Streetsblog San Francisco

There’s a place just outside Houston where the vinyl siding and attached garages thin out and recede into grasslands.

In this place — one of the country’s few remaining tall-grass prairies — something amazing happens each fall. First hundreds, then thousands, then millions of birds arrive here at Katy Prairie, an international wintering grounds for migratory birds, especially waterfowl.

Over the decades, this 1,000 square mile sanctuary has largely survived the encroachment of farmers and relentless development pressure from neighboring Houston, thanks in no small part to its dedicated supporters.

But the Katy Prairie has never faced a opponent like the Grand Parkway before. Piece by piece, the Houston area has been building a third — yes, third — bypass for the region. And much to the horror of local environmentalists, the next segment is planned to directly bisect this extraordinary habitat.

Development of this pristine land isn’t just collateral damage — it’s the point of the project. Project sponsors make no bones about it: The 15.2-mile Grand Parkway segment through Katy Prairie is a $462 million development project as much as it is a transportation project. Known as “Segment E,” it would be the third phase in a 180-mile “scenic bypass” for Houston. Each of the 11 segments is considered a separate and “independently justifiable project.”

Billy Burge of the Grand Parkway Association says right now there isn’t much need for Segment E, in terms of traffic. Burge and his colleagues don’t shy away from the fact that the project will generate more car trips and sprawl. In fact, they have what you might call a “build it and they will come” philosophy about road-building and traffic.

“There’s real demand in 15 to 17 years to have this,” said Burge, who chairs the association overseeing the project for the state and the region. “Once that link is completed, you’ll have a steady stream of traffic.”

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The South Carolina Department of Transportation is sometimes still familiarly known as the “highway department.” That was, in fact, the agency’s proper title until 1977, when it was changed by order of the general assembly to the Department of Highways and Public Transportation.

In many ways, though, the old name still fits. In the 2009-10 fiscal year, the department spent about two percent of its $1 billion budget on transit. The rest was distributed among maintenance, engineering, planning and construction of roads and bridges.

That bias appears to have carried over in SCDOT’s handling of the Interstate 526 extension in Charleston. Over the protests of a majority of local residents, SCDOT has put forward a nearly half-billion-dollar proposal for a traditional highway bypass through Savannah’s lowcountry. The origin for the plan dates back to the days when SCDOT was still called the highway department.

The seemingly single-minded devotion to highways on the part of state and many local leaders frustrates Josh Martin of the Coastal Conservation League. The League’s alternative plan, A New Way to Work, emphasized street-level reforms over the disruption and environmental destruction of a freeway. What’s more, the League contends that traffic problems in West Ashley, Johns Island and James Island could be resolved for less than half the cost of SCDOT’s “preferred alternative.”

Why are politicians and the DOT overlooking more affordable and effective solutions? Martin said many Charleston-area leaders simply aren’t informed about the latest developments in the field of transportation.

“It’s just a political leadership that is really embedded in this antiquated thought of how transportation planning works,” he said. “You look at all these other places actually tearing their freeways down and we’re about to build a half-billion-dollar highway.”

“We are making the largest dumb-growth investment in the country with I-526,” he added.

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While the world has gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss again a shared approach to Climate Chaos, action is already being taken in countless communities. On a visit last week to Guadalajara, Mexico, more than a thousand miles west of the Climate Meeting, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city. Interestingly, this movement leans primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

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Drive north from San Francisco for a few hours, and the 101 will gradually melt into a slim road between giant sequoia trees. You've found your way to Richardson Grove State Park, where you can see thousand-year-old redwoods, the South Fork Eel River, and lots of campgrounds, but you won't see any big box stores.

That's thanks, at least in part, to the narrowness of the 101. With a speed limit of 35 miles per hour, most tractor-trailers are banned from the park. This has helped keep sprawl to a minimum, but some Humboldt officials have long complained that it isolates the county and limits commerce.

In response to the politicians, Caltrans spent about a decade working on the Richardson Grove Improvement Project, which culminated this May in a Final Environmental Impact Report.

As described, Caltrans' project would widen the highway and eliminate detours for trucks, shortening the trip from Oakland to Eureka from 725 miles to 279.

And that's where things get controversial.

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The Senate today took its first steps towards voting on a new long-term federal transportation bill, with environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) vowing to take up a successor to the 2005 infrastructure law before 2011 and indicating she would use the House's already-introduced version as a framework.

Boxer described today's hearing in her panel as "the kickoff" of the upper chamber's drafting of new legislation governing U.S. road, transit, bridge, port, and rail policy. "Our intention is to hold a series of hearings and write the bill while you are still here and while Senator [George] Voinovich [R-OH] is still here," she told Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), who will retire at the end of the year.

Such willingness to consider a new infrastructure bill before the Obama administration's preferred timeframe of next spring could help thaw the frosty relations between Boxer's panel and the House transportation committee, where chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) has raged against upper-chamber inaction for months.

But lawmakers and industry lobbies have a long way to go before they can sing from the same hymnal on the next transportation bill. Boxer asked representatives of the four lobbies appearing today -- the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA), the National Construction Alliance (NCA) and the Associated General Contractors (AGC) -- to parse Oberstar's bill "literally, with a pen" and let senators know which provisions they favored or disliked.

"We're going to take their bill and work from it," Boxer said of the House, which has proposed a $500 billion plan that streamlines 108 categories of formula-based federal transportation spending into four and includes dedicated funding for metropolitan area priorities.

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A provision in the Senate jobs bill that would distribute $932 million in 2010 transportation funding based on existing earmarks is in line for a quick fix, thanks to a deal
struck on Friday between House transportation committee chairman Jim
Oberstar (D-MN) and Democratic leaders in the upper chamber.

But
it’s worth delving more deeply into the earmarking that dominated the
two disputed grant programs, the Projects of Regional and National
Significance (PRNS) and the National Corridor
Infrastructure Improvement Program (NCIIP).

The
watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS), which first coined the
term "Bridge to Nowhere" for Alaska’s infamous infrastructure earmark,
released a helpful spreadsheet
yesterday that shows which state projects claimed the lion’s share of
the PRNS and NCIIP money in the 2005 federal transport law. TCS also calculated
each state’s share of the grant programs, levels that would continue
this year if the Senate jobs bill passed without future corrections.

TCS’
research sheds further light on the objections of Oberstar and other
lawmakers who complained that the Senate jobs bill would send more than
half the $932 million to four states — California, Louisiana,
Illinois, and Washington. But it also answers the question of why those four states.

From the TCS report:

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The Obama administration’s awarding of $1.5 billion in competitive transportation stimulus grants on Wednesday sparked elation in cities such as Kansas City and New Orleans. But those celebrations were more than just anecdotal evidence of the so-called TIGER program‘s urban impact, according to a new analysis from the Brookings Institution’s Rob Puentes.

Writing on The New Republic’s Avenue blog, Puentes notes
that the nation’s top 100 metro areas — which collectively generate
three-quarters of U.S. GDP, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors
– got more than 70 percent of the total TIGER funding.

Meanwhile,
the stimulus law’s $48 billion in formula-based transportation spending
continues to give disproportionately short shrift to major cities.

Puentes
found that as of the end of 2009, the top 100 U.S. metro areas had
received about 59 percent of total infrastructure stimulus spending.
That number masks a greater urban-rural imbalance in highway stimulus
money, just 50 percent of which went to America’s biggest — and often,
most economically productive — cities. (See the chart above for more
details.)

A July analysis
by Streetsblog Capitol Hill reached a similar conclusion, focusing on
the top 20 U.S. cities and finding them getting 28 percent of the $787
billion stimulus law’s highway money, compared with 61 percent of its
transit funding.

So what can be done to help give major
cities a share of infrastructure recovery aid that’s commensurate with
the scale of their economic needs? For Puentes, the answer is simple:
Use TIGER as a model:

As Washington considers the additional steps
needs to retain and create jobs, the TIGER’s recognition of the
economic primacy of U.S. metropolitan area should be illustrative.