Source: Brookings Institution analysis of transit agency, Nielsen Pop-Facts 2010, and Nielsen Business Facts data.

If you’re a middle-income person living in the Philadelphia metro area, there’s an 85 percent chance you live within three-quarters of a mile of a transit stop, and you probably have to wait about 12 minutes for a bus or train. But if you’re looking for work, beware: only 20 percent of the jobs in the region are accessible to you via transit in a reasonable amount of time.

Older transit agencies like Philadelphia’s SEPTA are getting left behind by job sprawl, according to the Brookings Institution’s exhaustive new study on transit access to jobs. SEPTA is a hub-and-spoke system, concentrating transit access in the center city, while more and more job centers are located in the suburbs. Surprisingly, Brookings concludes that some sprawling western cities have better transit connectivity than more compact cities, since their transit networks are designed to fit their spread-out metro areas. Most importantly, they connect suburbs to suburbs better than many traditional systems, where all transit lines meet in the city center.

Brookings scholars will tell you, mapping transit access to jobs in 100 metro areas, with data from 371 different transit providers (some of which sent their data on paper) is no easy feat — “an act of academic masochism,” in the words of Bruce Katz, director of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Project. What they came up with is the largest database ever collected in the history of Brookings. The resulting report, “Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America,” could spur a shift in the way metropolitan areas plan transit service.

After all, there’s a difference between having a subway station or bus stop near you and having a transit system that gets you to the places you need to be. And the most important destination is the workplace. Transit is most valuable when it can take people from where they live to where the jobs are. But most regions are poorly equipped to provide that connectivity, especially for the people who would benefit the most: Low-income residents who need access to low-skill jobs.

Brookings found:

• Nearly 70 percent of residents in large metropolitan areas live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind. Transit coverage is highest in Western metro areas. Overall, it’s far better in cities and low-income communities than suburbs and high-income communities.
• But the typical metropolitan resident can reach only about 30 percent of jobs in their region via transit in 90 minutes. Even in Washington and New York, only 37 percent of jobs are accessible to the typical commuter.
• And it gets worse if you’re trying to get to a low- or middle-skill job. About one-quarter of these jobs are accessible via transit within 90 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter, compared to one-third of jobs in high-skill industries, which are more concentrated in cities.
• Western cities rank high. Fifteen of the 20 metro areas that did the best linking people to jobs via transit are in the West. Conversely, 15 of the 20 metro areas that rank lowest are in the South.

Brookings hopes transportation leaders will “make access to jobs an explicit priority in their spending and service decisions, especially given the budget pressures they face.”

Of course, the problem isn’t just that transit hasn’t kept up with job sprawl: It’s the job sprawl itself. “The cost of putting housing and jobs in the wrong place, relative to transportation, is huge,” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan told an audience at Brookings yesterday. “Not just in environmental costs, not just out of people’s pocketbooks in terms of what they’re spending on their commutes. But economic growth costs over the long term.”

Transit finds itself “running up a down escalator,” in the words of Brookings report co-author Alan Berube, constantly trying to keep up with development patterns that don’t lend themselves to transit connectivity. In Detroit, he said, only about eight percent of jobs are within three miles of the central business district. More than 70 percent are more than 10 miles away.

Case study: Greenville, SC ranks 93rd out of 100 metro areas for transit access. Source: Brookings Institution

Brookings scholars say we are living in a “transit moment,” and it’s hard not to agree. Transit ridership is going up for the first time in decades. High gas prices are driving people out of their cars, and bus and light rail networks are sprouting up everywhere just in time. But the report findings indicate we’re not ready for this public transit moment.

“Nationally, we face a transit paradox between transit coverage and job access,” said report co-author Robert Puentes of Brookings. “While some form of transit serves a large share of metropolitan America, that same service really does fall short in connecting residents to employment, especially when those jobs are outside of the urban core.”

Already, some metro areas, with forward-looking help from the federal government, are beginning to address the job access problem. PolicyLink, a research group focusing on social and economic equity, noted that in Kansas City, where low-income residents can only access 23 percent of the region’s jobs via transit, the region is using a Sustainable Communities Planning grant to better connect people to work, generate reinvestment and new jobs along specific corridors, and attract residents to urban centers that have been losing population.

And in the Twin Cities region, where low-income residents can access about 39 percent of jobs via transit, a Sustainable Communities Regional Planning grant is helping integrate commuter rail, two light rail lines, and a bus rapid transit system to connect residents to newly created and currently existing job centers around each transit corridor.

With incoming Transportation Chair John Mica refusing a gas tax increase, reformers can still make progress in the next two years. Image: Orlando Sentinel

The House recently approved a sixth extension of the current transportation law, this one lasting for nine months. Incoming Chair John Mica (R-FL) says he wants to work on a new six-year reauthorization, but there’s no reason to believe it’ll proceed smoothly without a robust financing mechanism in place. For now, lawmakers can’t agree on a way to stabilize the highway trust fund and adequately finance transportation.

If a long-term reauthorization proves impossible, Puentes argues for a deficit-neutral, short-term reauthorization rather than continue with endless extensions. He calls it SAFETEA-TWO.

Why a two-year bill? For one thing, it’s hard for construction projects to move forward with certainty under these short-term, temporary extensions. Contractors and states are timid about undertaking ambitious projects when the future of federal funding isn’t firm.

Another reason boils down to timing. Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) introduced his reauthorization bill to great fanfare in June 2009, but there was no agreement on a funding mechanism, as lawmakers refused to get behind a gas tax increase. They haven’t made any progress on that yet. Puentes hopes that in two years, with the 2012 presidential campaign season behind us and, one hopes, a stronger economy, a gas tax increase might gain traction.

So what can transportation advocates do in the next two years? And what can a SAFETEA-TWO accomplish? Here’s what Puentes recommends:

• Model a new evaluation system for project proposals on TIGER, basing awards on merit and performance metrics. Add more transparency and specificity to the process. Make TIGER and the High Speed Rail program permanent.
• Start transitioning from the gas tax to a more direct user fee system, like a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) fee. Support “aggressive research” and development, especially to address concerns about privacy and administering a mileage fee. These issues will take time to iron out, and the next two years are a perfect time to do that work.
• Invest in a strategic framework for multimodal freight movement.
• Establish a national policy for road pricing, including “standard tolling, variable pricing, high occupancy toll lanes, cordon and area-wide schemes.” Remove “archaic” restrictions on interstate tolling and utilitze state-of-the-art toll collection technologies.
• “Help those that help themselves.” Offer federal incentives to encourage local self-financing, as we’ve seen where taxpayers have voted to pay higher taxes to pay for transit improvements.
• Strengthen coordination among financing tools like TIFIA and private activity bonds to ease the process for applicants and embrace more complex and ambitious projects. A unified infrastructure financing system could also set the stage for the transition to a National Infrastructure Bank.
• Expand the use of Public-Private Partnerships with a governmental office designed, not to make decisions about PPP projects, but to provide quality control and technical advice.
• Work on reducing construction delays by instituting rewards for on-time project delivery and forgoing unnecessary environmental reviews (but keeping the necessary ones).
• Allow greater use of federal funds for rail maintenance to address concerns like those expressed by anti-rail politicians in Ohio and Wisconsin about state financial burdens.
• Cut some “legacy” programs, like the half-billion-dollar Appalachian Development Highway System Program, that are redundant with other federal agencies.

Puentes says these interim reforms could pave the way for an ambitious, six-year reauthorization when the political and economic stars are in better alignment than they are now. It’s a roadmap for action at a time when many reformers are throwing up their hands in despair, wondering what can possibly be achieved in the current climate.

A $50.5 million TIFIA loan helped finance the largest public works project ever undertaken in Northern Nevada, the Reno Transportation Rail Access Corridor. Image courtesy of the city of Reno

Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program says the current system is “both broke and broken,” meaning dramatic changes to the financing system are essential to get the kind of transportation system we want. “Minor tweaks are just not going to be enough,” he said. “You could triple the bike program and that’s great, but it’s not going to solve the major challenges we’re facing as a nation. It’s all got to be run through an economic lens.”

Puentes favors a National Infrastructure Bank, promoted by President Obama in his Labor Day speech, as a way to channel transportation investments strategically.

One person who will have a large role in shaping an infrastructure bank is California Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In a hearing this fall, Boxer challenged the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank, saying she’d prefer to see current financing programs strengthened. The program that Boxer wanted to see strengthened, instead of establishing a NIB, is known as TIFIA (Transportation Infrastructure Finance & Innovation Act).

So, you’re probably wondering whether using TIFIA or a NIB to pay for infrastructure makes a difference. Is one mechanism better suited to building a safer, more efficient, and sustainable transportation system than the other?

TIFIA

TIFIA is a program of the Federal Highway Administration that provides credit assistance – not grants – for infrastructure projects. It doesn’t substitute for public spending or private investment – it’s a way to encourage private investment by providing loan security.

TIFIA has been around since 1998 but it’s come into greater use since the recession started eating away at state budgets. “They didn’t need it [before the recession] the same way they need it today,” says Puentes. “It’s oversubscribed, and so we need to figure out a way to choose TIFIA projects based on their merits.”

It’s not clear how the TIFIA program chooses projects to support, now that applications outnumber availability by a factor of more than eight to one. That’s one critique of the program: that it’s not transparent enough in its decision-making.

The U.S. DOT has a proposal for TIFIA reform [PDF], but it refers to technicalities like repayment schedules and wage laws. Reformers say more dramatic, substantive reform would need to happen to make TIFIA a lever for change.

And many doubt that TIFIA can be as strong as it needs to be as long as it’s housed in the Department of Transportation. “Once something is created in DOT or in Treasury or anywhere else, it becomes part of someone’s jurisdiction, someone’s fiefdom,” says Scott Thomasson, an expert in infrastructure finance at the Progressive Policy Institute. “And there are people who want control of it and are going to fight if you try to change it too much.”

But could TIFIA be made into an independent entity? “That’s an institutional political fight you’re going to lose,” says Thomasson, “if you try to take away somebody’s baby.”

In our next post, we’ll investigate the proposal to establish a National Infrastructure Bank, how it compares to TIFIA, and evaluate its pros and cons.

It's nice that Michele Bachmann thinks transportation funding is important, but does it need to go through earmarks? Photo: Huffington Post

No. But they named a few post offices. And they re-elected their same leaders to keep on leading them. And the emboldened Republicans have made it clear they’re steering toward a ban on earmarks, a sign to the electorate that they’re going to tackle the “wasteful spending” they lambasted during the campaign. (Their effort to start by eliminating funding for NPR was quickly disposed of today.)

Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has taken a hard line against earmarks in her second term, after getting nearly $4 million in earmarks her first term. “It’s all bad, as far as I’m concerned,” she told Fox News this spring. “All this pork is bad.”

This week, she told the Minnesota Star Tribune that she wants to redefine earmarks so that they don’t include transportation earmarks. Meaning, she wants an absolute ban on earmarks, except the ones she really, really likes. “Advocating for transportation projects for one’s district, in my mind, does not equate to an earmark,” she said.

Actually, that’s exactly what an earmark is, and that’s why they’ve been so controversial. They’re one of the primary ways that the legislative branch exercises control over spending. Many lawmakers see them as indispensable, since, they assert, they know better what the needs are in their districts than federal bureaucrats in Washington.

But Bachmann says, “”I don’t believe that building roads and bridges and interchanges should be considered an earmark… There’s a big difference between funding a tea pot museum and a bridge over a vital waterway.”

Interesting choice of targets for a Tea Partier. Incidentally, the museum she’s referring to is North Carolina’s Sparta Teapot Museum, which closed its doors early this year. A few years back there was some brouhaha surrounding a half-million dollar federal grant that was approved but, in the end, not spent.

In any case, Bachmann’s carve-out for transportation earmarks is somewhat endearing – after all, it shows the importance she gives to infrastructure investment, even if she does only mention roads and bridges. But it also shows she’s committed to an old and broken system for appropriating money.

“The transport program has always been characterized by a desire to have less federal involvement,” Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution told Streetsblog today. “And that’s what we’ve done over the last couple years, is to whittle away the federal role, and what we’re left with is 6,300 earmarks.”

Meanwhile, he says, discretionary grant programs like TIGER have been able to target programs of national and regional significance and so are actually more consistent with fiscally conservative principles than earmarks. “They adhere to the mandate these guys are coming in with,” he said. “Better spending, more targeted spending, not wasting money – it hits all these things that they, abstractly, want to do.”

Michele Bachmann’s exemption for transportation earmarks may sound crazy, Puentes says, “But that’s how a lot of folks think about the transport system.” He says people treat transportation earmarks separately, “like if a member’s requesting it, it is therefore a matter of national significance, a high priority project.”

He’d rather switch to performance-based funding for projects that will actually help bring us into a 21^st century transportation system and not just bring home the bacon for one member’s district.

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."