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Yesterday was a tough day to try to get attention for a Senate hearing on the future of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. After all, at least one senator had gotten a poisonous letter and everyone on Capitol Hill was on high alert. What’s more, the Amtrak hearing coincided with the vote on gun control, one of the most dramatic and high-stakes votes in the body so far this session.

The Northeast Corridor is already at capacity during peak periods. Major investment will be needed to handle the increase in ridership that's already happening. Photo: WIkimedia/Peter Van den Bossche

Even Commerce Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller, a passionate supporter of Amtrak, gave his opening statement and scooted out of the room to join the action on the Senate floor.

Before he left, Rockefeller lambasted Congress for creating Amtrak and then failing to establish a viable strategy for it to succeed. “Amtrak, and passenger rail in general, has limped along financially since it was created,” Rockefeller said. “Unpredictable federal financial support has been a detriment to Amtrak’s core responsibility to provide travel for millions of Americans and continues to hamper its long-term planning.”

The consequences, he said, are $22 billion in lost productivity each year due to congestion on the highways and in the airspace above the region. “Everyone in this room knows that simply maintaining what we have in the Northeast Corridor is not enough,” he said. “We need to provide expanded capacity to meet future needs of the region. Throwing $22 billion down the drain annually in this economy – all because we cannot agree that transportation infrastructure is a priority – is shameful.”

He put in a plug for his infrastructure bank bill and encouraged the transportation establishment to break down its modal siloes, which he compared to the intelligence community’s turf battles that were exposed after 9/11.

Frank Lautenberg’s absence at a hearing on his beloved Northeast Corridor was glaring. Health problems have kept Lautenberg away from the Hill for about a month, and though he did make it back yesterday – in a wheelchair – to vote for the gun control measure, he didn’t make an appearance at the hearing.

The Northeast Corridor carries twice as many trains today as in 1976, said Amtrak CEO Joe Boardman, making the corridor “among the most heavily-used rail lines in world.” About 150 Amtrak trains, 2,000 commuter trains (run by eight different agencies), and 70 freight trains run up and down that track daily.

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This is the second installment in our three-part “Revolving Door” series about how cronyism in state DOTs leads to wasteful highway building. The first part profiled Ohio DOT chief Jerry Wray, who has switched back and forth between working directly for the asphalt industry and shoveling money to the asphalt industry as a public official.

Like Jerry Wray, Oklahoma DOT Director Gary Ridley has split his career between public office and lobbying on behalf of the asphalt industry. He started out in the mid-1960s, working as an equipment officer for the DOT. He climbed several rungs on the ladder and then left in 1997 to lead the Oklahoma Asphalt Paving Association, before returning to the department in 2001 as director of operations. In 2009, he was appointed to the top position in the agency.

As head of ODOT, Gary Ridley, a former asphalt lobbyist, helped destroy a rail yard that had been prepared for redevelopment. Photo: News on 6

The Oklahoma Asphalt Pavement Association made $3,000 in contributions to Governor Brad Henry’s reelection campaign in 2006, three years before Ridley’s appointment, and then donated $1,000 to the campaign of current Governor Mary Fallin in 2010. She had reappointed Ridley shortly after her confirmation.

Those are pretty small amounts in the world of political campaign money. But there are a lot of cozy ties between the road lobby and top politicians in Oklahoma, and Ridley is deeply embedded in the state’s industry-friendly culture. One of Ridley’s predecessors as ODOT director, Neal McCaleb, also worked as a lobbyist for the road industry, sandwiched between two terms as transportation secretary. McCaleb, reportedly a close political ally of Ridley, is now president of a road lobbying group called Transportation Revenues Used Strictly for Transportation. (TRUST — get it?)

Upon Ridley’s reappointment, McCaleb, acting as a representative of TRUST, called him the “best transportation director in the state’s history.” Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, one of the chief architects of the new transportation bill, MAP-21, went further, calling Ridley “the best secretary of transportation in the country.” Inhofe, a well-known climate change denier, is a political darling of the oil and gas industry and fervent opponent of federal programs that support biking and walking.

Sure enough, Inhofe trotted Ridley out to testify before Congress on behalf of the more backwards proposals for the transportation bill last July. His testimony was a direct appeal to exempt states from requirements to invest in biking and walking:

This country’s CORE infrastructure is in a deplorable condition. Therefore, we support the ability for States to carefully scrutinize, prioritize and direct transportation funding that may be available for peripheral projects and programs.

Programs that mandate the commitment of dedicated transportation funding to recreational and fringe activities such as bicycle and pedestrian trails, complete streets, landscaping and historic preservation should be vigorously reviewed. If community livability projects and other similar programs are determined to be critically important to the viability and prosperity of the Nation, other funding mechanisms should be identified and the programs should be funded separately from core transportation infrastructure.

Tom Elmore, executive director of the Oklahoma City-based North American Transportation Institute, said it is an open secret that ODOT is focused as much, if not more, on serving the highway lobby as the people of the Sooner State. He calls Ridley “the P.E. with no degree,” since Ridley does not have a college degree, but was awarded a certificate as a Professional Engineer because he passed a test. (The same test is no longer sufficient for the credential.)

“ODOT and the highway lobby are one and the same,” Elmore said. “It’s very difficult to tell these days who is working for ODOT and who is working for the contractors because there is a such a revolving door.”

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Speaking to reporters earlier today, Federal Railroad Administration chief Joe Szabo said that people are driving less and using transit more — and that those changes are permanent. “America’s travel habits are undergoing rapid change,” he said. It’s a fact, he said (“not opinion — statistically proven”), calling on Congress to show that it understands these changes by moving in a new direction.

FRA Chief Joe Szabo says Congress needs to recognize that Americans are driving less and using transit more. Photo: AllGov

Szabo referred to a recent report by U.S. PIRG that found the average American drives six percent fewer miles today than in 2004. “While that’s significant,” he said, “what’s really significant is what you’re seeing with younger people.” He cited U.S. PIRG’s finding that from 2001 to 2009, driving among the 16-34 year old demographic declined 23 percent while transit use increased 40 percent. Szabo went on:

We’re talking about the next generation that actually considers it badge of honor not to own a car but instead to use inter-city passenger rail, mass transit, bike-sharing, and car-sharing. And this is the future. So it’s time for Congress to recognize this future and prepare for this rapidly growing trend.

Szabo’s remarks came during a press event with the American Public Transportation Association, which released impressive ridership numbers for the first quarter of 2012. Americans took nearly 2.7 billion trips on transit during the first three months of the year, a five percent increase over last year — the fifth consecutive quarter of U.S. public transit ridership increase, APTA said.

Rail modes experienced especially strong growth, with light rail use up by 6.7 percent and heavy rail use up by 5.5 percent. Szabo said that rail transit will continue to play a big role in a mode shift away from cars.

“There are efficiencies in rail that can’t be ignored,” he said. “With service levels targeted for the marketplace, passenger rail can be the most cost-effective, least oil-reliant, and most environmentally friendly mode of transportation.” He said the country is experiencing a “rail renaissance,” with ridership up 72 percent between 1995 and 2008.

Swings in the economy have likely contributed to the recent ridership surge, with transit becoming more appealing to Americans looking to economize on transportation costs. Many of those new riders will stick with transit: APTA studies have shown that a significant number of transit converts don’t go back to driving when gas prices fall. Job growth could also be a factor, since commuting constitutes 60 percent of transit use.

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Image: Miami Herald

Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida — the Republican governors in each of these states recently aborted a major rail project claiming it was too expensive. Their methods were remarkably similar; their justifications aligned. In many ways, it was like they were all working from the same playbook.

Now that the Government Accountability Office has exposed New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s distortions (a.k.a. lies) to justify killing the ARC rail tunnel project to Manhattan, it makes you wonder if similar investigations in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida would reveal the same.

Today James Rowen, who writes The Political Environment blog out of Milwaukee, reminded readers that he was pointing out the distortions put forward by Wisconsin Governor Scott “No Train” Walker more than a year ago. In August 2010, Scott Walker, then a candidate for governor, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that the train would cost Wisconsin $8 million annually to operate.

Meanwhile the newspaper reported the actual cost to the state would be less than one-tenth of his claim:

Operating costs are projected at $7.5 million a year, not counting the part covered by fares. But [WisDot official Carl Anne] Renlund said the state is already using federal funds to cover 90% of the Hiawatha’s $5.2 million annual operating cost – leaving $520,000 a year for state taxpayers to pick up – and hopes to do the same with the new line. That would mean state taxpayers would be paying $750,000 a year for the service to Madison.

In Ohio, Governor John Kasich also relied on half-truths or worst-case scenarios in his campaign to kill Ohio’s 3C Rail project. Kasich repeated over and over that the train would be too slow to attract passengers, traveling at an average speed of 39 miles per hour. “The 39 mph high-speed train is dead when I become governor,” he told Ohio reporters.

Kasich did not change his tune when the plan was altered to raise the average speed to 50 miles per hour, as reported by Martin Gottlieb of the Dayton Daily News in October 2010:

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Congressman Joe Crowley and City Council Member Daniel Dromm hold up t-shirts from Transportation Alternatives' Rider Rebellion campaign for better transit. Photo: Noah Kazis

Elmhurst’s elected officials voiced support for transit investment at a town hall hosted by Congressman Joe Crowley and Council Member Daniel Dromm last night.

A group of politicians including the two hosts, State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky, and Assembly Members Grace Meng and Francisco Moya called for reopening Elmhurst’s Long Island Railroad Station, shuttered in 1985 due to low ridership. And to help bus and subway riders across the city, Elmhurst’s reps said the state would need to find new, dedicated revenue for transit.

Underlying the entire evening discussion was Elmhurst’s explosive population growth, fed by a vibrant immigrant community. The population of Elmhurst and the surrounding neighborhoods of Corona, East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights grew 40 percent between 1980 and 2010, and many believe recent estimates for the area are too low. “Elmhurst continues to grow and multiply,” said Crowley, “but we have still been limited to the same modes of transportation.”

Residents complained of crowded buses and leaky subway stations, demanding more investment in their neighborhood. Just under half of subway riders interviewed by Transportation Alternatives at a nearby station said they had a one-way commute of 45 minutes or more.

Crowley, who also serves as head of the Queens Democratic Party, said that more and better transit has to be part of the solution for the neighborhood. “It’s about more livable communities, places that provide access to people,” he said. “It’s about finding smarter ways to move people about.”

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Without ARC, these century-old tunnels will remain the only way for NJ Transit commuters to get to Manhattan. Photo: NJ Transit via Second Avenue Sagas

It was never about cost overruns. It was never about New Jersey’s share of the price tag. Chris Christie’s decision to kill the ARC tunnel under the Hudson River was always about two, and only two, things: the governor’s unwillingness to raise the state’s rock-bottom gas tax and his desire to make a name for himself among national Republicans.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office, the independent and non-partisan investigation agency of the federal government, lays bare what transit advocates knew all along: Christie wanted to break into the piggy bank of transit dollars put aside by previous administrations and use the money to bail out the state’s highways. He was willing to say anything to get his way.

Christie’s untrue statements about New Jersey’s most important transit project were catalogued by the New York Times, which broke the news of the GAO report this morning. The governor claimed, for example, that New Jersey would be paying 70 percent of the cost of building the first new rail tunnels under the Hudson in a century, which he argued was too high. The GAO found that the state would only shoulder 14.4 percent of the cost.

Christie repeatedly cited cost overruns, which he said would put the total price tag at up to $14 billion, as a reason to pull the plug on the project. But, reported the Times, “the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.”

Compare that to the value that ARC would have created for New Jersey. At the time, analysts predicted that the project would raise New Jersey property values by $18 billion and allow $50 billion in new wages to come back to the state from New York City. The GAO concluded that the ARC tunnel would have provided the region with economic, environmental and mobility benefits, though the report could not quantify to what extent. Read more…

Public-private partnerships have recently become a popular policy prescription for the prospect of reviving inter-city passenger rail.

Florida East Coast Railway is about to get a new look, with its new, all-private passenger rail line. Photo: Flickr / Dr. Purp Thumb

But now, a private company is setting out to do it alone – no public support needed. Florida East Coast Industries has announced that it will start operating passenger service between South Florida and Orlando in 2014. They’re calling it All Aboard Florida, and it comes just about a year after Governor Rick Scott rejected $2.4 billion in federal funds to build a far less ambitious 85-mile line from Tampa to Orlando. It’s no coincidence that All Aboard Florida’s 240-mile line also centers on Orlando, the most-visited city in the United States according to Forbes. (Miami is number five.) A Tampa-to-Jacksonville segment could be added on later.

Amtrak has been angling to beef up its Jacksonville-to-West Palm Beach service, just a little north and east of the All Aboard Florida line — also on FEC tracks.

Some observers say the All Aboard Florida initiative is a hopeful sign that inter-city passenger rail has a bright future. Most private railroads focus their attention solidly on freight, where the money is, but that’s beginning to change.

“All of the Class Ones are now getting back into the passenger rail service,” former Amtrak Chairman and CEO Tom Downs recently told a roundtable in Chicago. (Downs now serves as chairman of the North American board of Paris-based Veolia Transportation.) He said Union Pacific is going after Chicago-to-St. Louis service, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Norfolk-Southern both want to run any passenger rail that would operate on their tracks.

So does FECI really think it can make a profit off of passenger rail without subsidies? Its promotional materials emphasize that “the State and taxpayers shoulder zero operating risk – this privately owned rail system will be 100% privately operated and maintained.”

FECI is starting with some significant assets: The 200 miles of track between the two destinations it already owns and operates as a freight rail line. But the company is planning to spend $1 billion to upgrade its existing track and build the remaining 40 miles of track.

The service will take about three hours, according to FECI’s announcement. Driving between Orlando and Miami takes about four hours. The time savings are one good reason to be optimistic that train service could be popular. The $16.70 drivers pay in tolls between the two cities also helps make train service competitive (though FECI hasn’t released ticket prices yet).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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All eyes are on Texas Gov. Rick Perry these days, the faraway frontrunner in the Republican race. But as the primary goes on (and on and on) more Republicans might take note of the fact that in a matchup with President Obama, only one candidate stands a chance of winning: former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney had a mixed record on transit and smart growth. Photo: Daily Caller

According to the most recent polling data, Obama trounces Gov. Perry. He makes mincemeat of Bachmann and Gingrich. Only one poll shows a winning Republican candidate, and that’s Romney, with a two percent edge over the president in a recent USA Today poll.

We took a hard look at Rick Perry’s approach to transportation last fall, when he was running for re-election. As Texas governor, Perry championed a mega-highway plan that would make the Road Gang blush. He blocked metrorail extensions and vulnerable users legislation.

But what about Romney? His record as a red governor of the blue state of Massachusetts is a little more complex, and worth exploring.

In a recent Boston Globe story comparing current Democratic Governor Deval Patrick with his predecessor, Romney emerges as the more inspired candidate when it comes to smart growth. (It doesn’t help that Patrick was caught driving around in an SUV last week while telling his constituents to observe car-free week.)

According to the Globe, Patrick has done away with a program originated under Romney to encourage “mixed-use, walkable, downtown-centered, transit-oriented growth” and counter sprawl.

Under the Romney program, communities got credit for green building, saving energy, preserving open space, and zoning reform, among many other categories. Those that scored highest went to the front of the line to receive about $500 million per year in grants and revolving loan funds for infrastructure including water and sewer projects. The idea was to put state funding to municipalities through a filter, and reward innovation in sustainability at the local level; previously the money was just doled out.

Romney also pioneered an interagency partnership in Massachusetts not unlike the Obama administration initiative that brought together HUD, USDOT and EPA. Romney’s Office for Commonwealth Development brought together state agencies on transportation, environment, housing, and energy — a collaboration which has served as a model for other states. To head it, he hired Doug Foy, the head of the Conservation Law Foundation and “arguably New England’s most important environmentalist,” according to ModeShift.

Romney’s administration encouraged brownfield, instead of greenfield, development and created a bond program to encourage transit-oriented development. And ModeShift says he was “for RGGI (the Northeast regional greenhouse gas emissions compact) before he was against it.” Read more…

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.

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