Everybody wants transportation progress, nobody wants change
Local agencies can finally be agents of infrastructure change, but they have to learn from the “shovel ready” mistakes of the past.
Everybody wants progress, nobody wants change. –Søren Kierkegaard
National news outlets are transfixed on the political games of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Build Back Better Act. We the viewer watch, cheer, and moan as two teams battle for field position and control of a pot of gold.
Meanwhile, there’s a much more pressing issue off-screen. Local governments competed for dozens of funding sources.
$5 billion to make streets safe for the most basic modes of travel - walking and bicycling.
$5 billion for multijurisdictional megaprojects.
$5 billion for highway projects of regional and economic significance.
America Walks published an open letter to Secretary Pete, pulling no punches about their concern for the Reconnecting Communities program being used to fund projects that will further rip apart communities.
They’re right to be upset. The projects that do the most to knit together communities (i.e. pro-walk, pro-bike, pro-transit) have the highest return on investment, in terms of financial capital and social capital.
There’s an easy answer to this country’s transportation debacle: plan, design, and construct the stuff that has the best return on investment.
There are two types of data that should inform how funds are spent: (1) available solutions and (2) appropriate use of available solutions. For example, a bridge is a terrific solution to cross a body of water. However, a bridge to an island of 100 residents is a $223 million debacle that happens with far more frequency than you’d care to know.
It’s not enough to just have the solution. A road widening or new highway looks fabulous for political campaigns, but the long-term price includes higher speeds, more violent crashes, reduced access for people walking or bicycling, and the destruction of transit routes. And if that’s not enough, the road will be congested again in a few years.
Infrastructure decision makers use federal funds to build the same old terrible infrastructure either because they’re unaware or ignoring the return on investment calculations.
The new federal infrastructure funding ushered in a plethora of grant opportunities for cities and counties across the country. The selection criteria came down to safety, environmental sustainability, quality of life, economic competitiveness and opportunity, state of good repair, and mobility and community connectivity.
It sounds good, and it’s familiar, because that’s essentially the criterion of transportation bills over the last 20 years. Year over year, the federal government says that’s how local agencies should spend infrastructure money.
Instead of considering the long-term ROI of projects, grant applicants are chasing money for money’s sake.
Streets continue to crumble, accessibility gets worse, and neighborhoods are divided by widened arterials because public works and transportation departments have been using decades-old mobility assumptions. They’re just digging themselves a deeper pothole.
33 years ago, San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway carried 100,000 vehicles per day as a sort of traffic sewer, blocking the city from the expansive waterfront. But in 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the freeway beyond repair, giving planners and engineers no choice but to distribute all that traffic to surface streets.
The results were almost magical. The local streets absorbed the traffic, transit ridership shot up, housing soared, new jobs opened, and various redevelopment projects transformed the waterfront. Think about that. After part of a downtown freeway collapsed, the area began to thrive and turned into a highly sought after destination.
After such wild success, planners and engineers began studying similar opportunities around the country. Milwaukee paid $30 million to remove a highway spur that would have cost up to $80 million to repair. The Federal Highway Administration and New York State will remove a section of I-81 in Syracuse that literally and figuratively split the city in 1957.
The populace is trained to see triumph when a massive new road project that includes an interchange and a beautiful bridge is approved.
But what if the best way to reach those goals is a highway teardown? The Congress for New Urbanism maintains a “Freeways without Futures” resource library to educate and equip local governments.
Headlines about the dire need to repair crumbling infrastructure tempt us to believe any new project is a good project. Local governments have what they need to make the decisions that will strengthen the physical and social infrastructure of their communities.
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said everybody wants progress, nobody wants change. Local governments will have the stage and limelight in the coming months to be agents of change.