As has already been mentioned in earlier postings, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has undertaken important work to try to better understand our traffic safety “culture” and figure out ways to change it. The Foundation published its first-annual Traffic Safety Culture Index, a nationwide survey examining the attitudes and actions of people across the country, in 2008. The results were both alarming and telling. More than 60 percent of respondents rated road safety as a serious national problem. But the research found that motorists often were engaging in the very behavior that they abhor.

For instance, despite rating drunken driving as the most serious traffic safety issue, nearly one in 10 respondents admitted to driving in the previous month while they thought they might have been legally intoxicated. Over 80 percent of respondents rated distracted driving as a serious problem, yet over half admitted to talking on a cell phone while driving. Three in four drivers rated speeding as a safety threat, but 40 percent of those same drivers admitted to driving at least 15 mph over the speed limit on highways.

I believe we can change the nation’s safety culture to achieve safer drivers, safer vehicles, and safer roads. Traffic safety organizations have published comprehensive materials documenting dozens of safety measures that could reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries by as much as 50 percent. Listed below are just a handful of the many known strategies that are proven to reduce roadway fatalities, but are not yet used to their potential.

Car manufacturers can make a difference by implementing solutions that have been tested in the real world and shown to save lives. Electronic stability control (ESC) is an innovative technology that selectively applies brakes when a car is about to go out of control, and can decrease deaths in single-vehicle crashes by nearly 56 percent. The federal government will not mandate the use of ESC in new vehicles until 2012, but automakers may expedite vehicle improvements like ESC to begin saving lives today. 

Roadway improvements such as rumble strips at the edge and centerline of roads, and cable median barriers are quite effective in preventing vehicles from drifting out of travel lanes, which accounts for 25,000 deaths each year. Missouri’s adoption of these technologies has resulted in a 25 percent reduction in lane-departure fatalities and a 96 percent reduction in median crossing deaths. These are low-cost and easy-to-install countermeasures on which road authorities can act.

Comprehensive graduated driver licensing systems can help keep teen drivers safer through various provisions, such as a minimum learner’s permit age, supervised driving practice, nighttime driving restrictions and passenger restrictions. Elected officials can enact such policies designed to prevent injuries on our roadways – they just need the political will to act.

Of course, we can make a big difference by changing our own behavior. How many of us have engaged in the actions discussed on the blog this week? Motorists can greatly reduce the likelihood of being in a fatal crash by adopting commonsense behaviors: always buckle up; don’t drive while drunk, drowsy or distracted; and obey the speed limit (just to name a few). It appears as though everyone who has responded to this week’s blog agrees that we can and should do more. We need to band together and make sure this consistent voice is heard in Congress, DOTs, and in state legislatures across the country. 

The problem of distracted driving is just that, a problem in need of a fundamental shift in the way drivers view their responsibilities to each other while in transit. For example, the campaign to “Buckle Up” was aimed at the same groups of people, seeking the same change in the way drivers behave. Initially, we saw some resistance to the concept and, in truth, there is still some resistance to the concept of a primary seat belt law for a variety of reasons. However, the success of the education campaign affecting the frequency with which drivers use their seat belts cannot be denied.

And that is exactly what many COGs and MPOs, in partnership with their local elected officials, are creating in their regions. The transportation professionals continue to leverage scarce resources to develop programs educating their citizens, aimed at both adult and youth driving populations, about the dangers of distracted driving. As the unit of government closest to the people, the ability of local elected officials across the nation to develop priorities and strategies that are tailored to address the specific problems their regions face is a strength of the regional planning process that should not be overlooked. When planning any transportation project, all safety concerns such as emergency response, evacuation planning, fuel leakage, etc, must be considered. In past years, those issues have been an after thought.

The federally mandated MPO process is an important linkage to drivers that goes well beyond engineering solutions and should continue to be prioritized and recognized as an important tool for the federal government to disseminate safety related education campaigns.

“Why do we persist in believing that public information and education are going to change traffic safety outcomes when, after decades of this stuff, we’re still killing approx. 40,000 people every year?”

But Bill’s answers — and those of some others — miss a critical factor – financial incentives. Over a million people are killed worldwide every year, but those to blame are often not held financially accountable.

One way to bring financial accountability to bear would be to require insurers to test and license the drivers and vehicles they insure. Placing this responsibility on insurers is common in maritime transport, where safety is taken very seriously: Ships and ships’ officers are tested and licensed by Lloyds and other insurers.

Insurers have compelling incentives to avoid unsafe drivers and vehicles, and are likely to do a better job than the government departments currently responsible for those vital responsibilities.

For example, an October 2007 report by Maryland’s Office of Legislative Audits determined that Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Administration did not properly enforce Maryland’s Ignition Interlock program, which requires those convicted of drunken driving to have their vehicles equipped with devices which prevent them starting if excessive alcohol levels are detected. Can one envisage an insurance company, with millions of dollars at risk from vehicle accidents, failing to enforce such an important program?

Furthermore, competing insurers would have incentives to find ways of insuring even high-risk customers: They could, for example, insist on ignition interlock programs for reformed alcoholics, or on the use of special slow-moving vehicles as a condition for insuring the very young and the very old.

We cannot expect government to reverse its own mistakes — such as legislating CAFE regulations to force the production of less-safe cars. But could it not use its influence to introduce a pilot program, maybe starting with trucks, to have insurers test and license the drivers and vehicles they insure? 

One  fast and low cost method to reducing death and injury among the traveling public would be to have wireless internet connectivity on all public transportation.

1.     It would reduce distracted driving-related accidents by providing an alternative for those who are currently driving and communicating with friends, family, and work colleagues while driving,

2.     It  would attract new public transit riders, reducing VMTs and therefore all types of vehicle-related accidents, by offering a significant and long-term competitive advantage of transit over personal driving. Accidents per passenger mile on transit are dramatically lower than those completed by car.

It’s a two-fer!

Distracted driving also goes beyond the use of electronic devices. Tom Vanderbilt illustrates in his book “Traffic” that many accidents happen because drivers are not giving the road their full attention. According to Vanderbilt, 80 percent of crashes occur due to just three seconds of inattentiveness. To that end, Dennis Christiansen of the Texas Transportation Institute is right on target in his call for a “shift in safety culture” that makes safe driving more valued and universal.

But the discussion about transportation safety cannot stop there. Thousands of Americans die preventable deaths every year due in large part to how we design our transportation system in general and our roads in particular, and how we allocate funding.

The problem is that many communities have engineered physical activity out of their very design.  Managing traffic is a vital goal for transportation planners and traffic engineers, but it cannot simply continue to accommodate more traffic and higher speeds at the expense of good sidewalks, crosswalks and other amenities that make walking and biking safe and accessible. More than 43,000 Americans have died from preventable pedestrian deaths since 2000.

As Congress takes up a re-authorization of SAFETEA-LU, the federal transportation bill, “completing the streets” so that roads are designed to accommodate all users - pedestrians, bicyclists, transit vehicles and motorists alike - needs to be a top priority. Complete streets do not simply help recreational pedestrians and bikers. They also provide a lifeline to seniors, children, the disabled and low-income Americans who do not drive or do not have access to an automobile.  Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Doris Matsui each introduced Complete Streets legislation that would significantly advance these concepts and make them part of a new way of doing business in transportation planning and funding.

Making our streets safer also means reforming federal spending to prioritize projects according to outcomes and performance. The National Transportation Objectives Act, HR 2724, introduced by Representatives Rush Holt, Russ Carnahan and Jay Inslee would help achieve this needed accountability by setting strong performance measures that ensure new projects are safe, clean and smart, specifically by setting a goal of reducing traffic crashes by 50 percent over the next 20 years.

Lastly, I want to echo Carol Carmody’s comment about the need to continue speaking out on this critical issue. Long overdue cultural and policy shifts will never happen unless we keep safety and transportation on the front burner, and that’s what our growing coalition intends to do.

A “Lack of Awareness” …? I think not. Rather, it is a lack of will and a lack of leadership that sustains our appalling highway (un)safety record. Has there ever been a Secretary of USDOT or a NHTSA Administrator that wasn’t “aware” of the problem? After 40+ years, can either of these two agencies – or anyone else – honestly assert that the “problem” is due to a lack of data or that we need more research?

What we really need is a someone with a spine. More honesty and commonsense would help, too.

Okay, in the spirit of the comedian Steven Wright, here are just a few aspects of our current approach to traffic safety I find difficult to reconcile:

§         Why is it that every car sold in the U.S. is capable of exceeding the highest posted speed limit in the country by at least 40 mph (and, in some cases, by more than 100 mph)?

§         Why do highway engineers, who tell us that the design of the road determines the speed people will drive (the 85th percentile thing), use a “design speed” that is higher than the planned posted speed?

§         Why do we have laws to take away their license (and make it a felony) if a driver drives away without paying for the gas they just pumped ... but they will only get (at most) a ticket if they happen to hit and kill a pedestrian as they exit the gas station?

§         Why do some traffic engineers set the timing for traffic lights so you will keep getting a green light if you drive faster than the posted speed limit? [Hey, I’m not making this stuff up!]

§         We do we persist in believing that public information and education are going to change traffic safety outcomes when, after decades of this stuff, we’re still killing approx. 40,000 people every year?

What if, instead of all of this stuff, we declared a war on bad driving/drivers? What if we embraced the Vision Zero concept – “The Vision Zero policy is not a figure; it is a shift in philosophy. Normal traffic policy is a balancing act between mobility benefits and safety problems. The Vision Zero policy refuses to use human life and health as part of that balancing act; they are non negotiable.”

Okay, make me Traffic Safety Czar and here’s what I’ll do (and you can’t dis my ideas unless you’ve got a better one to replace it with!) –

 1.       Eliminate NHTSA (what has it accomplished?) and make the “new” FHWA (and the State DOTs) accountable for reducing MV-related deaths and injuries.

2.       Define/establish a “standard of care” for MV operators and hold them strictly accountable for the consequences of their actions (and inactions).

3.       Identify bad drivers, get them off the road, and keep them off the road.

4.       Hold Transportation Engineers professionally accountable for designing streets and highways that have an 85th percentile speed equal to the posted speed limit.

5.       Us all available means and measures to regulate/control MV speeds.

6.       Make full and active use of EDRs for enforcement and adjudication, and enhance the existing systems by integrating a positive identification of who the operator is (perhaps by requiring inserting their MV operators permit in the dash and entering a password).

7.       Reject once and for all the absurd claim to “privacy” when operating a MV on the public right-of-way – what a joke!

Okay, there it is, now, let’s get ‘er done.

Bill Wilkinson

Bill has been involved with transportation planning and policy for nearly 40 years. He claims to have mellowed a lot since “retiring” as executive director of the National Center for Bicycling & Walking in June 2008. Today, he does a bit of consulting and spends a lot of time with his grandchildren.

If our goal is to significantly reduce fatalities and injuries, I believe we must try a new approach.  We should move in the direction recommended by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission.  The Commission recommended that the US Department of Transportation establish national safety goals, beginning with an ambitious but reachable goal to cut surface transportation fatalities in half from current levels by 2025.  States and local governments would develop strategies and projects for meeting these goals.  The decision-making process would be transparent, with input from the general public.  The strategies would include engineering, enforcement and education.  Once adopted, the strategies, and the projects implementing the strategies, would be evaluated to ensure that progress is being made toward meeting the goals. In other words, States and local governments would ultimately be held accountable for reaching the goals, but they would have the flexibility to fashion the strategies and projects in a way that worked best in their area and for their citizens.  Reflecting the importance of transportation safety, the Federal share of funding for qualifying safety projects should be 90 percent of the project cost.

Ambitious but reachable national goals.  State and local flexibility.  Adequate resources. Accountability.  Enforcement.  These are the elements of  a new approach that would significantly  raise awareness of transportation safety and would could achieve significant safety benefits.  There would be far fewer fatalities and injuries on our surface transportation systems.  We can do it.  We must do it.

Anne McCartt, senior vice president, research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety sent us the following post:

The problem with distracted driving is not awareness. Surveys show that most people agree that drivers should not use cellphones and drive, even many of those who also admit they do so. The problem is how to make laws effective in changing driver behavior. 

 The cumulative evidence from various types of studies points to cellphone use as a risk factor for crashes and impaired driving performance. While studies have reached different estimates of the magnitude of the risk, well-controlled research that verified phone use in large samples of crash-involved drivers found that the risk of crashing was 4 times higher when a driver was talking on either a hand-held or hands-free phone.

Seven states and the District of Columbia have banned hand-held cellphone use while driving, but the effects of these laws on hand-held use is mixed. Moreover, the effect on safety isn’t clear. Many drivers still use hand-held phones where use is banned, and other drivers may switch to hands-free devices, which doesn’t help, since the crash risk with either type of device is about the same. Preliminary data from insurance claims for collision suggest no apparent reduction in crash risk after states enacted hand-held bans.

The research supports a ban on all cellphone use behind the wheel, but enforcement is problematic.  Police officers, for example, can’t readily ascertain that a driver is using a hands-free device.  Experience shows that laws that aren’t strongly and visibly enforced won’t be effective.  The public isn’t well served by rushing to proposed solutions that may not work.

Before policymakers can make sound decisions about what countermeasures to adopt, we need better evidence on several issues: the discrepant estimates of the risk of phone use; the risks of different types of hands-free phones relative to other devices; the number of crashes attributable to phone use, and whether this has changed as drivers’ phone use increased.  But the most serious deficit in our knowledge is that we don’t know whether laws banning drivers’ phone use have reduced the frequency of crashes. Before we encourage or require that more states pass bans, we need to establish whether they enhance traffic safety.  

http://fastlane.dot.gov/

So, what does everyone think of this effort?

Roger Wentz, CAE, President and CEO of the American Traffic Safety Services Association, sent us the following response:

Commendably, Secretary LaHood has repeatedly stated that safety is the number one priority for U.S.-DOT. But he is right on another point as well. Far too many people die on America’s road; on average, 40,000 individuals die each year in car crashes. Yes, distracted driving is an issue that deserves serious and thoughtful consideration and action in order to reduce distractions and enhance a driver’s ability to focus on the road.

However, there is roadway safety infrastructure that can implemented right now on our nation’s roads to immediately make the road safer for all who travel on it. Secretary LaHood even mentioned one of these devices in his statement to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee distracted driving hearing held on October 28. In his remarks, the Secretary mentioned that rumble strips could be used to alert distracted drivers about impending road departure. Other features, such as pavement markings, barrier, and rumble stripes, have proven to drastically reduce roadway departures and assist drivers in remaining on the road and in their lane. ATSSA commends U.S-DOT, Congress, and the transportation industry in highlighting the need for increased safety in all modes of transportation.

Upon reading the responses to the question Lisa posed, it is evident to me at least that as long as one remains immersed in the present transportation paradigm (i.e. inside “the box”) the best we can do is recycle platitudes.  In fact, the current transportation system is the result of a steady evolution from a its ancestral root, the horse and buggy – it is time let go of some of the vestigial characteristics that continue to lead to failing systems over and over.  

Of course we are driving more distracted than ever before – our culture has, for better or worse, evolved through technological innovation, to the point where multitasking has become almost innate.  To ask people to turn off their eagerly acquired multiple brains in the comfort of their private roving environments is asking too much – the genie is out of the bottle.

As past president for MADD-Central Maryland, I am keenly aware of the ability to shift public behavior through a steady public relations drum beat.  I also feel that in some ways MADD focused too much on legislation and PR and not enough on enforcement.  A Tennessee study, I believe in the mid-1990’s demonstrated that a blitzkrieg of random checkpoints had an immediate and profound impact on drunken driving and fatalities.   I think the problem very much lies with the presumption that somehow democracy and the American independent spirit is embodied in what is in reality a mundane public utility, our roadways.  (We have to be constantly reminded that driving is a privilege not a right.) But does the answer lie in a constant battle between citizen and state? This paradigm needs to change and can be changed.

While we as individuals have eagerly been drinking the technology kool-aid, the transportation network remains a glorified and grotesquely dolled-up version of the horse and buggy system.  Technology seems to stop a at our doorstep.  If the transportation community can get past rearranging the deck chairs, there is a remedy – personal rapid transit, PRT.  This discussion is not the venue to reel out the long list of benefits to mankind and the planet afforded by what has been deemed, the “Internet for transportation“  (Google "personal rapid transit" for the results of many of well-respected studies as well as  examples of systems actually under construction such as at London’s Heathrow airport to become operational this spring). But one key attribute of PRT is that the melding of existing computer technology with a novel and inexpensive vehicle transportation network will essentially break the deadly and schizophrenic duality of “distracted citizen traveler” verses “heavy mechanized equipment operator”.

Selling the concept to transportation officials is almost a lost cause – even in this new era of supposed enlightenment.  There are too many entrenched interests that see any upstart as a threat.  Of course in reality PRT is an enabling technology, not a threat, for it acts as the “glue” that ties the heavy modes  (rail, air travel) to the light (walking, bicycling).   (As a typical example of dysfunction, in the state of Maryland there is no public transportation between its major international airport, Marshall-BWI to the state capitol in Annapolis less than 20 miles away.)

Because Americans can not distinguish between themselves and the cars they drive, selling PRT to the public will not be easy either. It will be like prying a rigid death grip from a steering wheel.  Traveling via PRT is as unglamorous as a ride in an elevator – one punches in a “floor” and your “lift” travels horizontally rather than vertically to any destination available to an expandable network of raised guide-ways.  One is free to snooze, keyboard, snack, watch a video, work and yes, even sip a Martini without adding to the carnage on our failed roadways.  Again, Americans thrive on the phony wild-west hype pumped out by the auto industry – PRT will need to use a different angle to gain public acceptance.

Fortunately PRT is inherently scalable and, because of this acceptance, can be fine-tuned to be self fulfilling.  A small “local network” serving an airport or college or industrial campus can easily be expanded to serve a neighboring community or municipality.  Such pilot sub-networks will, through envy, begin to pop up like mushrooms. Interconnections between them with more and more redundancies will occur until, like the world wide web, it reaches a tipping point of acceptance.  Of course, as has become the norm with the “leader of the free world”, Europe and Asia will be at least a decade ahead of the US as is evidenced by PRT systems now under development. Current reliance on the automobile remains the last bastion of resistance to the techno tidal wave; PRT is a pathway toward embracing and exploiting it for the good of society and the safety of its citizens.

While airline travel has become ever safer, automobile travel continues to  be extremely hazardous. Jacqueline Gillan’s recent post makes the point that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 3 and 33.

Some Americans are indifferent to the risks they face because they do not know the extent of the carnage on our highways. Many more are  concerned, but are discouraged by the disappointing willingness of local, state and national leaders to ignore safety in favor of popularity. And many more seem to have simply renounced the concept of a common good, and prefer to endanger themselves and others rather than obey the laws regarding speeding, reckless driving, drinking and cell phone use.

On any journey north to south on I 95 – or any other interstate – the number of drivers exceeding the speed limit easily exceeds the number honoring it. In 2007 Virginia – in an effort to reduce accidents and raise revenue – proposed substantial increases in fines for speeding and other traffic violations. There was a firestorm of reaction and the new rules were soon rescinded. And despite the fact that speed both kills people and wastes energy, the Congress has shown no serious interest in re-establishing and enforcing a national speed limit.

As Pogo famously observed “We have met the enemy and he is us”. For whatever reason, we are prepared to expend both time and treasure to prevent major aviation, maritime and rail accidents but are unwilling to assign responsibility for the lack of motor vehicle safety to our political leaders, to spend what’s needed to properly maintain and optimally engineer our highways or to support vigorous enforcement of existing laws regarding driver behavior.

Making our roads safer should really be quite easy.

We need to make clear to those we elect that the current level of highway deaths is not acceptable and that we expect them to get serious about controlling driver behavior. Put more police on the roads. Reduce maximum speeds, outlaw driver use of cell phones, get seriously tough on mixing alcohol and gasoline, use lots more cameras in urban areas, strictly enforce all other traffic laws and dramatically increase penalties. And, as Greg Cohen suggests, we need to insist that government get back into the business of properly maintaining and optimally engineering our highways.

We’d save thousands of lives every year, reduce medical costs and save lots of gasoline. What’s not to like??  

While the ability of the operator to perform fundamental tasks is certainly impaired by outside distractions introduced into the vehicle such as drinking and texting, performance can also be potentially impaired by distractions that are built into or brought legally in vehicles.  These include bluetooth technologies that enable cellphone use, GPS systems that provide real-time routings and directions, and the type of corporate oriented programs used by the Northwest/Delta pilots. Measuring the cumulative impact these potential distractions have on safety is important if we are serious about improving safety.

As we explore the increasing use of ITS and other technologies, it is imperative that we do so in a way that does not overburden the operator.  In short, we need to focus on how real people use technologies in real situations instead of the way the ideal operator uses them.  

One other note: we also need to be vigilant about distractions outside of the vehicle.  The growing propensity of some localities to permit digital billboards that draw away the attention of drivers is just one example of a practice that has not been adequately examined for its impact of safety.

Steve Van Beek

As Peter Kissinger, President and CEO of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety promotes, we need to change the traffic safety culture in this country. As Kissinger states on his own blog on traffic safety, findings from this year’s AAA Foundation Traffic Safety Culture Index survey found 80 percent of drivers agree that distracted driving is a serious threat to their safety, but 67% of drivers also admitted to talking on a cell phone while driving in the past month. According to Kissinger, “This ‘Do as I say, Not as I do’ attitude is one of the things we must change to push toward a positive culture of safety.”

But changing attitudes and behaviors are not enough. As policy makers in Washington take up the issue of distracted driving it is important for them to be aware that distractions often lead to road departure – the #1 contributing factor in highway deaths. We need to minimize distractions, but when you make a mistake behind the wheel, you should not be killed, paralyzed, or severely injured. Roadway safety countermeasures such as median and roadside barriers, clear shoulders, rumble strips, bright signs, and reinforced bridge railings can help prevent these crashes or significantly lessen their severity. 

I also serve as the Executive Director of the Roadway Safety Foundation (RSF), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, educational and charitable organization whose mission is to reduce the frequency and severity of motor vehicle crashes, injuries and fatalities through improvements to roadway systems and their environments. We currently have several public awareness campaigns in the works that promote such safety countermeasures as median cable barriers and rumble strips. For more information I encourage you to visit www.roadwaysafety.org.

And this Thursday on Capitol Hill we will recognize 14 noteworthy roadway safety programs from across the country at our bi-annual awards luncheon with the Federal Highway Administration. We are honored that U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will be our featured speaker.

In summary, distracted driving is a growing epidemic which needs to be addressed with all the tools in our arsenal. This includes all of the four Es: education, enforcement, emergency services, AND ENGINEERING.

-          Continue to conduct relevant research to better understand the problems we face. To get the right answers, it is essential that we ask the right questions. This is especially true when the issue involves human behavior. At TTI, we have worked for decades to better understand the actions and motivations of all drivers, and in some cases more specifically, those of distinct groups like teenage drivers, through our Teens in the Driver Seat Center. Understanding fully what separates such distinct groups from the rest of the driving population is essential to improving safety not only for that group, but for all who share the roadways.

-          Support the development of public policy that improves transportation safety. Even the most substantial and groundbreaking findings of research are of little or no value if they sit on a shelf. Knowledge must be shared with everyone who may benefit from it, and this is especially true where public policy is concerned. We are proud that TTI researchers have on numerous occasions – often through formal testimony before Congress and the Texas Legislature – shared important findings that have supported the development or refinement of public policy.

-          Promote a shift in safety culture in which safe driving habits are valued and practiced universally. The Texas Legislature in 2001 created the Center for Transportation Safety at TTI, in part to conduct focused research, but also “to foster public awareness of the importance of roadway safety to the economy of this state.” Texas lawmakers then and now recognize the connection between transportation safety, sustainability, and our future prosperity. To a great extent, our fortunes depend upon our behavior, and our collective behavior will depend greatly on our understanding of how vitally important safety is to our future – not only as individuals, but as a society as well.

The persistent problem of transportation safety can only be addressed by a multi-faceted approach, and that is an approach to which we will always remain committed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/technology/02texting.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Rather than being complacent about the risks and dangers of multi-tasking in the car while driving, the American public for the most part has been kept in the dark about the dangers. Only recently have government and opinion leaders been honest with the public about the serious consequences. The recent release of a 2003 NHTSA-sponsored study on cell phone use resulting from a lawsuit filed by Public Citizen and the Center for Auto Safety, an investigative report on distracted driving by the New York Times, several public opinion surveys on cell phone use, and a growing body of research have all shown that crash risk increases dramatically when a driver uses a cell phone, hands-free or hand-held, and is texting. In addition, similar to the drunk driving movement that was forever changed and energized with the founding of MADD, the victims and survivors of distracted driving crashes and deaths are influencing the public policy debate with compelling stories and commonsense solutions.

This safety issue now has the attention of state and federal leaders and it’s these individuals who must not become complacent in addressing the problem with readily available solutions. It is clear from past efforts tackling other serious traffic safety challenges that certain countermeasures work to change driving behavior and others do not. Essentially, the formula for success is enactment of effective laws in every state, combined with public education and strong enforcement. And, the best approach to getting tough laws passed in every state to protect every motorist is the use of “sanctions,” or withholding federal highway dollars from states that don’t act. In the past 25 years, the threat of federal sanctions has been used successfully to encourage every state to enact a National Minimum 21 Drinking Age, a zero tolerance BAC law for underage drinking and driving, a .08% BAC law, and a uniform commercial driver license (CDL). In each case every state passed the law within the specified time frame and not one state lost a single dollar of federal-aid highway funds.

Offering states incentive grants has resulted in slow and sporadic state passage of primary enforcement seat belt and child booster seat laws. After five years and a $500 million incentive grant program encouraging enactment of primary enforcement seat belt laws, only ten states acted, leaving 21 still without this critical lifesaving law. As a result, the leaders of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee have included in the surface transportation authorization bill that was unveiled last June a sanction provision for states that do not pass a primary enforcement seat belt law within three years. Advocates applauds their leadership but we can’t keep delaying the passage of other important and effective traffic safety laws while the annual fatality toll of tens of thousands continues.

Transportation professionals, elected officials and public opinion leaders need to move forward on legislative solutions that will protect every person in every state from the deaths and injuries caused by distracted driving. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for all Americans ages 3 to 33 and the public is well-aware of the dangers on our roads and highways. That’s why they want to buy safe vehicles, drive on safe roads and engage in safe driving behavior. If lawmakers lead the public will gladly follow even if it takes a ticket or two to get their full attention.

Without knowing the full details of the NTSB investigation, or pre-judging its outcome, I had a couple of thoughts as I read about the NW pilots and their “overflight” of their destination.

First, no matter how sophisticated the equipment, no matter how redundant the systems, humans make errors. We have seen time and time again that human missteps, or a string of them, can thwart any safety system. As we advance technically, we must not overlook the fallibilities of the operators. Fatigue, distraction, boredom, repetition of simple tasks, schedule pressure, relations with co-operators – all of these conditions are crucial to recognize, understand and try to accommodate in our safety regulations.

Second, I agree with Secretary LaHood’s view that pilots (or other operators) have no business with laptops or with hand-held devices, or personal cell phones when they are operating a public conveyance. We know enough to understand that these devices are major distractions. I would favor banning them in this circumstance. My personal view is that regulation is preferable to legislation, but I would support whatever works.

I believe it is important for safety officials, such as Secretary LaHood and Administrator Babbitt, and others, to continue to speak out on this subject, so that one day using cell phones or laptops while operating public transportation will be as taboo as drinking on duty is.

He also implies that it is cheaper to live in Texas where there hasn't been any smart growth than in Maryland where there has been. This depends on what you call "living." The relevant measure is what does housing plus transportation together cost in any given area.

Using the Center for Neighborhood Technology Housing+Transportation Affordability Index one can choose specific census tracts and see the percent of median income for that specific area that does towards housing alone, or housing plus transportation. In both Maryland and in Texas, it is clear that it is always cheaper (housing PLUS transportation) to live in denser urban areas where smart growth metrics are in place than in sprawled areas that are auto-dependent.

The private sector seeks to provide services at a profit. So it has to provide what customers wish to pay for. Is that bad?

But what does the public sector seek? Glendening mentions “reducing vehicle miles traveled and … focusing on transportation to increase walkability, housing affordability and economic prosperity”.

Most of us can walk as much as we want to, without help from government. As for “housing affordability”, there is plenty of evidence that “Smart Growth” policies increase, rather than decrease, accommodation costs. Housing is cheaper in Texas than in Maryland.

As for economic prosperity, there is worldwide evidence that travel increases prosperity by increasing opportunities for employment, trade and leisure activities. Reducing travel is thus likely to reduce economic prosperity and, for that reason alone, does not seem to be a worthy government objective.

And the reason that Comcast can restrict the use of its services is because the public sector gave it a monopoly.

Nor is she right to assert that private providers are interested only in profit. Many of the hundreds of toll roads provided by the private sector in the US and UK in the 19th century were barely profitable, or not at all. They were provided by local people wishing to improve their neighbourhoods.

Robin is however right that both private and public agencies can provide “high quality, well-maintained infrastructure”. The drawback of public sector provision is not the inability to launch splendid services, but the inability to close them down when customers are no longer prepared to pay for them.

But that is a lesson that the public sector is unlikely to learn until politicians cease to enjoy giving away other people’s money.

The private sector’s goal is to maximize profit and give you exactly what you’ve agreed to pay for. Contractual relationships are constructed to provide a particular prescribed service and precisely nothing more. Consider our wireline and wireless infrastructure. I pay Comcast every month for broadband access. My contract says that I can’t leave my router open and let any of my neighbors get Internet access. Why not? I paid for the service and I perceive there is excess capacity that I’m willing to share. Similarly, we know that many features on cellphone devices (paid for and now owned by me, the consumer) have features disabled to prevent me from using it to its capacity. Infrastructure use extensions, even in cases where such use would result in no additional costs, are prohibited since they represent a loss of potential revenue. 

Wherever and whenever possible, the private sector infrastructure contractually prevents a user’s ability to adapt the infrastructure for future use in novel and unexpected ways. Chicago’s privatization of its downtown onstreet parking and the Skyway for 75 and 99 year leases, have restricted that city from changing road use to other purposes the public might see fit to do some time in the future. For example, several lanes of traffic could not be converted to HOV, bus only, or fixed rail, nor could streets be closed or bike lanes introduced in a manner that will result in fewer parking spaces, despite some future perceived public benefits.

Thoughtful public infrastructure should seek to maximize (safe) use, encouraging the public to take advantage of such infrastructure in novel and unexpected ways. And where possible, this infrastructure should able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances that benefit the public’s need. Sidewalks and curb cuts were not designed with rolling suitcases in mind, yet this novel use is welcome and allowable.

Government’s technology infrastructure investments, in transportation, electric grid, health care, education, and emergency response among other uses, is an area in which requiring and demanding open, non proprietary networks, devices, and standards will serve the public enormously well. This, in contrast to the closed proprietary systems that are often seen to be in the best interests of private sector providers of the same services. You can read more about the benefits of openness, downsides of road privatization, and the negative implications of Chicago’s privatization of its parking.

Public officials must better appreciate the value of time in terms of prompt payment ( delay in payment is a real cost to the vendor), and in terms of prompt project completion. Often the official gives greater weight to the interests of the Agency over the welfare of the public. A case in point, shifting road construction to night hours costs the agency more but this is outweighed by the benefit to the motoring public.

The private sector operates with a separate capital budget and operating budget but the federal government operates with a single budget treating all kinds of expenditures the same. This works to the great detriment of capital intensive programs. Creation of an infrastructure bank may alleviate the problem somewhat.

Public officials enjoy the thrill of serving the public and providing essential services to society. They are talented and dedicated and often underappreciated by private folks. There are inherent difficulties working for a public agency- operating in a fishbowl, legislative reluctance to support incentive compensation for public employees and inability to hire and fire at will although that is fast becoming scarce even in the private sector.

The current status quo in transportation has resulted from historical evolution, from legal and regulatory requirements (including federal legislation), and from other impediments to the private sector’s ability to participate.

Consider roads: the earliest major roads were privately-built turnpikes, starting around 1792 in Pennsylvania. Private turnpike companies constructed toll roads, and that was often how new roads were developed. But over time, competition from other modes, government participation in rate-setting, changing population patterns, and the need for better rural roads for automobiles led to calls for a new federal role, beginning with the Federal-aid Highway Act of 1916, and the first federal fuel tax (one cent per gallon) in 1932.

Likewise, airports were largely privately-owned until World War II, but thereafter federal law actually came to preclude private ownership. And transit lines often began as private companies, and were later taken over by municipalities during the middle part of the last century. For example, the New York City subway system that today is by far the largest public transit system in the United States was largely privately designed, financed, and operated at its outset.

Presently, there is renewed interest in private sector participation in transportation infrastructure, such as roads, ports, and airports. As has regularly been chronicled by National Journal’s online experts, the new arrangements often take the form of partnerships between the public and private sector in which various project risks are transferred from the public to the private sector in order to reduce taxpayer exposure to these risks and introduce market incentives to businesses that have often functioned as exclusive government monopolies. While much of the recent U.S. interest relates to public funding scarcity, many of the most important benefits of private sector participation are expected to come from the potential for increased efficiency in the operation and use of the infrastructure.

If one thinks about privately-operated rail lines and pipelines, and publicly-operated airports, one thing they have in common is a need for in-route traffic control, such as the dispatch centers for rail and pipelines, and the FAA’s air traffic control for aviation. Which is more costly and which is more cost-effective? What makes them so?

If one thinks about the need for expanded traffic capacity in rail and roads, for example, which system is better set to identify such needs promptly? And which is more likely to base increased investment on rigorous measures of the benefits to accrue from doing so? (And which is more susceptible to political pressure and earmarking?) It is reasonable to ask whether measures like those used to assess new capital investment in rail and pipelines might be applied to roads and transit, for example.

In 1994, President Clinton replaced Executive Order 12803 with a new Executive Order 12893 titled “Principles for Federal Infrastructure Investment”, which applies to transportation infrastructure. President Bush and President Obama retained that order, which expressly calls for agencies to “seek private sector participation in infrastructure investment and management”. But where it is determined that the public sector is preferred as the owner or operator, EO 12893 focuses on “efficient management”, encouraging structures and tools to improve efficiency and net benefits. So one of the key issues for publicly-owned transportation infrastructure is to identify ways for the system to be utilized efficiently and for expansions to be the optimal use of available resources.

These considerations deserve an increased focus both by policy makers and those who operate our publicly-owned transportation systems.

How can policymakers strike the best balance between ensuring that the public gets a fair deal and making investment in infrastructure projects attractive to private capital? And how much funding for transportation projects is it realistic to expect from the private sector?

Transit Oriented Development (or TOD) is one example of what could be considered private investment in infrastructure, especially where it is a private developer that is financing the construction project for the commercial revenues and the transit service and amenities are built into the project.  These projects are working across the country to increase the availability of transit while supporting local development.

Another example would be the inclusion of business contributions, directly or through Transportation Management Associations, to local projects where there are mitigation or other traffic reduction activities that allow projects to be completed for less time or lower cost.  While it is a nearly impossible exercise to try and quantify those contributions across the country, ACT members are contributing to these projects to allow them to be completed and potentially for other projects to then be able to move forward.  This activity is one of the reasons why ACT supports HR 3517, The Commute LESS ACT, introduced by Rep. Sires (D-NJ) to encourage more of these joint efforts.

We need to be mindful of the different scales on different needs.  It's one thing to try and handle the financing on major new construction or reconstruction projects.  It's quite another to handle the financing on smaller, local projects.  And there are both public and private interests that can be served by respecting the different investment opportunities based on the scale of the project.

No! Your generalization is not correct.

You seem to have forgotten about the PFI (“Private Finance Initiative”)  contracts executed in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. The private providers assumed all traffic risks, and all cost risks.

You and your students can read about them in Chapter 17, by Neil Roden, “Development of Highway Concessions on Trunk Roads in the United Kingdom”, in the award winning Street Smart — Competition, Entrepreneurship and the Future of Roads published in 2006 by Transaction Publishers for the Independent Institute and edited by

Gabriel Roth

You said, “These little-read contracts give far reaching power with effects that will continue long after the contracts end.” This prompts my question: What powerful effects will the contract have after the contract ends?

The following post was submitted byEllen Dannin, the Fannie Weiss Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson School of Law:

Claims that infrastructure privatization shifts future financial risk from the public to the private contractor are not correct. That the claims are not correct is apparent to anyone who reads the contracts.

Infrastructure privatization contracts are filled with terms that mean money flows from the public to the private contractor when there are lower than anticipated revenues. In fact, these contracts tend to run on for over 100 pages because of all the provisions that mean the public, rather than private contractors, bears risks associated with infrastructure privatization. The proposed Pennsylvania Turnpike Agreement was close to 700 pages when its appendices and attachments are included.

These claims can only be accepted because so few people actually read these contracts. Who can blame them? Reading - and understanding - such very long contracts is no easy task. It requires checking every word against the definitions section to determine the words' actual meaning. It means stopping multiple times to read other sections that are incorporated by reference. It means understanding what appear to be ordinary words but that actually have special legal significance. It means holding all that in your head to understand the significance of that one paragraph. And finally, it means repeating that exercise for page after page.

Tedious, painstaking work, indeed. But what it reveals is that infrastructure privatization contracts give private contractors a quasi-governmental status. Here are some common examples found almost verbatim in contract after contract.

"Adverse Action" provisions are found, for example, in contracts for the California's South Bay Expressway (SR 125), the proposed Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the Northwest Parkway. They give private contractors direct and indirect power to object to new laws, judicial decisions, propositions voted on by the public, and other government actions that the contractor claims would decrease tolls and revenues.

For example, Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway contract entitles the contractor to compensation for failure of the state to "exercise all discretionary authority available to it under Laws, Regulations and Ordinances to prevent any other governmental or private entity from developing Competitive Transportation Facilities, including but not limited to connections to State Highways." On Sept. 28, 2009, Crain's Chicago Business reported that Chicago developers and businesses and the public "could be on the hook for millions of dollars" if they displace a metered parking space under "Mayor Richard M. Daley's controversial $1.16-billion deal to privatize the city's parking meters".

These terms will force governments to vet all laws and decisions for any effect on private infrastructure contractors and then decide whether the new law or action is worth the cost.

Noncompete provisions, which are also common, alter the relationship between government and the public interest. First, public officials lose options for serving the public's need for high quality transportation when they must either ensure that the toll road is the only alternative. Second, and far worse, the agreements constrain options for dealing with congestion, pollution, and climate change for the generations that these contracts will run. Because solutions to these problems will likely mean decreased highway traffic and thus tolls, mitigating each of these problems will mean reimbursing the contractor for lost revenue - or deciding that it costs too much to mitigate the problems.

So far there has been no public consideration or discussion as to the wisdom of giving private contractors this degree of power over decisions that affect the public interest and that are normally made by public officials or citizens. Before we proceed farther down this path of subcontracting democracy to private interests we must know about and have a public discussion on the true costs of financing public infrastructure. These little-read contracts give far reaching power with effects that will continue long after the contracts end.

The public deserves to know how these very long contracts affect vital national infrastructure, how these contracts hand power over basic public policy decisions to private interests, and how they let private profit trump democratic processes and the public welfare.

If you think these costs are merely theoretical, in September 2008, it was the State of Indiana that bore the risk of an Act of Nature when it reimbursed a private contractor $447,000 for tolls lost during emergency evacuations due to severe flooding.

Demand for both freight and passenger rail service will only increase in the coming years and successful partnerships between government and private companies will be critical to meeting this challenge.

The FRA Preliminary National Rail Plan released last week was a step in the right direction; recognizing the critical role that freight railroads play in our nation’s economic health. The plan urges states to develop ways to address the modal inequity that exists in the nation's surface transportation program noting that all railroad infrastructure is privately owned and maintained unlike other modes of freight transportation.

The reauthorization of SAFETEA-LU provides an excellent opportunity for policymakers to start leveling the playing field when it comes to modal equity.  To the extent that general funds are used to shore up highway trust fund revenues, rail infrastructure investment projects should be made eligible for funding.  This would give States the option to invest in projects that produce the greatest public benefits and help meet national goals such as improved safety, economic competitiveness, energy efficiency and reduced consumption.

Public-private partnerships with the nation’s freight railroads make sense and will provide a more balanced transportation system for our country.  

Let’s assume for a minute that we follow Bill’s advice. We allow Wall Street investment firms and foreign consortia to create new roads as an alternative to already-existing options. Let’s also assume that these new roads – which must be toll roads if the Wall Street firms and foreign consortia are to recoup their investment – are so productive, avoid so much congestion, and provide such high mobility benefits that they really catch on. Let’s assume that 10 or 20 years from now, we have 75,000 miles of new roads created by Wall Street investment firms and foreign consortia. And these 75,000 miles of new roads are so much safer and more efficient than existing roads and so attractive to motorists and truckers that Americans abandon the existing Interstate Highway System…and the federal highway trust fund that supports it. 

Bill, you may be on to something here. I thought we were far apart on the issue of toll roads. I think we see eye to eye on this one.

All of the highway authorization laws in the last two decades – ISTEA, TEA-21, and SAFETEA-LU – have provided states with increased flexibility to use tolling not only to manage congestion but also to finance infrastructure improvements.  The Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009 (STAA 2009) unfortunately goes in the opposite direction by making it harder for states to use tolling.  States need more funding flexibility today, not less. 

At first glance, the Office of Public Benefit (OPB) seems innocuous.  In reality, this office would pose huge obstacles to state and local governments that might wish to create financially self-sustaining transportation assets that could be brought into service much more quickly than a federally funded project. 

While promoters and detractors of major concession agreements may disagree about the merits of deals in Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, and Texas, each transaction was a product of, and subject to, intense local and statewide scrutiny and debate. Mary Peters has already expressed very clearly the range of opportunities and protections that states can build into P3 agreements. 

I don’t believe the House bill is intentionally antagonistic towards tolling and pricing.  But the likely consequence of OPB language is to force state and local governments that wish to use tolling to do so without seeking any federal funding rather than subject themselves to an office whose apparent job is to think differently about the merits of a local transaction, has the power to judge those merits, and whose simple existence would damage their ability to issue bonds. 

What part of the public will benefit from a provision in law that restricts the ability of states to charge tolls on their own highways to improve transportation within their own borders?  Part of the mission of the OPB is to weigh “reasonable” costs and tolls; but who is measuring the costs of our currently broken funding system? What is reasonable about the current strangled highway funding system that results in reduced safety, higher emissions, and billions of dollars in lost time due to congestion? What is reasonable about a system that creates huge opportunity costs in projects that are delayed for years, decades, or even generations because of slow and inadequate levels of federal funding? 

I can think of only one constituency that will benefit from the Office of Public Benefit: people who want crappy congested highways.  In other words, no one.  It’s a constituency that doesn’t exist. 

In the midst of a serious recession, compounded by an uncertain federal reauthorization, is it in the public interest for state and regional officials to continue to forego much needed maintenance in order to fund for new capacity? Is it in the public interest to continue deferring new capacity projects with the attendant costs to economic growth and mobility? Is it in the public interest to pay additional regional taxes to fill at least a few holes in capital programs?

These very tough state and regional policy decisions are the context into which Congress will wade with the next reauthorization. Would the federal government best protect the public interest by making the difficult jobs of local officials harder or easier? At the same time the federal government is denying sufficient funding to right the ship, should Congress be limiting options available outside the Beltway? Should they be finding an overriding federal interest in objecting to how Sacramento, Austin, Richmond or Tallahassee elects to solve their difficult problems, despite the responsiveness to their electorate?

As Mary Peters notes in her response below, public-private partnerships are viable and valuable niche tools that provide unique advantages in certain categories of circumstances. These tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated in response to the ever changing circumstances affecting project delivery and finance. States across the nation, just like provinces across Canada, are offering crucibles of experimentation, developing and implementing PPPs tailored for their specific needs. This flexibility has been one of the great hallmarks of our federalist form of government, allowing the states to learn lessons for the benefit of others to follow later.

The potential for mistakes with innovative approaches exists, just as it exists if we continue to rely on conventional, past approaches. I think it was Bill Gates who said that if we are not failing occasionally we are not progressing enough.

Yet as Bob Poole notes, best practices for protecting the public interest in PPP deals already exist. The National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission detailed how the federal government can protect the public interest without getting in the way of the states and their ability to attract private interest to deliver critical infrastructure. Specifically the Commission addressed these issues:

   • Planning
   • Value-for-money (cost effectiveness) Assessment
   • Conflict of Interest
   • Transparency: Procurement Process and Proposals
   • Transparency: Agreements
   • Treatment of Unsolicited Proposals
   • Concession Term
   • Early Termination for Convenience
   • Environmental Approvals
   • Performance and Handback Standards
   • Facility Access
   • Competing Facilities
   • Toll Rate Setting
   • Revenue Allocation
   • Financial Reporting 

After a bipartisan debate, the Commission unanimously concluded that P3s can and should be an important tool in the toolbox and that the public interest can be protected largely through a best practices approach, not a heavy handed federal intrusion into state procurement and finance.

“not just a way to fund projects”, but also “as a program delivery strategy deployed on the right projects.”

But she is too polite to challenge the premise of this week’s question, that “the public interest” needs to be protected from “private investment”.

While private investment can be misguided, even corrupt, the more urgent need today is to protect the public from errors in public investment, which can also be misguided and corrupt.

Private investment in transport projects is generally preferable because it has to respond to customers’ willingness to pay. Public investment, on the other hand, responds to politicians’ preferences, and to their ability to tax and regulate. As federal politicians can tax and regulate more than others, it is their preferences that merit the most scrutiny.

What is the best way for “policymakers” to “ensure that the public gets a fair deal”? How about getting all of transport infrastructure provided privately, like regulated public utilities? Mary Peters knows that we take them for granted in essential services such as electricity, telecommunications and water supply.

Given the substantial gap between the need for transportation investment and current (and even future) revenues, there is no question the private sector will play a significant role in helping us meet our funding needs.  However, it is critical that officials at the federal, state and local levels focus on the impact any public-private partnership has on all stakeholders. Chairman Oberstar’s proposal to establish an Office of Public Benefit within the Department of Transportation is a step in the right direction.

Currently, there are few mechanisms in place to ensure the public interest is protected when the government enters into a public-private partnership.  In the absence of a concrete set of criteria, the focus of the agreement largely centers on the financing of the deal and little else. While state governments generally try to mitigate the costs of a new project for the public, without a framework to guide the decision process, many other issues are overlooked. For example, state governments must take a strong look at how a public-private partnership will impact not only the users of a proposed infrastructure project, but also businesses that may find themselves operating under conditions imposed by a private businesses with less public accountability than a government entity. 

Chairmen Oberstar and DeFazio recognize the deficiencies in how public-private partnerships are evaluated. The Office of Public Benefit created in their surface transportation reauthorization proposal would give a voice to all stakeholders regarding a proposed private-sector investment. 

In turning over critical elements of our nation’s infrastructure to private companies, it is essential that the public sector carefully evaluate the costs and benefits of a proposed transaction, both in terms of monetary impacts as well as quality of life issues. 

That is why our construction industry recovery plan, "Build Now for the Future,", calls on Congress and the Administration to eliminate barriers to public private partnerships by giving states greater flexibility to allow for tolling.  Municipalities also should be able to more easily privatize airports and accept private investments in transit.  And we need to find creative new ways to expand eligibility for private investments in public buildings.  (A good example being the privately-funded U.S. Transportation Department headquarters building.)

Because one of the central characteristics of public private partnerships is that they allow the needs of commuters and shippers to prioritize transportation investments, instead of politically powerful special interests, some in Washington have resisted this potential source of revenue.  Under the guise of "protecting the public interest" there are even efforts underway to erect insurmountable regulatory obstacles to these kinds of transactions.  Given the level of sophistication most state transportation departments have in writing contracts (traditional or otherwise) that protect the public's interest, these new regulatory hurdles are likely to do more harm than good, however.  After all, while the private operators of Indiana's toll road suffer, the state's taxpayers are enjoying the benefits of one of the country's fewlly-funded ten year transportation plan.

That being said, we also need to be realistic about the limits of public private partnerships.  They represent a great opportunity to supplement the federal transportation program, not replace it.  There are too many vital shipping corridors that are essential to goods movement that don't generate the kind of traffic needed to interest private investors - think long stretches of I-10 or I-81.  The stark reality is our needs are so great that we also must restore the gas tax to the purchasing power it had in 1993 while beginning the multi-year process it will require to transition to a vehicle-miles traveled method of financing transportation projects.

On the question of what is the best method for meeting our future transportation needs, the simple answer is "all of the above."

The most pressing issues concerning private investment in infrastructure aren't about how easy it should be, but how much the public should give up in return.

While the business models for private investment in high speed rail and transit oriented development are still emerging, most private money has gone to toll road concessions. As our research has shown, the public has tended to give up far too much.

The public has lost out in four ways: (1) The cost of tolls promised to private investors tends to exceed the costs of public borrowing due to companies’ higher capital costs and their hefty fees and profit margins; (2) compromised public control because investors demand compensation for any future policies that might reduce the volume of toll-paying traffic; (3) reduced public transparency because private companies declare their deal-making information to be proprietary, and (4) subsidized financing and special tax breaks, including federal TIFIA subsidies and special tax rules that allow concession owners to write off the value of toll roads decades before they wear out.

The risks of privatizing transportation finance become steeper when combined with reduced federal oversight. As the GAO has noted, states generally lack the capacity to analyze, monitor, and enforce these deals. Cash-strapped local officials can be enticed by large up-front payouts, overlooking the likely problems that will likely emerge years later. Unsolicited bids for privately operated roads similarly subvert the long-term planning process. And it’s no accident that most states touting private toll concessions choose routes that disproportionately carry out-of-state travelers. Beggar-thy-neighbor financing is exactly the wrong circumstances to start devolving oversight away from the federal authorities.

In the wake of the mortgage and banking meltdown, T&I Committee Chairman Oberstar’s approach reflects an awareness of the dangers of “innovative” finance and the dangers of devolving responsibility for systematic long term risks. Federal oversight is needed to responsibly direct private capital while reining in problems like TxDOT’s hugely unpopular deals with hard-lobbying private toll companies – including Zachry that currently employs Ms. Peters. Likewise, the Chicago City Council has the right idea to introduce an ordinance that would increase transparency and accountability on future private infrastructure (see case study ).

The only thing America’s transportation system needs more than money is a better focus on advancing long-term goals. At the very moment when America most needs to follow national transportation objectives, Congress should not undermine its capacity to do so.

While I am largely in agreement with both Mary Peters and Greg Cohen on the importance of PPPs and protecting the public interest, neither adequately addressed the key question as we move into debating surface transportation reauthorization: What is the appropriate role of the federal government on this question?

Chairman Oberstar’s bill, with its creation of an Office of Public Benefit, would greatly expand the federal government’s role, not only in PPPs but also in tolling, by creating what amounts to a tolling-and-PPP czar at US DOT. This position would have to approve any and all toll agreements and PPP agreements anywhere on the federal-aid highway system. Not only would this be a major expansion of federal control over what would normally be state-level decisions; it would also turn back the clock to the pre-ISTEA days when federal law banned the use of tolling anywhere on the federal-aid system.

ISTEA began the process of liberalization, keeping federal limits on tolling solely on the Interstate system. Subsequent reauthorizations further liberalized the federal role, by permitting exemptions for various kinds of toll pilot projects on Interstates: HOT lanes, express toll lanes, rebuilding three Interstates with toll finance, and constructing up to three new Interstates with toll finance. The Chairman’s bill would scrap all these pilot programs in the name of streamlining and consolidation—but at the price of greatly expanded federal control.

Creating a federal toll czar is the wrong way to go. Micro-managing tolling and PPP agreements that need to be tailored to the specifics of each project would create impediments to the timely and cost-effective use of these important tools by state DOTs. And if states were required to submit negotiated PPP agreements to the federal czar for a yes-or-no decision, the uncertainty created by that requirement would very likely kill the private sector’s interest in spending millions of dollars preparing proposals and negotiating complex deals that could be killed by the stroke of a pen at the 11th hour. We’ve seen the equivalent occur in those states whose PPP enabling acts required legislative approval of negotiated deals: no such deals were ever proposed.

In February the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission released its report. Chapter 7 of this report addresses protection of the public interest in PPP deals. One of its principal recommendations is that “Congress should generally support the states’ primary role in overseeing private-sector arrangements and, to this end, should encourage the development of appropriate technical assistance and dissemination of best practices information.” I agree with that recommendation, and so does the National Governors Association, based on recent statements.

A consensus is emerging on best practices for protecting the public interest in PPP agreements. The Finance Commission report includes a summary in its Box 7-7. The Transportation Research Board has also released an excellent synthesis report, NCHRP synthesis 391, “Public Sector Decision Making for Public-Private Partnerships.” Recent toll concession agreements are generally in line with these recommendations.

All fast-growing states are woefully short of transportation funding, measured against the need for rebuilding and expanding our highway system to keep pace with growth and improve its often-dismal performance. Tolling and PPPs are essential tools for their toolboxes. Heavy-handed federal regulation could, de-facto, remove these tools at the very time when states need them more than ever.

From the motorists’ perspective, however, some additional public interest protections are important. It is logical that private investors would only consider spending capital on projects that are expected to have a good return. With most PPPs, highway users are expected to provide that return over time. So it is important that highway users’ such as the local AAA club, trucking association, local business group, and state highway users federation are well represented in PPP negotiations.

PPPs are diverse and some deserve the support of motorists – particularly when they enable a road to be built that could not be built otherwise. Among the many additional “public interest” questions worth asking are the following:

1. Is the main purpose of the PPP to build a new road or add new, privately operated lanes that will benefit the public? Or, is the primary goal to “monetize” existing capacity to raise state or local government funds?  
2. If the private investors offer the state or local government cash for the rights to privatize a road, how will that cash be spent? Will it benefit the users of that road or be diverted?
3. How will tolling be structured to ensure fairness? Will the tolls be reasonable for all modes and all types of travelers? Or will toll rates be designed to benefit some users and fleece others? (See I-80 "public-;ublic" partnership tolling plan, which will discriminate against long-distance motorists in Pennsylvania)
4. Will the PPP improve area highway safety or create new problems?  
5. What is the impact of the PPP on efficiently moving people and commerce over the national highway system? Will it enhance personal and freight mobility or create barriers to commerce?
6. What is the anticipated return to private investors?  In Europe, some PPPs have a cap on returns. When the cap is reached, the PPP is re-bid or road operations are returned to the public transport agency. 

Every PPP project is different and the motoring public should be deeply involved in PPP negotiations to ensure a fair deal.  One of the better PPPs are the local HOT lane projects along the Shirley Highway and Capital Beltway in Virginia.  The main purpose of these projects are to add capacity, provide alternatives, and generally benefit the users of those transportation corridors.

Congress, US DOT, and national organizations should also have an oversight role & veto power under certain circumstances when PPPs include non-compete agreements that affect public roads or involve changing the status of existing public highways that have received federal-aid. 

Policymakers can ensure the public gets a fair deal by taking steps to protect the public interest in the agreements. They can also ensure investment in infrastructure projects is attractive to private capital by appropriately defining and assigning risk in the public private partnerships (P3) agreements. The emphasis must be on the partnership between the public and private sectors.

In protecting public interest, the public sector will need to have the institutional capacity and expertise to perform due diligence in identifying appropriate P3 projects and conducting value for money analyses to determine if private investment is the best option. The procurement process for a P3 must be open, transparent from the onset, and information made broadly available to the public with the exception of truly proprietary information.

P3 agreements can and should contain key performance indicators such as travel time reduction, safety, condition, operation and hand-back condition, recognizing an asset management approach for the infrastructure project. Also the length of the agreement and the inclusion of any non-compete clauses should be openly discussed.

Risk should be appropriately defined and assigned to the party best able to manage the risk. The public sector is often better positioned to address risk associated with conducting environmental studies, acquiring rights of way, and obtaining permits from other public agencies. The private sector is most appropriate to manage risk associated with project development, financing, and overseeing construction, maintenance and operation.

The rate of return or profit earned by the private party should be related to the risk allocation, and recognizing the public benefit of building the project many years sooner than would otherwise have been possible.

Private investment through public private partnerships should be a key option in meeting our nation’s transportation system requirements. Public policy should encourage these important agreements - we can protect public interest and attract private capital.

Has the time come to limit the scope and spending of the federal program, or does the next surface transportation bill require more money and a wider, if still nationally focused, approach?

However, for reasons stated by others on this blog (such as Parris Glendening), while there are useful components to her vision that should be incorporated into a new federal policy architecture I think overall it's a poor fit for a fiercely competitive, global 21st-century economy.

The federal role needs to be expanded. We need our government to build the infrastructure that will boost workforce and company productivity in our metropolitan regions, which compete not just with each other but with regions around the world. This can't simply be cobbled together at the local or even state levels, there needs to be a national strategy, well structured and capitalized. This does not necessarily mean matching other countries vis-a-vis percentage of GDP spent on infrastructure. That's a coarse metric for gauging effectiveness of a program. But the program does need to be scaled up.

Most important, however, is the fact that performance matters, or as Steve Heminger implies in his post and particularly his last observation about the price tag, the federal role needs to be much more effective and clear. It is indeed premature to debate the price tag without some measurable support for a new policy which offers clear benefits (and a path for getting there) in terms of performance metrics that are important to the nation -- increased productivity and jobs, decreased congestion, reduced dependence on oil, reduced heat-trapping pollution, and improved quality of life, for example.

Last but not least, the other challenge we face is communication, an area where I think the transportation industry is woefully deficient. For example, people don't want to hear about "infrastructure" or other vague terms that make one think of a bureaucracy awaiting more hard-won taxpayer money. We want to know that investments will pay off in ways that benefit the nation, and us. Those of us who work on transportation may not be able to produce a tool as compelling as a map that galvanizes the will to pay for a new program, as in the case of the Interstate system (although the Administration's map of high-speed rail corridors takes a stab), but I think we can paint a picture that is compelling enough if we set our minds to it.

And then, I want to take a comment from Ken Orski, who picked up on the point made at the Miller Center conference about "federal role" vs "federal interest," but take that idea in a different direction.

One thing we have learned over the years is how much transportation affects a number of issues we care about.  Defining the "federal interest," for me, means identifying areas where there is consensus about desired outcomes--outcomes broader than just transportation measures--and determining how transportation policy and programs can help acheive those outcomes.  The outcomes can cover a wide scope--reduction in greenhouse gases, improvement in economic performance, reduction of health care costs by improving transportation safety, development of livable communities, improvement in social equity or whatever else the public has identified as national goals.

The task for those charged with transportation policy and program development is to determine whether, and how, transportation can make a difference, and whether transportation investments (dollars or policy intitiatives) can do as well or better than other interventions.  Then, with a clear idea of what we want to achieve, we can size investments accordingly. or establish policies that draw on the relationships created through our investment programs.

The alternative approach, linking only to physical systems, and defining the federal role as providing certain systems but not others has real drawbacks.  It's the kind of approach that led us to build Interstate highways without looking at what they meant to cities and towns or improving airports without concern for how people get there..  Transportation decisions don't neatly sort out that way.  The transportation system is more than a collection of its individual parts,and the quality of federal actions will be improved if those actions aren't constrained to particular components.  This is not to say that the federal government does, or pays for, everything.  There need to be strong efforts by states, localities and the private sector.  But sometimes it will make sense to guide or invest in those efforts as they affect "national interests."

Since the completion of the Interstate Highway System, the federal financing role in surface transport has been conspicuous by its irrelevance to “core national priorities”. What has the Obama administration done to justify further federal involvement? Where is the analysis justifying investment in “High-Speed” rail?

As federal money is free to states receiving it, they have incentives to claim as much as possible, so there is no way of knowing whether $500 billion would be too much or to little to meet the needs of transport users. In the absence of convincing investment criteria (which Congress does not provide), common sense would suggest that investment for each transport project should depend on users or beneficiaries being prepared to pay for it.

If transport users’ “willingness to pay” were to be adopted as the basis for transport investment, then the required facilities could be financed by the states, or even privately and, as Mary Peters indicated, the federal contribution could thus be reduced. 

This, of course, is a fundamental question and one that deserves more discussion than it usually gets. As Steve Heminger notes, the public is likely to have little appetite for spending a half-billion dollars absent a clear picture of what they will get for it. Without trying to give a complete answer in a quick post, here are a few thoughts:

Nearly everyone seems to agree that the existing federal program, begun under President Eisenhower in 1956, has run its course. The Eisenhower program’s urgent goal was to induce states to build a national highway network to connect our major population centers and get this nation on a secure footing both economically and militarily. That goal has long been met, yet we continue to funnel money to state departments of transportation with the mandate merely to keep spending, with little accountability for the consequences.

Today the federal role should be to ensure that our world-class highway system, an astounding share of which is entering the late phase of its original design life, is preserved and that it operates as efficiently as possible.

In addition to preserving our assets, we need to address the thoroughly dysfunctional urban and suburban transportation systems we have, and for which there is no meaningful national policy. The vast majority of Americans, more than 80 percent, live in metropolitan areas that are all but crippled by convoluted and unaccountable planning and project delivery processes, even as they suffer through overworked highway networks, incomplete and disconnected transit systems, and streets that are unsafe for pedestrians and bicyclists alike. Ensuring that people and goods can flow and reach their destinations in our metro areas – without worsening our oil dependency and climate or harming our existing communities and quality of life – is central to our economy and is clearly a cause for national concern.

U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood had the right idea in his recent remarks:

“The fact is, metro areas hold over 80 percent of the U.S. population. They’re major centers of economic activity. And they account for most of the congestion and greenhouse-gas emissions.  Empowering metro regions to tackle their transportation and energy problems will move us closer to enjoying cities and suburbs that are cleaner, less congested, and less polluted than many are today.”

The other urgent need is to develop a meaningful policy for the rural areas and small cities and towns that have been pushed to the economic margins. For two generations the only answer federal policy has offered for the rural economy is to get to in line for a bypass. In our outreach to rural communities across the country, we have found that a much more diverse and responsive set of solutions is needed.

All in all, the federal role, in terms of being an active and attentive participant, does not need to be diminished so much as it needs to change. As a nation, we must not shrink from spending what we need to spend to remain prosperous, healthy and forward-looking. However, we certainly cannot afford to raise and spend tax dollars – from the gas tax or any other source – simply to continue a federal program that is not accountable for making progress on important national goals. Our large and broad coalition, representing millions of Americans from all walks of life who depend on our transportation system, will work hard to support the former, and will fight just has hard to prevent the latter from continuing.

We must reauthorize at least $500 billion over the next six years if we are to fix existing roads, bridges and transit. To maintain the current structure, however, is not enough. We need a major expansion of mass transit if we are to strengthen national security by reducing the need for oil, reduce carbon emissions and remain economically competitive.

Recognizing that near future gas prices will cause great harm to family, local and national economies, national governments around the world are investing dramatically in transit. Witness China – one of our major competitors – as a striking example.

Transportation is a core function of the national government. Consider the national support for canals at the beginning of the Republic, of the railroads as we expanded west and more recently of the interstate highway system. Now, ideological opponents want to place transportation further down on the priority list at a crucial time. Transit is our future.

Our most important transit systems are regional, such as the North East corridor systems serving more than 110 million people and the center of our financial and governmental systems. To suggest that we step back and rely only on state and local revenue is just a back-door effort to block the growing support for mass transit.

The local, state and federal government must take an active role in prioritizing transportation infrastructure. National security, competition in the marketplace, controlling fuel costs and emissions reduction in the wake of climate change are all are all at stake.

To her credit, former Secretary Mary Peters offers an intellectually honest view, yet I believe ultimately a flawed one, for how our nation should deal with the financial and policy crises we have across our transportation system. The “federal interest requirements” she discussed during the Bush Administration (and reiterated during the interview) leave little room for the public parts of our system where privatization, long-term leases and concession income are insufficient to pay the capital and operating parts of our system. After all, if they could, the private sector would already be operating them profitably and we would not have public transportation in many of the areas we do (e.g., Amtrak, transit, rural aviation, highways). 

In an increasingly interconnected world with a globalized trading system, a demographic time-bomb looming on the horizon, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy security issues, federal leadership and funding of rural, metropolitan, intercity and international infrastructure projects are vital. Hamilton foresaw it, the Whigs fought for it, Roosevelt codified it and, if we needed a further reminder or an update, the Commissions hit us on the head with it. Defining the interstate commerce clause as applying to only commerce or travel that crosses state lines in a world with a global supply chain and networked passenger transportation is inaccurate, quaint and outdated legally by at least 70 years.

The past Administration’s embrace of federal retrenchment is regrettable as some of the ideas Secretary Peters discussed during her tenure were certainly sound: the need to access new sources of capital by increasing the use of public private partnerships (PPPs) is one; and the need to better tap the benefits of aligning the costs of using infrastructure with the prices passengers and shippers pay is another (e.g., the Bush Administration’s FAA reauthorization proposal). The difference is that we need PPPs and market-based pricing alongside an increase in the fuels tax and an eventual shift to user fees that include market externalities, not as substitutes for them. As John Horsley enumerates, our needs are many.

Unfortunately, by linking a federal retrenchment with the problems of trust fund imbalances and a shift to market-based pricing, Secretary Peters and her supporters created the mistaken impression that in order for our transportation programs to use more private capital and better inculcate market incentives we have to reduce the federal role. Not only is this a false choice, it needlessly set advocates of an increased and redefined federal role against those that believe that a variety of PPPs can be quite valuable for meeting a portion of our nation’s needs. We in fact should be, and many of us are, allies.

In order to address outstanding transportation needs and achieve outcomes such as converting our industry to use cleaner sources of energy, we need access to existing and new sources of public and private capital and we need to improve the ways we price transportation, whether the passenger or good is moving through the air, ground or water. Fortunately groups as diverse as the American Trucking Association, the Chamber of Commerce, environmentalists and labor agree. 

Both commissions found that the nation’s aging infrastructure is in crisis and that the future economic health of our country depends on sustained and pro-active investment in our transportation systems. In fact, chronic underfunding of our current transportation system has led us to the point where one-quarter of the nation’s major urban roads are in poor condition, one out of four bridges either needs significant repair or is too narrow to handle today’s traffic, and half of the nation’s transit buses and rail cars have exceeded their service life or will do so within the next six years. Not to mention the billions of dollars lost in time and energy costs because of crippling congestion for both commuters and freight.

The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission found that the country is investing less than 40 percent of what is needed to meet current needs. Looking to the future, the panel – chartered by Congress – found that at least $225 billion a year would be necessary to meet our national needs, and that all levels of government must continue to fund their historic shares – in the case of the federal government approximately 45 percent of the total for capital improvements to our highways and transits. As the Commission stated, “The problem is simply too big for states and local governments to handle by themselves, even with the help of the private sector. We believe that the federal government must continue to be a major part of the solution.”

State transportation officials agree that the national program should be focused on national priorities, and that the existing cumbersome structure can be streamlined for efficiency. We also support the use of public-private partnerships to help meet the investment needs with all states being given the flexibility they need to determine what works best in their states. 

But let’s keep it real. Just last month, states submitted 1,400 projects totaling $56 billion for consideration in the TIGER grant program – which is capped at $1.5 billion. Twenty-four states are seeking $50 billion for high-speed rail projects, more than six times the money designated in the economic stimulus plan. 

Transportation dollars create physical assets that will last 50 to 100 years, building a foundation for a modern, globally competitive America, one that will enable current and future generations to sustain their families and enjoy an unprecedented quality of life. Surely that is a goal our federal government should pursue.

It’s not only Mary Peters who has concluded that the federal surface transportation program has lost its way, increasingly evolving into a politicized public-works program. That was the conclusion of a March 2008 GAO report (GAO-08-400) as well as the Policy and Revenue Commission. But while the latter claimed to be streamlining and simplifying the program, it actually called for significantly expanding its scope to encompass inter-city rail, environment, and energy programs, in addition to expanding federal transit assistance to cities and towns of all sizes. That’s also what Chairman Oberstar has proposed in the House reauthorization proposal.

Far wiser, in my view, is the kind of rethinking called for last year by Secretary Peters in the DOT’s report “Refocus, Reform, Renew.” As Peters said in her recent interview, the key to restoring public confidence and support is to refocus the federal program on truly national functions, while giving states and urban areas the freedom to address local and regional problems. To me, the most critically important federal government responsibility is interstate (and international) trade and travel, defined as a federal function by the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution.  Most certainly not a federal function is urban land-use planning, promoting scenic trails and bike paths, and any number of similar special-interest programs that have been grafted onto a program originally created to build the Interstate system.

A related issue is how to pay for the federal transportation function. If we pared back the truly federal role to enhancing, rebuilding, and maintaining the Interstate system and adding various intermodal trade connectors, the sums raised by the current federal fuel taxes could well be sufficient for the next reauthorization period. That’s especially true if Congress continues the trend of the past two decades of reducing restrictions on states’ use of tolling and public-private partnerships rather than, as the House bill proposes, significantly increasing such restrictions.

In the October issue of the Reason Foundation’s “Surface Transportation Innovations” newsletter, I further suggest that in the context of this kind of rethinking of the federal role, we should shift funding for urban transit from highway user taxes to the general fund. (And likewise, any continued funding for inter-city passenger rail should continue to come from the general fund, not from highway users.) This would return the federal fuel tax to its original purpose of ensuring proper funding for the truly national highway system, putting trust back in the Highway Trust Fund. And it would reinforce the very sound principle of user-pay/user-benefit.

The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission on which I served struggled with this question throughout our early debates, but eventually a strong majority of its members coalesced around a vision of the federal role that would be re-focused on a limited set of priorities for a national multi-modal transportation network, including: a state of good infrastucture repair, efficient goods movement, metropolitan mobility, connectivity between regions, passenger safety, and environmental enhancement.  We further agreed that the nation should set ambitious goals to improve performance in each of these focus areas, and that those performance objectives should drive the investment levels that the federal government undertakes with other public and private sector partners.

Now, reasonable people certainly can (and do) reach different conclusions about whether these are the right objectives for the federal government to pursue.  But if we can reach consensus on new national goals for our transportation program, we must follow through with the investment program and system management strategies to meet those goals.  As Ken Orski notes, that will mean both supply- and demand-side approaches to problems like persistent urban traffic congestion.

An authorization process that begins and ends in quarrels about whether we should spend $300 billion or $500 billion or $700 billion will just frustrate the Congress and the general public.  We need to figure out first what the federal program should do.  If we don't know what we're buying, how can we haggle over the price?

Over the years the federal surface transportation program has grown to include a variety of programs and activities that, at best, have a loose connection to the primary or core mission of the program: that of preserving and enhancing the nation’s surface transportation system. Useful as they may be in their own right, these “non-essential” programs and activities place a heavy burden on the already strained resources of the Highway Trust Fund. Eliminating them from the transportation budget would not necessarily eliminate the need for additional funding but it could significantly reduce that need.

Secretary Peters is only the latest voice to call for a refocusing of the federal program on investments of genuine national interest. The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission made a similar recommendation in its December 2007 report, “Transportation for Tomorrow.” More recently, this issue figured prominently in the discussions at the National Transportation Policy Conference held at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

In discussing this subject, conference participants drew a distinction between “the federal role” and “the federal (or national ) interest”. There are many transportation activities in which Congress and the federal government may have a legitimate “interest” but not necessarily a financial “role.” Perhaps fiscal circumstances will oblige us to adopt a less expansive definition of the federal role and cause us to limit the scope and size of the future federal transportation program to investments that truly advance critical national transportation goals. Which programs to eliminate and which ones to retain could become a key challenge in drafting the next program authorization.

In June, the administration launched a Partnership for Sustainable Communities and six "livability principles" for coordinating policy across the Department of Transportation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., whose panel has jurisdiction over mass transit programs, in August introduced his own Livable Communities Act, while House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn., made livability one of the key objectives of the surface transportation reauthorization bill he unveiled in June.

Given this increasing focus on promoting livability, what can transportation and urban planners and others in the transportation sector do to promote greater interconnection of affordable housing and transportation options? What role, if any, is appropriate for the federal government to play?

In our authorization agenda, we have an entire section dedicated to small urban/rural neighborhoods. The focus of this effort is in getting employers engaged in their employees commute. This can be encouraged through tax incentives, changes to the planning process, or by providing grants for commuter programs. Two pieces of legislation that address this are 'Green Routes to Work' (HR 3271) and Commute LESS (HR 3517) offered by Congressman Sires (D-NJ). These are two bills which will promote livability by offering commuters with real options. ACT feels that by offering commuters options like carpooling, vanpooling, and telework; Congress and the Federal government can provide virtual and real connectivity which is the underlying essence of livability.

An example of this concept we would use is Anchorage, Alaska.  Not because it is an out-of-the-way location, but because it illustrates a local response to very real livability issues.  Anchorage has a very necessary vanpool program option for their residents. Anchorage’s land development is cut short due to the existing infrastructure that was conceived before anyone could understand how much population growth would come to the area. Anchorage sits in the middle of vast mountain ranges to the West, and water to the South and East. North of Anchorage from the water to the mountains is all dedicated Military land. There is literally nowhere to affordably build in Anchorage. This is why so many residents have moved further North of the Military installations where the land is more plentiful and houses can be much more affordable. The 60 mile one way commute from the Matanuska Susitna Borough is well worth it to the residents who cannot afford the high property costs in Anchorage. As the cost of fuel rises, having an affordable option to make that daily commute becomes a necessity. The Borough is the 38th fastest growing community in the US. In this case, reaching out to available land for development is their only option, and therefore need affordable options for commuting.

Local examples like this illustrate the need to revisit how federal policies shape the available local options to develop or re-develop communities.  This authorization provides the opportunity to recognize that influence and move away from prescriptive program offerings towards performance and goal-based programs.

President Obama's New Plan to Decide Where Americans Live and How They Travel (Ron Utt)
http://www.heritage.org/Research/SmartGrowth/bg2260.cfm

The Tipping Point: The Transportation-Housing Trade-Offs of Suburban, Urban and Rural Living (Alan Pisarski) http://www.heritage.org/Research/SmartGrowth/wp052209a.cfm

Will Obama's "Livability" Program Bring Britain's "Hobbit Homes" to America? (Ron Utt) http://www.heritage.org/Research/SmartGrowth/wm2601.cfm

We have a unique opportunity for the administration and Congress to put the pieces together to save money, make communities work better, and advance the goals of community health, environmental protection, and sustainable development.

With this administration, we’re seeing a real step forward that will level the playing field and make the federal government a better partner to state and local governments. By providing the right incentives, we can give people more transportation options, reduce our dependence on oil, improve public health, and invest in local jobs. Local communities around the country are taking advantage of new opportunities, including the economic recovery package, to make their communities more livable – from Portland to Pittsburgh, and from Salt Lake City to South Dakota.

Candidate Obama talked about the big picture of livability when he addressed the Conference of Mayors in the summer of 2008, and his cabinet officers have shown an unprecedented degree of cooperation and vision for what it takes to make livable communities: a greater range of transportation and housing choices, more job opportunities, a healthier environment, and reduced energy use. Initiatives spearheaded by Secretaries Donovan, Chu, and LaHood, along with EPA Administrator Jackson, show that the administration understands the importance of collaboration and cooperation among these key agencies.

Now federal government must use the tools it has, coordinate its efforts, and lead by example. The recovery package, as well as the energy and climate legislation working its way through Congress, is an example of smart policy that will create jobs, improve community livability and reduce our dependence on oil.

Economic stimulus money is flowing to states and localities, and with a special emphasis on items that will boost the economy and reduce a community’s carbon footprint. Money is being spent on ready-to-go, low-carbon transportation projects, such as the more than $20 billion that has been made available for over 6,000 shovel-ready transportation construction projects – over 3,000 of which are already underway. These projects will reduce oil consumption, create local jobs, and give people more transportation choices.

The House energy and climate bill adopted my proposals to direct funding to low carbon transportation options.  In the House bill, 10% of the proceeds from the pollution permit auction go to the State Energy and Environment Development Accounts, some of which can be invested in transportation infrastructure that reduces energy use and expands commuting options. This is an opportunity for state and local governments to take advantage of federal programs and enact policies that will improve livability.

It would be strange to talk about the potential for the interconnectedness of agencies and the Obama administration’s “Livable Communities” initiative and not mention the HUD’s HOPE VI “Public & Indian Housing” program and it’s varied successes over the past 20 years.  Even despite the fact that the Bush administration essentially gutted the program’s budget, HOPE VI has set a great record for strategically-targeting blighted areas and structures and working with both federal and local agencies to renovate communities.  By tying-in the transportation factor, the administration has finally taken the step we all hoped they would in promoting transit-oriented development that set a real agenda to integrate city transit at the federal level (I novel idea, I know). 

Sometimes the coordinated management of agencies is what an area needs most in order to spur development interest and real smart growth change, but how often do we really tend to see that kind of inter-agency coordination?  With this in mind, the HOPE VI has a few really successful examples of targeted, well-managed redevelopment, and I don’t think we should be too surprised that the administration is seeking to replicate its success on a larger scale, utilizing the assets of more federal agencies.  In a nutshell, we should seek to use these great examples of public agency coordination for interconnected planning as launching points for larger, more ambitious projects and their management.

As the mover of 43 percent of our nation’s intercity freight, freight rail every day helps unclog our highways and roads.   Given that one freight train can carry the load of 280 trucks, each ton-mile of freight that moves by rail instead of by road reduces greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds or more.   

Policymakers can help ensure freight rail continues its role in making our communities more livable by supporting policies that allow us to keep reinvesting in our critical network infrastructure.  Whether through tax incentives or public-private partnerships, increased public investment in rail network capacity is essential to being able to move more people and goods by rail, instead of road, thus making our communities more livable.

http://insiderinterviews.nationaljournal.com/2009/10/post-1.php

Both of these can be defined or quantified in terms of local, or preferably (to address Secretary Biehler's point that absolute local economy can lead to poor choices in the aggregate) regional metrics. What percentage of the population has access to various mobility options? Good telecommunications? Affordable housing choices? Good schools? Safe neighborhoods (in terms of crime and traffic)? And so on.

I think many will agree that such standards for performance matter, and should inform public policy. These are the kinds of "goalposts," as James Corless mentions, that local, state and federal policy should be aligned towards. That is not the case now, thanks in part to a multi-decadal accretion of policies and investments that are not entirely performance-based (to put it charitably).

This is not about micromanagement, nor is it about doctrinal reliance on specific designs or other means to achieve valued ends. It's about a new partnership with states and regions based on the principle that performance matters most. And I think we're fortunate enough to have a team at DOT that is busy hammering out such an innovative partnership.

Steve Heminger is right on the money when he says that local elected officials are best equipped to decide how best to enhance their communities "livability." A single federally-imposed standard of "livability" colored by some officials' aversion to the automobile would not do justice to the diversity of our suburban nation.

Steve -

Thanks for your constructive suggestion, that the most useful federal role would be to put more federal transportation funds directly in the hands of local officials. Would not the simplest way to achieve this desirable objective be for the states, rather than the federal government, to collect the transportation funds themselves in the first place?

Of all the suggestions (except yours) made for further federal action, I suggest that a uniform carbon tax, carefully calculated to reduce “Greenhouse Gas” emissions, could be the least harmful.

And how many of us would like to see land developers lobbying members of the federal congress for improved “livability”?

Gabriel

Any discussion about livability as a goal must acknowledge the federal government’s role in getting us to where we are today. Federal intervention from the 1940s on in promoting highway construction, mortgage lending for suburban homes, funding for far-flung infrastructure and a host of other actions made dispersal of population and dependence on personal automobiles de facto national policy. Those policies were understandable in the 1950s, but as energy has gotten more expensive, congestion has skyrocketed, households have gotten smaller and Americans increasingly crave different lifestyle options than their parents did, those policies just do not meet our needs in 2009.

The principles of livability supported by the Obama administration emphasize housing close to jobs and transit, accessible retail and ample parks and open space. Or as DOT Secretary LaHood characterized it with one sentence earlier this week (LINK TO: http://dc.streetsblog.org/2009/10/05/lahood-defines-livability-in/), “a community where if people don’t want an automobile, they don’t have to have one.” To that I would add, “and if you do want to have one, you don’t have to drive it all day, every day just to live your life.”

I share Greg Cohen’s concern for families of modest means who struggle to find a home they can afford, especially when the “affordable” houses are in distant locations where each worker has to buy a car, insure it and fill the tank a couple times a week. The truth is, there are plenty of those houses out there, and a lot of them are sitting empty or going into foreclosure because that is not what everyone needs today. We have had years and years of federal, state and local policies lining up to provide one option and one option only: to live in a place where you must buy, insure, fuel -- and spend much of your day in -- a car. That’s fine if it is what you want and what you can afford; the point here is that a lot of people need something different, so we have to remove the regulatory barriers that keep them from getting it. At the same time, we need to create incentives and other inducements to ensure developers can make it affordable.

There is little question left about whether “livability” should be a national priority — it’s a priority for the everyday Americans who are looking to spend more time at home and out of traffic, or to drive less and be able to walk to the park or the store with their families. But the principle aim here is affordability. Greg is right that the places with good access to transit and jobs are popular, and therefore tend to be more expensive. Many communities around the country are working to solve this problem, but they need partners in the private sector and at the state and federal levels. The Obama initiative is about helping to facilitate, seed and speed along these innovative responses, while aligning federal spending and policies to support, and not thwart, these efforts.

Americans understandably expect decisions about the character of development to be made at the local level by their local officials. There is absolutely no reason why this has to change.

At the federal level, we need to update some of our tax incentives and priorities from the 1950’s to 2009 to make livability, affordable housing and transportation long-term goals of our federal transportation spending. Federal policy should be like a pair of goalposts setting broad parameters, but leaving it to local decision makers to find the specific solutions that work best in their communities.

Just like Secretary LaHood said in the same interview, “The idea of livable communities is not Ray LaHood’s idea or Barack Obama’s idea: It’s the people’s. This is what the people want right now.”

The following post was submitted by Allen D. Biehler, Pennsylvania Secretary of Transportation and AASHTO President:

It is one of my greatest frustrations when I learn that a local government has rezoned a piece of property that will generate additional truck or car traffic without looking at the larger transportation grid.  A new manufacturing plant?  Great for the economy but why is it stuck at the end of a highway with no access to the Interstate?  An upscale residential community?  Again, good for the tax base but how will the homeowners get to work if transit, buses or other non-highway modes are not in the vicinity?  These are some of the issues state transportation officials must contend with in devising sound, multi-modal and sustainable programs.  Yet land use has always been the prerogative of local government and we must respect this responsibility.   

To secure a more sustainable future, therefore, communications and partnerships between local and state officials must get stronger.  As state transportation officials, we must encourage a “triple bottom line” in evaluating any development project to ensure that it will result in an expanding economy, reducing our environmental footprint, and improving the quality of life for our growing population.

We must take a balanced approach at assessing our future development, promoting partnerships across all levels of government, business and academia, while seeking innovative approaches like never before.  Where it is appropriate, we must work hard to find opportunities to encourage non-motorized modes of transportation and to slow the growth in miles driven in this country.

The role of the federal government can and should be to offer national goals that will enable us to meet the needs of all parts of America, rural and urban.  Rather than be prescriptive, these goals should be broad enough to enable all of us – in towns, villages, cities and large megalopolises alike – to join onto the “livable communities bandwagon.”  

Sustainable communities are not something new in America.  Our earliest inhabitants recognized that their resources were precious and had to be carefully managed in order to sustain life and prosperity.  These days, of course, our world has expanded well beyond our farms, our cities, our states, our country – but the principles behind a livable community are still the same.  Innovation, partnerships, common goals, safety and personal mobility must be the hallmarks of any forward-thinking transportation policy for America. 

Moreover, access to public transportation service and the attributes of that access can have as much or more to do with whether people are attracted to using public transportation. So too does the placement of attractive destinations (e.g., office towers, sports venues) close to public transportation hubs. Generally, all major trip generating facilities, whether they be entertainment/sports venues, institutions of higher learning or office buildings etc, which generate more than about 15,000 total daily trips, equivalent to a 1.5m sf office building/complex, should be proximate to one or more major public transportation services.

The public transportation operating agencies in this country receive the majority of their Federal funding through the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). There is a multi-tiered, well-established relationship between the FTA and these agencies which should be used to channel funding to plan for improved land use and transit relationships, including TODs, to these operating agencies. Contracting and reporting relationships exist that provide an easy conduit for these funds allowing for:

• a tighter alignment of FTA funded transit planning and land use planning;
• enhanced matching of existing transit capabilities with land use opportunities; and,
• simplifying the distribution of available funding

The need to maximize the value of all modes of transit in fostering land use patterns that are sensitive to today’s emphasis on reducing green house gases, promoting affordable housing, cutting petroleum based energy consumption and wasteful sprawl development is apparent. Some transit agencies today are active in working with communities and developers on improved land use patterns and TOD projects. They are ready and eager to become partners in the future planning to encourage land use patterns and TODs that insure investments in economic development complement investments in transit infrastructure and services. 

 In light of the preceding statements, I recommend that:

• At least $15m in funding be made available from the Comprehensive Planning Grant Program to transit operating agencies, which is administered by the FTA, to work with other levels of government in a proactive manner to establish land use plans, master plans and other related programs to improve the ability of public transit to serve the needs of the residents, workers and visitors in a specific geographic area;
• At least $20m in Challenge Grant funding be made available to transit operating agencies for use in partnering with communities and others to foster improved land use and TOD planning, both aimed at achieving an implementable economic development project that facilitates increased transit use, among other goals;
• HUD should have oversight over and participate with the FTA in determinations of who will receive funding; and,
• A competitive process should be used to distribute these funds based on transparent and understandable requirements.
• Consider including a locally-based Advisory Council to the Federal Interagency Council structure. This Advisory Council would be composed of knowledgeable municipal economic development experts, transit agency representatives, academics and developer practitioners.

Governor Glendening discusses the plight of workers who live in Martinsburg, West Virginia and work in Washington DC or Baltimore. I can imagine how disappointed the Governor must be that these folks couldn’t afford the more “livable”, more expensive, more regulated, and higher taxed properties that are closer to their jobs in Baltimore and Washington.  Perhaps many of these workers wouldn’t have fled my home State of Maryland, “leapfrogging” inaccessible rural counties outside of the Governor’s smart growth priority funding areas, if they could have afforded a single-family home and a little land closer to work. I’m impressed by the implied solution to correct their behavior -- not approving their car loans! This type of “solution” is a great example of the dangers of allowing well-meaning federal officials to develop or “incentivize” local land use planning & zoning schemes. 

Another problem worth considering is that the federal government does not have the constitutional power to regulate local land use and zoning. Yet this fact doesn’t appear to have registered with proponents of the federal “livability” agenda.

On the other side of the coin, I seriously agree with AARP’s Nancy Leamond’s concerns about unaffordable “livable” communities, such as rail-based, transit-oriented development that seems almost designed to push poorer people out of the cities and into less dense suburbs that cannot provide the same quality of transit service. Certainly this result has been a major problem for many who live here in Washington DC.  California has also been grappling with this problem in supposedly livable communities that are unaffordable for teachers, police officers, and many other middle class people to actual live in.

Like the many disastrous planning fads of the past (think tenements), the country should not be fooled into setting national “livability” standards for local land use planning. The federal government should not be involved in local land use planning regardless of pleasant sounding names for their programs.

Intentionally approaching transit-oriented developments with better coordination and planning between transit providers, local governments and developers could address many equity concerns especially if it resulted in a fixed number of affordable housing set-asides. For example, FTA, as part of the New Starts approval process should require that localities have a plan for retaining and expanding the stock of affordable housing near future fixed-guideway rail or bus lines.  
 
In many parts of the country, the outer edge of the suburbs have enjoyed a disproportionate share of federal transportation dollars compared to existing communities. Unfortunately, this has facilitated suburban sprawl, increased commute time and costs, and further isolated economically disadvantaged inner city residents.  One principle of the federal partnership for sustainable communities is to support existing communities. To carry out this principle, regions and states should be required to show that the distribution of federal transportation dollars will do just that, including analysis of how new transportation facilities or services will impact existing and future community residents,
 
Preserving affordable housing in transit-rich locations allows affordable travel choices to those who do not drive.  Providing access to the broader region through a network of transit routes is an excellent way to help people save money and have it available to spend on other needs. 
 
Ultimately, the transportation sector can help make safer and more attractive communities that accommodate everyone by

• investing more in public transportation and paratransit services with increased frequency and coverage to ensure that everyone can get where they need and want to go, and

• Building Complete Streets that accommodate all users--motorists, transit users, pedestrians, or cyclists--regardless of their age or abilities.

The public sector must understand and communicate that the real cost of housing includes transportation costs. Right now, those are astronomical for folks living any distance from job centers as well as dropping off and picking up kids from school and doing the family shopping.

The key to reducing those costs involves increasing transit options, such as light rail, as well as the walkability of neighborhoods with in-fill projects and redevelopment. It also involves policy changes that put housing and jobs closer together. We should also make the cost of transportation a consideration in home mortgage applications.

Already, there’s an explosion of mass transit projects across the country, with 75 percent of 34 referendums approved last November that provide $75 billion in new revenues to support those projects. This is a good start. Smart Growth America will take the issue further when top state administrators come together October 27 in Washington, D.C. to discuss shaping future policy to form tighter collaboration with regard to housing and transportation.

Former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening serves as a Senior Advisor for NSI, where he works with the NSI team to develop winning legislative and marketing strategies for NSI’s clients. Mr. Glendening also serves as President of Smart Growth Leadership Institute, part of Smart Growth America, a nation-wide coalition of nearly 100 organizations promoting a better and more healthy way to grow; one that protects open space and farmland, revitalizes neighborhoods, keeps housing affordable, and makes communities more livable. As president, Mr. Glendening travels the country advising about the dangers of urban sprawl and its effect on our health, our prosperity and our communities as well as recommending a range of solutions to governors and public leaders.