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Out of 11 transportation-related measures that were voted on Tuesday, seven represented a victory for transit, two were losses to learn from, and two more aren’t really a win one way or another but are worth noting. According to the Center for Transportation Excellence, these numbers bring the year’s total to an impressive 79 percent win rate for transit. Especially impressive is the fact that most of these measures involved a tax of some sort, and people were willing to pay it if it meant better transit service – even in tough economic times.

Clark County's campaign to keep bus service won Tuesday, 54-46.

Angie has profiled the victory in Durham and the loss in Seattle. Here are the rest of the results:

In Montcalm County, MI, a proposed property tax hike to fund bus service failed 39-61.

A terrible idea failed to catch on in Cincinnati, but the closeness of the final tally showed there’s still work to be done. The proposal to ban any forward movement on building a streetcar system lost, but the vote was 49-51. Still, this loss was a big win for transit.

Bad news for residents of Trumbull County, Ohio: the property tax increase that would have saved their transit system failed 36-64. If the county is to be believed, this means the transit system will shut down entirely, a huge loss, especially for the county’s most vulnerable residents. According to a local paper, “In 2010, the transit provided 64,249 trips: 18,922 for senior citizens, 21,013 for the disabled, 16,131 for students, and 8,183 for other residents.”

The 54-46 passage of Proposition 1 in Clark County, Washington was a big win for transit. Residents of the Washington-side suburbs of Portland will pay another 0.2 percent sales tax in order to stave off harsh cuts to their transit service. Even the normally anti-tax local paper said the vote was essential to maintaining quality of life in the county.

The counting of the statewide initiative 1125 in Washington went into the next day, but we can say definitively now that this bad idea has lost – at last count, it had 48.44 percent of the vote. The measure would have put serious restrictions on tolling at a time when tolling is one of very few funding mechanisms available to states. Even worse, it would have codified a pro-roads bias by insisting that tolling revenues could only pay for roads. It also singled out light rail, banning it on the I-90 bridge.

* The proposal to increase the Lorain County sales tax failed pretty spectacularly — 32-68. Transit advocates took note of this one but aren’t counting it as a loss, since the primary focus of the campaign – and the primary destination of the tax revenues – was the criminal justice system, not transportation. The loss does, however, mean that the county will cut its contribution to the transit system in half, in order to have more money to pay for prisons.

Here are a few we didn’t mention Tuesday:

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The full Senate passed a major appropriations bill yesterday, including funding levels for transportation and housing. The Senate put the kibosh on Sen. Rand Paul’s attempt to strip bike/ped funding from the federal transportation program, as we reported yesterday. Here’s the lowdown on the bill as a whole.

In the current political environment, the Senate probably couldn't do much more than maintain current spending levels. But it's not enough to transform our transportation system. Photo: MTSNAC

The upper chamber maintained funding for several key livability programs, teeing up a fight with the GOP-led House over spending levels. A finished 2012 budget is already a month overdue and despite the Senate passage of a “minibus” (as opposed to an “omnibus”) spending bill yesterday, no one seems to expect a completed bill anytime soon.

The Senate bill maintains current overall spending levels, which, in the current environment, is a win for advocates of transportation investment, though given that the numbers don’t account for inflation, they essentially amount to a spending cut.

Either way, these figures don’t shift the status quo very much. While funding for TIGER and transit projects gets a modest boost, high-speed rail has been sharply reduced in this bill. And, since this appropriation comes in the absence of a new reauthorization of the federal transportation program, which could set new policies, these funds come without any guarantee that the money will be spent more wisely, in the pursuit of strategic goals and keeping systems in a state of good repair.

The bill includes:

• $550 million for the TIGER program, a key element of the shift away from formula funding and toward merit-based allocations for the most innovative projects. The bill sets aside almost a quarter of that funding for projects in rural communities. This funding level would represent a $23 million jump over the actual enacted number for this year.
• $41 billion – the same as this year – for the Federal-aid Highway program. Sen. Barbara Boxer was disappointed that the Senate did the math differently this year – rather than allocating $44 billion and then rescinding $3 billion of it, this bill makes the cut upfront. While that appears to be a more straightforward way to do it, some fear that it makes the baseline funding level look lower. That means that future funding will be determined based on $41 billion, not $44 billion.

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At the Tuesday morning plenary of the Rail~Volution conference, William Millar made a bold pronouncement. The president of the American Public Transportation Association suggested that, beyond the 1,200 attendees of the annual gathering, there are billions of public transit advocates — they just don’t know it yet.

The popularity of car sharing is a good sign for transit. Photo Sierra Club

Millar may have meant the comment as inspiration, but consumer and demographic data seem to back his claim.

Over the course of four decades, the Southeastern Institute of Research in Richmond, Virginia, has conducted more than 14,000 market research studies for clients like AT&T and the AARP. During a panel discussion on “The Shifting Paradigm of the City,” the company’s CEO, John Martin, outlined a convergence of measurable trends that paint a very promising future for public transportation.

According to Martin, Millar is right: There is a large and growing audience for more and better public transit. Here are the top five reasons we could soon see a swell of transit advocates.

Growing population: With the U.S. headed to 341 million residents by 2020 and 400 million by 2040, the population is growing. If the current trend continues, an overwhelming number of them are bound for the cities. “What ultimately will happen is we’ll have these urban villages everywhere,” Martin said. But more people means more cars, and tight budgets mean no new roads. “News flash: Congestion, access and mobility are really going to be challenged,” he added. In that context, public transit will be an obvious answer for new and long-time city dwellers.

Demographic sea change: We’re facing a profound generational shift and, according to Martin: “The dynamic is aligning with transit big time.”

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Rail~Volution 2011 marks the first time since 2002 that this conference for all things transit and smart growth has taken place in the nation’s capital. When it comes to livability, Washington and neighboring Arlington County have some great stories to share with the rest of the country.

The Washington Metro system keeps hundreds of thousands of cars off the streets a day, and is responsible for hundreds of millions in tax revenues and household savings per year. Photo: thisisbossi/Flickr

At the heart of the region’s success is, of course, the Washington Metro, which has shaped development for more than three decades. In fact, so much of the land near Metro stations has been developed that ridership is projected to reach the design capacity of the current system within the next 20 years. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is currently mapping out how to respond.

At a panel this morning, Nat Bottigheimer, an assistant general manager at WMATA, shared some results from an internal study the agency conducted as part of this process. The core question he investigated: “What is it you’re actually getting from a transit investment?”

The agency’s research and modeling produced some intriguing numbers demonstrating how the creation of Metro — its 86 stations and 106 miles of track — has benefited the region:

• Since the system was created, $212 billion in real estate value has been added within a half-mile of Metro stations.
• Land value near Metro stations generates $2.8 billion annually in property tax revenues. $195 million of that is directly attributable to transit.
• Households in the region reap the equivalent of $705 million per year in time savings thanks to Metro.
• Households save $305 million per year on costs related to owning and driving cars.
• Every day Metro riders walk 33,000 miles.

On the other side of the coin, there’s everything that Metro has prevented from happening. Without Metro…

• Commuters would have to put up with commutes that take 25 percent longer. This would effectively curtail people’s access to jobs and employers’ access to the workforce.
• The region would see more than a million additional auto trips per day.
• This traffic would require 1,000 additional lane miles to accommodate, the equivalent of two Capital Beltways’ worth of asphalt.
• Four to six more traffic lanes across the Potomac would be necessary.
• The downtown core would be eviscerated by parking. To store all the extra cars would take 200,000 parking spots, the equivalent of 170 blocks filled with five-story parking structures.
• All that car infrastructure would cost nearly $11 billion to build, and impose huge maintenance costs every year.

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Tomorrow night, President Obama will unveil his jobs plan before a skeptical Congress. It’s unclear how much of the $300 billion proposal will go to infrastructure, but the president has said that will be a centerpiece of the proposal. An infrastructure bank and a new version of the expired Build America Bonds program could also be on the agenda.

How about this for your next transportation stimulus, Mr. President? Image: Austin Strategic Mobility Plan

Given the GOP strategy of obstructing any stated goal of the administration, it’ll be a tough sell. Some Republicans have already made it clear they would rather see a $640 billion, 12-month payroll tax holiday. That would increase the deficit by more than twice what Obama’s plan would, but deficits don’t seem to matter as long as taxes are getting cut.

So it’s no surprise that the president is also looking for ways that he can spur infrastructure job creation without Congress’s approval. Last week, Obama pleaded with Congress to pass a clean extension of the transportation bill (a plea which some Republicans are gleefully denying). At the same time, he announced that he was directing some agencies to each identify three infrastructure projects that could use a little federal help in speeding up the process. Here’s what he said:

In keeping with a recommendation from my Jobs Council, today I’m directing certain federal agencies to identify high-priority infrastructure projects that can put people back to work. And these projects — these are projects that are already funded, and with some focused attention, we could expedite the permitting decisions and reviews necessary to get construction underway more quickly while still protecting safety, public health, and the environment.

He specifically called on the departments of agriculture, commerce, housing and urban development, interior and transportation to highlight three projects each. We were wondering whether this process will end up falling into some of the same traps as the stimulus, which emphasized shovel-readiness to the detriment of other evaluation criteria for new projects, like whether the money would be well-spent.

Though Obama didn’t use the phrase “shovel-ready” last week, he called for projects that are already funded and have state and local permits, which implies nearly the same thing. Without a new stimulus, which the Republicans have already promised to oppose, there is no money to fund new projects, making it imperative to find those that are already funded. Still, the president admitted last year that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

And despite the administration’s general friendliness toward transit and understanding of the limitations of the private automobile, 60 percent of transportation dollars in the stimulus went to highways, with just 20 percent to transit. (Most of the rest went to freight rail, with a little bit for aviation and maritime projects.)

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There are almost of them 38,000 in Atlanta. Another 65,000 between Dallas and Houston. Nearly 18,000 in Phoenix.

Across the United States, about 700,000 households not only lack access to a vehicle, but live in areas that are not served by transit, according to “Transit Access and Zero-Vehicle Households,” a new report from the Brookings Institution.

These guys are the lucky ones. About 700,000 people in the 100 largest U.S. metros not only don't have cars, but don't have access to transit. Photo: Angie Schmitt

This isolated population represents about 10 percent of the 7.5 million carless households in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas. Beyond issues of social justice, these households’ predicament presents a great economic concern for the country, say Brookings researchers.

“Seven hundred thousand households is larger than the population of Columbus, Ohio or San Antonio, Texas,” said Adie Tomer, senior research analyst and author of the report. “These people are terribly constrained in earning a living, getting to the store, or taking their kids to daycare. If this many people were facing a public health scare, this country would be in crisis mode. We need to approach this problem with similar urgency.”

The most vulnerable carless families, by and large, were those that live in the suburbs or the Southwest, according to the report. Cities with the highest number of families lacking access to transit and private automobiles included Atlanta, with just 69 percent transit coverage, Dallas (71 percent), Houston (73 percent), Phoenix (81 percent) and St. Louis (82 percent).

On the other hand, some of the biggest overall transit cities also do the best job making sure nearly every resident has access to service. Los Angeles’ transit services reach more than 99 percent percent of the regional population, just ahead of New York (99 percent), San Francisco (98 percent), Seattle (97 percent) and Miami (97 percent).

Report authors point to trends like job sprawl and the increased suburbanization of poverty as aggravating factors that put carless families at economic risk. Since the 1980s, the U.S. has built 655,000 roadway lane miles; this had the effect of increasing the distance between destinations, the report noted.

Brookings researchers urged both local and national leaders to respond to this crisis through land use policies that encourage development in densely populated areas and expanding transit service into under-served suburban communities.

Streetsblog sat down last week with Larry Hanley, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union and member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Yesterday, we published the first part of our interview, focusing on movement-building around transit. Here, we had a vigorous discussion about union rules and Buy America provisions that are the subject of some debate among transit advocates.

Tanya Snyder: There are some union rules that some transit advocates say are harmful, like the mandatory eight-hour workday and the restriction on part-time work, when transit especially has such peaks and valleys – you’ve got a rush hour in the morning and a rush hour in the evening, and all this dead time in between.

ATU President Larry Hanley says diminishing worker protections is not the way to a stronger transit network. Photo: Workday Minnesota

Larry Hanley: In most urban transit, you have a large number of bus drivers who work what are known as swing shifts, where they work in the morning rush hour, they work in the evening rush hour, they handle the question of peak service, and they essentially do the work of two people. It’s not their fault that demand for service falls off in the middle of the day; it’s just the reality of the business.

In Staten Island, in my local, the percentage of people in Staten Island transit who operate swing shifts, I think it’s 62 or 63 percent of all the work is swing shifts. And these are people working – driving – eight or more hours on almost every shift. They have time off in the middle, but they’re putting in a full day. Their day starts at 6 o’clock in the morning and ends at 6 or 7 o’clock at night. So, these are long days with hardworking people.

I think it’s really a cheap shot. I’d like to have people go down and hang out at a bank or a brokerage house and see how much time the executives really put in at their desk. But anyway, that’s my class war argument.

TS: Was “class war” off the record?

LH: No, class war is on the record! I agree with Warren Buffet. There’s a class war going on and his class is winning.

They are literally scraping bodies off highways because we have bus drivers falling asleep at the wheel, because proponents of bad labor policy were successful in the 1980s in deregulating that industry.

And as for what to do with these workers in the middle of the day, Congress, pandering to a small group of private bus companies – and this is an absolute obscenity – restricts public agencies from doing charter bus work. And this is nothing but pandering to private bus companies who have an inordinate amount of political influence. So, all over the United States, there are probably 100,000 buses that lay idle on weekends, lay idle in the middle of the day, when they could be used productively in the communities. They could be providing charter service to people all over our cities and providing better-rounded schedules, so that a bus driver who works the morning shift could actually do some charter work and have a full eight-hour day.

The charter restriction is on the level of the bridge to nowhere in terms of how much of a crazy rule it is, that is really responsive to the needs of a handful of people and harmful to the systems all over the country.

TS: What about just hiring workers part-time to handle either the morning or evening rush?

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Streetsblog sat down last week with Larry Hanley, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union and member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Hanley started his career in New York as a bus driver in Brooklyn and then Staten Island, from 1978 to 1987. He became active in the transit union and worked his way up the ranks until winning election last fall as its youngest president ever. He is known for his creative responses to attacks on the union, including attempts to privatize express bus service, and his ability to build coalitions across many sectors.

President Larry Hanley is considering ways to broaden the ATU to include passengers and other transit supporters as members. Photo courtesy of the ATU

Hanley started as president of the ATU the same week I started at Streetsblog. I remember that first week, hearing excited chatter about this transit firebrand taking the helm of the union.

Below is the first installment of Streetsblog’s edited interview with Hanley.

Tanya Snyder: Starting with the reauthorization: nothing is going to happen until after the recess, they’ve got this battle between two years and six years, the funding levels are miserable in either version – how do you organize your way out of this? How do you respond?

Larry Hanley: The only thing that can actually straighten out the problem is if the people – huge numbers of people – start to articulate a different vision. We need leaders to articulate a different vision and we need people to understand that were heading into a dead end financially, and we’re destroying all the things that made America a great country. And I think that we’ve been sold out by corporate interests that control the politicians.

And the only antidote to that is to try to figure out a way to mobilize the public, and we’re doing that. We’re actively ramping up our communications and trainings, and we’re providing a roadmap to our local leaders and members for how they can organize their communities around transit.

We were able to persuade the unpersuadable — people like Giuliani — because we built broad-based community support, including traditional Republican strongholds.

We don’t think that there is a short-term solution. We think Congress is so out of touch with the needs of the people who live in this country that the only remedy is to convince large numbers of people in districts to go after their members of Congress and straighten them out.

TS: You’ve been involved in coalitions at the local, regional, and national levels for a long time around transit. How have you seen them evolve? How do those coalitions compare now to when you started?

LH: The coalitions that work are the ones that can really get buy-in from non-traditional partners. There are very few places where labor unions partner, for example, with the real estate community and the Chamber of Commerce. But I found that to be a really successful formula back in New York. We were able to persuade the unpersuadable — people like [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani, a guy who was on his own mission — because we built broad-based community support, including traditional Republican strongholds. And we persuaded them that it was in our collective interest, that there was such a thing as a collective interest — that’s really been taken out of the debate publicly. But when we convinced them that there was a collective interest in having better mass transit and cheaper mass transit, they pretty quickly persuaded Giuliani and [Gov. George] Pataki to support it, despite the fact that they had internal pressure in their own political circles not to.

Our goals are really mainstream, but they’re not treated that way.

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“Why I Ride” is on hiatus this week. Instead we bring you the latest transit innovation from the Dutch city of Utrecht — the “transfer accelerator.”

The designers explain that their slide is meant to be a nice gesture to the travellers. They brilliantly foresaw that such a playful urban intervention can generate large-scale positive spin-off for a disadvantaged neighborhood like Overvecht, and that’s exactly what happened.

Frivolous fun, or ingenious solution to the MTA’s escalator maintenance woes? (In Utrecht, of course, they don’t get 106-degree scorchers like today, so this slide will probably stay usable all year round.)

Source: Donald Shoup

If you drive to work, you can get a $230 monthly parking benefit, subsidized by the federal government and paid through your employer. If you take transit, right now you can get up to $230 per month, but the cap may revert to $120 when the current transit benefit law expires at the end of the year. And if you ride a bike? If your employer can even figure out how the bike benefit works, you get twenty bucks. Don’t spend that all in one place, kiddo. (Full disclosure: even Streetsblog hasn’t worked through the confusing bureaucracy enough to give its bike-commuting staff this benefit.)

Rep. Earl Blumenauer announces the introduction of the Commuter Relief Act outside a metro station. Photo: Meghan Cahill/League of American Bicyclists

The privileged position of cars in the employer-benefits paradigm could soon change. As Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) said today, “We need to take away subsidies that incentivize people to do just the opposite of what we ought to be doing.” As a congressman representing the second most congested part of the country, Moran said it was “stunning” that the tax code “is designed to subsidize congestion.”

Moran is a co-sponsor of Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s (D-OR) Commuter Relief Act, introduced today as a way to bring some equity to different transportation modes. Why should drivers get up to $230 a month to foster oil dependency, greenhouse gas emissions, and congestion when everyone else gets so much less?

Blumenauer’s proposal contains a menu of options that lawmakers can choose among – or they can choose all of them. They are:

• Transit equity: sets the cap for all transportation benefits at $200 a month – parking and transit.
• Self-employed extension of transportation benefits: gives self-employed workers transit benefits for their work travel.
• Parking cash-out: requires employers who offer a parking benefit to also offer the option to take cash instead (reducing the incentive to drive).
• Van-pool credit: creates a 10 percent tax credit for spending on vanpool services.
• Bike benefit: raises the cap for the bike benefit from $20 to $40 and makes the procedures easier for employers. It also allows commuters to combine the bike benefit with transit or parking benefits, which they’re now not allowed to do.

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