TICKET TO RIDEthe Surface Transportation Policy Project's SoCal newsletterMarch 1998 Volume 2 Issue 1Readers: With this issue STPP-L.A. will resume regular monthlypublication of this newsletter. If you would also like to receive our periodicISTEA action alerts please call or e-mail. |
SENATE PROVIDES NO MONEY FOR TRANSIT In a sudden turn of events after months of inactivity, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) brought ISTEA 2 (S1173) to the Senate floor last week, even while budget negotiations to find more money for transportation continued behind closed doors. The money was found and Tuesday (3/3) the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee marked up a funding deal adding $25.9 billion to the mammoth $145 billion six-year transportation bill -- but none of the increase would go to transit. Environmental and community groups were quick to condemn the proposal, pointing out that it ignores the historical precedent established under the Reagan Administration that 20 percent of any spending increase should be dedicated to mass transit. The proposal gives the highest priority to special earmarked projects and flexible block grants given directly to state departments of transportation, including $1.9 billion for Senator Robert Byrd's (D-WV) Appalachian roads program and for NAFTA Trade Corridor and Border Infrastructure highway-building programs. Besides providing zero dollars for transit it shortchanges programs like CMAQ, enhancements and road and highway maintenance by earmarking so much funding off the top. STPP had sent a letter co-signed by 30 environmental and community groups to every Senator last weekend, urging them to ensure that any funding increase include 20 percent for mass transit. The coalition's letter also urged Senators to reject five anticipated anti-environment and anti-transit amendments: Inhofe's (R-OK) rider dismantling the new air quality standards; Smith's (R-NH) weakening of the National Environmental Policy Act; Brownback's (R-KS) threat to the enhancements program by allowing state DOTs to opt out; several amendments for state transit "minimum allocation" that threaten the viability of the federal transit program as well as local transit systems and transit "new start" projects throughout the country; and Inhofe's attack on the CMAQ program by expanding eligibility to highway expansion projects. The first of the remaining 200-plus filed amendments are likely tobe taken up this week, including Senator Inhofe's amendment to dismantle the Administration's new air standards -- possibly the first major environmental battle of ISTEA 2. For frequent updates on ISTEA 2 developments visit http://www.istea.org. |
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The U.S. General Accounting Office predicts that road congestion will triple in 15 years even if capacity is increased by 20 percent. |
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These are dark days for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But there are many MTA critics who pose a radical notion: Money isn't the problem. The MTA has enough money to provide more and better service, it just has to be smarter about what it does. The rail construction program is a problem not because it's the wrong mode but because building the subway everywhere as a subway makes no sense and is exorbitantly expensive. And because MTA project costs are greatly inflated by building into project budgets contingencies upon reserves upon allowances that all become self-fulfilling prophecies and wind up as changeorders and cost overruns. But there's another problem that hasn't been taken up by the media or aired in the Bus Riders Union lawsuit. At the very core of the agency's fiscal problem is the operating deficit. Shut down the capital program and the operating deficit will continue to expand to the point where the agency is no better off than when it had a capital program for constructing much-needed transportation infrastructure. The MTA should divest itself of some or all of its bus and rail services to cities, private operators and new public/private ventures. The MTA's bus operation costs per hour of service are nearly twice that of other L.A.-area municipal operators who contract with the same unions that the MTA does. Given the growing body of evidence suggesting that high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes may actually be harmful to air quality since they expand highway capacity but do not seem to be appreciably increasing carpooling, does the MTA's multi-billion dollar investment in HOV lanes make sense? The MTA is building only new lanes instead of converting existing lanes. The HOV program amounts to the nation's largest freeway-capacity-expansion effort in a region with the nation's worst air quality. And it's being built with flexible federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funds designed to improveair quality! Is the MTA's bi-annual Call for Projects -- used to fund projects proposed by Caltrans and the cities -- merely a mechanism by which the agency buys itself friends? The MTA committed to $666 million of new projects in this year's Call, even at the same time that it was under scrutiny by the Federal Transit Administration because of its fiscal problems. The point is that the MTA has lots of money, and the issue isn't bus vs. rail, or city vs. suburb, or poor vs. rich, or even transit vs. highway, all of which are rhetorical red herrings that serve to divert attention away from what should be the MTA's goal -- meeting the mobility and access needs of all the people of L.A. County. |
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Traffic engineers have for decades been operating under the dictate that when it comes to roads, wider and straighter is better, mostly because of the so-called “Green Book,” the industry bible of highway design written by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). Its principles are simple: In order to make roads as safe as possible they must be able to accommodate fast-moving traffic, even cars traveling at speeds in excess of posted limits. This means wider and straighter even though wider, straighter roads encourage drivers to drive faster still. But activists unhappy with the effects of so much pavement and fast-moving traffic on quality of life in communities are questioning why these speeds must be accommodated. As noted in a recent issue of Congressional Quarterly's Governing magazine, Vermont, Connecticut, Philadelphia and Phoenix are among those rewriting AASHTO's standards. Other cities are going a step further and making existing roads narrower. Riverside and San Bernardino, for example, are narrowing their main streets from four lanes to two and switching from parallel to diagonal parking to make them narrower still. “The discontent is everywhere,” Barton D. Russell of Connecticut's Council of Small Towns told Governing. “There's just too much pavement.” Added Alan Chapin, a Connecticut selectman who lobbied for passage of his state's new law, “This is still a guerrilla movement. The institutional resistance is tremendous. But at the neighborhood level this has tremendous appeal.” Last summer the Institute of Traffic Engineers issued its own manifesto of street guidelines, and now the Federal Highway Administration has prepared its own text. Critics of AASHTO point to that organization's close ties to labor, AAA, asphalt and concrete suppliers, and trucking companies. Wider, straighter roads benefit those who are paid to design, build and ship goods on them, say these critics, and not the communities that have to live with them. The dispute was also reported in the Engineering News Record in January, which concluded that communities now expect transportation engineers to help them build livable communities “where people -- not automobiles -- are the priority.” STPP is distributing the FHWA's new Flexible Highway Design guidelines. Call STPP for a copy. |
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L.A. IS A “BUILT” ENVIRONMENT AND WE CAN'T CHANGE EXISTING LAND USE PATTERNS During the past 20 years the region's population grew by 45 percent and the land area grew by 300 percent. If the population increases by another 44 percent in the next 20 years, as is projected, there will be ample momentum for change. The city can continue to sprawl outward -- at tremendous social and environmental cost -- or we can redevelop existing communities, channeling growth, investment and revitalization efforts into “infill”development along significant transportation corridors. |
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New York newspapers had a field day with Mayor Rudolf Guiliani's imposition of pedestrian barriers at midtown intersections. Newsday reported that pedestrian and bicyclist deaths jumped by 25 percent in a year, and the Daily News reported that during the same time police ticketing of drivers fell by a third. The New York Times found that 80 percent of motorists deemed at fault for driving into pedestrians last year received no summons, and compared New York with London, where traffic calming has dramatically reduced pedestrian deaths. The Daily News faulted the mayor's priorities, pointing out that no pedestrian ever “killed a car by smashing into it”. The British Parliament is considering a bill to implement “homezones,” or groups of streets in which authorities could impose 10 mph speed limits and implement traffic calming strategies and in which motorists would be wholly liable for any injuries caused to pedestrians and bicyclists. Brisk half-hour walks six times a month can reduce the risk of premature death by 44 percent, reported Finnish researchers in last month's Journal of the American Medical Association. |
Written by Gloria Ohland and Ron Milam |