The former director of the Center for Disease Control’s Environment Health Department will take to the airwaves Tuesday in an interview with PBS’s Tavis Smiley. The interview will run in coordination with Dr. Jackson’s four-hour documentary series, Designing Healthy Communities (check local listings).

Dr. Jackson spent years researching public health epidemics and zeroed in on car dependence and sprawl as leading factors in America’s diabetes and obesity epidemics.

“We have built America in a way that is, I believe, is fundamentally unhealthy,” Dr. Jackson says. “It prevents us from walking. It inhibits us from socializing. It removes trees and the things that make our air quality better. We could not have designed an environment that is more difficult for people’s well being at this point.”

He adds: “Two percent of the United States’ gross domestic product goes to the treatment of diabetes. This is a crushing economic impact.”

The series looks at communities across the country, highlighting best practices while attempting to reveal the human suffering that results from poorly planned communities.

The full interview will be available 24 hours before screening at PBS.org.

Graphic: Planetizen

Walkable development pays — that’s the conclusion of a study recently outlined in Planetizen. For cities and towns facing tight budgets — just about everywhere in the United States right now — the smart way to boost tax revenue is to encourage mixed-use, walkable development, as the above graphic amply illustrates.

The for-profit development company Public Interest Projects (PIP) reports that urbanism produces much more tax revenue for localities than sprawl. Analyzing tax data around Asheville, North Carolina, the research team found that downtowns — places with the most places to shop per acre — often subsidize the more suburban parts of the community. In places like Asheville, mixed-use developments offered up to eight times the tax revenue per acre of a Super Walmart.

Former PIP employee Joseph Minicozzi, now a principal with for-profit development firm Urban3, tells Planetizen readers that many cities are approaching development from the wrong frame of mind (emphasis added):

Our mistake has been looking at the overall value of a development project rather than its per unit productivity. Especially relevant in these times of limited public means, every city should be thinking long and hard about encouraging, and not accidentally discouraging, the property tax bonus that comes with mixed-use urbanism. Put simply, density gets far more bang for its buck.

He concludes that public policies that encourage low-density development urgently need to be reformed:

Communities across the United States are going broke, and we can rightly look to our municipal finance systems and our failure to fully appreciate the payoff for density as a big part of the cause. Let’s all do the math so we can make some positive changes in the system because, in the end, downtown pays.

The authors of the comprehensive plan for Brainerd, Minnesota (pop: 13,590) probably thought they had a great idea: Take the properties along busy Highway 210 in the east part of town, an assortment of run-down or vacant storefronts, and encourage their replacement by “highway-oriented businesses.” The plan bases this strategy on the idea that “having a strong highway commercial area… provides for a healthy downtown.”

“The problem,” writes Charles Marohn of Strong Towns, “is that ‘strong’ and ‘highway commercial’ are – in almost all cases – mutually exclusive terms.” Furthermore, the “fast food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations and other auto-oriented businesses” promoted by the comprehensive plan are actually worth less to the city than the marginal establishments that are there already.

Marohn compares the “old and blighted” development on one block — the kind of development the town would like to get rid of — to the “shiny and new” development down the street, a fast food joint with lots of surface parking:

The eleven old and blighted lots [above left] — some of the most undesirable commercial property in the city — arranged in the traditional development pattern along the incompatible, major arterial of Highway 210 have a combined tax base of $1,136,500.

To compare, the Taco John’s property [above right] — the one that is not only shiny and new but configured precisely as the city of Brainerd desires the old and blighted properties to someday be — has a total valuation of only $803,200.

At its nastiest and most decrepit, fighting the negative auto traffic speeding by and the absence of pedestrian connectivity, lacking all natural advantage from the neighboring land uses that would ideally accompany a traditional neighborhood design, the old and blighted traditional commercial block still outperforms the new, auto-oriented development by 41%. [emphasis his]

The city is shrinking its own tax base by encouraging businesses to turn their backs on traditional Main Streets in favor of busy arterial highways. A cheaper way to maximize these parcels’ value, according to Marohn, would be to restore connectivity to the nearby residential area.

The City of Grand Rapids was awarded $459,224 for the Michigan Street Corridor Plan. Image: City of Grand Rapids

HUD granted nearly $96 million in 27 Community Challenge grants and 29 Regional Planning grants.

“The communities selected to receive these grants have a great opportunity to put their plans for smarter development and economic revitalization into action,” said Geoffrey Anderson of Smart Growth America in an email. “These grants are bittersweet, however, since they come just days after Congress passed legislation that did not include specific funding for another round of HUD grants next year.”

The Community Challenge grants are awarded to communities and organizations working to integrate transportation and housing, a key smart-growth goal and the focus of many livability advocates, like the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which seeks to include transportation in the calculation of housing costs. With a HUD grant, communities can update their local plans and zoning and building codes to support mixed-use development, affordable housing and the re-use of older buildings, according to HUD.

Regional Planning grants do much the same thing on a regional scale, with a priority on partnerships, including arts and culture and philanthropy. These grants aren’t just for planning, either; they’re also available for implementation of well-drawn plans for sustainable development.

As if it weren’t tragic enough to see Congress kill off the office’s funding, it’s especially sad that it had to happen during a banner year for interest in the program, in which applications outstripped available money more than 5 to 1. And, according to HUD, they’re encouraging just the kinds of partnerships they’re designed for:

This year, HUD’s investment of $95.8 million is garnering $115 million in matching and in-kind contributions – which is over 120 percent of the Federal investment – from the 56 selected grantees. This brings to total public and private investment for this round of grants to over $211 million.

In truth, HUD’s Office of Sustainable Communities wasn’t completely zeroed out – there’s enough in the budget to keep the lights on, but not enough to make grants. I’m not sure what the office will do if it’s not making grants, though. Maybe some low-level cooperation with DOT and EPA can continue – after all, it seems like a no-brainer that the efforts the three agencies have made fit well within the goals lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been trumpeting this reauthorization cycle: streamlining federal process, eliminating duplication, accelerating project delivery. Aren’t those things Republicans and Democrats can get behind?

Apparently the members of the conference committee thought such federal cost-cutting – and the livability programs the partnership supports – were dispensable. But HUD’s extensive documentation of the grants in this cycle proves otherwise.

For example, Michigan brings home more than $7 million for four different projects: corridor planning in Grand Rapids, denser housing for the county where Ann Arbor sits, tri-county sustainability planning in mid-Michigan, and region-wide data analysis in the northwestern part of the state.

Kaid Benfield of NRDC’s Switchboard blog spotlights a worthy project in Boston:

Consider the distressed neighborhooods along Boston’s Fairmount/Indigo transit corridor, for example. Ninety thousand people live within walking distance of the line (but not within walking distance of the limited number of stops), their median income some 35 percent below the state average. Two-thirds of the Boston region’s foreclosures were along the corridor. But currently the rail service lacks stops in the low-income communities that most need them; as a result the line primarily serves commuters passing through. HUD is awarding the City of Boston $1,865,160 to facilitate mixed-income, mixed-use development in conjunction with the construction of four strategically placed new stations (and improvements to existing stations) along the line.

The Sustainable Communities Initiative isn’t just about federal bureaucratic efficiency, though it is about that. It’s also signaled a sea change in mainstream thinking about planning. If even big, ossified agencies like HUD, DOT and EPA can learn to intertwine work on housing, transportation, economic development, and environmental protection, the barriers between those sectors begin to blur and fade away. Community and regional planning grants like the ones announced this week were a celebrated symbol of the long-overdue integration of those fields, and they’ve made an incalculable difference in the communities they’ve assisted. With any luck, the next Congress won’t be so short-sighted in making spending cuts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came an interesting chain of events:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another one bites the dust. A vacant Walmart in Lewiston, Washington. Photo: Flickr/Happy Vampire

These empty husks — yet to be filled by any other retail tenant — are part of the detritus left behind by a paradigm shift in the real estate industry. Signs of the changing times, they tell us what kind of society we were before the bubble burst.

Now, as the commercial real estate industry regroups, evidence is mounting that Walmart and other mega-retailers will take a much different form than they have in the past. The new American shopping experience, according to many industry observers, will be less “suburban big-box” and more “urban destination.”

The demise of several mega-retail chains during the recession, including Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things, helped produce a vast oversupply of retail space, particularly that of the giant, boxy, just-off-the-interstate variety. Last summer, the research arm of giant commercial real estate firm Colliers International reported that there was nearly 300 million square feet of vacant big box retail space on the market — 34 percent of total retail vacancy left behind by a recession that walloped commercial real estate almost as hard as housing.

Since 2008 alone, 120 million square feet of big box retail space has become available. To put such numbers in perspective, that is the equivalent of the total shopping center space in Cincinnati, Kansas City and Baltimore combined, Colliers reported.

This period of retrenchment has humbled even the once-mightiest of retail forces. CNN reported last month that Walmart stores suffered their ninth-straight quarterly drop in sales. Another sign of the times: Walmart is no longer enough of a bargain for U.S. consumers, it appears. The mega-retailer has been losing market share to dollar stores.

The situation has apparently reached the point where the retail monolith is rethinking its whole carbon-gulping model. Walmart is joining other retailers in thinking smaller and more urban, says Ed McMahon, a fellow at the Urban Land Institute.

“What the recession has made completely clear is that we have way too much retail,” McMahon said. “We are going from the era of the big box to the era of the small box.”

Enter the “Walmart Express.”

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.”

As baby boomers age, more of them are finding that auto dependent suburbia doesn't work for everybody. Photo: Transportation for America

However, more than 20 percent of seniors (age 65 and up) do not drive at all. In the spread-out, transit-poor communities where many of them live, seniors who don’t drive miss out on countless opportunities. According to a report released today by Transportation for America called “Aging in Place: Stuck Without Options”:

Absent access to affordable travel options, seniors face isolation, a reduced quality of life and possible economic hardship. A 2004 study found that seniors age 65 and older who no longer drive make 15 percent fewer trips to the doctor, 59 percent fewer trips to shop or eat out, and 65 percent fewer trips to visit friends and family, than drivers of the same age.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology conducted the analysis for the T4A report, finding that a large proportion of seniors lack transit access currently, and that in 2015, just a few short years away, 15.5 million seniors will find themselves without transportation options

“My generation grew up and reared our children in communities that, for the first time in human history, were built on the assumption that everyone would be able to drive an automobile,” said John Robert Smith, former mayor of Meridian, Mississippi and co-chair of Transportation for America.

When seniors can’t get out, the local economy suffers too. Smith says when he was mayor, Meridian set a goal of recruiting retirees.

“Retirees bring their retirement funds into your communities, deposit them in your banks; they support your school systems but they don’t make demands on your school systems, they don’t put children in the school system; they are law-abiding, good citizens so they don’t have that impact on your police department, they’re just an all around benefit and plus for your community,” Smith said.

Even seniors who can still drive might find that they feel nervous driving after dark, or that their reflexes are slowing down. Still others start looking for other transportation options because their fixed incomes can’t absorb high gas prices.

CNT’s definition of access to transit is not without its problems. It defines poor access differently for different sized metro areas, which makes sense if you’re comparing areas to each other, but for all intents and purposes, a senior with access to 11 transit lines in densely-developed New York City is a lot better off than a person without decent access to even one transit line in Houma, Louisiana – yet both are considered equally transit-poor by the study. (Of course, only 41 percent of New York seniors will lack good transit access in four years, as opposed to 87 percent in Houma.)

Meanwhile, the information on the metro areas was pulled from a larger data pool which considered “transit access” to mean that a person was within half a mile of a rail station or a quarter mile from a bus stop. Those distances weren’t revised for this study, although this study dealt with a population for whom a half-mile may be a significantly long walk. Reducing the distance allowed for a definition of “access” would only increase the numbers of seniors stranded by the current system.

Transportation for America calls for federal-level fixes to the problem, which the group hopes to see included in the next transportation reauthorization bill:

• Increased dedicated funding for buses, trains, vanpools, specialized transit and ridesharing
• Continued funding of transit through the Highway Trust Fund
• Inclusion of seniors and other community stakeholders as states and metros develop plans for meeting the mobility needs of seniors
• Continued authority for states to “flex” a portion of their highway funds for transit projects and programs
• A “complete streets” approach to make streets and intersections around transit stops safe for people of all ages and abilities

Those recommendations might help geographically isolated seniors reach services, but is it really the responsibility of the taxpayer to subsidize the decisions people have made to live in places that explicitly reject transit accessibility? Should those inefficient, low-density, sprawling areas be retrofitted with transit now that their populations are aging?

Cristina Martin Firvida, who works on these issues for AARP, said helping seniors marooned in those areas helps everybody. And besides, the suburbs were built through federal policies encouraging outward development after the second world war, she said – it’s not just that one person built a house on top of a mountain and then demanded that taxpayer-subsidized transit come to them. “The suburbs is where our economy and our entire society has moved to since the fifties,” Firvida said. “It’s where everyone lives.”

However, Cathie Berger of Atlanta’s Area Agency on Aging acknowledged that that type of development isn’t helping, and that at the very least, metro areas can try to change the way they plan land use. (And this is coming from Atlanta, the worst-ranked large metro area the report found, with 90 percent of seniors lacking adequate transit access by 2015.)

“We are trying to shift away from the continued development of the largest subdivisions that really don’t provide the options people need,” Berger said.

She also went beyond the report’s recommendations, which maintain a tight focus on transportation solutions, to explore other land use options that can make for more senior-friendly neighborhoods. “We are trying to retrofit the built environment to make our communities more age-friendly and enable our seniors to age in place,” Berger said. “This includes making our communities more walkable and improving access to services. We are also, for instance, working with our county and city planning departments to revise zoning codes to make it easier to develop denser projects that offer diverse housing.”

“It’s really important we get communities that work for people, having grocery stores and the amenities people need in their own community,” added Peter Haas, the chief research scientist for the Center for Neighborhood Technology. “And if that’s only market-driven, it’s not going to happen in a low-density suburban location. So the incentives need to be there, or there has to be a redistribution of development patterns.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Brookings report ranks the New York region 13th in transit accessibility. Can that be right?

Does the New York City region really rank only 13th in the nation in providing transit access to jobs? Has it truly been bested by a top five of Honolulu, San Jose, Salt Lake City, Tucson and Fresno? That’s what a new report from the Brookings Institution claims, but don’t worry New Yorkers, there are very good reasons to second-guess that conclusion.

The report, which Streetsblog Capitol Hill’s Tanya Snyder recapped earlier today, is an impressive piece of research. Brookings built the largest database in its long history and developed some pretty sophisticated tools to analyze it. Some of the data points that Tanya pulled out in her piece add tremendously to our understanding of the connection between transit and land use across the country. That said, when it comes to ranking the top cities, the findings are a little too counterintuitive to be true.

Notably, there appears to be a weak connection between the cities with the best transit access to jobs, as ranked by Brookings, and the cities where commuters actually use transit. New York City came in 13th in the first ranking despite being far and away the top in the latter.

According to Census data gathered by Brookings itself, 30.5 percent of New York region commuters take transit to work. Compare that to Honolulu, where only 7.5 percent of commuters ride transit, or the four runners-up at 3.1 percent, 3.0 percent, 2.5 percent and 1.3 percent. It’s not even close.

In other words, whatever Brookings is measuring in this report doesn’t seem to be particularly important for the men and women who actually decide whether to hop on a bus or in the car each morning. Whether it’s poor off-peak transit service, easy parking at home and at work, or even just transit-skeptical local cultures, something is making it so that access to jobs by transit doesn’t translate into actually making use of it.

Some of the reasons for New York’s unexpectedly low ranking may be technical. The report excludes commuters traveling between metro areas, as defined by the federal government. That seriously undercounts the number of jobs that residents of Fairfield County, for example, can access via transit, counting jobs in Bridgeport but not in New York City.

More fundamentally, however, at the top of the ranking the Brookings approach may give too much weight to transit that no one is likely to use. In the New York region, for example, they show that 89.6 percent of residents live within three-quarters of a mile of a transit stop, while 95.6 percent of San Jose residents do. Assuming transit agencies provide service in an at least somewhat rational fashion, however, those extra six percent of residents in San Jose must be among the people in the region least likely to ride transit. That extra coverage, likely off at the exurban fringe, is very low return, but counts fully in Brookings’ rankings.

That isn’t to say that coverage isn’t important. In certain areas, transit might only serve a small number of low-income and elderly riders while everyone else drives, but for those riders it’s absolutely essential.

Moreover, the Brookings report presents a worrying estimate of the upper bound of transit growth in the New York region. They estimate that only 36.6 percent of all jobs could be reached by a typical resident in 90 minutes or less. Considering that 30.5 percent of New York commuters already ride transit, this implies that the bulk of the transit-accessible jobs are already being accessed by transit.

That’s the legacy of decades of job sprawl in the region. “Even though we have the most extensive transit network in the country, the region outgrew this network in the post-war period,” said Regional Plan Association vice president for research Chris Jones. “Much of the job growth that occurred, especially during the 70s and 80s, occurred outside the reach of the subway and rail network.” Between 1970 and 2010, he said, New York City added 300,000 jobs while the rest of the region added 2,000,000. Unless job growth becomes far more concentrated in downtowns and near transit, transit commuting can only increase so much.

The Katy Prairie, one of the country's last remaining natural grasslands and an important bird habitat, may be replaced with a highway and sprawl. Image: Houston Tomorrow

In this place — one of the country’s few remaining tall-grass prairies — something amazing happens each fall. First hundreds, then thousands, then millions of birds arrive here at Katy Prairie, an international wintering grounds for migratory birds, especially waterfowl.

Over the decades, this 1,000 square mile sanctuary has largely survived the encroachment of farmers and relentless development pressure from neighboring Houston, thanks in no small part to its dedicated supporters.

But the Katy Prairie has never faced a opponent like the Grand Parkway before. Piece by piece, the Houston area has been building a third — yes, third — bypass for the region. And much to the horror of local environmentalists, the next segment is planned to directly bisect this extraordinary habitat.

Development of this pristine land isn’t just collateral damage — it’s the point of the project. Project sponsors make no bones about it: The 15.2-mile Grand Parkway segment through Katy Prairie is a $462 million development project as much as it is a transportation project. Known as “Segment E,” it would be the third phase in a 180-mile “scenic bypass” for Houston. Each of the 11 segments is considered a separate and “independently justifiable project.”

Billy Burge of the Grand Parkway Association says right now there isn’t much need for Segment E, in terms of traffic. Burge and his colleagues don’t shy away from the fact that the project will generate more car trips and sprawl. In fact, they have what you might call a “build it and they will come” philosophy about road-building and traffic.

“There’s real demand in 15 to 17 years to have this,” said Burge, who chairs the association overseeing the project for the state and the region. “Once that link is completed, you’ll have a steady stream of traffic.”

To hear Burge and his colleagues at TexDOT and Harris County tell it, they are simply trying to get out ahead of what they see as inevitable: sprawl, on top of sprawl, on top of sprawl. But not in a bad way, they say.

“It will increase sprawl but that’s really the reason people come to Houston: to have a big house and a big yard,” said Burge. “You can call it sprawl, or you can call it quality of life.”

Bridgeland development advertises its closeness to the Katy Prairie. But if the Grand Parkway is completed, developments like this one will likely replace most of the important grasslands. Photo: Bridgeland

If you want to see what will likely replace the switchgrass and wildflowers of Katy, look to the Bridgeland development. This massive, 12,000-acre “new urbanism” development, where homes sell from $160,000 to north of $1 million, stalled in the real estate crisis. Since then, developers have stepped up pressure on local authorities to bring forward highway infrastructure needed to jump start sales.

Meanwhile, local environmentalists are pushing back. Conservationists and bird-watchers feel so strongly about the Katy Prairie that in 2009, when 1,000 acres were threatened by development, volunteers painstakingly dug up every inch and transplanted it on land owned by the Katy Prairie Conservancy.

In March 2009, the Sierra Club filed suit against the FHWA, alleging that the agency was wrong to provide preliminary environmental approval for the project. Though its first attempt to halt the project was struck down in court, the group is currently awaiting the results of an appeal.

Sierra’s Lone-Star Chapter charges that project sponsors purposely constrained “the purpose and need” section of the plan to preclude the no-build option. Further, the environmental assessment ignored the impact of induced growth.

The Sierra Club has also appealed to the Army Corps of Engineers to deny the permit needed to fill in wetlands. Wildlife concerns aside, the Sierra Club says, the Grand Parkway proposal presents a real flooding problem. The wetlands act as a sponge to prevent flooding downstream. Local transportation officials’ plan to fill in the prairie and build a new wetlands 30 miles away won’t cut it, said Sierra’s Brandt Mannchen.

“This project is a poster child of everything that’s bad about losing wetlands about reducing water quality,” he said.

The Sierra Club and other local environmental groups have proposed a series of alternatives. The Sierra Club, for example, would support making the whole structure a bridge or widening existing arterial roads that connect I-10 and US-290.

Each year, millions of birds winter in the grasslands of the Katy Prairie. Photo: Swamplots

Jay Crossley of the local think tank Houston Tomorrow says the money would be better spent improving transportation options where people already live, through transit, bikeways and micro-level road projects.

“It’s a speculative investment project while all our elected officials basically say we’re broke,” he said. “I think it has rightfully been characterized as the worst transportation project in the country.”

The reaction isn’t much more positive in the 221 pages of public comments [PDF] submitted to the Grand Parkway Association on Segment E.

“My hope is that Segment E will not be built at all because it will destroy the Katy Prairie as we know it and dramatically reduce wildlife habitat,” said Ken Hartman of Houston in a letter to project leaders.

Said Steve Gross of Houston: “The Katy Prairie is a precious and dwindling resource for wildlife, including thousands of birds that utilize this area for a wintering and breeding grounds. I oppose any development project that fails to recognize these important areas.”

Steven Gast, address not given, was more direct. “Such a waste of everything,” he said. “Where do I vote against this, and everyone associated with it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a letter to nonprofit Michigan Future, Inc., Basile vents his frustration with a leadership climate that has gone “berserk on suburbia.” (Basile is also the brains behind the Woodward Project, an initiative aimed at developing a vibrant livable center for Detroit.)

This instructive letter, sent by email under the subject line “Why our growing firm may have to leave Michigan,” explains how places like Detroit pay an economic price for lagging behind other regions on livability. Reprinted with permission of the author:

All…

Our recruiters are very blunt. They say it is almost impossible to recruit to Michigan without paying big premiums above competitive salaries on the coasts.

People – particularly affluent and educated people – just don’t want to live here. For example, below are charts of migration patterns based on IRS data. Black is inbound, red is outbound. Even though the CA economy is in very bad shape, there is still a mass migration to San Francisco vs. mass outbound migration from Oakland County (most notably to cities like SF, LA, Dallas, Atlanta, NY, DC, Boston, and Philly). San Fran only seems to be losing people to Portland, a place with even more open space and higher quality urban environments.

Net migration to San Francisco: The black lines represent inward migration and the red lines outward migration.

The situation for Michigan is even worse than it seems because those lines are net migration…

Net migration from Oakland County, Michigan.

There’s a simple reason why many people don’t want to live here: it’s an unpleasant place because most of it is visually unattractive and because it is lacking in quality living options other than tract suburbia. Some might call this poor ‘quality of life.’ A better term might be poor ‘quality of place.’ In Metro Detroit, we have built a very bad physical place. We don’t have charming, vibrant cities and we don’t have open space. What we do have are several thousand miles of streets that look like this:

Having moved here from California five years ago, I will testify that Metro Detroit is a very hard place to live. Ask any former Detroiter in California, and you will hear a consistent recital of the flaws that make Metro Detroit so unattractive. Things are spread too far apart. You have to drive everywhere. There’s no mass transit. There are no viable cities. Lots of it is really ugly, especially the mile after mile of sterile and often dingy suburban strip shopping and utility wires that line our dilapidated roads (note left, below). There’s no nearby open space for most people (living in Birmingham, it’s 45 minutes in traffic to places like Proud Lake or Kensington). It’s impossible to get around by bike without taking your life in your hands. Most people lead sedentary lifestyles.

There’s a grating ‘car culture’ that is really off-putting to many people from outside of Michigan. I heard these same complaints when I left 25 years ago. In a quarter century, things have only gotten considerably worse. Ironically, California is supposed to be a sprawling place. In my experience they are pikers compared to us. Did you know that Metro Detroit is one half the density of Los Angeles County?

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is that our region has gone berserk on suburbia to the expense of having any type of nearby open space or viable urban communities, which are the two primary spatial assets that attract and retain the best human capital. For example, I noted sadly the other day that the entire Oakland Country government complex was built in a field five miles outside of downtown Pontiac. I find that decision shocking. What a wasted opportunity for maintaining a viable downtown Pontiac, not to mention the open space now consumed by the existing complex. What possibly could have been going through their minds? Happily, most of the men who made those foolish decisions 30 or 40 years ago are no longer in policy-making roles.

A younger generation needs to recognize the immense folly that they perpetrated and begin the costly, decades long task of cleaning up the wreckage. These are problems, sure, but they could be easily overcome, especially in Oakland County, which is widely recognized as one of the best-run large counties in the country. But despite our talents and resources, the region’s problem of place may be intractable for one simple, sorry reason: Our political and business leadership does not view poor quality of place as a problem and certainly lacks motivation to address the issue.

Indeed, Brooks Patterson — an otherwise extraordinary leader — claims to love sprawl and says Oakland Country can’t get enough of it. These leaders presume that the region has ‘great’ quality of life (apparently defined as big yards, cul de sacs and a nearby Home Depot). In their minds, we just need to reopen a few more factories and all will be well. The cherished corollary to this is that Michigan and Metro Detroit have an ‘image’ problem and that if only people knew what great things were, they would consider living or investing here. The attitude of many in our region is that our problems are confined to Detroit city while the suburbs are thought to be lovely.

We don’t have a perception problem, we have a reality problem. Most young, highly talented knowledge workers from places like Seattle or San Francisco or Chicago find the even the upper end suburbs of Metro Detroit to be unappealing. I think long term residents including many leaders are simply so used to the dreary physical environment of southeast Michigan that it has come to seem normal, comfortable and maybe even attractive. Which is fine so long as we have no aspiration to attract talent and capital from outside our region.

My fears were confirmed when I began trying to gather local economic development literature to use as a recruiting tool. The deficits which so dog our region are sometimes heralded by this literature as assets. For example, some boosters trumpet our ‘unrivaled’ freeway system as if freeways and the sprawl they engender are ‘quality of life’ assets. In San Francisco, the place sucking up all the talent and money, they have removed — literally torn out of the ground — two freeways because people prefer not to have them. I noted one ‘Quality of Life’ page of a Detroit area economic development website featured a prominent picture of an enclosed regional shopping mall! Yuck. It’s theater of the absurd.

The people who put together that website must live in a different cultural universe from the high income/high education people streaming out of Michigan for New York, Chicago, and California. Not only is there no plan to address these issues, I fear that the public and their elected leaders in Michigan don’t even recognize the problem or want change. We have at least one bright spot in the nascent urban corridor between Pontiac and Ferndale, which is slowly building a critical mass of walkable urban assets. At the same time, there’s no coordinated effort to develop this. Indeed, MDOT officials lie awake at night thinking of ways to thwart the efforts of local communities along Woodward to become more walkable. Another symptom of the region’s peculiar and self-destructive adoration of the automobile. Even though the Big Three are a tiny shadow of their former selves, Michigan is still locked in the iron grip of their toxic cultural legacy.

I’d like to hang on another five years. I feel like we’re making a difference. But by the same token, I don’t see any forward progress or even a meaningful attempt at forward progress. It’s almost like the people running things are profoundly disconnected from the reality that many if not most talented knowledge workers find our region’s paradigm of extreme suburbanization to be highly unattractive. It seems to me that we are halfway through a hundred year death spiral in which the forces in support of the status quo become relatively stronger, as people with vision and ambition just give up and leave. As we descend this death spiral, we must in my mind be approaching the point of no return, where the constituency for reform dwindles below a critical threshold and the region’s path of self destruction becomes unalterable.

Thank you for considering my views. I welcome any opportunity to be of help to any efforts you may have to fix this.

Andrew Basile, Jr.
—
Andrew R. Basile, Jr.
Young Basile Hanlon & MacFarlane, P.C.
228 Hamilton Avenue, Suite 300
Palo Alto, California 94301

The end of the road. Will Charleston County elect to build eight more miles of I-526, a 40-year-old idea that many local residents oppose? Photo: The Post and Courier

But Charleston never got around to completing the arc. It comes to a stop about eight miles short of its planned destination in West Ashley, leaving the rural and suburban communities ahead un-scarred.

A few years ago, however, county officials decided to complete the 40-year-old highway plan after all. They applied for, and received, $420 million from the state transportation infrastructure bank.

Since then, the state has been moving forward with plans to construct an eight-mile stretch of highway from West Ashley through rural Johns Island to James Island, crossing the Stono River twice.

Under contract to Charleston County, the South Carolina Department of Transportation has continued to beat the drum for highway expansion even in the face of mounting public outcry and the introduction of a less-costly alternative proposal. In its refusal to consider ideas that do not conform to the limited-access highway model, SC DOT has staunchly upheld the bias for highway development that afflicts state transportation authorities nationwide.

In Charleston, reception to the I-526 expansion has been chilly, and an organized and outspoken opposition movement has taken hold. Locals question whether a 70s-era highway plan is still the proper formula for this historic yet increasingly modern southern city. Opposition has been strong enough that county officials have brought the plan to a standstill while they consider alternatives. But will advocates for a different approach successfully disrupt the entrenched practices of the state DOT?

Some of the loudest cries have come from rural and suburban communities worried they’ll be overwhelmed by the sprawling residential and commercial development — subdivisions, strip malls, parking lots — that come hand in hand with highways.

“What we’ve seen from the places where they have completed the horseshoe is crazy development,” said Rob Welch, a James Island Commissioner. “In the afternoon it’s very dangerous because the traffic literally backs up outside the exit of the interstate.”

“What we see it doing for us is just cutting an ugly scar through two beautiful islands and promoting development,” he continued. “Developers come in and build lots of big box stores.”

In a series of five public meetings on the project held by the South Carolina Department of Transportation, more than 1,200 residents turned out with a range of concerns — more than 62 percent of them opposed, compared to 32 percent in support, according to records kept by SC DOT [PDF]. Residents questioned whether the project would increase traffic and development and cost more than it is worth.

Kate Parks, land use program director with the Coastal Conservation League, said the extension will destroy wetlands and fuel sprawl. Parks says the project will jump-start rapid development on about 1,000 acres surrounding the new highway that are already zoned for development. But much of the remaining land is agricultural and could be rezoned. Parks also insists that the city’s major traffic problems are concentrated elsewhere, mainly along I-26, and questioned the wisdom of using the state’s limited resources on a project that won’t solve those problems.

When the state DOT requested proposals for the construction of the extension, the League submitted a plan called A New Way to Work. Their plan calls for street-grade changes to the region’s congested thoroughfares, like creating a more connected street grid. The League maintains that such improvements to the local street network could remedy the same congestion problems the 526 extension targets while saving millions that could be directed toward transit, more important regional corridors, or other pressing local concerns. (More about that plan in a future post.)

“A 40 year delay in getting a project completed might turn out to be one of the greatest blessings the city has ever been bestowed,” the League stated in its report. “Any project that proposes to spend a half billion dollars of tax revenue should do more than move cars from point A to point B. This investment should make life appreciably better in as many ways as possible.”

The League’s plan was one of 38 that were eliminated from consideration after a review by the state Department of Transportation.

The highway extension favored by SC DOT, "Alternative G," is pictured in dark green on this map. Image: SC DOT

The DOT’s “preferred alternative” is a four-lane limited-access parkway with at-grade intersections, to be divided by a 15-foot median. The road will have a posted speed limit of between 35 and 45 miles per hour, and, in a tinge of green, will be equipped with a path for biking and walking.

Make no mistake, this is still a massive road expansion. State officials estimate the project will cause the destruction of 17 acres of wetlands. It will create a noise impact on 137 homes and businesses and cost $489 million in 2009 dollars. Still, it is, on balance, the least destructive of the seven final proposals that cleared the state DOT’s screen, which were all variations on the highway extension theme.

David Kinard, project manager at SC DOT, acknowledged there were a lot of concerns about the plan “on both sides.” But the project has now been vetted through the agency’s public involvement process, he said, and the state DOT has been waiting on final word from the county before seeking additional environmental approval.

Now the situation is coming to a head. In the face of public opposition, county officials recently asked SC DOT to consider some alternative or modified proposals, including the Conservation League’s proposal.

Earlier this week, SC DOT fired back, refusing to go back on its recommendation for the highway expansion. State officials told the county they must choose between DOT’s “preferred alternative” or the “no-build” option. The county has yet to respond.

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. told local media sources that he remains supportive of the highway expansion. But some members of the county council have indicated they disagree.

In an editorial on the project earlier this week the Post and Courier encouraged the council to bring the project up for a vote, “if only to eliminate an unpopular option from future consideration.”

“In five hearings, residents spoke by a more than 2-to-1 margin against building I-526 across Johns Island, linking the James Island Connector and Savannah Highway,” the paper said. “So what was the reason for the public hearings? Applause?”

But there are no springs in Waukesha anymore. Over the years, as Waukesha evolved into a sprawling and affluent suburb of Milwaukee, its springs went dry or were paved over. More recently, the deep sandstone aquifer that is the town’s main source of water has been drained substantially and has become contaminated with radium.

An application by the city of Waukesha to divert water from Lake Michigan could exacerbate sprawl in the region. Pictured is the greenfield development Pabst Farms, about 12 miles west of Waukesha, where the streets are named after springs that now run dry. Photo: Pabst Farms

All of which has led to the watershed moment in which Waukesha finds itself today. The suburb is seeking permission to be the first community since the Great Lakes Pact of 2008 to pipe water in from the lakes, the country’s largest source of fresh surface water.

The proposal has sparked debates about sprawl and water policy in a region where land development has far outpaced population growth. And observers are watching this case closely because it will set a precedent which could have a profound effect on urban form and rural land throughout the Great Lakes region.

The Great Lakes Pact was designed to protect this important freshwater source from ever being depleted by water-starved communities in the U.S. South and Southwest. Ironically, however, unsustainable development patterns in relatively water-rich places near the Great Lakes have exhausted local freshwater sources. As a result, conflicts over Great Lakes water will be fought much closer to home. Waukesha is the first battleground.

The pact allows only communities inside the Great Lakes basin to pipe water from the lakes. Waukesha itself lies entirely outside the basin, but is eligible to apply for special diversion permission because it is part of a county that lies partly inside. Under the pact, all eight governors of the Great Lakes states will have to give their approval before Waukesha is granted an exception to pipe water 15 miles west from Lake Michigan.

First, however, the plan will need to be approved by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. It has already received the approval of Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

These decisions could open up vast new stretches of the Great Lakes region to the type of land-devouring development that already characterizes Waukesha. And it could signal more bad news for nearby rural areas, the city of Milwaukee, and other Great Lakes regions that can scarcely afford any more outward sprawl.

Proponents of Waukesha’s diversion plan point out that it has some environmental benefits. All water consumed by the community will be treated and then pumped back into Lake Michigan, so as not to lower water levels. The proposal would also allow the aquifer to begin its long recovery and would put an end to homeowners’ use of water softeners, which add chloride to the water, said Mike Hahn said, chief environmental engineer with SEWRPC.

But watchdogs say the plan will fuel sprawl and weaken the region’s urbanized areas. The most controversial portion would create a new water service territory extending beyond the boundaries of Waukesha into surrounding municipalities.

“That’s where many of us in the environmental community look at that and think, ‘That is just to allow sprawl in the western suburbs,’” said Emily Green, senior field managing organizer with the Wisconsin Sierra Club. “That’s not what the Great Lakes Pact was intended to cover.”

Local environmentalists are working to ensure that communities from outside the basin seeking Great Lakes water are held to a very high standard.

Hahn of the Planning Commission says much of the new service area is already developed and all environmentally significant areas are precluded from development. SEWPRC has officially stated that the new service area would allow for only 1,500 new homes.

James Rowen, author of the local blog The Political Environment and a former Milwaukee mayoral staffer, thinks that estimate is low. Rowen says that, given the diversion, Waukesha is likely to use its abundance of clean freshwater to lure new businesses and residents. And the likely loser in the whole scenario is Milwaukee, which for decades has been declining relative to its western suburban neighborhoods.

“The compact is a water management and conservation document first and foremost,” Rowen said, and should not be used to give “one municipality an economic advantage over another, or one state over another.”

As Milwaukee has lost manufacturing jobs, suburban Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties have beckoned to businesses and residents from the city. As the region sprawled in the nineties, its population grew only two percent, but 18 percent of its farmland was lost to development.

David Rusk of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago examined the insidious pattern of low-growth sprawl in his report “Sprawl, Race and Concentrated Poverty in Southeast Wisconsin” [PDF] in 2001. He found that between 1950 and 1990, the footprint of the Milwaukee-Waukesha metropolitan area grew at eight times the rate of its population.

New greenfield developments have had a particularly strong pull for the region’s middle- and upper-classes. The “secession” of affluent residents from the city of Milwaukee was the subject of a 1999 report by Marc Levine at the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The report noted that exurban regions of the metro area saw a 60 percent increase in their share of people with incomes greater than $100,000 between 1987 and 1997. Meanwhile, the city of Milwaukee’s population of high earners fell by 19 percent. At the time, Waukesha County contained 44 percent of the region’s affluent residents.

In turn, low-growth sprawl has widened the chasm between rich and poor, Levine wrote. The Brookings Institution recently named it the most segregated area in the country.

“Metropolitan Milwaukee has already become a highly polarized region, with growing exurban pockets of affluence more and more disconnected from an increasingly impoverished central city,” Levine wrote. “The exodus damages the city’s tax base and weakens its consumer markets, and hinders urban revitalization efforts.”

Further growth in Waukesha is likely to come at the expense of the rest of the region, said Rowen.

“Even if the city of Milwaukee were to sell Lake Michigan water to the city of Waukesha, the economic benefit would be a pittance, compared to the economic benefit transferred in terms of jobs and development,” he said.

That’s why local activists have been adamant that Waukesha control its growth and its impact on the environment and find another way to secure safe drinking water. The suburb has been making do by pulling water from a combination of deep and shallow wells and using a special filtration process. Activists say they should continue to explore alternatives like these, rather than import lake water.

It’s not just urban contingents that have raised concerns about Waukesha’s potential growth. Residents of the nearby town of Waukesha — a rural community that borders the city of Waukesha — aren’t happy about the expanded water service area either. Angie Van Scyoc, chairman of the town of Waukesha, said the plan, as it is currently written, threatens the rural character of her community, raising the threat of annexation.

“Many communities feel like the towns around them are there for their consumption,” she said. “We don’t want to be consumed by them. We want to be independent.”

- 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.

A quarter of U.S. bridges may be deficient, but focusing on just the most dangerous will have the most impact. Image: Partnership Border Study

If you left your grandma’s old wicker chair out on the porch all winter – and the next, and the next, and the next for 20 years – would you still trust that chair to hold you if you sat down?

According to Barry LePatner, author of the new book Too Big to Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward, you shouldn’t trust our country’s bridges much more than you trust that chair. He calls them “ticking time bombs” and “tragedies waiting to happen.”

But, he says, there’s good news. You’ve heard the estimates that a quarter of the nation’s bridges are either “structurally deficient” or “functionally obsolete.” That’s more than 160,000 bridges to repair or replace. But rather than throw up our hands and say the problem is too big, LePatner urges us to take a look at a much more significant – and manageable – number: 7,980.

“Forget ‘structurally deficient.’ Forget ‘functionally obsolete,’” LePatner told a group of experts in Washington, DC last week. He urges a new focus on bridges he calls “fracture-critical.”

“A ‘fracture-critical’ bridge is a bridge designed where if one critical member of the bridge fails – one piece –the entire bridge goes down like a house of cards,” he said, “It has no redundancy.”

He’s done an exhaustive analysis and found that there are 18,000 fracture-critical bridges in the U.S. and almost 8,000 of those are also structurally deficient. “Since 1989, nearly 600 bridges in this nation have failed,” LePatner said. “Without immediate repair, those nearly 8,000 fracture critical and structurally deficient bridges will fail as well.”

The narrower focus could be reassuring to governors worried about the overwhelming number of bridges in need of repair in their states. The tragedy in Minneapolis in 2007 is a bitter reminder to all of us – especially to politicians – that ignoring these maintenance needs is not an option. The bridge on I-35W was both fracture-critical and structurally deficient. So was the Champlain Bridge between New York and Vermont that was dynamited last year for safety reasons.

So why is it taking so long to attend to these needs? Advocates of a fix-it-first approach to highways are familiar with the problem, as LePatner describes it:

It’s exciting for politicians to plan and promise a new bridge. They love to stand next to oversized renderings of the new bridge against a brilliant blue sky. But to maintain one, nobody gets too excited about that. And no politician wants to spend limited capital budget expenditures on something you can’t see, something you can’t show your constituents, or have a ribbon cutting ceremony with happy campaign contributors at your side. From the outside, a new bridge looks pretty much like an old one.

The I-35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis was both fracture-critical and structurally deficient -- like nearly 8,000 other U.S. bridges. Image courtesy of Barry LePatner

Meanwhile, bridge repair isn’t just a safety issue; it’s an issue of sprawl. The bridges at the top of state DOTs’ lists to replace aren’t necessarily the most decrepit ones. Often, agencies will place priority on replacing the most congested bridges with wider ones that induce driving and sprawl.

Veronica Vanterpool of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign attributes the problem to old-school transportation officials that hold the pursestrings. “Traffic engineers in a lot of the state DOTs have been there for generations,” Vanterpool said in an interview with Streetsblog. “And [building new capacity instead of repairing existing bridges] is an old approach to traffic demand management. And it’s just not an approach that is sustainable today. When you build new roads it just attracts more traffic, more congestion, and when you widen existing roads it’s the same deal.”

LePatner also describes the “perverse incentives” that encourage politicians to let bridges fall into disrepair. “If you have a bridge that’s new, were you to maintain it at the cost of a million dollars a year, that comes out of your state general budget,” he said. “If you let it deteriorate, and 20 years later you now rate it structurally deficient or poor, you qualify for federal funding. So you’re better off, to get monies from the federal government, by letting your bridges deteriorate.”

Many attendees of LePatner’s presentation, including former Pennsylvania and Colorado DOT official Jack Kinstlinger, took offense at LePatner’s portrayal of DOT negligence. “We did all kinds of analyses, and the bridges without redundancy went at the top,” Kinstlinger said in response to LePatner’s assertion. “Most states spend an incredible amount of money getting it right.”

Of course, getting it right means rebuilding old bridges with access for multiple modes, as we reported last week. Bridge reconstruction presents a great opportunity for cyclists and pedestrians to ensure that they’re kept in mind in the design process.

Are there fracture-critical and structurally deficient (ie, unsafe) bridges in your community? LePatner says he’s working on geo-mapping the bridges online, but the maps won’t be ready for a few more months.