America's Transportation inching forward

If one wants to study the sad state of American transportation in and around metropolitan areas, Baltimore is just as good a study object as any. Once people leave the congested but smoothly paved interstates the journey goes across potholed city streets with hundreds of patches from quick fixes on the many utilities rotting away under the crumbling surface.

CMTA Transportation Report Card

Baltimore has a 1980s single line subway in serious need of overhaul (new cars are funded, however), a 1990s single line light rail also approaching the "midlife overhaul"  threshold. An additional rail line that would connected the other lonely lines creating the beginning of a rail system was scrapped by a Republican Governor mostly to make a point, and despite being fully designed and federally approved.

Commuter trains to the adjacent metro area (DC) share the tracks with Amtrak and freight. At various stations passengers board from adjacent tracks via step stool, on the line shared with freight passenger trains sometimes get delayed to let the freight pass.

800+ city and commuter buses fan out into the region to haul a quarter million people per day. The coaches are rather modern due to some TARP money, but endure heavy wear and tear on the bumpy roads they travel. There is no money to continue buying the recently introduced hybrid models, so the next replacement batch will be standard diesel again. The buses are notoriously unreliable and are often overcrowded due to the uneven schedule.

a 21st century commuter rail station? West Baltimore MARC

Entering the city by train on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak's only service making a profit and reaching speeds approaching what is defined as high speed rail (150mph), the train crawls at 30mph through the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel completed in 1873. Plans for the replacement of this historic artifact have begun their journey through the arduous National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) mandated process, but neither full engineering nor construction are funded. Congress faces regular efforts by Republicans of reducing funding for Amtrak in spite of the staggering needs and the poor conditions of current lines. Any improvements on the NEC depend on how the new federal transportation bill will look. An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) outlining a set of three alternatives for the entire corridor was released this week. ( website).

Acela train  at the B&P tunnel portal

Overall, the Baltimore area just received an overall grade of D in a report card by the regional transportation advocacy group CMTA using 12 criteria. The Baltimore-area transportation system with a D or lower in 8 out of 12 indicators. The report card included two Fs, for a disposable income category measuring how much households spend on transportation and housing, and for a disconnected communities measure that found a whopping 22 percent of Central Maryland workers spend at least 45 minutes commuting to work.

Is there any help coming from Washington? These days getting the House of Representatives to pass just about anything is cause for celebration. So when it passed a six year transportation authorization bill last week, even main stream media took notice, since such a long-term transport bill hadn't been passed in 10 years. With a 363-to-64 vote, the House passed a six-year, $325 billion federal highway bill, called the Surface Transportation Re-authorization and Reform Act (STRR) Act.

The House is on the cusp of something huge today — passing the first long-term highway and transit bill in a decade. Yes, you read that right — the last time a transportation bill longer than two years made it to the president’s desk was 2005, the year YouTube was founded. (Politico)

The decade during which Congress limped from one extension of the transportation bill to another was also a decade during which America gave up all hope of being or becoming a leader again in matters of getting around.

 

The cover of the new transportation bill, aptly dubbed
"highway bill"

High speed rail? Obama made a big push for it so America would be able to follow Europe or China's lead with a 40 or 10-year lag respectively, but the big plans turned, if not into dust entirely, to rubble, with fragments moving forward here and there.

Active modes of transportation, in other words, biking and walking? Far too many cities and suburban places in America remain unwalkable or too unsafe for pedestrians and bicyclists to have any chance to be a leader in that category, no matter how many progressive cities make great strides in catching up with Europe in bike sharing, bike facilities, local transit, and pedestrian amenities.

Airports, by contrast have been America's domain. It is ours to lose that leadership rank. Yet, we seem to be slipping. Air traffic control remains firmly anchored in the past century and most facilities are so crowded that hardly anybody would consider them trailblazers. A number of smaller airports are exceptions, thanks to their very welcoming architecture (Dulles, Airport near Washington, Raleigh-Durham International, or Jacksonhole, Wyoming to name just a few examples).

So cars, right? Ah, American freeways, unsurpassed worldwide! Someone who is still impressed by the aesthetics of the spaghetti bowls of freeway interchanges which become ever more complex with separated HOV lanes and ever higher design speeds can still admire engineering feats of multilevel interchanges gracing LA or the northern suburbs of Baltimore (where I-95 intersects with I-695), the widened Woodrow Wilson Bridge or the interchange between I-95 and the DC Beltway I-495. These monuments to automobility are probably represent a peak, before the car in its current form, single occupancy, personally-owned and operated machine will become obsolete. As noted before, in general the road infrastructure is neither in especially good condition nor is it exceptionally safe. Although we are probably still most advanced in car orientation worldwide, we have gotten ourselves trapped in a spiral of ever diminishing affordability. The aforementioned excesses around our major cities raise the problem of future maintenance with renewed urgency. Our infrastructure is in many ways just as bloated as the gas guzzling monster SUVs our car industry prefers to produce.

the ever expanding Baltimore beltway

What would it take to make the US and American cities leaders again in transportation?

What would it take to make the US and American cities leaders again in transportation?

Most would mention increased funding first. Indeed, the aforementioned transportation bill is mostly funded by the gasoline tax and it has not changed in 21 years. Worse, the amount of gasoline used has gone down in part due to better fuel economy, in part due to a weak economy and in part because a new generation of young people considers the privately owned car an obsolete model for mobility. This dwindling funding stream, matched up against an ever larger collections of assets to maintain and eventually replace is one of the chief culprits of the poor condition of almost any mode described above.

 

deteriorated urban street

In spite of this obvious calamity, though, any attempt of increasing revenue or shifting it to less regressive sources or those that will not dwindle over time has gone nowhere. The ideological aversion to anything that has to do with taxes is too pervasive among conservatives in both parties. In fact, the task of actually funding the transportation bill that passed the House last week has been left to the Senate to resolve.

The irony is that in a system that is as fundamentally flawed as the US transportation system, a lack of money may be a good thing. Currently expenditures are so slanted towards roads that the transportation bill is commonly called "the highway bill". Once one sees constant expansion of the highway system as a fallacy, that leads further and further away from solving both congestion and the money crunch, it should be obvious that more money is not better.

More lanes, more roads, more capacity, none of those old standbys of solving congestion have worked. In fact, more (suburban) roads do not only deplete cities and fuel sprawl, they ironically even increase demand and ultimately congestion because more and bigger roads make the cheaper and much more sustainable modes of getting around not only less attractive but also impossible. Who wants to walk or bike along modern arterial highways? Which transit agency can afford to serve low-density suburban cul-de-sacs, let alone build stations for speedy connections by train?  In other words, solving congestion with road building is like extinguishing a fire with gasoline or curing alcohol dependency with whiskey. The auto-oriented world that this current transportation system represents has forced every able body to drive and has left everybody else stuck without mobility, which as it turns out is not at all an insignificant contributor to poverty, unemployment and societal dysfunction.

congested airports

This leaves us with a an irrational condition: While the needs of transportation in America and its cities are enormous and meeting them will cost, indeed, a lot of money, the insufficient resources we do have don't even go towards actual solutions. In that situation many would argue that more available money would be poison and not medicine as long as there would be no reform in how funds get allocated, how transportation projects are evaluated and how particular projects get done.

In a situation where large amounts of our dwindling resources are wasted on expanding capacity for the non-sustainable single occupant private car use model, where roads are typically built more on the grounds of political patronage than data based needs and performance metrics, in such a situation a change in process is needed before there is an increase in funding.

While America had a fair share of anti-urban freeway movements that had various successes as far back as 1959 (San Francisco) and the 1970s (Baltimore), the movement of actively taking city streets back from the automobile began in Europe under the umbrella term of traffic calming. The idea of reducing road capacity and speed for quality of life was a reversal of the catechism of traffic engineers that demanded devotion to the two gods of speed and capacity, and that reigned supreme for decades.  The concepts of traffic calming, "road diets" and "complete streets" are still much disputed in the US and have become part of the prevailing cultural war between rural libertarians and the so called urban elite even though the dominance of the car policies has arguably devastated rural areas to a larger extent than even urban ones.

The causes and effects of sprawl, urban flight, and large-scale destruction of rural spaces has converted neighborhood streets into "traffic sewers" used to flee the city and has turned suburban arteries into nightmarish, ugly conglomerations of gas stations, parking lots and car dealerships. 

The urban solutions of the 1950s, the freeways cutting through neighborhoods, the one-way streets, the rush-hour parking restrictions and the timed signals with narrow sidewalks and the elimination of streetcars are still in full effect in most cities across the country and they still make living along city streets much less pleasant than it could be. The suburban solutions of car-centric planning, arteries, cul-de-sacs, low density and dispersal make the prospects for retrofits for a less car-dependent era hard to imagine.

Inside urban cores, it does not cost much to re-create streets that serve all modes of mobility because "the bones" are good and predate the cars in many instances.  Doing so restores quality of life along those streets by making them safer and more pleasant. Often only paint is needed to stripe a bike-lane that turns a two lane one way street into one with one lane for cars and one for bikes. Sometimes it would take only the removal of those signs that limit parking to move the danger and noise of cars at least 8' further away from storefronts, entry doors, and pedestrians. 

a street taken back from traffic: Ithaca, NY

The cost of turning one way streets into bi-directional streets is also low, even though it involves a bit more than paint and signs. The cost of reconfiguring traffic signals can be substantial, but that cost could be much diminished if the total number of signals were to be drastically reduced. The city of San Diego, for example, removed many downtown signals in favor of four-way stops, a device that slows traffic but avoids those waits at red signals when nobody else is in sight that are equally annoying for pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers. All those methods would encourage active transportation (walking and biking) and help solve the last mile problem, but they would not solve all transportation woes. Massive infusions of money into feeble transit systems would be needed all across the country to makes cities really less car dependent. Cities such as Salt Lake City, Dallas, Charlotte or Denver have demonstrated this successfully.  Baltimore’s neighboring metro area of DC is still benefiting from large transit investments of the past which allowed DC to grow by 40,000 residents and still reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT).

In the most successful cases of transit investment, citizens imposed special taxes onto themselves through referenda,  earmarking those revenues specifically for transit. Ironically, this leaves states like Maryland, which have a good transportation trust fund and aren't typically depending on funding via referendum in a lurch when, for example, one governor enacts increased fuel taxes to fund transit and the next one diverts those funds to build roads. 

The absence of a strong national transportation agenda not only leaves the country as such without a clear mobility vision, it accelerates the growing divide between affluent and poor states and by extension, between the rich and the poor in general. 

It is not likely that the new long-term transportation bill (STRR) will make a big dent in that trend, even if the Senate does resolve the funding conundrum and proper criteria for expenditures are established before the final bill is enacted.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff, JD

As of Tursday 11/17 it appears as if the bill won't pass by Friday's deadline because the Conference Committee will likely not be able to resolve the differences by then.  That would mean another short term extension is likely, the 15th!   

Here a few highlights of the House Transportation bill 
(taken from the "Mobilizing the Region" blog)

Mobilizing the Region (MTR) is the official blog of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a 501 (c)(3) advocacy organization dedicated to creating a more sustainable, balanced, and equitable transportation network in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

• Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA): While the TIFIA financing program was one of the best features of MAP-21, its funding was cut by 80 percent in STRR, from $1 billion to $200 million. On the bright side, the house bill does lower the minimum cost of projects from $25 million to $10 million, enabling more communities to access this smaller pot of low-cost loans.
• Freight: TIFIA’s loss was freight’s gain. A new, $725 million-per-year discretionary “multi-modal” freight grant program was included in the bill, but it comes with one big caveat: it’s not really multi-modal. Only 10 percent of the funds can be spent on non-highway projects, hamstringing the ability of states to find the best solution for their freight issues. There is some good news though: an amendment which would have increased the weight limit of commercial trucks from 80,000 pounds to 91,000 pounds—compromising safety on our roads while causing more wear and tear—was successfully defeated.
• Local Control: The Davis-Titus amendment, which would have given communities of all sizes more control and better access to federal dollars, and which had the most bi-partisan support of any amendment, was not even allowed to come up for a vote in rules committee.
• Transit-Oriented Development (TOD): An amendment that would have enabled TOD projects to be eligible under the Railroad Rehabilitation Improvement Financing program (RRIF) failed. The smaller TOD planning grants—$10 million per year—which help communities build smart development projects survived the knife.
• Other Transit Funding: While the traditional 80-20 formula split between highways and transit was retained, transit funding got dinged in a couple of important ways:
  • New Starts/Small Starts Programs: Highway projects will still have 20 percent local-dollar match, but new transit capital projects will face a steeper, 50 percent local match. This move disproportionately impacts smaller and poorer communities, given that larger communities are already kicking in close to 50 percent in local dollars. On top of that, once-flexible Surface Transportation Program funds also won’t be eligible for transit projects. On the upside, a successful amendment, put forward by Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York and others, partially fixes the problem by enabling CMAQ funds to be used as part of the local match, effectively increasing the federal portion above 50 percent.
  • High Density Program: This program, which provides transit aid to the seven states that collectively account for 50 percent of the nation’s public transit riders (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland and the District of Columbia), will be slashed by $1.6 billion over six years.
• Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP): This program, which provides the most significant source of funds for walking and biking projects, was not significantly changed from a policy perspective—despite threatening amendments—but funding was capped at $819 million per year, while all other programs will increase with inflation.
• Complete Streets: A complete streets provision, which enjoyed strong support from AARP, was adopted, and will ensure that more of our transportation projects are considering all users of the road.
• Gas Tax: Despite House Speaker Paul Ryan’s promise to have a more open legislative process, discussion on sustainable revenue sources were squashed: a vote was allowed to cut the gas tax by 15 cents (defeated 118-310), but the vote to raise the tax was blocked.
• Extra $40 Billion?: In a surprise move late Wednesday night, an amendment was passed that adds an additional $40 billion, from a Federal Reserve capital account, and provides the potential for the full six years of the transportation bill to be funded.

There is still the opportunity for improvements as the House and Senate reconcile the differences in their bills through conference.