leave us out of this.

Maus is convinced the project will never see the light of day. “It’s so politically toxic,” he said. “There’s just no money for it and it’s too controversial.”

But Osborn is not as sanguine. After all, in his budget announcement last month, President Obama listed the project for potential New Starts funding. And just last week, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber stumped for the CRC in a speech to local civic leaders.

“There’s still a big push to try and make this happen,” Osborn said, despite the fact that “the project just continues to run into problem after problem.”

Mandy Putney, a spokesperson for the bi-state partnership that oversees the project, denies it is embattled. “There’s a regional agreement to move forward with a replacement bridge,” she said. “This region needs to move goods and people across the region. The region will grow by about one million people by 2030. Freight just is running out of the ability to move.”

Supporters say the CRC will create 20,000 jobs and reduce crashes by 70 percent. In addition, the bridge — which was built in 1917 and substantially renovated in 1958 — is in need of replacement, Putney said. Its pilings don’t go all the way to solid soil. Pedestrian and bike access is also “challenging,” she said.

A prominent critic of the CRC is economist Joseph Cortright of Portland-based urban consulting firm Impresa, Inc. Commissioned by a local business leader to do a study on the project, Cortright has compiled data that disprove arguments in its favor. He found that traffic projections being used to justify the CRC, for instance, are out of date and inaccurate. Those projections showed traffic steadily increasing over a a 25-year period, but as Cortright pointed out and as Streetsblog has reported, traffic has actually been declining regionally, a trend that preceded the recession.

That’s a big issue because project financing relies heavily on tolling, according to Cortright. CRC backers hope to generate about one-third of the project’s cost from tolls, and plan to borrow against those projections. If tolling revenues come up short, the project could leave Oregon and Washington residents on the hook for total costs closer to $10 billion, Cortright predicts.

The study highlights other financial shortcomings, according to Cortright. Project sponsors did not include the costs of debt financing in their projections, Cortright said. Also important, the two states were hoping the CRC would benefit from federal investment, but Congress has cooled to earmarks. It speaks volumes, Cortright said, that thus far nobody — not Washington, not Oregon, not the federal government — has committed any money to the project.

Cortright, like Maus, Osborn and others, said congestion on Interstate 5 could, and should, be mitigated through smaller-scale interventions. Boomhower says delays caused by the drawbridge could be remedied by making adjustments to a railroad bridge upriver. Maus recommends rehabbing the existing bridge and adding a transit bridge. Cortright said adding another local bridge at a different location could draw away traffic and ease the bottleneck.

But CRC sponsors have consistently said that the project is too far advanced to return, more or less, to the drawing board.

“These things are all about momentum,” Maus said. “Once you get a big project like this rolling down the hill, you either move ahead or get smashed.”

Putney said construction will begin as early as 2013 and should be completed in five to seven years.

Local labor unions and the regional port authority are lobbying hard for the project’s advancement, said Osborn, as are the local construction and engineering industries. One of the major justifications for the project is to create jobs that will help bring down the region’s unemployment rate, which hovers at about 10 percent.

Meanwhile, Washington and Oregon aren’t exactly flush with cash for infrastructure. Without an increase in revenues, said Cortright, the funds for the CRC just aren’t there. “It should really be daunting,” he said. “I don’t see any momentum on the part of either state on raising the gas tax.”

But as we’ve seen in other areas of the country, local transportation officials seem undeterred by very real financial questions and widespread and organized public opposition. Cortright chalks it up to a lack of creativity.

“Basically you’ve got highway departments thinking the way they always have, only more so,” Cortright said, “when the money is running out.”

More street grid, less traffic: The Coastal Conservation League's proposal for Savannah Highway would cut congestion by reducing the number of curb cuts and establishing secondary roads for those traveling short distances. Image: "A New Way to Work"

Roads like Charleston’s Savannah Highway are a common sight across America: a suburban arterial marked by high speeds, dangerous pedestrian crossings and depressing aesthetics. A five-lane strip of asphalt surrounded by used car dealerships and motels, it’s heavy on parking and curb cuts, light on crosswalks and trees. Like many streets of this type, Savannah Highway gets congested, particularly in a few key bottlenecks.

When congestion becomes a problem, the default response for many public officials is still the old-fashioned highway. As we reported last week, Charleston is no exception.

Charleston's Savannah Highway is a mess, and it will still be a mess if the state DOT builds a $500 million highway bypass. Image: thisisrobert on Flickr

To ease congestion on Savannah Highway, officials in Charleston have proposed an eight-mile, $489 million expansion of Interstate 526 through the towns of West Ashley, Johns Island and James Island. While less expensive, more effective options are available, the South Carolina Department of Transportation has rejected the idea that the best way to reduce congestion is to reduce car dependence. They prefer to build a traffic-generating new highway.

One plan SC DOT rejected was developed by the Coastal Conservation League. The League opposes the I-526 extension, saying the project will destroy wetlands and perpetuate sprawl while having no effect on congestion on Savannah Highway. Their alternative proposal, “A New Way to Work,” could serve as a model for how to improve safety and make communities more livable while avoiding the expense and sprawl caused highway expansion.

“A New Way to Work” asserts that the congestion problems on Savannah Highway can be solved through street-level interventions in key locations. The biggest shortcoming of Savannah Highway, say League staff, is poor design. Their report notes that the road has a driveway every 80 feet, on average, creating a chaotic scramble between drivers who use the road to travel far distances and those who dash in and out of retail establishments. The lack of connectivity in the street network also limits drivers’ options, forcing traffic onto the arterial road.

What is needed, the report states, is a hierarchy of streets for different types of trips.

In its proposed redesign of Savannah Highway, the League would:

• Eliminate many curb cuts
• Install medians to control turning
• Repair connections between cul-de-sac-style, disconnected streets

These three principles are recommended by the Transportation Research Board to reduce congestion, preserve scenic landscapes and improve safety of motorists and pedestrians.

“It centers around the power of the network streets to relieve the knots in the system,” said the League’s Josh Martin. “We’re trying to create a really great, livable, walkable multi-modal street.”

In addition, the League recommends that commercial sites along the corridor be redeveloped to promote walkability and a more diverse mix of uses. Sidewalk improvements, crosswalks, and increased landscaping are also recommended to safeguard pedestrians and improve aesthetics. Similar interventions would also be applied on Folly Road in James Island and Maybank Highway in Johns Island.

A rendering of the League's plan to improve the Johns Island Connection at Folly Road.

This approach, League staff say, would reduce crashes, protect wetlands, and increase property values in already developed areas, while the proposed highway extension would transfer land value to distant, undeveloped pastures, perpetuating sprawl.

Moreover, the League estimates that their plan could be completed at just a fraction of the cost of the I-526 extension, which is pegged at $489 million. The projected public cost of the League’s proposal would be $220 million.

The plan would likely spur considerable private investment as well. A real estate analysis conducted by the League found that improvements at just one intersection — Folly Road — could produce a $700,000 increase in property tax revenues. More than a dozen properties along the corridor are consider “underutilized,” in that their buildings are worth 40 percent of the value of the land they occupy, or less.

Investment in Charleston’s existing infrastructure is likely to improve the value of nearby residential property as well, said Martin.

“You’re creating great places,” he said, “places that hold more value than the current state of strip malls.”

David Bragdon. Photo: Randy Rasmussen/The Oregonian.

City sustainability chief David Bragdon offered some more hints about what to expect from April’s update of PlaNYC this morning. Speaking at a livability conference hosted by NYU’s Rudin Center, Bragdon said that the update would eschew large capital projects and feature a larger role for neighborhoods and individuals. In terms of transportation, Bragdon seemed to suggest that a call for a new Hudson River crossing of some kind would be a part of PlaNYC 2.0.

Much of what Bragdon had to say about the PlaNYC update has already been revealed: That the plan will take on solid waste management, for example, or that the administration wants to allow street hails for livery vehicles.

But he did suggest one idea sure to inspire fierce controversy. “We will be proposing to charge people ten dollars,” said Bragdon, pausing for effect, “if they want to have a hard copy of PlaNYC.”

When Bragdon turned more seriously to transportation policy, he offered an intriguing discussion about New York’s connections to the west. Bragdon pointed out that the number of rail crossings underneath the Hudson River, two, hasn’t changed in a century, though in that time the population of New Jersey has tripled while that of New York City has doubled. “We’re still making do with what we have here,” he said, but “doing nothing has a high cost.”

With that kind of talk, it seems that some sort of post-ARC proposal to add rail capacity underneath the Hudson will be in PlaNYC 2.0. Perhaps the return of the Secaucus 7?

In large part, Bragdon focused on the update’s new approach rather than new policies. With the city grappling with the recession’s fiscal fallout, he said, there won’t be any major new capital commitments in the update. Outlays like the $134 million for public plazas, he said, will be maintained but not likely to be repeated. How that commitment could be squared with the goal of new capacity across the Hudson isn’t clear.

Perhaps because of those fiscal constraints, Bragdon said that the update wouldn’t exclusively be made up of city programs, but would seek to enlist both local community groups and individuals. “A greater and greener New York is made up of greater and greener neighborhoods,” he said. That shift is already underway in the Department of Environmental Protection’s announcement yesterday of a competitive grant program that would fund local businesses and non-profits trying to build their own green infrastructure projects.

Finally, Bragdon said that the new PlaNYC would expand the sustainability focus from being about “pure utility for human beings” to include “nature for the sake of nature.” In addition to asking how to fit one million new people in New York City, he said, it would also ask “how many alewife herrings do we want coming back to the Bronx River?”

During his remarks, Bragdon also warned New Yorkers not to over-learn from Portland. The city is far newer, smaller, and more homogeneous than New York. In fact, at 580,000 people, Portland is only as populated as Manhattan was in 1850.

Bragdon did think it important, however, that Portland and New York City were two of the first cities to trade in federal highway dollars for transit. In Portland, they used the money slated for the Mt. Hood freeway, which would have destroyed one percent of the city, to build the first pieces of the city’s light rail system.

New York City, argued Bragdon, saved its transit system by cashing in Westway. Every time you travel on a clean and reliable subway, said Bragdon, “You need to be able to connect the dots on that experience we have every day to the $1.5B dollars, in 1985 dollars, to Mayor Koch and Governor Cuomo coming around and cancelling Westway.”

Minneapolis-St. Paul is investing in a new system of transitways and priced traffic lanes instead of traditional highway expansion. Planners there say the region will never be able to build its way out of congestion with highways.

Like many communities throughout the country, Minneapolis-St. Paul is moving beyond the decades-old assumption that the only way to eliminate congestion is with more outward-stretching asphalt. This fall, officials in the Twin Cities voted to roll back highway expansions and increase access to transit options instead.

Local planners say it’s time to acknowledge that the region simply can’t afford to accommodate growth by building new highways.

“We couldn’t keep going on acting as if we were going to get money to build our way out of congestion,” said Arlene McCarthy, Director of Metropolitan Transportation Services for the Twin Cities Metro Council, which drafted and approved the new plan. “One county alone could easily consume all the money the region has. That’s the reality.”

With vehicle trips expected to increase 35 percent by 2030, regional planners estimate it would cost approximately $40 billion to even attempt to tackle congestion with traditional road projects. But only about $8 billion is expected to be available to the regional planning agency over the next ten years.

The goal of the Twin Cities 2030 Transportation Plan is to maximize the use of existing freeways by adding bus lanes or priced traffic lanes in shoulders wherever possible. The new framework will require increased emphasis on transit and other non-automotive modes.

Rather than measuring transportation capacity in terms of traffic volumes, planners have focused on moving people. The 2030 plan calls for using congestion pricing to help encourage transit, carpooling, walking and biking. The Twin Cities envision a network of “transitways,” which will serve the region through passenger rail, bus rapid transit or express busways. Compact, transit-oriented development will be built in clusters along these corridors. The plan also calls for clustering jobs near transportation centers and encouraging mixed-use development, McCarthy said.

The overall strategy is to pursue high-benefit, low-cost projects. “We’re asking the question, ‘Can we provide the majority of the benefit at a much lower cost?’” McCarthy said. “We’re finding that we can do that.”

As part of the new framework, 14 previously planned highway expansions totaling $2.3 billion have been tabled. However, six “high-impact, low-cost” highway projects are still slated to move forward. Many of the remaining projects focus on the building of high-occupancy/toll (HOT) lanes, but traditional highway building is included to a limited extent as well.

Local environmental and business groups have been supportive of the proposal. Jim Erkel, director of the land use and transportation program at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, said it will help ease water and air pollution in the region and prevent sprawl from consuming farmland. The plan, he said, should also help the region stay in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

“We’re going to be looking at less impervious surface,” he said. “Building in already developed areas should mean fewer vehicle miles traveled.”

In addition, Jeremy Estenson of the regional chamber of commerce told the Star Tribune in September that despite some reservations, overall the business group is behind the plan.

This map outlines the downsized number of highway expansions planned for the Twin Cities under the 2030 Plan. Map: Twin Cities Metro Council

Of course, not everyone is thrilled. A group of suburban political leaders raised strong objections, noting that without highway expansion plans in place, the suburban counties would not have been eligible to apply for windfall funds like the federal support that flowed from the 2008 stimulus package.

“Some of us felt that we should have a more aggressive plan,” said Dennis Hegberg, a commissioner with suburban Washington County, which is growing rapidly. “There are a number of state and federal highways that need attention and I feel they’re not being paid attention to.” Still, Hegberg said he and his counterparts have accepted the result of the council’s vote.

One major catalyst for change was the tragedy that took place on August 1, 2007, when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis and seven people were killed. The event prompted a tax increase to support bridge maintenance, and more generally, forced political leaders to take their responsibility for infrastructure maintenance seriously.

“After August 1, 2007 the ground shifted tremendously,” said Erkel. “It seemed to take that to make the legislature realize that we had a lot of things to take care of.”

The 2030 Plan, and its emphasis on maintenance, should help ensure the community avoids such tragedies in the future.

The plan puts the Twin Cities ahead of the curve in regional transportation policy from a national standpoint. But Minneapolis still lags behind places like Portland, Oregon; Arlington, Virginia; and Montgomery County, Maryland on issues such as land use and transit, said Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota and author of American Metropolitics.

Though the traditionally progressive Twin Cities benefit from having very strong land use statutes, they haven’t been aggressive enough in enforcing those standards, he said.

Will Schroeer, policy and research director for Smart Growth America, agreed that the Minneapolis plan has room for improvement. Priced lanes offer some advantages, including the ability to recoup expenses, manage congestion, and create priority space for buses, Schroeer said. But the additional lanes still reinforce auto dependence.

Twin Cities officials acknowledge within the plan that the region already has a greater number of highway miles per capita than many comparable areas. The region built hundreds of miles of new highways in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. While the 2030 plan is a step forward, Minneapolis could have gained more ground on the nation’s best-planned regions by just saying no to any new highway lanes. “It’s new capacity in an area which doesn’t really need new capacity,” said Schroeer. “It’s better than regular capacity but it’s still not great.”

Since 1947, American highways have run up a deficit bigger than $600 billion, in 2005 dollars. Source: U.S. PIRG

You’ve heard it a thousand times from the highway lobby: Roads pay for themselves through “user fees” — a.k.a. gas taxes and tolls — whereas transit is a drain on the taxpayer. They use this argument to push for new roads, instead of transit, as fiscally prudent investments.

The myth of the self-financed road meets its match today in the form of a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group: “Do Roads Pay For Themselves?” The answer is a resounding “no.” All told, the authors calculate that road construction has sucked $600 billion out of America’s public purse since the dawn of the interstate system.

The Myth of the User Fee

First, let’s dispense with the idea that the gas tax – the primary source of financing for federal transportation projects – is a user fee.

“If you go to a state park and pay the fee to get in there, that’s a user fee,” report author Dan Smith, U.S. PIRG’s transportation associate, told Streetsblog. “If you’re driving down the road and you have to pay the toll for driving on that specific road, that’s a user fee.”

But people also pay gas taxes to fill up their lawnmowers. And those lawnmowers don’t usually end up on the highway. Just because you fill your tank doesn’t mean you ever drive on the roads funded by the gas tax you pay.

The Catch-22

Then there’s the huge contradiction underpinning the core arguments for highway expansion. Do new roads cut congestion, or do they “pay for themselves”? Highway lobbyists try to have it both ways, but the truth is that neither of these propositions hold water.

Highway expansions are often justified as projects that relieve traffic and, believe it or not, reduce pollution. So if a highway widening achieved its stated aims, it would cut congestion and fuel consumption, which would mean fewer gas tax dollars and roads that don’t pay for even a fraction of their construction costs. However, we know that new highway capacity doesn’t actually reduce driving – it induces more driving.

The additional traffic created by expanding highways does generate more gas tax revenue, but still not enough to come close to covering the costs of new roads.

U.S. PIRG cites the Pew Charitable Trusts’ SubsidyScope project, which found that “user fees paid for only 51 percent of highway costs, down 10 percent over the course of a single decade.”

Even if gas taxes were the direct user payment they’re made out to be, no one seems to have much appetite for making sure they actually pay for the infrastructure needs in this country. Gas taxes haven’t risen to accommodate more fuel efficient cars or even for plain old inflation. Nor have they compensated for the fact that driving is declining, meaning less gas consumption (but, puzzlingly, not less road-building).

The federal gas tax hasn’t gone up since 1993.

The Highway Funding System as a Subsidy for Driving

The argument that drivers pay for roads might be somewhat more credible if they weren’t taking money away from other public funding streams. Gasoline is exempt from sales taxes in 37 states and the District of Columbia. So rather than paying into the general revenues for the state, motorists are paying into an already narrowly prescribed pot of funding, which highway advocates want to see prescribed even more narrowly to exclude transit and bike/pedestrian projects.

In New Jersey, the savings on the sales tax exceeds the gas tax drivers have to pay. In that way, the government actually provides a financial incentive to purchase gas and drive. And since gas taxes are fixed and sales taxes are percentages of the purchase price, more and more states could end up with this perverse subsidy as gas prices rise.

Photo: Sound Eco Adventures

What About Tolls?

Tolls are, indeed, an honest-to-goodness user fee, charging drivers directly for the road they’re driving on. But the overwhelming majority of roads are not funded by tolls. Local streets don’t have tolls. Rural highways don’t often have them. And tolls don’t come close to covering the costs of roads. According to U.S. PIRG, “In the 1950s, experts estimated that no more than 9,000 miles of highway (compared with the more than 3 million miles of highway in existence at that time) could support themselves with tolls.”

Founding Fathers

The report goes into ancient history (the Hoover administration), investigating the original intent of the gas tax at both the state and federal levels, and debunking the myth that they were always intended to pay only for highways. Indeed, federal gas taxes originated in the 1930s and were dedicated exclusively for highways only for a 17-year period, starting in 1956, covering the construction of the interstate highway system. Since 1973, the gas tax has been used for a variety of transportation programs and has even been used, on occasion, to pay down the deficit.

External Costs

And now the obvious: You can’t measure all the costs of driving with the price of asphalt. The U.S. PIRG report gives a laundry list of external costs associated with driving, including:

Photo:ret0dd/Flickr

• Changes in the risk of accidents, including injuries to non-drivers and damages to property.
• Environmental and public health impacts, including smog, greenhouse gases, water pollution from highway runoff, and the impacts on wildlife and outdoor enthusiasts.
• National security and economic implications of protecting access to foreign oil.
• Increased pressure on those without cars.
• Quality of life and the impact of roads on active transportation, such as walking and biking.
• Car-centric development patterns, sprawl, and the resulting infrastructure costs for the expansion of water, sewer, and other services.

The report cites one study that finds that, just to pay for roads, user fees need to be 20 to 70 cents higher, and another study that finds that, to pay for external costs like these, we’d have to add another $2.10 a gallon.

The Cost of the Myths

“Road advocates use these myths about the gas tax being this user fee and that highways pay for themselves to get preferential treatment, and to get a larger chunk of the dedicated fund,” says Smith of U.S. PIRG. “Advocates of any type of policy would like a dedicated fund, because it is a stable source of funding.”

The myths associated with road financing put all other forms of transportation at a disadvantage, said Smith. “Conservatives say all other transit is social policy and should come from the general fund.”

With a Republican majority in the House, the myth that roads pay for themselves will be again be enlisted to prioritize highways over transit, as the GOP begins shaping a transportation agenda around “getting back to basics” and cutting spending, especially for transit.

“We want to make sure that those falsehoods are not a part of this debate,” said Smith. “People will think twice before saying roads pay for themselves when the numbers say they don’t.”

Definitely No to the Freeway! (La Via Express)

While the world has gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss again a shared approach to Climate Chaos, action is already being taken in countless communities. On a visit last week to Guadalajara, Mexico, more than a thousand miles west of the Climate Meeting, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city. Interestingly, this movement leans primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

This is the current situation along much of the line. Train tracks down the middle. High tension electric lines on the right, underground gas and oil pipelines under the left.

Ciudad Para Todos gained Guadalajara's attention with a months-long campout in the green space at the far end of this road to protest a bridge.

I met Étienne von Bertrab and Negro Soto Morfín, two of the main Ciudad Para Todos activists, at the World Car-Free Cities Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2008 and later they invited me to speak to the 2nd annual Congress of Urban Cycling in Mexico held in Guadalajara in September 2009. We got together just after Thanksgiving and they filled us in on the new campaign.

In June 2010, just before they left for York, England for this year’s Car-Free Cities Conference, the Jalisco State Government published a video online describing the new freeway (La Via Express) plan. The Jalisco state government (which encompasses the city of Guadalajara) declared its intention to build a freeway on the same railroad line that a previous city government had proposed for a linear park and garden corridor with bicycle and pedestrian zones. The corridor conveniently cuts through the city and is used by laborers riding bicycles 20-30 kilometers a day between home and work.

Avenida Inglaterra is just above the red line crossing the image; it is currently a rail corridor with utility lines and limited open space on either side.

Étienne and Negro brought the government video with them to England and showed it to the gathered planners and activists on the first day and made two guerrilla video responses. At first the Jalisco government protested to Youtube and demanded the videos be taken down on the grounds of copyright violation (they had garnered 12,000 views in just the first four days), but when that news broke, even more people went to see the videos. (Youtube did take down the videos for a while, but restored them after protests from Ciudad Para Todos.) All three are posted here, but this is the one primarily in English:

The guerrilla videos made by Ciudad Para Todos were circulating and galvanizing local opponents, but the neighbors had already begun organizing before they even saw the video. We met Dr. Alicia Jaik, an energetic former medical doctor, now running a small corner store along the proposed route. Her neighbor is a local politician and when he asked her what she thought of the proposal she announced her dismay. “What should we do?” asked the politician. “Get to work!” was her immediate response. Signs sprung up along the houses up and down the street.

One of the signs alongside the proposed route.

This is posted on the sidewalk in front of Dr. Alicia's shop, indicating the places where neighbors have already begun the transformation.

A short time later Étienne was walking along the rail line with a local journalist and was thrilled when he saw the signs. With the journalist in tow, he knocked on Dr. Alicia’s door and after realizing they had much to discuss, he was invited to a meeting called a few days later. At the meeting Etienne and Negro and their colleagues presented their videos, their larger critique, and the plans that had been created by the previous municipal government for a linear park. They were met with great enthusiasm. “What can we do? When can we start? Can we do it this Saturday?” demanded the neighbors. Etienne and Negro hadn’t anticipated an action plan emerging so quickly, but they saw a good thing when it appeared. “Why not?”

That Saturday was the first gardening party, beginning with the removal of tons of accumulated trash. From that July meeting there has been a regular Saturday work party ever since. There are now over 400 new trees planted and at least eight different neighborhood associations involved. Neighbors have established new relationships with each other, and public feasts have become a regular feature of the Saturday work parties and other days. The independent Hotel del Bosque sits on an adjacent corner. They were at first cool to the activism, but became an enthusiastic participant, including their recent support of a mural painted by some local graffiti artists.

This mural was just painted in the past couple of weeks on a wall facing the corridor.

A university campus is adjacent too, and students have been eager participants as well. Painstaking work with local businesses has gained further support, many of them angered by the backroom dealing going on with big connected Mexican companies ICA, Cemex, and Grupo Mexico. A press conference of two local business associations was held on December 2 supporting demands for more transparency, public hearings, and technical evaluations of the freeway plans before anything begins. Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are getting better every weekend.

Neighbors have begun implanting a linear park on their own.

Homemade signs adorn the newly minted unauthorized park.

This lovely garden has obviously been growing for much longer than the rest of the efforts nearby.

Neighbors and passersby already make use of the shady trees and park benches that locals have installed as part of their guerrilla park-making.

Picnicking and hanging out in the grassroots linear park.

On September 22, 2010, World Carfree Day, our intrepid activists decided to install a monument in the middle of the contested terrain. They acquired a junked car, and turned it into a large flower pot, fixing it in place at one of the busiest intersections on Avenida Inglaterra. On the morning they were going to put it in place, the first arrival was pondering how to move massive concrete pieces into place when a man drove by on a big backhoe, most serendipitously! He quickly agreed to use his machine to move two big slabs of nearby concrete across the railroad tracks and even suggested a better placement for them. Voila! A new monument was installed, and we had fun visiting it last Tuesday. Here’s a few shots of it, followed by a video showing its installation, including the arrival of a Critical Mass-like procession by the GDL en Bici crowd.

The yellow sign above indicates this car was a public art installation for Carfree Day, 2010.

Heavy cement was moved by a guy passing by serendipitously on a big backhoe!

Flowers Not Motors!

This back seat is a rest stop for bike and ped commuters crossing a long way from one side of the city to the other.

The down-to-earth politics of this new Freeway Revolt in Mexico are a shining example to climate change activists everywhere. As Dr. Alicia put it to us, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” (Roughly translated as “Here, nobody’s a bigshot, we’re all in it together.”) She was emphasizing that they weren’t relying on the political parties or their representatives, to the contrary, they were disallowed in this campaign. Our friends in Ciudad Para Todos underlined the same point: The local diputado (elected representative in the state government) could participate as a citizen, but they wouldn’t support his offer to bring in work crews, equipment, and resources, whereby his political party would colonize the effort for their own ends. Dr. Alicia told us, “Before neighbors wouldn’t really talk to each other. Now we’re a community!” She’d been gardening across from her house for years, but now there are hundreds of neighbors doing the same up and down the rail line. The doctor is already scheming ways to deepen the new community’s life. She was planning to establish a free outdoor library near the benches that had already been built. “Take a book to read, leave one behind.”

Adriana and Dr. Alicia in the park.

A dead tree across from her small store had come back to life with several dozen fluttering hand-written “leaves.” One of our favorites said “Leave the closet and let’s be citizens all the time.” It’s just such a reinvigorated—and visionary—citizenship that is the foundation of the transition that we must make in the face of Climate Chaos, the Energy and Economic Crises, and the generally dissatisfying daily lives we lead in the second decade of the 21st century.

The dead tree with living "leaves."

Leave the closet and let's be citizens all the time!

Thanks to Adriana Camarena, my compañera who fully participated in gathering this story, and without whom I wouldn’t have been able to write it!

Adding a few more lanes should do the trick. Photo of the 405: Atwater Village Newbie

After yesterday’s electoral drubbing, the Obama administration will have to deal with a starkly different Congress when they make their expected push for a multi-year transportation bill early next year. We know that some influential House Republicans, like John Mica, don’t necessarily believe that bigger highways will solve America’s transportation problems. And we know that some pro-transit voices in Washington originate from the right. But no one expects the GOP ascendancy to make transportation reform any easier.

For a taste of the right-wing line against transportation reform, check out the election week issue of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. Inside, editor Fred Barnes (under fire recently for accepting speaking fees from the GOP) mounts an attack on just about every federal transportation policy other than highway spending. There’s nothing really conservative about Barnes’s screed — it could have come straight from the pen of an asphalt industry lobbyist. Wondering what a transportation bill would look like if it were reshaped according to what highway boosters believe should be the “core program”? Read Barnes and find out.

He starts by ridiculing Ray LaHood’s speech at the 2010 National Bike Summit, where the transportation secretary said that Americans “want out of their cars, they want out of congestion, they want to live in livable neighborhoods and livable communities.” Barnes disagrees:

LaHood was half right. People hate traffic congestion. But they want to get out of their cars about as much as they want to get stuck behind a bicyclist who rides at a donkey’s pace before running through red lights and stop signs. What people mainly want is to stay in their cars and have LaHood do something to reduce congestion.

Like finance the construction and maintenance of highways and bridges to facilitate the flow of autos and trucks. That, rather than promoting “livability” or “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of nonmotorized,” is the job of the Department of Transportation. Always has been.

This is, basically, his entire argument: People just want to “stay in their cars.” We have zero interest in getting around any other way. According to Fred Barnes, we are perfectly content to drive and drive and drive, as long as we don’t have to put up with all the other people driving. If you believe that, then his cheerleading for highway construction makes a lot of sense.

If being inside our cars is what we’re really all about, by all means lets throw more money down the sinkhole of highway expansion. That will guarantee more quality time inside our cars. Then, a few years later, when we’re in our cars but not enjoying it so much because the new lanes are jammed with traffic again, we’ll repeat the whole expensive process.

But if we’d rather spend more time with our families and loved ones — or, you know, doing actual work instead of commuting — maybe we should try a different way of building our transportation system. According to public opinion research by Transportation for America, 57 percent of Americans would like to spend less time in their cars. Even with our highway-centric system, we’re already voting with our feet: These days, Americans are driving less and opting to walk, bike, and ride transit more than we were at the beginning of the decade.

A cursory internet search reveals that, when Barnes says the job of U.S. DOT has always been to build highways and only highways, he’s just making stuff up. The U.S. DOT mission statement does not mention any particular mode. The department’s job is, in fact, to “serve the United States by ensuring a fast, safe, efficient, accessible and convenient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and enhances the quality of life of the American people, today and into the future.”

So there’s some flexibility here. Now, consider that the Pentagon is under the impression that climate change poses a risk to national security. Or that public health experts peg the annual medical costs imposed by traffic and pollution at more than $200 billion. Or the mounting evidence that car dependence begets obesity and higher medical costs. Or that, according to research by CEOs for Cities, travel times are longest in sprawling metro areas, while areas that pursued smart growth and livability strategies have actually reduced commute times. All of which points to the conclusion that at this moment, the U.S. DOT’s job — providing an efficient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and so forth — is indeed to advance livability and stop promoting motorized transport.

Back to the Barnes highway-building argument. Maybe you’re worried that fighting congestion by building more roads that generate more congestion is not a wise way to spend money. But Fred Barnes isn’t. He is, however, highly concerned about spending on rail:

The stimulus included $8 billion for high-speed projects, again not “paid for.” Now the administration is taking “the next step toward realizing its vision for high-speed rail,” the Department of Transportation said in June, handing out “$2.1 billion in grants to continue the development of high-speed intercity passenger rail corridors.”

On top of that, there’s talk in Washington of spending $50 billion more on high-speed trains. Where the funding would come from is anybody’s guess, but LaHood is fully on board. High-speed rail between cities is needed “so people can get out of their cars,” he said in an interview last month with Grist magazine. “They can take a train ride to see Grandma rather than doing it in a car.”

You know what else we haven’t figured out how to pay for? Highways. According to Subsidyscope, gas taxes and other fees have never covered the costs of the highway system. In 2007, fees collected from highway users barely covered half the costs of building and maintaining highways. That year, about $70 billion in highway funding came from other sources. (Even in New York, which, more than any other state, uses fees on driving to support public transit, drivers cover only 65 cents of each dollar spent on highways [PDF].) Meanwhile, the bicycle and pedestrian projects that Barnes moans about received all of $1.2 billion in federal funding in 2009, a record-setting year.

You could say that these massive subsidies for the highway system affect our behavior and induce driving. But Fred Barnes has different ideas about what affects our transportation decisions:

Last year, George Will zinged LaHood as the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” for his fervent opposition to cars. LaHood all but pleaded guilty. Steering funds from highways to bike and walking paths and streetcars, he said, “is a way to coerce people out of their cars.” His word, coerce.

But it’s hardly an answer to traffic congestion. Most people, most of the time, aren’t going to ride a bike to work or walk. They’re going to drive, even in the face of disincentives erected by LaHood.

LaHood will wear “coerce people out of their cars” around his neck forever. Which is ironic, because if anything, the Obama DOT has assiduously avoided erecting any “disincentives” to driving. The gas tax rate has been untouchable under LaHood. A mileage tax has been a non-starter. The last time U.S. DOT encouraged cities to pursue policies like congestion pricing or performance parking, which do affect driving behavior, George W. Bush was president.

Barnes wraps up with the following policy proposal:

The Obama administration, with its priority on ejecting people from their cars and its embrace of an environmental ethic that regards highways as evil, is unlikely to champion a higher gas tax. Any other tax increase you can imagine, yes. This one, no. That means Republicans will have to step up. They can insist the revenues be used solely for highways and bridges. Local governments would then be free to spend on bikeways.

A lobbyist for highway builders could hardly have said it better. The gas tax is theirs — it belongs to highways. This is the mentality that advocates for transportation reform will face off against in the months ahead, when the administration moves forward with its infrastructure push. Every dollar for transit, bicycling and safer streets will be contested. Be prepared.

Let’s not sugar-coat this. Rick Perry, already the longest-serving governor in Texas history, is almost certainly going to win an unprecedented third term. And that’s bad news for people hoping for a shift away from autocentric transportation planning.

An artist's rendering of the planned Trans-Texas Corridor, with a separate right-of-way for every mode. FHWA

Perry is running against Democrat and former Houston Mayor Bill White. White has challenged some of Perry’s more ill-conceived road-building projects and has some nice things to say about high speed rail, but he’s no banner-waving reformer.

“Throughout his administration, it was apparent that he was fine with people wanting trains, but he himself does not see them as an important priority,” said Andrew Burleson, who writes the transportation and planning blog neoHOUSTON. “To him, the purpose of democracy is to let people vote for frivolities if they wish, but his job as mayor was to keep cars moving.”

For example, Burleson said, White talked a good game about promoting transit, but he effectively blocked a metrorail extension bill that would have added 40 new miles of light rail to the seven miles already in the system. White’s administration insisted on 12-foot-wide traffic lanes on every street. Aside from the huge additional expense, Burleson said, “You don’t want that on a pedestrian-heavy street. Cars will drive too fast.”

White told Grist that he’s in favor of “removing barriers” to people who want to walk to work, but that he wouldn’t push walkable urbanism from the state level. He wants to reform TxDOT by decentralizing power to give local jurisdictions more of a say in where the money goes. He criticizes Perry’s road-building binge, mostly because the state had to take on billions of dollars in debt to do it. Texas, under Perry, has built more roads in the last 10 years than any other state – a fact Perry touts every chance he gets.

White also criticizes Perry’s controversial attempt to privatize of toll roads, which would have paid billions to design, build and finance State Highway 121. The legislature blocked the deal. Perry says he’ll keep fighting for it if reelected. White says he would have applied for federal high speed rail funds, “rather than losing those dollars by default to Florida and California.” He says the congested I-35 corridor, which goes north from Mexico, is a prime candidate for rail. Perry has pushed to widen the highway.

Gov. Rick Perry, left, is expected to beat out Democrat Bill White to win an unprecedented third term. Texas Tribune

Perry was also the architect of the Trans-Texas Corridor plan, a mega-construction mission currently underway (albeit in slightly downsized form). The plan is to create a corridor up to a quarter of a mile wide with separate rights-of-way for trucks, passenger cars, freight rail, oil and gas pipelines, and high speed rail.

While Burleson of neoHOUSTON acknowledged the need to deal with the high volume of trucks from Mexico and that the rail additions would be welcome, “The vision for execution was asinine,” he said. “With a quarter-mile right of way, it can’t be remotely close to any city, so they planned these major corridors 50 to 60 miles outside of major cities. For passenger rail? Are you kidding me? If you need to drive 50 miles to the station and then another 50 miles once you get there, you’ve already driven half the distance. You might as well just drive the whole way and have your car when you arrive. Any passenger rail should be directly city to city.”

White ran a political ad blasting the Trans-Texas Corridor project. “Rick Perry said he loves private property rights until he wanted to take people’s homes and family farms,” the ad states. “Perry would bulldoze half a million acres of private land and give it to a Spanish company to build toll roads and let the company set the tolls.”

Rick Perry also earned the wrath of reformers by vetoing a wildly popular bill to protect vulnerable road users. “The bill passed both houses by veto-proof majorities—25-5 in the Senate and 140-5 in the House with one absence—but with the legislative session over, the veto most likely will not be overridden,” lamented Houston Tomorrow, a nonprofit that works on urban issues in the region.

The bill, similar to recently enacted laws in Delaware and New York, requires drivers to maintain a safe passing distance near pedestrians, highway construction and maintenance workers, stranded motorists, and bicyclists, and increases penalties for motorists who cause injuries to vulnerable road users.

In his veto statement, Perry showed his complete disregard for the safety of these people and for the concept of complete streets. He said vulnerable users “already have operation regulations and restrictions in statute” and pointed out several responsibilities that they have, but none of the rights. He rejected the idea of requiring “specific actions by operators of motor vehicles.” And he resisted the implication that motorists should be assumed to be at fault in collisions with pedestrians.

Bill White is known for a “my way or the highway” style of governing — but at least he’d rein in some of Perry’s highway spending. Not that he’s likely to get the chance — Perry has maintained a solid eight point lead, and many Texans have tuned out of a race not expected to bear any surprises.

Monday started with 15 different workshops that took place around the city, including one highlighting Portland’s “Lost Freeways” – the roads that were never built, and one that was actually torn out. These battles happened decades ago, but in many cities, highway fights continue to this day, and in some, teardowns are looking more and more possible. (Take note, readers in New Orleans, St. Louis, Seattle, New York, and New Haven.)

Traveling around on bikes and on foot, two groups visited some notable sites in Portland’s battles against freeways. First, we saw some battlegrounds where the anti-freeway movement lost.

South Park Blocks and I-405

Here's the block of the Goose Hollow neighborhood right next to I-405...

... and here's the highway that paved over two more blocks just like it. Photos by Shoshanah Oppenheim

In 1943, Portland invited New York’s master freeway planner, Robert Moses, to come to town. After a month of study, he came out with an 86-page document mapping out the “future of Portland”: 14 freeways and a tangle of limited-access parkways to re-make the city. Portland would have become what longtime local transit official Dick Feeney calls “a wonderful place to drive a car through,” where “the neighborhoods would have all vanished.”

Today, one of those highways, I-405, runs right through downtown. Tour guide Sarah Mirk, author of Oregon history comic books (including one about dead highways), took us to a little grassy patchy just across the I-405 overpass from the South Park Blocks, built in the mid-1960s.

This little marooned park over here is an orphan of when they built the I-405 freeway right here. The South Park Blocks are something people love in Portland; it’s a historic part of our city. And when they built I-405 through, they not only tore out two solid blocks of dense housing here in this neighborhood – which was really diverse, low-income housing – they also tore out two blocks of the South Park Blocks. People were really upset about that. And as a concession to people who were really upset about tearing out the park blocks, they said, we’ll do a ‘park-like treatment’ on the overpass coming over here. So you can see the overgrown bramble, and the cement, and the weeds. This is the ‘park-like treatment’ given to the South Park Blocks.

The freeway cut the neighborhood off from their school and library on the other side, becoming a “wall” between the residents and the services they used. Developers put in a bike-ped trail along the freeway as a concession.

That trail – unsigned, virtually unknown and unused – is known informally as the Ho Chi Minh trail. “Not to honor the Vietnamese leader,” says Mirk, “but because it was so dangerous and there were lots of muggings along here at night. There’s zero lighting, the neighbors have put up barbed wire, and it’s out of sight, out of sound. No one can hear you scream over the sound of the freeway.”

In my next post, I’ll get to the good stuff: the freeway plans that never saw the light of day, and one that came tumbling down.