Cascading Billions For Transportation: Where's The Accountability?

Neal Peirce

WASHINGTON--Even as the federal budget tumbles into deep red ink, a coterie of lobbying titans--road builders, politically muscular state transportation departments and resurgent public transit agencies--are converging on Congress to demand not less but a lot more money.

With the current federal transportation program due to expire next Sept. 30, the road builders are proposing a staggering increase in Washington's yearly highway subsidies--from $35 billion now to $60 billion by 2009. A touch more modest, the state transportation departments are requesting $41 billion a year.

And the historically neglected local transit agencies want a doubling of the federal assistance they receive, from $7 billion yearly now to $14 billion in 2009. There's been such a cascade of requests for "new start" federal funding of light rail or busway systems, say the transit lobbyists, that it would take 50 years to finance them all under the current funding formulas.

So what's Congress to do with ballooning transportation demands? Will it be willing to cut other programs, or increase federal deficits, to finance the avalanche of new transportation requests?

Even more fundamentally, what results can be expected from radically expanded spending?

The Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP), a reform group that's taken a strong role in each transportation bill since the early 1990s, has begun to ask that pesky question.

There was a huge (40 percent) increase in federal transportation spending in 1998, notes STPP. But to what end? Has the spending produced less traffic congestion? Any dramatic improvement in road and bridge conditions? Reduced fatalities and injuries? Cleaner air (and less asthma cases)? And any serious scientific or land use innovation to improve Americans' mobility?

The answer to all questions: No.

"Until we hear what happened with the money last time around," says STPP chief David Burwell, "we can't support any increases in the funding levels."

There is one bright spot, say Burwell and Hank Dittmar, his predecessor heading STPP. That's public transit. Reversing decades of decline, transit ridership (albeit from a much smaller base) has been rising faster than auto vehicle miles driven. Some new local systems, like Dallas' DART light rail network, are proving wildly popular. Every transit rider takes a user off today's congested highways.

But transit advocates are split themselves among advocates of radically less expensive exclusive busways and more popular regionwide rail systems.

And as STPP itself notes, sometimes transit lines are planned smartly--as "multi-modal nodes" with community-fostering shops, banks, day-care centers, apartments, and walking and biking opportunities, all clustered at the stations. Conversely, they're sometimes executed the wrong way--acres of parking, but no community or mixed use.

The challenge is to insist on tying transportation aid to much smarter land use.

Don Chen of Smart Growth America defined the issue last year for the Funders' Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities. Transportation reform in America, he wrote, is at a "tipping point." The 44,000-mile Interstate highway system was mapped in 1956 in top-down fashion, out of Washington and state capitals, virtually never soliciting community input.

It was a perfect engineers' mentality--decide, then tell folks to accept your formula. That started to change in 1990 when STPP, coalescing environmentalists, architects, planners, biking advocates and social equity advocates, cried "enough" and got at least some transportation decisions made at the regional level. The 1991 transportation law opened the door to support of public transit, pedestrian ways, biking and public involvement.

From New Jersey's "Fix-It-First" transportation improvement statute to California's Safe Routes to School Law, lead states have followed suit. Transit riders unions have developed nationwide. The connection has begun to sink in--how sprawl development, thickening traffic, environmental damage, open space loss and the health-imperiling obesity of drive-everywhere-Americans develop in tandem.

Lead business groups, from Silicon Valley to Utah to Chicago, have faulted sprawl as a drag on their regional economies and a detriment to community livability. "Smart growth" movements have been sparked in state after state.

"What's the best long-term solution to traffic congestion?"--the Atlanta Regional Commission asked in a poll last year. The reply--not untypical: expanded mass transit, 49 percent; new roads and lane miles, only 22 percent.

The Washington lobby game tends to ignore those grass-roots shifts. But STPP has formed a nationwide grass-roots "Alliance for a New Transportation Charter" focused on public health and safety, social equity, livable communities, energy conservation and sustainable local economies. Signatories run from the American Heart Association to the NAACP, Friends of the Earth to the Colorado Association of Ski Towns--550 in all (www.antc.net).

Can they make their voices heard in a conservative Congress, or with an administration wed to energy interests? It won't be easy. But focusing tough performance and accountability questions on the federal government's already gargantuan transportation subsidies sounds like a dandy way to start.

Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.