Streetsblog Los Angeles

Highways 'n' pipelines: The cover page to the House transportation bill brochure. Image: Politico

There was no grand unveiling of the House’s five-year transportation bill today, but a summary of the bill has been kicking around for a few days. While there aren’t any hard numbers available yet, the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act looks like a return to 1950s-style transportation policy. It is particularly unkind to transit and bike/ped programs, and to cities in general.

The bill’s overarching themes, again in the absence of official language, seem to be:

• Funneling as much money as possible to highways
• Giving even more power to spend that money to state DOTs, not cities and metro regions
• Shortening the environmental review process
• Eliminating programs “that do not have a federal interest,” which apparently includes all dedicated funding for bicycle and pedestrian programs
• Doing away with discretionary transit programs, which would spell the end for the very successful TIGER
• Augmenting gas tax revenue with a yet-unspecified revenue stream from oil and gas drilling

When the San Diego Association of Governments passed its regional transportation plan, which will direct transportation spending in the region for decades, the agency hailed the plan as a national model.  This was the first plan passed that followed the standards of SB 375, the California environmental law that set greenhouse gas reduction targets based on transportation and development planning.

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The agency declared victory, but many local advocates weren’t convinced.

“If this is a national and regional model, we’re in bad shape,” Dough McFetridge of the Cleveland National Forest Foundation grumbled to Streetsblog last November.  ”We have a need — a tremendous need — for transit right now, today. This proposal puts funding transit off into so far in to the future that many of us won’t be around anymore.”

McFetridge and other environmental groups pressed forward with a lawsuit claiming that the EIR for the plan was flawed because it didn’t take into account the impact new highway construction would have on vehicles miles traveled.  This week their lawsuit received a major boost when California Attorney General Kamala Harris joined their efforts.

“The 3.2 million residents of the San Diego region already suffer from the seventh worst ozone pollution in the country,” said Harris in a press release. “Spending our transit dollars in the right way today will improve the economy, create sustainable jobs and ensure that future generations do not continue to suffer from heavily polluted air.”

The lawsuit argues that the environmental review of the transit plan did not adequately analyze the public health impacts of the increased air pollution. The San Diego region already has a very high risk of cancer from particulate matter emitted by diesel engines and vehicles and there is no analysis as to whether this risk will increase.  By prioritizing highway expansion in the first years of the plan, SANDAG claims more pedestrian, bicycle and transit expansion in the plan even though those plans may never happen.  The bulk of the investment in transit and active transportation begins decades from now.

“The attorney general’s intervention in this case supports our argument that SANDAG’s plan is deeply flawed,” said Kathryn Phillips of the Sierra Club.  ”We’re encouraged that the State of California is serious about limiting air pollution and climate change pollution created by transportation in the region.”

Read more…

The New York Times yesterday published a series of six opinion pieces debating the merits of the $90 billion High-Speed Rail plan that would connect Los Angeles to San Francisco. Attacks have intensified on the “bullet train” rail project in recent weeks, focused mainly on the projects gigantic $90 billion budget and a recent audit that called funding for the project “shaky.”  Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown has stood firm with his support for the project, there is some momentum to provide voters with a chance to repeal the bonding plan to support the project passed on a statewide ballot initiative in 2008.

Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that four of the six writers at the Times’ website are questioning the value of the project. Streetsblog provides a summary of the six pieces after the jump, but for the full pieces visit “Room for Debate: Does California Need High Speed Rail.”

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If the Transportation Research Board annual meeting were a music festival, the headline act would have been yesterday’s panel of six secretaries of transportation, including Ray LaHood (the incumbent) and Alan Boyd (the first to ever hold the post). As headliners go, they were a bit of a downer: They told a standing-room-only crowd that they’re all pretty worried about America’s ability to deliver the transportation policy the country needs.

By comparison, their opening act was a little more upbeat. Congressmen Bill Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Railroads Subcommittee in the House, and Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat and former member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, held forth on ”The Future Federal Role in Transportation.” They demonstrated a little more reason for optimism than the secretaries did.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). Photo: ThinkProgress

For one thing, Shuster defended the explicit constitutional responsibilities of the federal government to provide for infrastructure. And when asked about transportation’s relationship to global trade, Shuster said, “When you’re talking about trade, you’re talking about transportation,” since goods need to be shipped from factory to port to overseas. “Sometimes, my party doesn’t link the two.” It was a display of nonpartisanship that hearkened back to the days when, in Blumenauer’s words, “Congress had three parties: Democrats, Republicans, and the T&I Committee.” (Bill Shuster’s father Bud chaired that committee from 1995 to 2001.)

But Shuster also opened his remarks with the announcement that his party’s five-year surface transportation bill would be unveiled on Friday. And, less than 12 hours removed from a State of the Union address that stressed an “all-out, all-of-the-above” energy policy, he was all too happy to suggest the inclusion of gas and oil drilling revenue to pay for it. Blumenauer, on the other hand, pointed out that oil and gas drilling doesn’t represent “anything near what’s necessary” to fund transportation spending at current levels, given the declining power of the gas tax. Blumenauer expressed his hope that “sometime in the coming decade, we can move away from the gas and diesel fuel tax, and to something more stable, fair, and efficient” in the form of a mileage-based fee system. Blumenauer’s home state of Oregon, which he pointed out was the first state to institute a gas tax dedicated to transportation funding, is in the midst of an experiment to implement VMT fees.

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This map shows the planned scope of IndyConnect, Indianapolis's bold new transit plan. The proposal is now in jeopardy because of a legislative rider regarding labor rules. Larger version here. Image: Urban Indy

Over the last few years, greater Indianapolis has been thinking big about transit. They developed a plan to double bus service and add new rail lines. They even identified funding (a 0.3 percent income tax hike) and built a viable political coalition around the vision — which represented a dramatic shift away from the old car-centric approach that has dominated transportation planning there for decades.

All that work is now hanging in the balance of a partisan standoff unrelated to the actual transit plan. Network blog Urban Indy reported yesterday that an Indiana House committee had voted down the transit legislation 11-10 after a Republican lawmaker inserted language into the bill that would make the transit system “right-to-work.”

The folks at Urban Indy, who have been advocating hard for this bill, are beside themselves. But a shred of hope remains, explains blogger extraordinaire Curt Ailes:

To be clear, the transit portion of the bill never seemed to be at the heart of the debate over HB1073; it was always the labor. The bickering could be see as an extension of the passionate debate of the past few weeks over Right to Work legislation which passed the House yesterday with Democrats coming up on the losing end of that debate.

This officially puts HB1073 in the failed bills category but does not altogether bury it from being passed in some other form this session.

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• County Takes Steps to Reduce Obesity, Increase Exercise Through Better Planning (LAT)
• The Source Celebrates Passage of “Construction Careers Program”
• The Times Editorial Board Likes the Jobs Program Idea Too
• Some Other Stuff Happened at the Board Meeting Too (The Source)
• A Look at LA’s ATSACR Traffic Lights Program (Forbes)
• Streetfilms Flashback 2009: Behind the Scenes of LA’s Traffic Control
• Air Resource Board Wants to Triple Amount of “Green” Cars on Road (Daily News)
• University of Iowa Report: Bikes Bring $365 Million in Economic Activity to Iowa (Cap. Hill Streetsblog)
• What’s the Best Way To Get People On to Mass Transit? Make it pleasant? Or make it efficient? (Slate)

For a full sized of LAANE's graphic explaining the Construction Careers Program, click on the image.

Earlier today, the Metro Board of Directors unanimously passed a motion creating a “construction careers program” that will require that at least 40% of workers on Metro projects come from disadvantaged communities. Streetsblog wrote about the program this week. The program was approved by the Federal Transit Administration after negotiations with local labor unions.

Insuring that the construction boom promised by Measure R benefits workers of lesser means has been a priority for community and advocacy groups. Federal law prohibits requirements designating geographic area hiring policies, but does allow agencies to create hiring policies that benefit “disadvantaged communities” more generally.

“Some people think that Measure R is only about transit, but it can be about a lot more,” testified Denny Zane, the executive director of Move L.A. ““Building Measure R projects are good jobs. This is a very important step you can take today.”

Zane kicked off a public comment period which saw nobody rise in opposition to the motion and a parade of speakers from all parts of L.A. County testifying what this policy could mean to their careers and their communities. The closest thing to opposition was a few comments from the Bus Riders Union that praised the program itself, but wished that it were going to support different projects than the Measure R rail projects. Read more…

There’s been plenty of buzz over the last few days surrounding Congress’s efforts to pass a multi-year transportation bill.

Rep. John Mica's five-year transportation bill will be unveiled tomorrow. Photo: 13 News

When Congress adjourned last month, the Senate had made significant progress on a two-year bill. In the House, Rep. John Mica had repeatedly promised a five- or six-year bill, but nothing had been introduced. Now, finally, Congress is showing signs of picking up where they left off. Here’s a rundown of the latest:

Details of House Transportation Bill Emerge…

According to multiple sources, the House transportation bill – called the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act – reauthorizes highway and transit programs for five years at around $52 billion per year, for a total of $260 billion. It seems likely that the bill would use revenue from oil and gas drilling fees. Mica is reportedly still pushing for a sixth year.

Rep. Bill Shuster said yesterday that T&I Committee Democrats would get their copies of the bill today, and the full text would be released to the general public tomorrow. Shuster had much more to say about the future of federal support for transportation, and Streetsblog will have more on that later today.

…And Next Week Will Be Busy…

Once the full text is released, three House committees need to bring portions of the bill into markup: Ways and Means, Natural Resources, and of course Transportation and Infrastructure are all planning markups for next week. T&I’s markup for the House bill is tentatively scheduled for next Thursday at 9 a.m., but it does not yet appear on the committee’s legislative calendar.

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Fearless prediction: April. I'll bet Mitt Romney $10,000 Expo Phase I opens in April without Culver City Station. That will open in August. Note, these are just predictions!

Earlier this morning at the Metro Board Meeting, CEO Art Leahy announced that pre-revenue operation of the Expo Line Phase I will begin on Monday.  ”Pre-revenue operation” is usually the last phase of tests a new fixed rail transit line undergoes before the line opens to the public.  The agency will run trains on the line as though service has begun although there won’t be any passengers on the train other than the crew and any special guests.

The beginning of pre-revenue while construction of the station in Culver City is ongoing means that if no other problems pop up, Phase I will open sometime this Spring but end at the station located at La Cienega and Jefferson Blvd.  An opening for the completed line will come a couple of months after the station is completed in Culver City.

While this is good news for supporters of the Expo Line, the question most people still have is, “when will Phase I open?”  Pre-revenue operations usually run somewhere between six and eight weeks, so an opening in April isn’t out of the question.  According to The Source, the agency is playing it close to the vest and hasn’t announced an opening date yet.

One of the debates about open streets events, such as the wildly popular CicLAvia in Los Angeles, is whether or not the event is “good for business.”  While it’s a mistake to rate events that have such a tremendous benefit to the city based on the one-day impact of businesses, a new video from the Mayor’s Office demonstrates that open streets aren’t just good for the city’s residents, but also good for the city’s business.

Matt Berman from Bolt Barbers, Nancy Carlson of Pet Project Pet Supplies, and a pair of Barristas at Coffee Bar on Spring Street all appear in the video and tell the camera that not only do the tens of thousands of people rolling and walking by their businesses isn’t just good for exposure.  It makes for a great day to do business.