Time is running out to tell DOTs that bicycle and pedestrian projects should be a priority.

This is consistent with what I find when I talk to people at State DOT B. Congress's dangling of billions in front of the politicians has created a feeding frenzy, with the people at the top desperately trying to prove that they can spend every penny, and imposing on staff to create list after list without ever knowing what the rules of the game are. All sense of standards and reason is out the window.

People are already investing resources in hurriedly putting together projects that they think the bill will call for. If Congress wants to steer them to, say, bike/ped or maintenance, legislators have to get the word out now. Alternately, they have to be more pragmatic about this and recognize that they may have to give the DOTs 90 days to gear up to what Congress wants them to spend the money on, then 180 days to spend the money. Otherwise, the DOTs will have no choice but to pick business-as-usual projects, because that is all they have in the pipeline.

Word around DOT B is that, due to the same financial issues driving DC to desperately figure out how to prop up jobs, DOT B is now developing the framework to lay off 85 maintenance workers amongst a few hundred potential job cuts. Even before cuts were being considered, staff at DOT B did not believe that they had enough resources to get the stimulus out. DOT A has similar doubts. But their leaders will never say die, never admit to Congress that they need more time out of fear that the money will go to another state which is not quite as honest about its capabilities.

Furthermore, in both states staff believe that the only way to get anything out within the stimulus bill's tight time frame is to offer up jobs that were already "ready to go," plus attempt to accelerate projects that were 80 to 90 percent complete and perhaps scheduled for late 2009 or early 2010. These are projects for which the DOTs had already programmed funds and which would have gone out anyway.

I also believe that the undervalued DOT staff will valiantly attempt to double or triple their output, but perhaps succeed only in relatively modest increases in such a short period of time. Except of course for any state that for some reason had a piece of a multi-billion dollar freeway ready -- but I am skeptical as to how many of those are really out there.

In neither state has anyone appeared to have seriously considered ramping up the routine maintenance work that is sorely in need of attention. This could not be done overnight either. Instead of real maintenance, the fix-it-first projects that they are pumping out are bigger capital projects (5 to 50 million dollar range) which have had to go through the design mill. Of course, things could be worse, as evidenced by the states that are hawking multi-billion dollar freeway projects.

Does Congress know what it is about to unleash? This looks like a repeat of last year's banking bailout. In a few months, everyone will be wondering what happened to all the money, nothing much will have seemed to change.

Rather not waste billions on stuff like this? Call your rep. Photo: dherrera_96/Flickr.

The folks at Transportation for America are urging supporters to call their representatives in Washington and give key decision makers a push in the right direction. 

The shape of the stimulus will have major consequences for Obama's domestic agenda. "The economic recovery package should send a strong signal on the rest of the legislative priorities that are coming up," said Robert Puentes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a prolific author of infrastructure and transportation policy recommendations. "We know that after this legislation passes, we have a ticking clock with respect to the climate bill, energy legislation, and the next transportation bill. It's critical that the economic recovery package support a new way forward that's being promised with those other pieces of legislation."

The bill is expected to deliver up to $100 billion to transportation projects, or about two years' worth of typical federal spending. One of the big risks is that too much leeway will be given to states, which have an unhealthy appetite for highway expansion. "The big highway projects are eating up the majority of the money in many of the states," said David Burwell, a strategic consultant with T4A.

Most of the states' wish lists are shielded from public view. Of those that have come to light, it's clear that fix-it-first projects -- maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure -- are not a top priority, nor are transit projects. Gary Toth, a former director of project planning at NJDOT who now heads up transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces, has reviewed some of the state lists and what he turned up isn't pretty. "Florida's list is three-quarters expansion, 10 percent fix-it-first," he said in an email message. "On the highway side, Wisconsin asks for over $3 billion for two big expansion projects, less than $100 million for fix-it-first. Utah's list is almost exclusively populated with expansion projects; Missouri is two thirds; Kansas, three-quarters." Throwing all those billions at traffic-generating highway capacity projects would come at the direct expense of greener modes and overdue maintenance.

The highway lobby contends that their expansion projects are the optimal way to create jobs. Toth and others aren't buying it. "Each of those states easily have at least a billion dollars of bridge and road and pavement repair and maintenance needs that could be ramped up over the next two years," he said. "Yet, like an overweight diabetic who can't kick the sugar habit, these DOTs are spurning these absolutely critical maintenance needs in the quest for the seductive roadway expansion projects that elected officials just love -- if they are in their district."

You can see more state list breakdowns, including Utah's colossal $7.5 billion highway expansion ask, on the T4A website, which explains the modal bias at work behind the numbers:

This is not because road projects are "ready to go" and others are not. On the contrary, local governments and public transportation agencies have identified scores of transit, sidewalks and local road repairs. It appears that the DOTs often are simply leaving them off the list.

Puentes also believes that framing the debate as "job creation versus green priorities" offers a false choice. "The focus should be on both speed and quality -- that we're not just putting people to work and stimulating the economy in the short term, but that it's also the right kind of projects," he said. "While speed is certainly critical, we can do both. These goals don't have to be inconsistent with each other."

In his storied career at New Jersey DOT, Gary Toth played an indispensable role changing the culture of the agency, promoting a place-based ethic instead of the auto-centric transportation planning dogma. Today Toth heads transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces, where he has written "A Citizen's Guide to Better Streets." The book, which will be published by AARP, serves as a how-to for working constructively with your local transportation and planning agencies. (It is not yet available for purchase.)

Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naparstek sat down with Toth last week for this interview. Anyone interested in how the American landscape has become so dominated by cars should watch. Toth's insights about the compound effects of transportation and land use policies are invaluable.

Residents in the village of 4,000 recently voiced their opposition to a proposal that would encourage mixed-use and infill development, reports the Burlington County Times:

The ordinance would allow for the addition of up to 100 dwellings downtown. It would allow developers to put apartments or condominiums above storefronts and would increase the allowable height for buildings. Currently, developers have to obtain variances to do such things.

The rejection of the zoning changes was stoked by fears that the town's historic character would be threatened, among other things:

Some argued that the ordinance would create more traffic, noise and parking problems. If the town's population increased as a result of the ordinance, demands on municipal services and schools would also increase, possibly resulting in higher taxes for property owners, they said.

But as Toth points out, pushing development outside the town center will create more traffic, not less. "Ironically, people oppose [the re-zoning] based on the incorrect assumption that it will add traffic," he said. "Yet what will take the place of the infill will be sprawl development which will choke off their quaint little town and make things far worse." 

"NJ Transit invested billions to build the Trenton-to-Camden light rail line to help shape New Jersey's future towards a more walkable, less car-dependent region" he added. But even though Bordentown is located on a transit corridor, it won't see "transit-oriented development" until residents buy into the notion that clustering growth downtown is in their best interest. As the Trenton Times reports, the uproar over the ordinance has led commissioners to scuttle the promotion of development near the center of Bordentown and its rail station:

They deleted provisions for apartments, 100 additional housing units in a proposed town center zone, residential flats above commercial structures downtown, four-story buildings in the town center and bed and breakfasts.

And they removed all mention of the term "transit village" from the document.

Disinformation about smart growth-style development -- like the assumption that it will lead to densities resembling Manhattan's -- is rampant even along transit corridors, Toth said. Countering those perceptions, he believes, requires a targeted PR effort promoting more compact development as an avenue toward relieving traffic congestion.

Photo: steve367 / Flickr

Suburbanites in northern Virginia are finding their streets more clogged with traffic than ever, and, as the Washington Post reported earlier this week, they aren't about to get bailed out by road-widening projects. Here's the crux of the problem, told from the Post reporter's decidedly windshield perspective:

Thoroughfares like Rolling Road are the blood vessels that connect suburbia, the secondary roads that carry commuters to interstates, residents to supermarkets and children to school. They include Braddock Road in Fairfax County, Colesville Road in Montgomery, and even such larger highways as routes 7 and 50. They are the roads that Washington area residents traverse every day, sometimes several times a day.

Just months ago, Northern Virginia residents and elected officials were expecting hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements to such roads. Now, because of budget cuts and state lawmakers' failure to reach a deal on regional transportation funding, drivers can expect only more misery.

The Virginia Department of Transportation recently announced a 51 percent cut in the region's road-building program. Dozens of projects have been eliminated or postponed indefinitely. And rising maintenance costs are eating away at what little remains.

The Post assumes that expanding road capacity is the only answer, and casts the problem as purely a budgetary shortfall. It neglects to mention the role of land use in bringing about this state of affairs. The pattern described in the article is similar to what regions all over the country are facing, as past decisions to separate housing from other land uses come back to haunt them in the form of ever-mounting traffic.

"Councils of Governments and local jurisdictions spread out and segregate the various forms of land use, rebel against mixed-use, put all of their non-residential uses on the arterials, and then sit there and scratch their heads and wonder where all of the traffic came from," says Gary Toth, who heads up transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces and formerly served as director of project planning and development at NJDOT. "Then, they demand that the state DOT fix it. It is like a middle aged man who eats donuts and smokes all day, never exercises, and then wonders why he has chest pains."

The Post, while doing nothing to counter this mentality, at least captures it perfectly with its driver-on-the-street interviews:

"My youngest child is going to celebrate his fifth birthday sitting at a traffic light," said McLean resident Julie Hyams, who frequently uses Route 123, which had a key interchange cut from the state transportation budget. "Now the money that was allotted for improvement has gone 'poof,' and the roads are only going to get worse."

When the default assumption is that road widening will solve the problem, suburban residents fail to see the benefit of smart growth initiatives to their daily lives. "What is missing," says Toth, "is an organized and comprehensive PR campaign designed to educate people that they are opposing and crippling the only solutions to their problems."

"In the immortal words of Pogo, 'We have met the enemy, and he is us.'"

With higher gas prices and more budget-constrained DOTs becoming the norm, will suburbanites be open to a different perspective? There's little reason for optimism in the Post story, but at least one northern Virginia resident grasped the concept of induced demand:

Leesburg resident William Bethke drives the bypass every day to get to a park-and-ride lot in Herndon, where he catches a Fairfax Connector bus for the 20-minute ride to the West Falls Church Metro station and on to his job in Crystal City. In the 3 1/2 years Bethke has been traveling the bypass bottleneck, the trip has gone from 10 or 15 minutes to 20 or 30 minutes.

But he doesn't think widening the road will solve its long-term problems.

"Those who now avoid it would then use it, and in three years we'll be back to where we are," he said.

Photo: AlbinoFlea / Flickr

It's official: We're a franchise.

The Open Planning Project is proud to announce the launch of Streetsblog Los Angeles, our first new edition beyond the borders of the five boroughs.

LA.Streetsblog is edited and run by Damien Newton, formerly the New Jersey Coordinator for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and a recent LA transplant. With his New Jersey experience, Damien is well versed in the policies, politics and problems of suburban sprawl. He's also got a pretty good sense of the solutions. New Jersey, it so happens, is fortunate to have one of the most progressive State Departments of Transportation in the nation. Thanks to people like Gary Toth, currently working for Project for Public Spaces, New Jersey is way ahead when it comes to smart growth, context-sensitive design and viewing transportation policy as something more than just a way to move cars and trucks. 

You'll probably notice that LA.Streetsblog's archives go back a few months. Damien actually started blogging back in October as Street Heat LA. In just a few short months Damien has done a great job of networking and making himself a meaningful part of the local transportation policy scene out there. In the coming months, as the 2009 federal transportation funding campaign heats up, we expect LA.Streetsblog to emerge an important part of the push for sustainable transport, smart growth and livable streets policies on the federal level.

In the meantime, if you know anyone out on the west coast who is interested in these issues, point them Damien's way and wish him good luck in his new job. In his own words:

For this blog to work, I'm going to need your help with story ideas, comments and events... If you see or hear something you think I should write about, let me know! Even if I can't make the event, I can at least put it in the calendar section or even solicit a post from the event organizers.

Oh, and if you already write about or work on the kinds of issues we cover and you're interested in opening up a McStreetsblog franchise in your own city, drop us a line.

Project for Public Spaces and Open Planning Project set up at Third Ave. and St. Marks.


NYU students planted a garden in this parking space at E. 9th and Stuyvesant.

Open Planning Project's Nick Grossman chats with author Tony Hiss as Livable Streets luminaries Ethan Kent, Paul White, Gary Toth and Phil Myrick enjoy the shade.

Enjoying lunch at 7th Ave. and 24th St.

On-street Park(ing): The best deal in Manhattan.

Insiders believe that Mayor Mike Bloomberg will look inside his administration for Iris Weinshall's replacement as transportation commissioner. But because Bloomberg will be out in 2009, top transportation people may favor state jobs: state transportation commissioner, Long Island Rail Road president or New York City Transit president. NJ Transit is seeking an executive director.. Two private-sector candidates could be Janette Sadik-Kahn of Parsons Brinckerhoff, who lost out to Weinshall for the job, and former MTA chair Bob Kiley, who implemented congestion pricing in London. Weinshall is leaving for CUNY in mid-April.

Sadik-Kahn was Mayor David Dinkins' Transportation Advisor. In addition to setting up London's congestion charging system, Kiley was chairman of the MTA in the 1980's.

Here are some other names that are flying around:

• Emily Lloyd
• Sam Schwartz
• Gary Toth
• Jack Lettiere
• David Woloch
• Michael Primeggia
• And then there's this one. It's not quite a "name" per se. More a question: Isn't there some deputy commissioner from London we could call?