Streetsblog San Francisco

Building America’s Future, led by former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has added their voice to the chorus calling for greater investment in U.S. infrastructure, lest the country fall behind its global competitors. In a new report, Falling Apart and Falling Behind, BAF recommends more focus on mass transit, a switch away from formula funding without performance requirements, and more emphasis on metropolitan areas.

A couple weeks ago, we took some heat from some of you, dear readers, about our coverage of a somewhat similar report from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Indeed, that report called for more infrastructure spending, but without specific recommendations on how to build a bettertransportation system. Charles Marohn at Strong Towns wrote a scathing critique of the report, questioning the urgent need to “spend trillions to save seconds” of commute time – especially the assertion that the U.S. should spend $2.2 trillion in order to save $1.0 trillion. Marohn went on to say:

At Strong Towns, we want our infrastructure maintained. In fact, it’s the common denominator of a Strong Town. But the reason why we can’t maintain our infrastructure is not because we lack the money or are afraid to spend it. It is because the systems we have built and the decisions we’ve made on what is a good investment are based on the kind of ridiculous math you see reflected in this ASCE report. We spend a billion here and a billion there and we get nothing but a couple minutes shaved off of our commutes, which just means we can build more roads and live further away from where we work. (Or, as we call that here in America: growth.)

Well put. And we’re glad to see that today’s contribution to the infrastructure debate goes deeper than the ASCE report in recommending concrete ways to build smarter, not just more.

Building America’s Future urges more spending, but says that to do it right, funding priorities should adhere to national strategies. And they’re not shy about spelling out what those are: more economic growth and mobility, less congestion and pollution. “Largely run on gasoline, our transportation system is environmentally, politically, and economically unsustainable,” they write.

Read more…

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.

Read more...

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.

In today’s New York Times, Bob Herbert celebrates the cause of
infrastructure maintenance — a less exciting proposition for
politicians than cutting the ribbon at new transportation projects, but
in many ways more vital to economic growth.

After talking to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), an avowed booster of the National Infrastructure Bank concept, Herbert asks, "What’s wrong with us?" and continues:

We’re so far behind in some
areas that … Rendell has said that getting our infrastructure
act together can feel like “sledding uphill.”

“When I took over
as governor,” he said, “I was told that Pennsylvania led the nation in
the number of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges.
We had more than 5,600 of them. So I put a ton of money into bridge
repair. We more than tripled the amount in the capital budget, from
$200 million a year to $700 million a year. And I got a special
appropriation from the Legislature to do $200 million a year extra for
the next four years.”

One might be tempted to respond that what’s wrong with American
infrastructure policy has much to do with pundits such as Randal
O’Toole of the Cato Institute, who converts new acolytes in Washington
by arguing that the biggest defect in national infrastructure policy is
insufficient road spending. To O’Toole, the fact that one in four of
U.S. bridges is rated obsolete or deficient is no big deal:

“Functionally obsolete” bridges are not in any danger of falling down;
they merely have narrow lanes, inadequate overhead clearances, overly
sharp on- and off-ramps, or other outdated design features. These
bridges pose no risk to auto drivers unless the drivers themselves
drive recklessly.

… "[S]tructurally deficient” bridges have
suffered enough deterioration or damage that their load-carrying
abilities are lower than when they were built. But that still doesn’t
mean they are about to fall down; though they may be closed to heavy
loads, the most serious problem is that they cost more to maintain than
other bridges.

When the debate stumbles on the mere question of whether deficiency is worth fixing — incidentally, the National Bridge Inventory states that
deficient and obsolete bridges often contribute to congestion — it’s
difficult to see a broad consensus emerging in favor of government
spending to bring our built environment into good order. What Herbert
didn’t address in his column, unfortunately, was how to carve out that
consensus by talking in new and different ways about the importance of
infrastructure investment.

Read more…

During last month’s White House jobs summit, President Obama carved out
some common ground with critics of his first stimulus law’s $47 billion
in infrastructure spending — which was distributed mainly by the book
through state DOTs. "The term "shovel-ready," let’s be honest here,
doesn’t always live up to its billing," he acknowledged.

Now, as the Senate mulls its response to the House jobs bill that included
$27.5 billion for highways and $8.4 billion for transit, the
independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is echoing some of
Obama’s concerns.

In a report released Thursday, the Capitol budgeteers concluded
that most of the economic benefits of sending more transportation aid
to states would not be felt until 2011 at the earliest.

The
"large-scale construction projects" that could fundamentally reshape
local infrastructure tend to take years before their impact is felt on
the economy, the CBO noted:

[F]or example,
building new transportation infrastructure that requires establishing
new rights-of-way and developing and implementing alternative energy
sources would probably have their biggest effects on output and
employment after the recovery was well along. As a practical matter,
the experience with [the first stimulus] suggests that fewer projects
are “shovel ready” than one might expect …

Moreover, given the substantial increase in infrastructure
funding provided by [the first stimulus], achieving significant
increases in outlays above the amounts funded by [the first stimulus]
would probably take even longer. Thus, most of the increases in output
and employment from this option would probably occur after 2011.

Read more…

During the first stimulus debate, House Democrats and the White House famously sparred over how quickly infrastructure money could be spent — with the data later proving that transit was just as "shovel-ready" as roads, if not more so.

Now
that transportation policymakers have turned to stemming the rising
unemployment rate, three transit advocacy groups examined the age-old question of how many jobs are created per $1 billion of spending on transit versus roads.

But this study, conducted by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT),
Smart Growth America (SGA), and the U.S. Public Interest Research
Groups, used numbers taken directly from the stimulus job-creation
reports that every state sends to the House transportation committee.

According to the most recent report to Congress [PDF],
16,419 direct job-months were created by every $1 billion in transit
aid. Roads lagged behind with 8,781 job-months created per $1 billion
in stimulus aid.

SGA state policy director Will Schroeer said the study — using jobs math endorsed by lawmakers as recently as last week — sends a message to Congress that transit spending in the House jobs bill should be increased.

"If your goal, as it seems to be, is first to create jobs,
then your own data is saying we should be spending more on transit," Schroeer said in an interview.

It’s important to note two factors that make today’s study different from previous looks at infrastructure job creation.

Read more…

President Obama today threw his weight behind significant new
transportation spending as part of a broad jobs bill taking shape in
Congress, with $50 billion slated for transit, roads, bridges, and
ports and the administration endorsing "merit-based infrastructure
investment that leverages federal dollars."

During his speech in Washington, Obama revisited his past acknowledgment of the trade-off
between the goals of creating transportation jobs quickly and focusing
on projects that substantially improve America’s built environment. 

"I recognize that by their nature these projects often take time, and
will therefore create jobs over time," Obama said. "But the need for jobs will also
last beyond next year, and the benefits of these investments will last
years beyond that."

Obama
offered no details on the costs of his new economic recovery effort,
which also includes rebates for energy-efficient home retrofits (the
so-called "cash for caulkers"
concept) and tax incentives for small businesses. But a senior
administration official told reporters after the speech that the
infrastructure portion of Obama’s jobs proposal is expected to cost $50
billion.

The administration also suggested that it would seek
to offset the new legislation with repaid financial bailout money,
running counter to a report
this morning that the White House would be limited in its ability to
use funds from Wall Street’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

But
as Congress sifts through lengthy — and so far non-specific — lists
of "ready-to-go" projects from highway and transit planners, the day’s
biggest transportation reform news came buried in a White House release
outlining details of its plan. Under the infrastructure section of the
jobs bill, the White House stated:

Read more…

In an economic recovery report released
today by New York Gov. David Paterson (D), the state broke down its
plans for the estimated $31 billion it received as part of the Obama
administration’s first stimulus law.

A chart of
New York’s stimulus spending shows that, out of a total of $2.4 billion
in expected transportation aid, the state plans to direct $1.12 billion
to highways and bridges and $1.22 to transit.

With the federal government still dividing
its transport funding along an 80-20 split that favors roads, New
York’s decision to spend $100 million more stimulus aid on transit
represents a welcome break from tradition. In California,
where San Francisco and Los Angeles maintain large transit networks,
roads received slightly more than double the amount of stimulus aid
going to rail and buses.

Directly comparing New York and
California’s transportation funding choices would be the epitome of the
old idiom about apples and oranges. But as the congressional jobs
debate sharpens its focus on infrastructure projects, it’s worth noting that the roads-transit split is only one chapter in a bigger story.

A federal "fix-it-first" mandate, which environmental groups and transportation reformers are urging
Congress to include in the new jobs bill, would help break down the
cultural divide between different transport modes by ensuring that
repairs of existing infrastructure come first. After all, crumbling and
pothole-ridden roads affect pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike.

California, incidentally, lacks a "fix-it-first" requirement despite ranking 49th out of 50 states in recent rankings of nationwide road quality.