Unfortunately, nuttiness like this is no new thing, and its reach is longer than you might think. It has its roots in an antiquated and peculiarly American belief system that is standing in the way of improved urban livability.

Let’s start with gas prices. In recent weeks, Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and House Speaker John Boehner have all played to the notion that gas prices have doubled since President Obama took office. The price of gas is notoriously volatile; the national average price has actually fallen in 45 of the past 100 months (Excel spreadsheet). So a fair accounting would employ the U.S. average over an entire presidency, as in this chart, for the three most recent:

The chart makes clear that it was former oilman George W. Bush, not Obama, who came closest to presiding over a doubling of gas prices.

At one level, Gingrich and company are merely shilling for the Keystone XL pipeline. But of course excavating Canadian tar sands oil and piping it to Houston is so costly and energy-intensive that without high gas prices, the venture would collapse.

That aside, consider what Gingrich is really saying when he derides New Yorkers as elitists because each uptick in the price of gas doesn’t make us itchy to start a new war. In one way, he has a point. Unlike our countrymen trapped in punishing commutes and paying off two-car garages, we big city dwellers are fairly well insulated from fluctuating gas prices. And unlike big-box suburbs and the Sunbelt, which were built on the inefficiency of cars, highways, supersized houses and office parks, New York is built on the efficiency of dense neighborhoods and public transportation.

To anyone with common sense, that difference makes the ‘burbs brittle and cities resilient. To Newt, it makes city dwellers suspect.

Similarly suspect, in the eyes of Tea Party activists, are “all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy,” as the Times reported on Saturday. “Government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space [is seen] as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.” Ditto, bike lanes. And, you better believe, congestion pricing or any form of traffic pricing.

What’s at work here, according to the writer (and New Yorker) Dan Lazare, is the “Jeffersonian ideology that assumed that individual actions were autonomous unless proven otherwise. Whether a motorist chose to drive or not to drive,” Lazare wrote in his 2000 classic, America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How You Can Stop It, “was nobody’s business but his own; any suggestion to the contrary was positively un-American.”

The standard counterweight to the agrarian Jeffersonian model is the Hamiltonian sovereign nation-state drawing strength from cities built on manufacturing and trade. Lazare plumbed this duality in America’s Undeclared War, but he also broke new ground by contrasting Jeffersonianism to the “theory of externalities” that emerged in the early 20^th Century, which emphasized “the public dimension of individual acts” that consumed resources or otherwise damaged the commons:

Rather than regarding individual acts as private unless proven otherwise, the growing volume of external costs suggested that they had to be regarded as public acts — unless, that is, affirmative action was taken to mitigate the social consequences. To drive or not to drive, in other words, was no longer an individual decision but a social question because so many people were affected besides the motorist himself.

A great many people are affected by an individual’s decision to drive in NYC. I have shown elsewhere that a single car round-trip into the Manhattan Central Business District generates external costs on the order of a hundred dollars, just in terms of other road users’ lost time. Although the Bloomberg administration didn’t use this meme in its 2007-2008 push for congestion pricing, it is the essential motivating idea behind tolling vehicles entering the CBD. As I wrote on Reuters last month, any New York-area driver “is cognizant of the time he will expend being slowed by other cars, but not of the far greater delays he will impose on them.” A congestion toll helps close that feedback loop.

Tea Partiers are having none of that, of course, and Dan Lazare helps us make sense of their antipathy to treating driving — not to mention land use, transit provision, and climate change — as a social question rather than the sole province of individuals. To paraphrase America’s Undeclared War, “Where the externalities analysis highlights the tyranny that a mass of atomized individuals imposes on society, adherents of Jefferson worry about the tyranny imposed by society on the individual.”

In short, congestion pricing’s benefits be damned, you’ll still have to pry the car keys out of my cold dead hand.

The Cuomo administration's draft EIS for the new Tappan Zee Bridge makes a mockery of New York's smart growth law.

Passed in 2010 under David Paterson’s administration, the Smart Growth Public Infrastructure Policy Act requires any state infrastructure project to meet 10 smart growth criteria. Under the law, the state should only build projects that support sustainability and downtown revitalization, not sprawl.

Nowhere is the Cuomo administration’s hypocrisy regarding the Tappan Zee Bridge project more clearly displayed than in its arguments that the new bridge complies with the smart growth law. In its draft environmental impact statement, the state walks through each of the 10 smart growth criteria, arguing that a new Tappan Zee with no transit and twice the width of the current bridge fits the bill. In the process, the fact that Cuomo’s Tappan Zee is really not a smart growth bridge becomes painfully clear.

Criterion 6, for example, requires the project to “provide mobility through transportation choices including improved public transportation and reduced automobile dependency.” The state argues that since the new bridge will “improve mobility” with highway improvements, it’s consistent with this requirement. “In addition,” reads the draft EIS, “the bridge would be designed not to preclude transit.” Not precluding transit, of course, is hardly the same as improving it. Instead of reducing automobile dependency, the project does the opposite, spending billions to improve car commutes and double the width of the bridge.

Criterion 5 calls for infrastructure “to foster mixed land uses and compact development, downtown revitalization, brownfield redevelopment, the enhancement of beauty in public spaces, the diversity and affordability of housing in proximity to places of employment, recreation and commercial development and the integration of all income and age groups.” In a brazen affront to common sense and empirical evidence, the Cuomo administration denies that transportation decisions even affect the way regions develop. “Not Applicable,” the DEIS says. “The Replacement Bridge Alternative would be a transportation infrastructure improvement project” and “would not directly affect community development.”

If smart growth means anything, it means understanding how a cars-only bridge promotes dispersed, sprawling development while including transit would help promote growth in town centers. It means acknowledging how automobile-dependency isolates low-income and elderly people who rely on transit.

It goes on like that. The smart growth law requires projects to “promote sustainability by strengthening existing and creating new communities which reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” The Cuomo administration ticks that one off its list by touting the emissions reductions from reducing the number of congestion-causing accidents and eliminating the need to move the median barrier with a diesel engine. (The median barrier is moved every day so that the seven lane bridge can always have four lanes in the peak direction.) The state claims that the Tappan Zee project is exempt from a requirement to participate in “community-based planning” because it “is a large-scale regional transportation initiative.”

In claiming that the Tappan Zee Bridge meets the requirements of the smart growth law, the state elegantly shows just how much this bridge fails to meet the state’s purported development goals. A bridge with room for seven lanes of traffic on each span but no space for transit is exactly the kind of 1950s sprawl generator that the smart growth law should prohibit.

Is this the new image of walkable urbanism? Photo: WekeRoad

Leinberger noted that Hollywood does more consumer research than anyone else, and it portrays what audiences aspire to. So, we can see in the difference between TV shows of past decades and current shows the evolution of tastes in the U.S. Where we had I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, and The Brady Bunch, all set in the suburbs, we now have Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex in the City – all set in cities.

Indeed, Leinberger often talks about the increased demand for urbanism, especially among young people, but he also noted the downsizing trend as baby boomers move out of big houses to smaller spaces in more walkable, urban neighborhoods. And he credited the trend of people having fewer children with the expansion of the demand for walkable urbanism: Only 25 percent of households have children now, as opposed to 50 percent in the 1950s. Singles and couples without children are the “target market” for walkable urbanism, he said, and that constituency is only growing.

At the same time, Manuel Pastor argued that the main catalysts of walkable urbanism in the future are going to be the people with the highest fertility rate in the nation, having the most children: Latinos. (Latina women have an average of three children each, while each white woman has an average of 2.1.)

Pastor said the age gap between whites and “non-white Hispanics” (Latinos) – the median age among whites is 41; among Latinos it’s 27 – is causing significant tension. The state with the largest age gap between whites and Latinos is Arizona, which notoriously passed (what was then) the country’s most repressive anti-immigrant law last year. The gap is also responsible for low levels of per capita spending on education, since older whites “don’t see themselves” in the younger generation using the schools. And good urban schools are key to keeping families in cities as their children grow up.

Even with their big families and many children, Latinos prefer to live in cities, Pastor said. New arrivals, especially, disproportionately use transit. The walkable urbanism in immigrant neighborhoods is characterized by “taquerías, not cappuccino bars,” Pastor said. Latinos simply don’t follow the same trends as white Americans when it comes to suburban flight when kids come into the picture.

Meanwhile, a growing chorus of intellectual leaders says the country is experiencing something different than a normal cyclical fluctuation: the end of an epoch.

Leading urban thinkers, from Richard Florida to James Howard Kunstler, believe we have reached the limits of our fossil-fueled, double-mortgaged, McMansion-based economy. Relief won’t come, they say, until America begins confronting the systemic problems that produced the meltdown, including inefficient and unsustainable public infrastructure investments and housing development.

“What were seeing right now is an inability to look at how we live and how it relates to our problems, and financial problems,” said Kunstler Tuesday during a speaking engagement with the Congress for the New Urbanism. “Production homebuilders, mortgage lenders, real estate agents, they are all sitting back now waiting for the, quote, bottom of the housing market to come with the expectation that things will go back to the way they were in 2005.”

But despite massive government expenditures to restart the old economic engine driven by suburban homebuilding, recovery is elusive, Kunstler said. The author of “The Geography of Nowhere” and “The Long Emergency” argues that suburbanization has been a multi-decade American experiment, and a failed one.

Kunstler is joined in that perspective by Charles Marohn, the director of non-profit group Strong Towns. A new report from Strong Towns places blame for the lagging economy directly on policies that favor low-density housing, fossil-fuel dependence and publicly-subsidized overbuilt infrastructure.

In its new booklet Curbside Chat, Strong Towns asserts that since the 1970s, the suburban growth that powered America’s economy operated much like a Ponzi scheme. In towns across the country, politicians traded the short-term payoffs of sprawling development — namely increased taxes — for long-term maintenance obligations that are just now coming due. And they’re coming up short.

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.”

That highlights one fundamental truth about Mitt Romney, which is that it’s sometimes hard to know what is the fundamental truth about Mitt Romney. The man who brought health care reform to Massachusetts is not the same animal currently fighting for the right-wing-extremist vote in the Republican primary.

Romney is “neutral” on the idea that human pollution is a significant cause of global warming and opposes international climate treaties like the Kyoto Protocol. He’s pro-nuclear and pro-drilling (including in protected areas in Alaska). And as governor, Romney “used approximately $45,000 in the state’s parks and conservation money to stage a pre-Super Bowl send-off rally for the New England Patriots football team on January 30,” according to the Boston Globe.

Indeed, according to a story printed by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, Romney “viewed land protection as a barrier to his top campaign pledge to double housing production.” Romney shelved the Statewide Open Space Plan soon after entering office, according to the story.

Gov. Romney also gets a lot of blame for reneging on promises made by his predecessors to build transit to offset some of the environmental damage done by the Big Dig road project. According to an editorial in the Harvard Crimson:

As part of the 1990 legal agreement to begin the Big Dig highway project, Massachusetts promised to fund a number of desperately needed public transportation projects in order to ameliorate the increased pollution and traffic that the new highway would generate. But the Romney administration has consistently downsized, delayed, or outright terminated most of the projects that were included in the 1990 agreement, choosing instead to divert transportation funds to other expensive highway projects and mass transit extensions that would primarily benefit the Commonwealth’s more affluent residents.

Many of the transit projects, like a green line extension to Somerville and Medford, and orange line service in Jamaica Plain, are still in limbo.

But given that Boston has the oldest transit system in the country, with badly deteriorating infrastructure, the restraint when it comes to new construction may not be a bad thing.

“I think it’s admirable that these guys [Patrick and Romney] have taken safety and maintenance as their prime goals, and capital projects have to take a back seat,” said Ted Brown, a former city transportation official and writer of the Boston-based Radials blog. “I think that’s a pretty good judge of what people want.”

Romney did have a significant hand in improving the transportation bureaucracy in his state. There was no Massachusetts Department of Transportation until two years ago. Seven different entities had some hand in transportation planning and building, according to Brown, with the Turnpike Authority being the biggest and most powerful. The authority was independent until this year. Romney got the ball rolling on unification of the transportation work in the state and the creation of the department.

Meanwhile, the commuter rail system was privatized under Romney, but perhaps not of his own choosing: After a series of disagreements with the T, Amtrak declined to bid on the commuter rail service contract in 2003. The Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Company (MBCR) now runs the rail system, and according to Brown, privatization was “not the worst thing in the world.”

Romney invested in the improvement of certain lines as part of the privatization process. Some saw the improvements, performed before handing over operations, as a donation of sorts to a private company, but Brown said it had the important effect of improving the stations and making commuter rail a more viable service. Besides, he said, for riders, “it’s the same deal.” He said the switch was seamless, and few noticed a change.

Soon after the 2008 election was sewn up, Romney came out opposing the auto bailout, saying it would encourage Detroit automakers to “stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses.”

His opposition certainly had nothing to do with a principled stand against car subsidies or promotion of clean-fuel vehicles. Indeed, during the 2008 campaign, he told a Michigan audience that he would help “build a brighter, prosperous future” by championing the auto industry, and he attacked opponent John McCain for backing fuel economy standards, calling them “anvils around the neck of the domestic auto manufacturers.”

We’ll take a look at other candidates’ transportation records as the primary season unfolds.

Normal, Illinois' multimodal transportation center, funded with a TIGER grant from the Partnership. Image: Normal, Illinois

Through the partnership, the three agencies have coordinated transportation and land use policy to a greater extent than they did before, helping to curb sprawl and promote smart growth. This partnership has taken the federal agencies out of their “stovepipe” mentality and encouraged efficiency and collaboration at an unprecedented level. Why would lawmakers who want to reduce inefficiencies and waste in the federal government want to cut a program that has been so effective at doing just that?

Last fall, Mariia Zimmerman from HUD told Streetsblog that the Partnership has standardized guidelines to make it easier to apply for grants and eliminated some areas of inefficiency, overlap, and even direct contradiction among the agencies. But perhaps more importantly, she said the Partnership has transformed all of HUD, incorporating a focus on sustainability in all of the agency’s work.

A vote of support from the Senate would mean a lot to the Partnership, which saw its funding stripped in the House proposal for next year’s budget. But the Partnership isn’t the only potential casualty of the House plan: Highway and transit funding each get slashed by 34 percent, TIGER and TIGGER grants are cut entirely, high-speed rail gets nothing, the New Starts transit program gets slashed, and Amtrak is left gasping for air. If the Senate subcommittee doesn’t vote to save funding for these programs tomorrow, they have no chance.

See the Smart Growth America action alert for more information.

He just gave a TED talk about how to make cities more sustainable. And while he’s primarily looking at climate impacts, he pretty conclusively dismissed the notion that the problem can be solved with clean fuels.

“We tend to seek simple answers,” he said. And if we assume the problem is fossil fuels, he said, “the answer must be to replace fossil fuels with clean sources of energy. And while we do need clean energy, I would put to you that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we’re setting ourselves up not to solve it.”

With a rapidly urbanizing planet and eight billion people projected to live in or near cities by midcentury, Steffen asserts that it may just not be possible to generate enough energy to power all those cities – if those cities continue to look like the ones in the developed world today, anyway. The solution, he said, is density.

“There’s a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions its residents spew out into the air,” Steffen said. “Denser places tend to have lower emissions.”

Source: GRID-Arendal

You know the reason why: you don’t have to drive as much if everything you need is close by. Passenger travel accounts for more than 70 percent of U.S. transportation emissions. Steffen says that a city doesn’t need to increase density everywhere – just a few “hyperdense” hotspots will make a big difference, having a sort of “tentpole” effect that raises the density of the whole city.

“What we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect, where people simply stop driving as much and increasingly, more and more, if people are surrounded by places that make them feel at home, people give up their cars altogether. And this is a huge, huge energy savings. Because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars. We have the manufacture of the car, the disposal of the car, all of the parking and freeways and so on. When you can get rid of all of them, because somebody doesn’t use any of them, really, you can cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent. “

People are embracing a “walkshed life” where the idea of the “dream home” has given way to the “dream neighborhood,” Steffen said.

The town of Metuchen is one of New Jersey's "Transit Villages," a program designed to encourage sustainable, transit oriented development. Photo: NJ.com

Most state DOTs — and there are notable exceptions — see their primary responsibility as building highways, never mind that highways are likely to spur outward development, which leads to the need for more highways. What comes after the highways are built is considered by many to be beyond the state transportation agency’s scope.

A decade ago, however, the state of New Jersey — historically a poster child for sprawl — achieved a transportation planning breakthrough. Two administrators at the New Jersey Department of Transportation set out to reverse the whole dynamic. They wanted to make transportation projects more holistic, serving communities rather than subordinating all other concerns to the hallowed cause of car capacity. They wanted to infuse transportation planning with a land use strategy that would minimize costs and environmental impacts.

At the time, the Garden State was rapidly approaching the limits of its developable land. And the standard practice of tackling congestion with more roads just seemed to be a fiscal impossibility, says Jack Lettiere, who led NJDOT from 2002 to 2006.

“We spent tens of millions trying to relieve congestion,” said Lettiere. “The faster we went, the slower we went. People were getting mad at us. Funds were getting low.”

Working with planning director Gary Toth, Lettiere sought to institute a new approach. They created a program within the department called New Jersey Future in Transportation (FIT) and, though later administrations have diluted its impact, the concept remains influential.

At the time, NJDOT was building on a concept, pioneered by the state of Maryland, called “Context Sensitive Solutions.”

“Four-lane highways through the center of downtown just don’t revitalize,” Lettiere said. “What we did was give our engineers a different problem to solve. Rather than build a highway, we told them, ‘Transportation is not an end unto itself. We have to fit it into the culture of the community.’”

That was the goal when they redeveloped Route 57, which runs through New Jersey’s rural northwestern corner. The project sought to contain future development within established town centers, while preserving farmland and scenic vistas.

Lettiere and Toth sent transportation planners out to hear community concerns and develop a plan that fit the region’s rural nature. A corridor plan was completed in 2006. It set the goal of preserving 7,000 acres of land through smart growth strategies. The plan also included traffic calming measures through some of the small towns along the route. Route 57 was designated as a scenic byway in 2009.

The dairy, pig and Christmas tree farms that characterize this area have been preserved. There is little suburban-style development pressure. In addition, scenic byway status allows road agencies to tap into federal grant money, said Brian Appezzato, a senior transportation planner with Warren County, which is bisected by the road.

Believe it or not, this was a major departure from the standard practice at state DOTs. Even today, many state DOTs approach road projects as challenges in maximizing vehicle throughput.

“Most [transportation] departments will tell you that land use planning is not their purview,” said Lettiere. “I think that’s the problem that has to be overcome.”

Lettiere and Toth were both pushed out by subsequent administrations (one of the hazards of public service). But Jay Corbalis of New Jersey Future said the state is still a national leader in progressive transportation. Unfortunately, since the time that Lettiere and Toth were at the state DOT, New Jersey has lost some ground in its progress toward sustainability.

“Getting into the land use issue essentially, it’s something that has waned really since they left,” Corbalis said. “They were pioneers in a way.”

“I think the broader legacy of spending more money on ‘fix-it-first,’ the philosophy of the department being in the land use business, has declined,” Corbalis went on.

Part of the problem with changing the objectives in such a fundamental way is that it requires a long educational process for the department, said Lettiere.

“Initiatives like this really need to be shepherded through the department,” he said. “You have to recognize that transportation is more than just building a road or a bridge. It’s a departure from how [transportation engineers] do their business. They haven’t been educated.”

New Jersey FIT continues to leave its imprint on the field. During Lettiere’s administration, NJDOT and PennDOT developed the Smart Transportation Guidebook, a manual for coordinating land use and transportation decisions. That document continues to help guide transportation policy in a sustainable way in the Keystone State.

Meanwhile, Allen Biehler, former secretary of PennDOT, is working to advance those same principles as part of the Smart State Transportation Initiative, a project of the Rockefeller Foundation and USDOT involving 19 states.

Biehler said he remembers some advice Lettiere imparted.

“He said, ‘The real challenge is to get that practice accepted by people in the field.’”

“The highway guys are great about talking about highway thickness and adding five lanes to deal with congestion,” Biehler said. “But they’re not so great about talking to communities about land use.”

But programs like the Smart State Transportation Initiative are slowly helping that shift take place in more and more places around the country.

“It’s evolving,” said Biehler. “We’re trying to make progress and keep things moving forward.”

Transit investment lagged in regions where MPO boards did not give equal representation to city populations, Detroit being an especially bad example. In more democratic metros, investment was much more balanced. Image: Nelson, 2003

Do you know the name of your local Metropolitan Planning Organization or Council of Government? Most Americans don’t. In fact, most people probably have no idea these agencies even exist, let alone what they do. Yet they are surprisingly powerful and play a substantial role in shaping the places where we live and work.

Led by unelected boards, MPOs and COGs, as they’re known, are a special breed among government agencies. They lack the authority to issue taxes or impose laws. As such, they go largely unmentioned in the media and are mostly unknown to local residents, outside of the most wonkish circles. But the low profile of MPOs and COGs belies their considerable power.

Despite their limitations, they represent the strongest form of regional governance we’ve got in the United States, crossing city and county lines. More importantly, they disperse hundreds of millions of federal transportation dollars annually. MPOs and COGs are powerful forces shaping metro regions. While these agencies often distribute transportation funds more fairly than state DOTs, many of them are structured in a way that favors sprawl and undermines cities.

MPOs and COGs can be profoundly undemocratic. They are governed by boards of public officeholders, but there is no requirement that they be in any way representative of the region’s population. In fact, the general rule that governs the composition of MPO boards is “one place, one vote,” rather than the more traditional “one person, one vote.” This often produces decisions dramatically skewed toward suburban and rural interests.

For example, greater Milwaukee’s MPO, known by the unwieldy acronym SEWRPC, is governed by a board of 21 members, three from each of the counties that make up the planning region. That means that the city of Milwaukee — population nearly 600,000 — has zero representatives on the commission that distributes millions of dollars for transportation throughout the region. It is not guaranteed any votes. The city’s only voting power comes from the three seats given to Milwaukee County — and those must be spread between the central city and many suburbs. Meanwhile, rural Walworth County — population 100,000 — is guaranteed three votes.

Milwaukee is an especially egregious case. But unfortunately, this general pattern is more the norm than the exception. A 1999 Brookings Institution study [PDF] found that central cities were under-represented in as many as 92 percent of MPOs and COGs.

That bias can have a strong impact on policy, further research has shown. A 2003 study by researchers at Virginia Tech found that for each additional suburban member on an MPO board, there was a 1 to 9 percent decrease in funding for transit — with highways being the favored alternative.

Researchers examined three regions where boards were unrepresentative and three regions where it was proportional to population. They found significant differences: Transit investment varied from a low of 3.2 percent in Detroit (unrepresentative) to 50 percent in Seattle (proportional).

Across the country, the composition of MPO boards varies wildly. The only federal requirement is that at least 75 percent of the region be represented in some capacity, said Delania Hardy, director of the Association of Metropolitan Planning Agencies. And while there are plenty of examples of places where there is room for improvement, she said, there are also good examples.

While Milwaukee represents one extreme, Portland embodies another. This region is the only place in the country where the MPO board is not only representative of the region’s population, but also directly elected by the local population.

In late 2009, Myron Orfield, author of “American Metropolitics,” set out to determine which metro areas had the most effective regional planning agencies. He evaluated the country’s 25 largest metro regions on indicators such as sprawl, segregation, growth and fiscal equity. Portland was the runaway standout.

“They have a very good urban growth boundary. They cluster jobs at defined job centers. They require that all communities build their fair share of affordable housing. They have low and decreasing segregation,” he said. “On every measure that we care about, it does well.”

Outside of having directly elected MPO representatives, Portland has some other advantages, a strong land use policy framework being the most notable. But allowing the public to directly elect the people who will shape their region is also important, Orfield said.

“If you don’t have it up for election, it’s really hard for people to participate,” he said. “It’s sort of a general principle of democracy.”

During the last round of negotiations over the federal transportation bill, in 2009, Orfield joined the National Association of City Transportation Officials in lobbying for MPO reform. His legislation would have required proportional representation for directly-elected MPO boards. The reforms were adopted into the transportation reauthorization bill put forward by Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) but never became law.

Some communities are making progress toward important sustainability and equity goals on their own. Orfield pointed to Chicago, Washington D.C., Seattle, San Diego, and even Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Regions with more proportional representation tend to do a better job,” he said.

Detroit's MPO is dominated by rural and suburban interests. It's transit system is uniquely dysfunctional among large metro areas. Photo: Beaumont Enterprise

On the other hand you have Detoit’s SEMCOG, which is responsible for dispersing $1 billion in federal funds annually. In 2006, SEMCOG was the subject of a civil rights lawsuit over the composition of its executive committee. At the time, the agency had allocated three delegates to the city of Detroit, representing more than 900,000 people. Meanwhile, Livingston County — which has a population of less than 200,000 people — was given four delegates.

Discrepancies like this can be especially insidious for people of color. For example, at the time of the lawsuit, Detroit was more than 80 percent African-American. Meanwhile Livingston County, on the opposite extreme, is less than one percent African-American, according to a court deposition.

The suit was dismissed because the court determined the principle of “one person, one vote” does not apply to appointed positions. Five years later, not much has changed, says Ponscella Hardaway, director of MOSES, the low-income advocacy group that brought suit against SEMCOG.

In a symbol of regional failure, Detroit is unique among large metros for operating separate transit systems for its central city and the surrounding suburbs — a byproduct of the Motor City’s stark racial segregation. That creates a logistical nightmare for transit riders.

SEMCOG “could have taken some leadership” on this issue, said Hardaway. “Their vision for regional cooperation is not matched with their actions. It’s almost like they’re a nonentity.”

As you might expect, the Detroit region performs poorly on the measures Orfield used to measure effective regional planning.

“It is really probably the worst in the country,” said Orfield. “Detroit builds massive highways into cornfields and doesn’t reinvest in the existing infrastructure or build transit. Detroit is a catastrophe.”

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.’”

State DOT Commissioner Joan McDonald had positive words for progressive transportation planning at today's NYMTC annual meeting. Photo: NYMTC.

Coming two days after her confirmation as the new commissioner of the state DOT, Joan McDonald’s keynote speech at today’s annual meeting of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council offered her the chance to lay out her agenda for statewide transportation policy. McDonald’s remarks should provide cause for optimism among New Yorkers hoping for a more progressive transportation system: She strongly endorsed smart growth principles and indicated to Streetsblog after her speech that she welcomes the planning process that could advance the Sheridan Expressway teardown.

“I am a very strong proponent and advocate for those smart growth principles,” McDonald announced in her keynote, citing the fact that transportation accounts for nearly 40 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

She said that the state DOT has the responsibility to ensure that last year’s smart growth law is implemented and that she believes there is a real movement within the department to embrace it. “It’s going to take a little bit to get to the practical side of it,” she said after the event, “but I am committed to pushing that envelope as much as we can.”

In particular, McDonald highlighted the department’s nationally-recognized GreenLITES certification system as a model around which to build. “We are expanding it to all areas within the department,” she said. “We know that we need to go further.”

Substantively, McDonald said making NYS DOT a smart growth agency is “pedestrian improvements, it’s bike improvements, it’s always looking and making safety our top priority.” During her speech, McDonald also singled out high-speed rail as a necessary investment for the state.

Though she cautioned that she hasn’t reached any conclusions on the fate of the Sheridan, her comments suggest that her administration will be more in tune with neighborhood activists seeking to replace the under-used highway with new housing, jobs, and open space.

“I’m thrilled that the city of New York is undertaking a land use study,” said McDonald, adding that conversations have begun about the Sheridan between the state DOT, the city DOT, and the city Department of City Planning.

The land use study, which was funded by a federal TIGER grant, is the key to an honest accounting of the costs and benefits of a Sheridan teardown. Last year, state DOT officials said that they could only compare the current Sheridan to a shuttered but still standing highway, because no officially sanctioned plan existed for what would replace it. If McDonald is excited about working with the city on the plan, she would seem to be open to the idea that replacing the Sheridan with a new mix of uses would add more value to the community than the highway does.

There was one worrisome contradiction in McDonald’s remarks, however. While she said that “we need to address our aging infrastructure through fix-it-first strategies,” implying that repairs would take precedence over making more room for cars at the cash-strapped agency, McDonald also expressed support for three road capacity increases in the downstate area: on the Staten Island Expressway, on the Gowanus and BQE, and on the Tappan Zee corridor. “I think society demands it,” she explained after the event.

When it comes to this report, a picture’s worth a thousand words. As the graph above shows, the biggest energy efficiency gains come from living in transit-oriented neighborhoods.

A household living in a single family detached house located in a typical sprawl development uses an average of 240 million BTU (British Thermal Units, a unit of energy output) of energy a year, while the same household would only use 147 million BTU if the exact same house were located in a compact neighborhood. Make that single family house an apartment and energy use is down to 93 million BTU.

“While energy efficiency measures in homes and vehicles can make a notable improvement in consumption, the impact is considerably less dramatic than the gains possible offered by housing type and location efficiency,” the authors write. The ideal solution, of course, is to combine smart growth with green technology.

The report serves as a high-level rebuke to those who dismiss the importance of smart growth for curbing energy use, a point of view that was reinforced by a recent report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. While putting a stop to the country’s many sprawl-inducing policies may not be easy, the EPA’s numbers show it’s necessary.

Compact urbanism can work in the suburbs, like Bethesda, Maryland. Image: Maryland Sierra Club

“Growing Wealthier: Smart Growth, Climate Change, and Prosperity” starts with the simple assertion that accessibility – “bringing origins and destinations closer together” – is, after all, “the very reason that cities exist.”

“You want to have your choices nearby so you can meet your daily needs as efficiently as possible,” said report author Steve Winkelman.

By separating residential areas, commercial services, and places of employment, suburban planning requires that people travel long distances to meet their needs. All those miles used to be viewed as a measure of economic progress.

“[Vehicle Miles Traveled] and GDP have grown concurrently since World War II and in lock step for much of that time,” the report states. But around 1996, GDP began growing faster than VMT, and, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “the importance of travel as a component of the U.S. economy has been declining since the early 1990s.”

Indeed, CCAP’s research shows that states with lower VMT per capita tend to have higher GDP per capita.

Excessive travel is more likely to be an economic detriment than a benefit. Ironically, GDP counts as economic productivity many of the counterproductive aspects of motorized travel, such as fuel consumed waiting in traffic jams, oil spills, vehicle repairs and medical treatment resulting from collisions, costs of air pollution, and defense operations to protect U.S. petroleum interests around the world. In fact, many costs of sprawling land use patterns (particularly increased infrastructure) themselves boost GDP figures.

The authors also urge us to distinguish between economically productive travel and what they call “empty miles.” It’s like differentiating between empty calories and nutrition.

“A lot of driving that most people are doing nowadays is not helping them economically,” said report author Chuck Kooshian. “Although the VMT has been going up per capita, as we’re making trips to the grocery store five miles to get some milk, and we’re taking the kids out driving to go trick-or-treating, and driving to the park to walk our dog, this is not helping the average household economically. It might be helping the Saudis.”

From the Center for Housing Policy's 2006 report, “A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families.” Is the strangulation of the suburbs by rising transportation costs really contributing to GDP?

Economic benefits from walkable, bikable neighborhoods aren’t calculated by GDP alone. They’re also calculated in the drop in health care costs when people get more exercise. The authors cite a study in Seattle, where researchers found that with every five percent increase in the overall level of walkability, there was a 32 percent increase in walking or biking, and Body Mass Index was reduced.

Not to mention the economic impact of the real estate boom in compact urban areas, relative to the suburbs. The authors say that in Denver, homes within a half-mile of stations on the Southeast light rail line rose in value an average of 17.6 percent between 2006 and 2008, while home values in the rest of Denver declined by an average 7.5 percent.

Will driving 2.93 trillion miles again next year help us become healthier and wealthier? Not likely.

The CCAP report focuses largely on economic benefits of compact development, but it also addresses climate change – and comes to the opposite conclusions that Pew came to in its report touting clean car technology as the only viable avenue toward carbon reduction.

If the U.S. is to meet the goal of reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050, CCAP says clean car technologies like those lauded in the Pew report won’t be sufficient. Public transportation can help: mass transit produces, according to a study by APTA, about 45 percent less carbon dioxide per passenger mile than travel by private vehicles. But in the end, we have to give people the option to drive less. And not even that much less: “The actual drop in miles driven per person that is required is relatively modest: We calculate that a 9 percent reduction in per capita VMT (roughly equivalent to each person driving 2.5 miles less per day) will be sufficient.”

Cleaner fuels might reduce the smog but you're still left with this traffic jam. Image: Boxoid

Pew has a well-earned reputation for integrity, commitment to hard-hitting research, and impact on policy debates. And the report, “Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from U.S. Transportation,” does an excellent job of analyzing the potential of various vehicle technologies to reduce emissions. But when it comes to Pew’s conclusions on transit and smart growth, the report is skewed by major omissions and dubious assumptions.

I asked Pew project manager Nick Nigro why the acknowledgments specifically state, “This report is not a publication of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, or The National Academies.” It turns out the report was funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, a program of the Transportation Research Board that works in close collaboration with AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

“They provided the funding,” Nigro told Streetsblog, “but it’s a Pew report. They were just a source of funding.”

The authors Pew enlisted, David Greene and Steven Plotkin, have unassailable credentials in fuel economy research and alternative fuels. But how much do they know about transit and smart growth? Their resumés are thin in those areas. So whom did they pull in to offer further depth of understanding? A longtime official from the Federal Highway Administration.

“The study would have been better and more balanced if, for example, Reid Ewing had been a third co-author,” said Deron Lovaas, transportation policy analyst for NRDC. “I wish that Pew had structured this differently. They structured it so that it’s very strong and aggressive in its vehicles and fuels focus and it’s lacking in its focus on other measures that affect travel activity and travel efficiency.”

The report finds that transit makes up such a low proportion of passenger-miles in this country that even doubling transit usage would represent a small improvement in emissions. It also asserts that transit is usually “only modestly more energy-efficient than personal vehicles.”

“Yeah it’s a very low percentage of current passenger miles,” Lovaas told Streetsblog. “That’s true. But hybrid electric vehicle sales also account for about that percentage of total vehicle sales, currently. Let’s be fair, this is a long slope to climb either for breakthrough technologies such as hybrid electric vehicle technology, or for transit systems that attract higher ridership.”

Indeed, the Pew study envisions a world where people are making vastly different vehicle choices than they are today (even in the age of the three-dollar-gallon) but rejects a future where transit is a more viable travel option. Even more strangely, the authors dismiss smart growth the same way, saying local control of land use regulation is an insurmountable barrier to instituting compact models of development.

Compact development means fewer vehicle miles traveled - a recipe for lower emissions. Image: NY Dept. of Environmental Conservation

“Homeowners living in low-density communities may be opposed to higher density zoning in or near their neighborhoods,” the authors write, and “the [National Research Council] notes that state and citywide policies for promoting compact development are quite limited, and they speculate that strong political resistance explains the scarcity of such efforts.”

The real estate market is telling a different story. “The Pew study is basically saying that people want to continue to drive – and drive and drive – and we can make them drive without having the emissions problem but they’re still going to want to drive. And that’s not necessarily what’s happening anymore,” said Chuck Kooshian, transportation policy analyst for the Center for Clean Air Policy. “How much more driving do you want to do?”

The question, as summed up by Steve Winkelman, who also specializes in transportation with CCAP, boils down to this: “Why is Brooklyn so expensive?”

“People are moving in to communities where they have accessibility, where you can get your dry cleaning and coffee on your way to work, instead of being in traffic,” Winkelman said. “People are voting with their feet.”

Indeed, in the fallout from the housing crash, real estate held far more of its value in walkable cities than in the drivable suburbs. Study after study shows that public preferences are shifting toward smart growth-inspired, walkable communities, and you can tell by the housing prices in many places that that kind of development is far undersupplied.

So why the skepticism on Pew’s part that smart growth could be a key to a lower-carbon future? The report states, “The primary GHG benefit [from compact development] comes from reduced VMT rather than actual mode shifts.” Isn’t a reduction in travel a better solution than finding marginally cleaner ways to log the same number of miles? Especially given the other costs of driving that cleaner fuels don’t address – safety, land conservation, community cohesion – it makes more sense to look beyond the automobile.

Note: the Center for Clean Air Policy released their report yesterday on how smart growth can mitigate climate change and boost the economy. It’s a useful counterpoint to the Pew study. We’ll say more about the CCAP story in a bit. In the meantime, you can check it out for yourself.

- Allen Biehler, Secretary, Pennsylvania DOT and Chair, AASHTO Standing Committee on Highways

Every state Department of Transportation (DOT) is led by a chief executive. In some states, they’re called the “secretary.” In others, the “director.” In New York, we call the state DOT chief “commissioner,” and last week, Governor Cuomo named Joan McDonald as the next Commissioner of New York State DOT.

NYSDOT staff have already demonstrated a strong inclination to support community-based transportation projects, like the redesign of State Route 376 in Poughkeepsie as a complete street. Commissioner McDonald needs to make projects like this the centerpiece of her administration. Photo: Project for Public Spaces

Although they have been reluctant to play an active role in land use planning, state DOTs have a huge impact on how their states grow and develop. Since the dawn of the post-WWII freeway era, the vast majority of state DOTs have declined to address concerns which we now group under the banners of sustainability and livability. The result has been unsustainable growth (sprawl) and precarious dependence on a single mode (driving).  This in turn has produced extreme vulnerability to rising fuel prices, mounting emissions that have us on a course for catastrophic climate change, and alarming declines in public health.

Ironically, single-minded spending on high-speed freeways has not even accomplished transportation goals. Congestion has grown exponentially worse; more than 1,000 people lose their lives on New York’s roads each year; and the physical condition of transportation infrastructure is declining.

It is time to accept that transportation investments in livability and sustainability are essential to New York’s future, and incoming Commissioner McDonald must lead the way. DOT chiefs have enormous capability to set agendas, shift billions of dollars in transportation investments, and change agency culture. Commissioner McDonald can help New York pick itself up and get back into the race with other states leading the way on 21st Century transportation policy. In so doing, she can build on the foundation for smart transportation and land use solutions that the previous administration began to create, before getting sidetracked by financial woes.

Will McDonald follow the innovative path set by New York City’s own Janette Sadik-Khan, or will she run a state DOT content with business-as-usual planning? In the hopes that the Cuomo Administration recognizes that in tough financial times, New York needs more progressive transportation planning and investment, not less, below are a series of recommendations based on my work with state DOTs around the country.

1. Take the nationally trend-setting GreenLITES program to the next level

The NYSDOT GreenLITES program is a brilliant effort to integrate principles of livability and sustainability into transportation projects from start to finish, which has already received national recognition. Early GreenLITES initiatives have retrofit roads to prevent pollution from stormwater runoff and, in partnership with the Nature Conversancy, targeted invasive species in the Adirondacks.

GreenLITES can be powerful because it begins at the beginning, with the selection of projects. We have to start feeding smart, sustainable transportation projects into the state DOT pipeline, otherwise we’re just dressing up 20^th Century solutions to make them appear like 21^st Century solutions. For instance, some have called the application of complete streets and sustainability principles to the widening of Route 347 in Long Island a case of transportation greenwashing.

Expanding and refining the GreenLITES program would help ensure that sustainable design is part of a project's DNA, rather than being added on top of a road widening as on Long Island's Route 347. Image: Times Beacon Record.

As one of her first steps, Joan McDonald should reconsider the wisdom of continuing to pour precious capital dollars into hugely expensive road widening projects, like the conversion of Route 17 into I-86. Think of it this way: Would you use the money you need to stop your roof from leaking to buy glitzy new kitchen appliances instead? We can no longer hope that channeling hundreds of millions into projects like the I-86 “upgrade” or the extension of Route 219 in Erie County will magically revitalize economies in various parts of New York state, while critical infrastructure crumbles in areas where most of New York’s existing population and economic wealth already reside. Instead, Commissioner McDonald should expand the GreenLITES program into agency-wide policy, practice and guidelines.

2. Enact performance-based goals and policies

Building on the GreenLITES pilot and programs such as STARS in Portland, Oregon, NYSDOT needs to evaluate its performance based on a broader range of goals than moving traffic. Success should be judged according to the agency’s effect on the environment, energy conservation, housing affordability, land use, and social equity.

3. Implement the land use and transportation program that Astrid Glynn started

Former DOT Commissioner Astrid Glynn came into power with the Spitzer administration in 2007, tasked with building a transportation and land use planning program to foster smart, compact growth. A new initiative modeled on NJDOT’s innovative Future in Transportation program seemed primed to launch with 12 full-time transportation and land use planners to implement it.  It was aborted due to funding issues, which is unfortunate, because a well-run land use planning initiative, pursued in partnership with local communities, could save NYSDOT hundreds of millions of dollars that will otherwise be spent widening roads and chasing sprawl.

4. Foster the creation of NGOs around the state to oversee implementation of transportation and land use visions

The state DOT’s internal transportation and land use program should be complemented by parallel programs outside the agency. Why? Because even when state, regional and local government agencies successfully coordinate their planning efforts, they can still have trouble implementing them. Without a third party to hold individual agencies accountable to each other and to sticking to the joint vision, communities quickly succumb to the pressures that destroy livable places. A smart plan for sustainable growth can fall apart, for instance, if one municipality starts chasing after the tax receipts generated by big box development.

These watchdog organizations would have to be entities outside of government, so that they can avoid being dominated by politics.

5. Fully engage the public in long range planning

Every state DOT formulates and adjusts a long-range plan in collaboration with the various regions throughout that state. Engaging the public so that real decision making is shared with citizens during the long range planning process will be essential to the success of transportation agencies in the 21^st Century.  Due to the abstract nature of the planning process, which involves lots of ideas but few details, it has been difficult to figure out how to accomplish this. In this author’s opinion, this is a major reason why transportation agencies can no longer muster public support for tax increases to build and maintain infrastructure.

There is one superb model for the incoming Commissioner to borrow from: the 2004-05 New Hampshire DOT Long Range Business Plan.  Instead of following the conventional top-down process, then-Commissioner Carol Murray turned it upside down, enlisting the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation to organize a public constituency. NHDOT provided participants with data on the state’s transportation needs and funding resources. These people then shaped the plan, relying on professional planners for direction and specific advice.  In other words, the state DOT used its expertise to support and nurture public goals, instead of dictate them.  The result: For the first time in decades, New Hampshire residents advocated for increased revenues for the DOT.

6. Trust and engage your career staff

New administrations often come into power with a mistrust of career staff, imposing change from the top down. The incoming administration should understand that there are many enlightened change agents in the state DOT bureaucracy, who if engaged, can dramatically accelerate reforms thanks to their competence and understanding of how to get things done. Having worked closely with or trained a number of NYSDOT staff over the years, I know for a fact that they already have a wealth of such committed talent.

For the new Tappan Zee Bridge to actually carry transit riders, the state DOT must do more than leave room on its bridge for buses and trains. Image: Tappan Zee Bridge Website.

7. Operate and oversee the entire system, not just the segments under the control of the state DOT

NYSDOT must evolve into a truly multi-modal agency that can influence the operations and performance of the entire transportation system, not just the portion of the state highway system that is under their jurisdiction.  For instance, it needs to make itself responsible for seeing that transit in corridors like the I-287 Tappan Zee Bridge project actually gets done, instead of simply leaving room on the bridge for someone else to build it. To meet the challenges of the 21^st Century, we need to knit together the operations of the multitude of transit services as well as the street and highway capacity of state, county, local and toll jurisdictions.  To the citizens of New York, the system needs to appear seamless and legible.  I recognize that this will pose all sorts of political problems, having lived through several attempts at accomplishing this in New Jersey. Nevertheless, we can no longer be daunted by the obstacles.

8. Transform NYSDOT’s mission from “building transportation through communities” to “building communities through transportation”

All of the above strategies should be employed according to the principle that transportation is not an end to itself, but a means to support the places we inhabit. Planning transportation through the prism of place is the key to busting the silos that all transportation agencies and jurisdictions now operate within.  It is also the key to integrating transportation with land use, creating location-efficient housing, helping health departments address obesity and diabetes, and improving the quality of our watersheds and solving other ecological problems.

Place-based – or “upside down” – planning involves shifting the focus of transportation and land use planning so that it no longer simply reacts to entrenched patterns and trends, treating traffic and sprawl like irresistible forces that must be accommodated. Instead, a place-based approach involves collaboratively setting a course based on the outcomes we want to see for our communities. Then transportation planning and projects can be used to shape and support the future that we want. Organizing around place will elevate transportation to be a positive force in the growth of New York State.

Gary Toth is currently director of transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces. Previously, during his 34-year career with the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT), Gary become one of the architects of the transformation of NJDOT to a national leader in context-sensitive transportation planning. Gary’s work has brought him into contact with the operations of many state DOTs around the country. He is one of the leading experts on what “makes DOTs tick,” and how to engage the transportation planning, funding, project development and design processes to achieve sustainable and livable outcomes.

The Buffalo area has sprawled out to three times its former size despite its population remaining static. That's hurting both the environment and the state budget. Image: Joe the Planner.

A coalition of environmental groups has lined up behind a smart growth agenda for New York State. Released by 12 organizations, the new memo lays out how Governor Cuomo and the state legislature can help New York use scarce public dollars more efficiently and sustainably when it comes to development.

The coalition’s smart growth recommendations are part of a larger set of memos outlining top environmental priorities for the state [PDF]. As the Tri-State Transportation Campaign (one of the signatories) notes, the smart growth section earned the most endorsements of them all. Moving away from sprawl would not only reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, notes the memo, but would also preserve open space, protect drinking water, and improve air quality. It could also save the state millions of dollars.

To help New York grow green, the enviros recommend that Cuomo work hard to enforce the smart growth law that passed last year, which requires the state’s infrastructure spending to go towards projects in line with certain smart growth principles. Cuomo should also appoint a reformer to head the state DOT and direct him or her to boost the agency’s much-lauded GreenLITES program, which links transportation, land use, and environmental sustainability.

The memo also warns Cuomo not to raid dedicated transit funds in his budget, to consider congestion pricing or other ways of funding transit, and to support complete streets legislation.

These recommendations earned the support of the Adirondack Council, Adirondack Mountain Club, American Lung Association in New York, Audubon New York, Citizens Campaign for the Environment, Environmental Advocates of New York, Empire State Future, Natural Resources Defense Council, New York League of Conservation Voters, New York Public Interest Research Group, Sierra Club-Atlantic Chapter and Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

Smart growth grants, framed as a green jobs program, made it into the governor's State of the State slideshow.

If his State of the State address yesterday offers any indication, transportation policy isn’t going to be a top-tier priority for Andrew Cuomo. He didn’t mention pressing issues like the MTA’s looming deficits or the state’s crumbling infrastructure, instead focusing his attention on ethics reform, Medicaid and reorganizing state government. He did, however, repeat his proposal to institute a $100 million competitive grant program to encourage smart growth around the state, suggesting that campaign promise has momentum early in his administration.

The grants, which Cuomo calls the “New York Cleaner, Greener Communities Program,” would reward regions that develop the best plans to coordinate sustainable housing, transportation, and energy policies. In his campaign policy book, Cuomo said that transit, alternative fuel cars, and pedestrian and bike infrastructure were “essential component[s] of our urban redevelopment efforts.”

During the State of the State, Cuomo chose to frame the smart growth grants as a green jobs program. Said Cuomo yesterday:

We proposed a $100 million competitive grant program that will go to local private sector partnerships that come up with the best plans to create green jobs, reduce pollution and further environmental justice. Let the private marketplace come in, let them work with the local governments and the local community groups to come up with the best plans. Let’s reward performance. Lets incentivize performance. Let competition run, and let us fund the best.

A comparison with Cuomo’s prepared remarks and slideshow make clear that the green jobs program and the smart growth program are in fact the same.

While both the policy and political details remain yet to be worked out, smart growth advocates were excited to see the program mentioned in the State of the State. Empire State Future director Peter Fleischer said he was “quite encouraged” by that section of the speech. Fleischer also praised Cuomo for his decision to keep the state’s Smart Growth Cabinet, formed under Eliot Spitzer, in place.

That said, it is noteworthy how low on Cuomo’s agenda transportation is. For comparison’s sake, Spitzer’s first State of the State discussed still-timely issues like the Second Avenue Subway and the Tappan Zee Bridge, albeit in a very different political climate.

This intersection, the most dangerous in Syracuse, can't inspire too many people to walk or bike. If Albany passed a complete streets law, one of many green transportation policies they haven't acted on, it could be safer. Image: Google Street View.

“Getting Back on Track,” a new report by Smart Growth America and the Natural Resources Defense Council, ranks New York 21st of all the states when it comes to environmentally friendly transportation policy, right between Nevada and New Mexico (check out Streetsblog Capitol Hill for a national perspective on the report). Though the state does a decent job of spending its money in the right places, New York lacks almost all the legislative cornerstones necessary to move our transportation system towards sustainability.

Transportation accounts for a full 32 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. American transportation emissions alone are greater than the total greenhouse gas emissions of any other country except China and Russia. State policy is crucial to cutting that figure. The report cites one study which found that if Maryland built a new outer beltway through the D.C. suburbs, those 18 miles of tolled highway would increase the total greenhouse gas emissions of the entire Washington region by 11 percent.

But because of Albany inaction, New York is an embarrassment when it comes to policies other than spending and investment. At 44th, our infrastructure policies are rated worse than South Dakota’s (consolation prize: we just barely edge out North Dakota).

Thanks to the State Assembly, we don’t have a complete streets law, so in many areas, people don’t feel safe making even the shortest trips without getting in a car. We’re one of only nine states that doesn’t allow pay-as-you-drive insurance, which creates a big financial incentive to drive less. We don’t offer incentives to carpool or telecommute and we don’t offer incentives for transit-oriented development.

The report’s authors made special note of New York’s poor performance. “One of the states that fared less well than I might have expected is New York State,” said Smart Growth America’s Neha Bhatt on a conference call with reporters. “It was outperformed by a lot of rural states.” The Assembly’s killing of congestion pricing in 2008 received special attention from the report authors as a case study in state-level obstructionism.

When it comes to state spending, at least, New York does much better, beaten out only by Rhode Island and Delaware. New York earns top marks for being the only state to spend more on transit than highways. On top of that, more of that highway spending goes toward maintenance, as opposed to trip-inducing road expansions, than in any other state.

Even so, “Getting Back on Track” finds that New York State is failing to adequately fund transit, leaving riders reliant on what comes from local governments and the feds. These days, that means the numbers just don’t add up. And New York was one of 15 states given the lowest ranking on using federal road money for bike or pedestrian infrastructure. Despite the state’s relatively high score on spending, we’re not doing nearly as well as we could be in terms of the budget; it’s just that most states are doing even worse.

To be fair, New York isn’t getting all the credit it deserves. Our newly passed smart growth law wasn’t counted because it hadn’t taken effect when the report was being prepared. “If they pull the implementation of that off well, it’s going to become a model state policy for the entire country,” said Bhatt. If effective, the smart growth law would bump New York up a few slots, though it would still be well outside the top tier of states.

With so many transit riders — and perhaps more importantly, transit-riding voters — New York should be a leader in green transportation. “Getting Back on Track” shows that instead, we’re in many ways at the very back of the pack.

Plus, there’s the ultimate shame for New Yorkers. The third-place state to our number 21? New Jersey.

Construction to widen I-40 in Arkansas, which came in last in a state ranking of environmental transpo policies. Image: Weaver Bailey Contractors

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Smart Growth America just teamed up to release a new study of states’ efforts between 2005 and 2008. The verdict? “Most states do not make any effort at all to connect transportation policy with climate change and energy goals, and some put in place systems that effectively sabotage these goals.”

NRDC and SGA want to see states invest in public transportation, support smart growth policies and transit-oriented development, and set traffic reduction targets (using tools like congestion prices to reach them).

The authors looked at a variety of policies they say can be applied all over the country, in cities, small towns and rural areas.

California scored highest, with an overall score of 82 out of 100, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story. Mott Smith, a smart growth-minded real estate developer based in Los Angeles, said he’s pleased to be living in a state that is getting so much right. “But I hope our leaders don’t get the wrong idea that they can just relax and rest on their laurels and not push even further,” he said, “because we still have quite a ways to go.”

Even the top-ranked state has a lot of room for improvement, the report authors note.

California scored very well in the Linking Transportation and Land Use sub-category, yet only contributes 16 percent of the state’s overall public transportation funds. Similarly, while the state did very well in the overall Policy category (85 points), it did relatively worse in the Investment category (58 points). Though California has many of the right policies in place, the state could improve the effectiveness of its strong smart growth and transit oriented development policies, further supporting a reduction of transportation-related GHG emissions if the state focused a greater proportion of its transportation funds on cleaner transportation modes and projects such as transit and non-motorized facilities.

Some unexpected results from the rankings: New Jersey cleaned up, finishing third out of all the states, but New York was way down at #21, between Nevada and New Mexico.

California got 17 out of 17 points for complete streets. Photo by Bryan Goebel.

Not unexpectedly, more urban states fared better. Arkansas ranked lowest with a total of 2 points.

Federal policy, of course, provides major incentives to keep states from enacting better policies of their own. Federal transportation funding is allocated according to vehicle miles traveled, fuel consumption, and highway lane miles – rewarding states that enact highway-oriented transportation policies with more money to continue those policies.

What kind of federal policies would encourage state DOTs to invest in more efficient and sustainable transportation modes? NRDC and SGA want to see the federal government:

• Set specific emissions reduction targets for the transportation sector.
• Make low-emission transportation plans a criterion for receiving federal aid.
• Update funding formulas to reward reductions in driving, instead of increases.
• Prioritize cleaner transportation modes.
• In the event that carbon is taxed or pollution permits are sold under a future climate policy, dedicate those revenues to fund clean transportation investment.

Former Maryland governor Parris Glendening (who leads Smart Growth America’s Leadership Institute) said he went over the results of the survey with current Governor Martin O’Malley. Maryland scored second out of all 50 states, but according to Glendening, O’Malley is already angling to beat California next time around.

“I’m hoping, in all candor, that just about every state looks at this and says, ‘How do we move up the ranking?’” Glendening said. “Not just because it’s fun to move up the ranking. But because it represents real progress in the overall picture of the country.”

Report author Colin Peppard of NRDC agreed. “The policies that support clean transportation are also very effective at promoting things like local economic growth, reducing the public health impacts of transportation like childhood asthma and respiratory disease, and also improving the affordability to households across the country,” he said. But a lot of states aren’t connecting the dots yet. “There’s a lot of potential out there.”

No wonder the residents of mid-coast Maine don't want traffic and sprawl to dilute this view. Image: Outside

The bypasses have been “hugely controversial, hugely disruptive, hugely expensive,” according to Kate Beaudoin, Chief of Planning for Maine DOT. She worked with local residents like White on a new corridor action plan to keep the small-town quality intact among the communities along Route 1.

It’s not just for nostalgia. Allowing Route 1 to be overwhelmed by traffic and sprawl would be detrimental to the tourism economy and the local culture. So a steering committee, made up of representatives from each of the 20 communities along a 100-mile stretch of the corridor, developed a plan to reduce traffic congestion.

The plan was recognized by the EPA yesterday as one of five winners of the agency’s annual awards for “Smart Growth Achievement.” It’s the first time the EPA has presented an award in the category of Rural Smart Growth.

The Gateway 1 Corridor Action Plan aims to preserve rural lands and habitat. Planners are kicking off a transit study to establish public transportation, and they’re integrating on- and off-street bike paths, according to lead planner Stacy Benjamin.

She notes that they used an open, collaborative process to get buy-in from the adjacent towns. But, she says, it wasn’t easy.

“It is a challenge to talk to people about land use regulation in Maine,” Benjamin said. “Some of the towns in the corridor don’t even have basic zoning.”

Sixteen of the communities have agreed to amend their local plans and ordinances to embrace the Gateway 1 plan.

It may not be a big surprise that New York, San Francisco and Portland were also recognized by the EPA for their smart growth initiatives. Their contributions to urban planning are well documented and highly touted, including on our pages. It was satisfying to see Baltimore, a not-so-usual suspect, win for “Smart Growth and Green Building.” But rural places like mid-coast Maine don’t often get singled out for praise on “urban” design, and the inclusion of the Gateway 1 plan was significant.

Now is a key time for advocates to sharpen their arguments about how rural areas and small towns benefit from smart growth principles. With a Republican majority taking control in the House, many of whom represent rural areas, they’ll need to be shown a vision of livability that they can relate to. As we’ve mentioned before, some House Republican leaders have made it clear that the way urbanists talk about “livability” doesn’t resonate with them.

The story of Maine’s award-winning corridor plan can help rural representatives understand that their interests align with smart growth too.