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OK, truth: Raise your hand if you find federal transportation legislation intimidating and incomprehensible.

I thought so. Me too.

The problem, as you know, is that it’s enormously important that advocates not only understand the new transportation law, MAP-21, but that they understand it in granular detail so they can find the small opportunities buried in a depressingly large mass of disappointment.

So a big thank-you goes out to the folks at Transportation for America, who just released exactly the resource advocates need: a guide to the law called “Making the Most of MAP-21.”

In addition to providing a basic outline of the law and its relevant provisions (and omissions), the document contains some excellent how-to’s and talking points for advocates and project sponsors trying to squeeze funding for sustainable transportation projects out of programs biased heavily toward auto-oriented infrastructure. Here are a few of the excellent ideas that stand out:

Ask states to flex highway funds for bridge repair. One major hidden peril of MAP-21 is that it transferred the responsibility of repairing 460,000 bridges, which aren’t on the National Highway System (NHS), to the overburdened Surface Transportation Program, without adding any money for it. In fact, STP has $5 billion of new responsibilities under MAP-21 and only $1 billion of new money.

Luckily, there’s a solution: States can flex up to half of their National Highway Performance Program (NHPP) funds, normally earmarked for NHS projects, to other uses. After all, NHS gets a disproportionate share of funding: “Although the NHS represents only five percent of all American roads, fully 58 percent of the highway program is committed to its upkeep,” the report says. Read more…

According to AARP, 88 percent of seniors want to stay in their own homes as long as they can. But where are those homes? In auto-dependent suburbs. That’s where most Baby Boomers grew up, in the postwar era, and that’s where most of them have stayed – even as the largest (and longest-living) generation ever enters its golden years.

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.

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Few people think that this could happen to their local bridge or highway overpass, but a snowballing epidemic of deferred maintenance could mean more and more bridge closings across the country. How we got here is the subject of Transportation for America’s new “Fix It” campaign, which was launched yesterday with the release of a special report on the country’s aging bridges. “The Fix We’re In For: The State of Our Nation’s Bridges” [PDF] aims to motivate Congress to significantly increase “common sense” funding for the repair, reconstruction and upgrading of existing bridges and overpasses. It addresses the political and fiscal challenges that transportation officials face in maintaining the infrastructure we already have. The report marks a significant contribution of data to the national transportation debate and presents an interactive online map that people can use to check the safety of the bridges in their area, offering a new level of transparency on the status of our bridges.

Ready for some good news? Voters around the country got to decide on 29 transportation-related ballot initiatives yesterday. According to an analysis by the Center for Transportation Excellence, transportation advocates and reformers won 73 percent of them. If you add in other initiatives that passed earlier this year, the victory rate jumps to 77 percent.

“In the midst of an election framed as a revolt against the size of government and the scope of taxes and spending, we not only saw transportation investment measures meet the 10 year success rate average but exceed it,” said Jason Jordan, executive director of the Center for Transportation Excellence. “In all cases, there was a direct impact on taxpayers. And about 75 percent of the time we saw voters standing up and saying yes, we’re willing to pay for investment in our transportation infrastructure.”

Many of the initiatives were non-binding referenda, but they set the stage for concrete action later.

In five California counties, people voted for new automobile registration fees to pay for transportation improvements. Historically, sales taxes and property taxes (as well as the gas tax) have been the primary sources of revenue for these investments. California is opening up a whole new revenue stream.

California also adopted Prop 22, which bans state raids on transportation funds, and rejected Prop 23, which would have delayed implementation of the state’s new emissions standards until unemployment is reduced.

The 29 ballot measures decided last night aren’t the only ones this year. Back in April, St. Louis voters gave the green light to a half-cent sales tax increase to fund mass transit – the biggest tax increase any jurisdiction voted to give itself this year. It had failed in November 2008 but with some re-tooling and organizing, it got 63 percent of the vote in the spring.

David Goldberg, communications director of Transportation for America, agrees that the ballot measures were a reason to “take heart.”

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Thanks to Transportation for America for putting together this handy map of U.S. DOT’s TIGER grant recipients. It shows the geographical reach of the program, as well as the broad range of projects benefiting from the grants.

T4America says:

In two batches in February and October 2010, USDOT gave out a total of $2.1 billion for innovative transportation projects that address economic, environmental and travel issues at once. The TIGER program, as its known (Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery), is a competitive and merit-based process to pick projects and should be a model for next transportation authorization.

“Almost all of these projects have two things in common,” said T4 America director James Corless. ”They will all create desperately-needed jobs while building critical transportation infrastructure, and they have a hard time getting funded under the outdated structure of the current federal transportation program. These projects in communities across the country will create good paying jobs, spur local economic development, and keep our metro and rural areas connected. The administration is responding to the demand for funding that can help make communities of all sizes more livable, more competitive and more connected.

On Monday, President Obama talked infrastructure with two governors, eight mayors, four former transportation secretaries (and the current one), two labor leaders – and one public interest advocate. That advocate was Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of the think tank PolicyLink and chair of the Transportation for America Equity Caucus, which launched last week. The roundtable discussed the president’s $50 billion infrastructure proposal, which is galvanizing transportation reformers as the contours come into sharper focus.

Blackwell spoke to Streetsblog about her meeting with the president, why transportation matters for social equity, and how people can help make the most of the current opportunity to reform national transportation policy.

Streetsblog: What was it like meeting with the president?

Blackwell: It was wonderful to be in a meeting with the president and the Treasury secretary and governors and mayors from around the country talking about infrastructure, with an emphasis on transportation. We’ve been focused on it for years, and it was encouraging to see it getting that level of attention and to see the President of the United States take an interest in transportation.

But I felt I had a tremendous responsibility to lift up the voices of low-income people and people of color and the communities where they live. It’s easy to talk about transportation and not talk about poverty, or the severe unemployment among Latinos and African Americans, those hit first and worst by this recession. I felt on my shoulders the responsibility to express that this has to be done in a way that impacts those who need it most. And the others there really heard what I was saying. Several referred back to what I had said, which was that transportation is a lifeline to opportunity in this country, and it’s way too important to leave to transportation professionals.

I also thought it was very important that at the top of the conversation, when the president came in, he turned to Governor Rendell and me to frame the conversation. He showed a lot of interest in talking about equity and inclusion.

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In Pittsburgh, elderly para-transit riders get automated phone calls with the precise arrival time of their vehicle. Bus priority lanes and preferential traffic signals in the Twin Cities are improving on-time service. Here in Washington, DC, stored value on SmartTrip cards pays for Metro parking, train and bus, and it can sync with pre-tax employee transit benefits. In San Francisco, dynamic pricing varies parking rates based on supply and demand, reducing traffic and helping people find available parking spaces.

All of these transportation improvements are happening already – they’re examples of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that are being heralded in a new report as a way to set the bar higher for transportation efficiency. Transportation for America, ITS America and other groups have teamed up to urge Congress to include technological enhancements in its transportation policies. They’re hoping these changes can help us get more out of our streets without building sprawl-inducing highways.

ITS is a catch-all phrase for the ways digital technology can be applied to all modes of transportation. There are familiar forms of ITS on highways. E-ZPass has been around for about 15 years already. Electronic highway signs warning of delays or detours are becoming commonplace. Now, Google traffic maps supplement radio reports to help drivers pick more efficient routes. Add to the mix Zipcar and other car-sharing services, or vanpools with real-time tracking, and ITS becomes not just a method to move cars more efficiently, but to make streets more efficient by taking cars off the road.

“The technologies already exist,” says Lilly Shoup, the report author at T4A. “Now it’s a matter of being more strategic in integrating them throughout the transportation network.”

Read more…

Despite the frequent reluctance of rural lawmakers to support more federal investment in transit, a majority of rural and urban voters alike believe their home towns would gain from a local transit expansion, according to a new poll released today by the infrastructure reform group Transportation for America (T4A) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

When asked if increased transit investment would help their community, 69 percent of poll respondents answered in the affirmative, including 74 percent of suburbanites and 55 percent of rural residents. Those numbers decreased for a separate question that asked whether transit should get more federal funding, but a majority of voters from both suburban (59 percent) and rural (50 percent) areas remained supportive.

The survey, conducted four weeks ago by pollsters from both GOP- and Democratic-aligned firms, also sought to gauge public consciousness of U.S. transportation spending patterns. When respondents were asked what share of federal transport dollars they thought should go to transit, the mean answer was 37 percent. Transit's actual share is about 19 percent.

David Metz of Fairbank Maslin Maullin Metz & Associates, one of two pollsters who worked on the survey, told reporters that its conclusion was clear: "Americans want more transportation options than they have today," he said. "The vast majority of Americans say they have no choice but to drive as much as they do and that they would like to drive less."

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It's not news that a half-century of transportation spending to accommodate the automobile has made the typical American city hazardous and hostile to people on foot. But it's shocking how we still devote so few resources to correcting those mistakes. A new report released today by a coalition of advocacy groups, including Transportation for America and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, quantifies current funding disparities and the cost in human lives. From T4A:

In the last 15 years, more than 76,000 Americans have been killed while crossing or walking along a street in their community. More than 43,000 Americans -- including 3,906 children under 16 -- have been killed this decade alone. This is the equivalent of a jumbo jet going down roughly every month, yet it receives nothing like the kind of attention that would surely follow such a disaster.

Counterintuitive as it may be, "Dangerous by Design" also finds that, when it comes to investing in pedestrian-friendly streets, New York has little room to boast. Here are local stats culled from the report, issued in a joint statement from TSTC, Transportation Alternatives, the Regional Plan Association and TWU Local 100:

• 22.5 percent of total traffic deaths in New York State are pedestrians
  
• 31 percent of total traffic deaths in the NYC metropolitan area are pedestrians
  
• Only 1 percent of New York State federal transportation funds are spent on pedestrian infrastructure, an average of $0.73 per person
  
• New York State ranks 44th in the nation for federal spending on walking and biking
  
• The NYC metropolitan area receives only $0.61 per person in federal funds for pedestrian and bike facilities, well below the meager $1.39 spent per person for metro areas nationwide

Advocates are calling on Governor Paterson and the New York State Legislature to designate 10 percent of federal Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) and 10 percent of federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funding for pedestrian safety; to enact a statewide complete streets policy; to increase funding for Safe Routes to School and Safe Seniors programs; and to create a statewide Safe Routes to Transit program.

"From 2005 to 2008, New York has received $5.6 billion in federal transportation funds," reads the statement. "In the same amount of time there have been 1,215 preventable pedestrian deaths."

You can download "Dangerous By Design" in its entirety here. Elana Schor has more on the report's national implications at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

In a report released this morning, Transportation for America (T4A) expands on its months-long effort to map transit cutbacks across the nation and concludes that 10 of the largest 25 local agencies are being forced to hike fares by more than 13 percent.

T4A's report illustrates the punishing effect of such cuts on transit riders, many of them low-income workers, with a set of well-trammeled statistics: demand hit a 50-year high in 2008; every dollar invested in transit produces an estimated $6 in economic growth; transit is far safer than car travel and provides greater public health benefits.

But when it comes to the political battle over remaking national transport priorities, T4A's transit cuts map -- viewable right here -- speaks loudest of all.

Transit fare increases and service reductions, T4A found, are concentrated in major cities and along the coasts. And as the current health care conflagration has shown, lawmakers rarely wield political power that's commensurate with the share of the population they represent.

As the Washington Post's Alec MacGillis catalogued in a commentary last week, Senate influence is particularly concentrated in the hands of small-state denizens such as Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D) of Montana, who fought to remove a provision helping transit agencies with punitive tax shelters from last year's auto bailout bill.

Per MacGillis:

And then there's the Senate's age-old distortion of distributive politics, in which goodies are doled out on anything but a per-capita basis. California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey are among the 10 states that get the least back per tax dollar sent to Washington; Alaska, the Dakotas and West Virginia are among those that get the most.

In that context, it's not surprising that federal support for metro-area priorities such as transit is so perilously thin. Even in the House, where urban representatives lead several key committees, transit backers have yet to convince the Ways and Means panel to move forward with a solution to the immense revenue gap that has stalled progress on new long-term transport legislation.

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