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The majority of the roads and highways built in America are simply bad investments. Continuing this pattern will only ensure that wasteful projects consume larger chunks of our federal, state, and local budgets, without addressing the real need for transportation options.

This Streetfacts chapter has a bit more math than usual, but we think we’ve made an entertaining and accessible profile of how government agencies routinely justify unnecessary road projects. The example we’ve chosen to illustrate the problem is a federally-funded “diamond-diverter” interchange in Colorado. The project as proposed may look like a pretty good deal for taxpayers at first, but after crunching the numbers, you’ll see that’s not the case at all.

Much of the inspiration for this piece comes from the outstanding work of Strong Towns, an organization that emphasizes obtaining a higher return on infrastructure investments. Strong Towns Executive Director Charles Marohn, Jr. has been getting his message out through what he calls curbside chats, and we’ll soon be debuting a Streetfilm that features his work.

If you live close to a transit station, chances are you’ve weathered the recession better than your friends who don’t.

Your transportation costs are probably lower, since you can take transit instead of driving. Transit-served areas are usually more walkable and bikeable too, multiplying your options. And while home values plummeted during a recession that was triggered by a massive housing bubble, your home probably held its value relatively well – if you live near transit.

The National Association of Realtors and the American Public Transportation Association commissioned the Center for Neighborhood Technology to study the impact of transit access on home values during the recession. For the report, “The New Real Estate Mantra: Location Near Public Transportation” [PDF], CNT looked at five metro regions — Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

While nearly everyone in hard-hit cities experienced some setback from tanking housing prices, transit-served areas were largely insulated from the worst of it, CNT found:

Across the study regions, the transit shed outperformed the region as a whole by 41.6 percent. In all of the regions the drop in average residential sales prices within the transit shed was smaller than in the region as a whole or the non-transit area. Boston station areas outperformed the region the most (129 percent), followed by Minneapolis-St. Paul (48 percent), San Francisco and Phoenix (37 percent), and Chicago (30 percent).

This is consistent with a study released last year by the Center for Housing Policy showing that access to rail transit created a “transit premium” for nearby home values of between six and 50 percent. That study, like CNT’s, looked at Minneapolis and Chicago, as well as Portland. The Center for Transit Oriented Development has also looked at this phenomenon and found transit premiums as high as 150 percent.

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Just how absurd have American development patterns become over the past few decades?

Behold: Two houses with adjoining backyards in suburban Orlando. If you want to travel the streets from point A on Anna Catherine Drive to point B on Summer Rain Drive, which are only 50 feet apart, you’ll have to go a minimum of seven miles. The trip would take almost twenty minutes in a car, according to Google Maps.

Windy street patterns, full of cul-de-sacs and circles, have become such a ubiquitous feature of the suburbs that they mostly escape remark. But disconnected streets have many insidious consequences for the environment, public health, and social equity.

For one, the lack of a functional street grid funnels traffic onto wide arterial roads — which tend to be the most dangerous places for pedestrians. Furthermore, disconnected streets discourage trips by foot or bike. People who can drive have no incentive to walk or bike anywhere because the trips would be too long and dangerous, while people who can’t drive are effectively trapped in their own homes, or are highly dependent on caretakers.

The Congress for the New Urbanism’s Sustainable Street Network Principles guide outlines seven principles for walkable, safe streets. The number one principle is to “create a street network that supports communities and places.”

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Congratulations are owed to Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. He’s scored a victory on his transportation funding plan, cementing his legacy (though infuriating conservatives, including his hand-picked successor). His achievement is being called the first bipartisan initiative to pass in Virginia in decades. And what does this great deed accomplish? Secure revenue to fuel a new era of wasteful road-building in the commonwealth of Virginia.

Virginia’s state House and Senate both voted this weekend to approve McDonnell’s funding plan for transportation, despite opposition from anti-tax activists. McDonnell’s original proposal to eliminate the gas tax entirely got massaged a little bit, turning into a 3.5 percent tax on the wholesale price of gas.

His proposal to raise the sales tax survived the legislature, as did the $100 tax on alternative fuels – an idea that is somewhat less backwards now that some semblance of gas tax remains. Democrats hate it, though, and McDonnell has already signaled a vague willingness to “review” it.

The sales tax hike, however, is as backwards as ever. McDonnell is raising the sales tax 0.3 percent in most parts of the state but 6 percent in the populous Hampton Roads and northern Virginia areas. Much of the extra funds raised in those areas will go to local projects, but it still means the most urban and transit-rich areas, where most of the state’s non-drivers live, will pay more for a plan that disproportionately funds rural roads.

Drivers will pay five cents per gallon less than they did under the old gas tax, given current prices — shrinking their contribution by about 30 percent. Rather than strengthen the gas tax’s small but important incentive to drive less, McDonnell’s plan turns it the other way.

The other reason the sales tax hike won’t do the trick is that sales taxes aren’t an appropriate tool when what you need is a stable source of funding.

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This is the final 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 and the second part looked at Oklahoma DOT boss Gary Ridley. Both Wray and Ridley left the DOTs to work as asphalt industry lobbyists, only to return to the public sector later on. 

This edition of our Revolving Door series features TxDOT Director Phil Wilson, whose chief qualification for leading the $10 billion-a-year agency seems to be not his transportation or administrative expertise, but his cozy relationship with the governor.

Wilson has held half a dozen public offices under Texas Governor Rick Perry, including secretary of state and personal communications director. While Wilson was serving as the governor’s deputy chief of staff, in 2006, he helped set in motion a “public private partnership” on wind energy that cost taxpayers a bundle, but offered some personal benefits to both him and the governor. We relay this anecdote, even though it doesn’t directly relate to transportation, because it speaks to the level of cronyism and deal-making that Wilson brings to the office of state-wide transportation commissioner in the second most-populous state in the union.

As a member of the governor’s cabinet, Wilson recommended the state pay for the construction of utility lines from wind farms in the western part of Texas to the more populous eastern half. He estimated the deal would cost Texas taxpayers a few hundred million dollars. But according to a report from Texans for Public Justice [PDF], when contracts were awarded in 2009 the price had ballooned to $5 billion.

By then, Wilson had left the Perry administration to work as vice president and lobbyist for the energy company Luminant, one of the country’s largest wind energy buyers. Between 2008 and 2011, Phil Wilson reported he received between $250,000 and $470,000 in total compensation as a lobbyist for Luminant, according to Texans for Public Justice. (In Texas, lobbyists report their wages in ranges.) Meanwhile, Wilson helped Texas Energy Future Holdings, the parent company of Luminant, win the biggest utility line contract, for a cool $1.3 billion, TPJ reported.

At the same time, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, Luminant was stepping up to help ensure Rick Perry’s reelection. The company donated $633,575 to the governor’s campaign fund from 2001 to 2011. Last year, the whole thing came full circle when Perry welcomed Wilson back into public service. Wilson was appointed by Perry to head TxDOT, making him the first non-engineer ever to hold the position. The Texas media criticized the appointment, calling Wilson a “political hack” with a thin resume. Terri Hall, founder of Texans Uniting for Freedom and Reform, called the move “flaming pay-to-play cronyism.”

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One of the top goals of the national transportation reform movement is to get state DOTs to spend their money more wisely. The feds distribute tens of billions of dollars to state DOTs each year with very few strings attached. But for every state like Massachusetts or Tennessee that’s decided to shift toward building walkable streets and away from highway construction, there are plenty of state DOTs that continue to build very expensive, sprawl-inducing roads, even though they can’t afford to maintain what they already have.

In many states, big decisions about how to spend money have less to do with the actual public benefits of a given project than the rewards that accrue to elected officials. With billions of dollars at stake, transportation departments can be used to reward favored constituencies or to achieve other political goals. Witness Birmingham’s $4.7 billion zombie highway, which won’t do much besides line the pockets of politically-connected companies. Or how about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s decision in 2010 to kill the ARC rail tunnel connection to New York’s Penn Station, which threw away years of preparation so Christie could win national attention from movement conservatives and appeal to his suburban base by diverting the funds to roadbuilding.

Sometimes transportation decisions amount to little more than cronyism, which is never more obvious than when a governor hires an industry lobbyist to run his state DOT. For this series, which we’re calling “The Revolving Door,” Streetsblog looked at three states where governors have gone so far as to put a lobbyist for the roadbuilding or energy industries in charge of transportation policy.

To kick off the Revolving Door series, we’re taking a look at Ohio Department of Transportation Director Jerry Wray, nicknamed the “asphalt sheriff,” who managed to sandwich a lobbying position at an asphalt industry group in between his two terms as ODOT head.

“ODOT is a machine for the road contractors. Everything that they do is intended to produce more gas tax revenue so there can be more revenue for ODOT.”

- Ken Prendergast, All Aboard Ohio

Wray first filled ODOT’s top office under Republican Governor George Voinovich in the 1990s, when he was often accused of favoring the asphalt industry, according to the Columbus Dispatch. After “retiring” from ODOT in 1999, he became vice president of Flexible Pavements of Ohio, an asphalt industry lobbying group. He was then brought back into the public sector when Republican Governor John Kasich took office in 2009. Major road builders like Columbus-based Kokosing Construction and its founder Bill Burgett were among Kasich’s largest donors.

Right away, Wray and Kasich let Ohioans know they had new priorities for the state — the kind of priorities that would certainly please Wray’s former employer. In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Kasich said he and Wray shared a similar philosophy on transportation: namely, a deeply partisan obsession with obstructing the state’s passenger rail plans — the “3C” train service connecting Columbus, Cincinnati, and Columbus that the Obama administration had pledged $400 million to start up. “His people that he will bring on will understand: no games, no politics, no train,” Kasich said of Wray. Killing the train — which would have cost the state a paltry $17 million annually to operate, less than the state currently spends cleaning and maintaining highway rest areas — was Kasich’s first act after being elected.

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If you’ve had your head stuck inside street design manuals or engineering guides – if you’ve been thinking at the level of the bulb-out or the bollard – I’ve got a present for you.

I wouldn’t have expected to find it in Foreign Policy magazine, but last week, Patrick Doherty of the New America Foundation published in its pages a big-picture, visionary manifesto calling for America to exert global leadership and help the planet “accommodate 3 billion additional middle­class aspirants in two short decades ­­without provoking resource wars, insurgencies, and the devastation of our planet’s ecosystem.” And Doherty sees walkable communities as a key to achieving America’s strategic goals in the years ahead. (Don’t tell Glenn Beck.)

Doherty names inequality, economic depression, resource depletion, and natural disasters as “the four horsemen of the coming decades.” A big contributor to those four horsemen was the suburban experiment of the post-war period and its ongoing perpetuation. Doherty asserts that today, “the country’s economic engine is misaligned to the threats and opportunities of the 21st century.” More highways and subdivisions, in other words, aren’t going to make America prosperous and secure.

So walkable communities should be at the center of a redefinition of American economic policy, Doherty writes:

Economists from Bernanke to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman agree that the predominant factor driving long-­term unemployment is weakness in aggregate demand. Fortunately, due to large-­scale demographic shifts over the past 20 years, the United States is sitting astride three vast pools of it. It is now imperative to design a new economic engine to exploit this demand while restoring America’s fiscal health.

The first pool of demand is homegrown. American tastes have changed from the splendid isolation of the suburb to what advocates are calling the “five­-minute lifestyle” ­­ work, school, transit, doctors, dining, playgrounds, entertainment all within a five­ minute walk of the front door. From 2014 to 2029, baby boomers and their children, the millennial generation, will converge in the housing marketplace ­­ seeking smaller homes in walkable, service-­rich, transit­-oriented communities. Already, 56 percent of Americans seek this lifestyle in their next housing purchase. That’s roughly three times the demand for such housing after World War II.

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Real estate in the United States, it turns out, isn’t really guided by “the invisible hand” of the free market.

In truth, federal policy puts a finger on the scale in a major way. Even apart from the quasi-governmental Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, the federal government is the single largest investor in the American real estate market. And according to a new report from Smart Growth America, each year an assortment of subsidies, tax credits, and deductions exerts $450 billion worth of influence on the location and character of American residences and commercial spaces.

That massive influence can distort the market in significant, and insidious, ways.

“Viewed as whole, federal funds are not targeted to those most in need, are not targeted to strengthen existing communities and are not targeted to places where people have economic opportunities,” says Smart Growth America’s research team.

For starters, according to SGA, not a single federal program is primarily focused on support for existing neighborhoods. Government priorities are often contradictory on this front, with subsidies operating at cross-purposes. One program may subsidize new housing in undeveloped locations, for instance, while another attempts to shore up the city neighborhoods left behind. These programs also fail to factor in what it costs to support real estate development: There is no preference for projects with lower long-term infrastructure costs, leading to higher spending on things like roads and sewers at the local and state levels.

Overall, the report suggests, federal real estate interventions undermine market trends toward the development of more walkable places. About 85 percent of federal housing subsidies flow to single-family housing over multi-family, although only 65 percent of American households are homeowners and the majority of renters live in multi-family buildings. This has hampered the market for rental housing even as demand for multi-family rental housing has soared following the housing bust.

“Federal real estate spending is stuck in the past,” said smart growth-focused real estate developer Chris Leinberger in an SGA-sponsored call with reporters yesterday. “It’s not what the market wants today, it’s what the market wanted in the ’70s and ’80s and into the ’90s.”

Leinberger added that while consumers are demanding walkable urbanism, federal policy stands in the way of that kind of development — to the detriment of the economy.

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It’s been a bad few years for homeowners around the country, and those in greater Philadelphia are no different. But people who owned houses in Philadelphia’s center city or suburban areas near a walkable town center fared better than others.

According to a new report from the Congress for the New Urbanism, the homes in greater Philadelphia that suffered the steepest losses of the housing crisis were those in the most car-centric, sprawling neighborhoods. That was exactly the opposite of what occurred in the last housing downturn, when larger, single-family housing in disconnected, far-flung neighborhoods retained more of its value, researchers found:

During the first housing downturn of 1989-1995, housing prices declined the greatest in the urban core center (-33.7% in the center city), second-most in the central city of Philadelphia as a whole (-17.6%) and least in the lower-density areas of the suburban counties (-14.3%). But during the most-recent housing downturn of 2007-2012, home price declines have been the greatest in the low-density suburbs (-32.7%), second-most in Philadelphia County (-26.7%) and the smallest in the urban core of the center city (-20.2%).

The study evaluated the urban character of each zip code in the region, using criteria like housing density, transit accessibility, mix of land uses and other indicators. This method was employed to examine the relationship between urban form and the housing market, instead of using crude measurements like the political boundaries between suburbs and the city.

The authors attribute the new dynamic to rising energy prices, as well as the revitalization of central city Philadelphia and shifting housing preferences, especially among seniors and young people. The findings are consistent with other studies that have found walkable, transit-accessible places have bounced back stronger from this housing downturn than more car-centric areas.

This whole “peak car” may be more than just a sustainability nut’s fantasy. We’ve seen time after time that young people are souring on car culture and finding other ways to get around and connect with friends. We know that the suburban sprawl that fueled the rise of the automobile is in decline. And now The Economist – no treehugging lefty publication – is listing off reason after reason why the trend of declining driving — “peak car,” they call it — is here to stay.

First, let’s be clear: Driving rates are plateauing and even dropping in developed countries, or what The Economist bluntly calls “the rich world.” Developing countries are a few decades behind and are just entering a car acquisition stage. According to a study conducted earlier this year, 20 developed countries show a “saturating trend” on driving. The results are the same for all three measures of saturation: total distance driven, distance per driver and total trips made. “After decades when each individual was on average travelling farther every year, growth per person has slowed distinctly, and in many cases stopped altogether,” the article states.

Is it just the recession? High unemployment? Stubborn gas prices? The Economist, like many analysts before, says the trend goes deeper than those temporary factors. Here’s why:

Generational shift. The generation that went cruising around town in tail-finned Chevys is in retirement now. More American retirees have drivers licenses than ever before — and “more than 90 percent of people aged 60-64 can drive, a larger share than for any other cohort,” the article states. “New generations of drivers will replace old ones rather than add to the total number.” Older people tend to drive shorter distances than younger ones.

Meanwhile, throughout the developed world, young people are less eager to start driving and they’re getting their licenses later. Studies show that people who learn to drive later in life continue to drive less. Gordon Stokes of Oxford University found that people in Britain who learn in their late 20s drive 30 percent less than those who learn a decade earlier.

Geography. The growing preference for urban living, fueled in part by a desire to walk more and drive less, also reduces VMT. In wealthy countries, car use is still stable or increasing in rural areas, but that’s not where the future is. “The OECD, a rich-country think-tank, expects that by 2050, 86 percent of the rich world’s population will live in urban areas, up from 77 percent in 2010.” Nature magazine recently mapped the urbanization trend, noting, “The United Nations predicts that cities will absorb all of the world’s population growth — of around 2.3 billion people — in the next four decades.” [emphasis mine]

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