Steve Miller's Blog — II

A while ago, following the fatal collapse of some ceiling panels in the Big Dig tunnels, Commonwealth magazine published interviews with local pundits about what went wrong with the management and public relations aspects of the gargantuan, 30-year project.  Some of the issues they raise include the need for:

• A strong leader and management team within the appropriate state agency with sufficient independence, power and talent to manage the contractor as well as keep the project from becoming a patronage dumping ground.
• Regular and honest outreach to keep the public informed and supportive as the project, and its budget, evolve.
• An exit strategy with the contractor if the work doesn’t meet expectations and a “succession” plan in place for others to finish the job if needed.

But there is another perspective that is equally important – at least to those of us who have spent our lives working for progressive social change.  From that perspective, the key issue is not project management or contract oversight.  The issue is how to maximize the project’s positive contribution to the livability and viability of our communities, the quality of our air and water, the sustainability of our resource use patterns, and the equitable distribution of the project’s costs and benefits.

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From Transit To Traffic – The Background

It’s hard to remember, but the initial idea for the Big Dig was a minor part of the Boston Transportation Planning Review (BTPR) process, created in response to growing protests against the Inner Belt and associated highway projects that would have ripped apart huge swaths of the region’s residential areas.  (Full disclosure: the house I now live in was one that would have been torn down.)  In setting up the BTPR, Governor Frank Sargent said:

Four years ago, I was the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Works, our road-building agency. Then, nearly everyone was sure that highways were the only answer to transportation problems for years to come. We were wrong. Today, we know more clearly what are real needs are: what our environment means to us, what a community means to us, and what is valuable to us as a people.  The plan will….integrate road-building with mass transit, and it will study some of these other imaginative means of moving goods and people: park-and-ride systems, metered traffic on expressways, special bus lanes, and the host of other space-age approaches now available to transportation planners.

The BTPR process produced a “strong consensus” about the need for “an aggressive transit expansion program” including both rail and trolley lines.

Soon afterwards, newly elected Governor Michael Dukakis appointed Fred Salvucci – who had been active in the fight against the Inner Belt – as Secretary of Transportation.  Salvucci said that instead of tearing down neighborhoods, the state should up space for development by burying the heavily congested elevated down-town sections of I-93.  The original plan for what became the Big Dig didn’t even include a new river crossing.

Going Forward By Stepping Sideways

As Big Dig plans evolved, state officials were required to respond to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) requirements that major construction describe potential environmental impacts.  This led to conflicting estimates of the net effect on air quality that would be caused by the increased capacity of the new project – more pollution-causing vehicles versus less congestion and the burial of the road.  The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) took legal action on the basis that the project would undermine the state’s federally mandated Compliance Plan to meet standards set by the Clean Air Act.  CLF demanded major mitigating expansion and upgrading of commuter rail, trolley line, and bus transit. They also pushed for the creation of suburban “park and ride” facilities, restrictions on the growth of inner-city parking spaces, and other measures.  It wasn’t until the end of the Dukakis era that outgoing Secretary of Transportation Salvucci finally agreed to sign a legally binding commitment with CLF pledging the state to fulfill a variety of the demanded improvements.

For some people, using the Clean Air Act as leverage to shape transportation policy and projects is gross manipulation of the purposes of both.  It’s similar to the fury that western loggers felt about environmentalists’ use of the Endangered Species Act to regulate their industry.

But it is part of the job of progressives to point out the connections, to fight against business’ desire to externalize costs and against political leaders desire to keep issues separate in order to minimize opposition.  The Big Dig’s mitigation commitments would have probably become as mythical as the Cape Cod Tunnel if CLF hadn’t found a basis to sue the state and get a legally enforceable commitment.  And for all the state’s subsequent efforts to postpone or deny its obligations, a lot of the original BTPR vision and CLF’s demands have been accomplished, with more to come.  So a key Big Dig lesson is the value of using whatever tools you have to force concessions – even if it means creating new and officially unintended legal connections.

The Use and Danger of Hitching a Ride

Smart legislators try to attach an otherwise difficult-to-pass policy or project to a “must-pass” bill or budget.  It’s not pretty, but it’s legal; and it is a key way for Legislative leaders to pull together majority support for action around larger or more controversial issues – a part of the give-and-take among competing interests that is the essence of the “dirty democracy” we enjoy.

Progressive advocates are often pursuing goals that will upset the status quo.  The more those goals will upset powerful elites, the less likely they are to get government approval or be directly fundable.  But effective advocacy groups do have the ability to mobilize protests, to bring some of the dubious aspects of elite-supported projects to public attention.  So, in order to avoid potential disruption, elite decision-makers sometimes include some of the advocates’ desires around the periphery of major efforts.   For example, as debate escalated about the Big Dig’s exit to the north (what kind of bridge or tunnel?) the state sought to ameliorate opposition by offering another set of mitigating measures along the lower basin under the new span – three new parks along the “lost half-mile” from the McGrath to the Washington Street bridge, pedestrian bridges linking it all together, basketball and tennis courts, and other improvements to nearby open spaces and building.

Riding through obstacles by sitting in the rear car of a train pulled by someone else’s locomotive is a time honored strategy.  But this makes your own success dependent on the larger project’s – if they become a train wreck, you’ll be the first fatality.  It also makes you vulnerable to efforts by the rail road operators to unhook your car and let it drift off to a stop!  Even if you can stay attached, being a peripheral and non-critical-path component of a larger effort makes it hard to keep project management focused on your priorities, leading to delays and downgrading until all that’s left are skinny remnants of your original vision.

There were a lot of rear-end cars attached to the Big Dig, from the Horticultural Society’s dreams of revival to pedestrian/bicyclists hopes for a welcoming greenway to the business community’s need for downtown revival.  Not all those goals, or the many others in a similar situation, have been realized.  Another advocacy lesson from the Big Dig is that if you are riding in someone else’s train, remember to keep careful track of your connection!

Do The Good Stuff First

Murphy was right –projects will take longer and cost more than anticipated.  Which means that most projects run out of time and money near the end.  And the first things to get ditched are non-critical-path components.

From an advocacy perspective, this means that it is vital to identify the aspects of the project that will provide the most important public benefits (perhaps because they will have the most immediate impact, or help the largest number of people, or change the nature of power relationships, etc.) and push to get them included in the first phases of work so that there is time (and budget) to deal with any unforeseen problem – especially if those benefits come from activities not essential to the main thrust of the project.

Get It In Writing

If Fred Salvucci hadn’t signed the Memorandum of Understanding with CLF there would have been little basis for subsequent legal efforts to force the state to live up to its commitments.  As a person familiar with early Big Dig advocacy efforts suggested, part of Salvucci’s motivated may have been to tie the hands of this successors – forcing them to have to deal with projects that he personally liked but didn’t have funds or political approval to do himself.

In fact, it seems very strange that Governor Patrick isn’t using this Big Dig lesson around the Green Line extension, and some other projects as well – committing the state to desperately needed transit expansions hoping that evolving political circumstances will make it easier for subsequent Administrations to deal with the cost.

Ultimately, It’s All About Power

In every society all decisions – economic, political, educational, judicial, even cultural and social – reflect the power realities around them.  But power is a dynamic process.  The most power is held by those with wealth or institutional authority, the ability to shape the way we understand issues or to threaten violence.  But there are numerous counter-thrusting flows – from the survival tactics of the poor to workers’ efforts to unionize, from insurgent political movements to law suits demanding the upholding of rights.

The outcome of any major project or policy depends on the alignment of forces at its inception and during its implementation – which can lead to unintended consequences as the balance of power shifts.  The Big Dig was begun at a time when the environmental movement was strong and anti-highway sentiment was growing.  But during the decades of planning and construction, the political climate changed – leading to the dilution of what remained of the original progressive intent.

Fortunately, the years of public protest had led to significantly expanded opportunities for public input in transportation planning projects.  Early plans called for the surface road above the tunnel to have up to 10 lanes, even though the whole point of the project was to move cars underground.   But a citizen’s review group had been formed which was able to examine surface layout plans block by block and use a variety of tactics to reduce the amount of pavement.  Public engagement, supported by advocacy insights, can make a difference.

The Big Dig still has many good ideas and unfilled promises dangling like page markers out from its now closed books.  It’s now time to learn the lessons, continue or revive the campaigns, and move on.  We’re very unlikely to see anything as large as the Big Dig happen again within our lifetimes.  But there are lots of other opportunities waiting out there – preferably at surface level!

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Thanks to David Luberoff, Rafael Mares, Ann Hershfang, and many others who have asked to remain anonymous for talking with me about this intimidatingly complicated history.  None of them have any responsibility for (and probably disagree with much of) what I have written!

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Other relevant posts:

>GREEN LINE EXTENSION: State Needs To Make The Trains Run On Time

>SAVING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: Safe Routes To The “T”

>Picking Transportation Spending Priorities

>YOU CAN’T PLAN A ROUTE UNLESS YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING: Comments on MassDOT’s 2010-2015 Capital Investment Plan

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.”   “I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost

The two most important things about relatives, my mother used to say, are that you don’t get to choose them and that they take care of each other.  Back in the day, when most families were extended, you had no choice about going to grandma’s for Sunday dinner and you simply accepted that Uncle Al was loud, that Aunt Sarah was obnoxious, that Cousin Bob told bad jokes, and that each of the other people in the room were just who they were.  There was no option – family was your world:  for some of us, a significant part of our social life was the regular meeting of our “cousins’ club.”  At family gatherings, you learned not only that everyone was different but that it was possible to tolerate those differences and still share a meal – one of the fundamental understandings that underpin both families and democracy.

Today, despite some trends to the contrary and some lucky anomalies, most of our families are smaller and more scattered.  Many of us have compensated by creating alternative families of close friends, often forming when everyone in the group is first having children.  And those children, as they grow up, are now using email and social networks to maintain those connections, staying close to childhood and college friends.  But these extended friendship circles are composed of people we’ve chosen to be with.  Wonderful as they are, they do not force us to accept the validity of random differences.

So where do we learn to accept the uncomfortable other – which is what people from different social networks or groups often feel like – as a legitimate part of our daily lives?  Where and how do we learn that we’re all in this together?

Schools, mass culture, and the workplace provide some social mixing.  But the space were we interact with the widest variety of others, the place most essential to fostering democratic respect in those interactions, is the public built environment  – the places where we walk, drive, shop, play, and hang out.  But space is not merely a physical phenomenon.  Government programs and policies are also a kind of space within which we function and interact with others.  In fact, the public sector is the most important space we have because it shapes both the built environment and the social context that shapes our lives.

There is a complete circle aspect of all this – acceptance of others is one of the bedrock cultural requirements for democracy; democracy is one of the drivers of good government; good government programs shape the spaces that influence our daily life and the cultural attitudes that emerge from it, including the acceptance of others.

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Schools, Culture, Workplaces

Schools can play a role, especially sports which tends (at least for boys) to be a mixing ground; although our habit of moving into neighborhoods with people like ourselves combined with the growing inequalities in our society is leading to increasingly homogeneous educational settings (and more polarized politics).  The growth of private or home-school options just adds to the self-segregation. And school is just for kids – it doesn’t encourage adults, fewer of whom have young children anymore, to engage in regular, informal mixing across social categories.

More powerful than school is pop culture – entertainment, music, movies – where the commercial imperative to stay noticeable and titillating leads to the absorption of fringe trends and a normalization of the presence (and humanity) of outsiders.  The multi-racial, multi-gendered, and multi-national nature of youth culture is one of the reasons so many young people were open to Barak Obama during the last election.  (However, the rest of the digital world is too virtual, self-centered, and self-controlled to foster social integration.  We can “unfriend” anyone who gives us a hard time, automatically send emails from people we don’t like straight to Trash, only read articles and blogs we agree with, only listen to music we already like.  For all its information, from a values and human inter-action perspective, most of the Internet is more of an echo chamber than a call for maturity.)

The workplace is our society’s most important adult-education center.  And it is probably one of the more integrated parts of our society – although that tendency only reaches significant levels in the military, government agencies, parts of the service industry, and some urban companies (especially low-end manufacturing, to the extent it still exists in this country).

The Built Environment As A Social Force

But there’s another place that we need to take seriously as a meeting place, a common ground, where we learn to get along:  the public built environment.   Sidewalks, roads, busses and subways and trains – as well as the retail shopping areas, parks, and recreational areas we get to via these transportation systems.  Boston’s Main Streets areas, Cambridge’s Central Square, Somerville’s Union (and even Davis) Squares – in some ways, these are a contemporary replacement of our grandmother’s living room.

Shared public spaces are, these days, where we most regularly see – and to varying degrees interact with – the rest of the world.  People with salaries we’ll never earn; people without homes.  People much older and much younger than us; better looking and more homely; nicer and nastier.  People whose faces and families are nothing like our own.  We see them.  They see us.  If we’ve been lucky enough to live or work in the same place for long enough, we may even say hello and ask how they are.  (My wife had what she described as a “relationship” with the person who asked for spare change every day on one of the corners she passed coming home from work.)

You may dismiss all this as superficial, more about reducing the friction of busy streets than making meaningful connections.  However, even this level of public equality is a relatively new historical phenomenon. Think of the street scenes depicted in any of Dickens’ books, or the “whites only” signs that some of us experienced first-hand very few years ago.  In contrast, today there is a general acceptance that everyone has the same right to be on the sidewalk, the same legitimacy to be at the front of the line no matter what their race or wealth or physical ability.  Today, retail stores train employees to greet all customers with smiles, to say “have a good day,” to offer to help us find things or even to carry our packages to our car.  And even here in the colder northeast it feels like people are more likely than in years past to say hello as they pass.  No one is expected to deferentially step out of the way of their “betters.”

Our culture has changed.  But an equally powerful influence on our behavior is our physical surroundings – the way our buildings and the spaces between them are designed makes it more (or less) likely that we will go into public areas, more (or less) likely that we will meet others, and more (or less) likely that we will feel comfortable enough to hang around and talk.

This is not a new insight.  Years ago, Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”  He was right:  progressive architects and city planners have long understood that their job was not simply to create beautiful and efficient spaces, but to also amplify the normal human desire to be together with others – to make it easy to socialize.  This is not “feel-good” blather by those professions. The hard cash of increased sales has made retail businesses confirmed believers in the power of special design to change behaviors.  And the business press is full of stories surging smart businesses to change their office layouts to encourage informal cross-departmental interactions in order to spur innovation and problem-solving.

Unfortunately, the other major profession with significant influence over the design of our built spaces, transportation planners, has been much less sensitive to this larger significance of roads.  Traffic engineers still mainly focus on the level of service provided to cars, with much less attention given to the impact of their work on the quality of life.  It is one of the deeper tasks of Advocates to address this gap.  (See SUCCESSFUL ADVOCACY: Lessons of the BU Bridge Campaign)

Government And Public Programs As Public Spaces

 “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own—nobody….You built a factory out there? Good for you. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory…because of the work the rest of us did….God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”  Elizabeth Warren, campaign interview

There is another place where we come together, where we experience the reality that our individual well-being is intimately tied to our common wealth:  the public sector.  James Carroll has written that our quadrennial presidential election ritual is a major renewer of our feeling of “commonality.”  But, as Carroll admits, elections are only episodic and mostly about hope, which runs into “the inevitable compromises of the officer holder….and therefore always disappoints.”

In contrast, on a day-to-day basis we live within the public programs and services that define the baseline of so many Americans’ reality – from road construction to Social Security, from garbage collection to the police, from public health to education.  The public sector is not just a safety net to protect us from smashing our faces when we suffer the inevitable stumble, merely a form of insurance through which we reduce the risk of personal disaster by aggregating small amounts of our collective resources.  It is also the foundation from which we build our lives and families, the resources and tools from which we create our society and our wealth.

Even more radically, public programs are both created by and the creator of our feelings of shared citizenship.  They are a public space that shapes our perceptions and attitudes about each other as concretely as the built environment.  If we believe that everyone is contributing and getting back a fair share, if we know that our security and wellbeing depends on our continued collective willingness to treat each other’s basic needs as legitimate as our own, if we understand that we rise or fall together – then we are laying the foundation for mutual acceptance and respect across all the otherwise difficult social barriers.  We are also maintaining the conditions that allow democratic government to exist.

It is not just the existence of government programs, but their nature.  Respect for others is undermined when government programs are designed to stigmatize or punish those who use them, when Government programs reinforce “the force of the blows levied on poorer people by our culture of insult….from religious doctrines that treat good fortune as a sign of heavenly favor and poverty as the reverse, to the insult implicit in the inability of people living on the edge to share in the obsessive shopping and consumption that constitute so much of our daily life.”  (“A Proud, Angry Poor” by Frances Fox Piven, The Nation magazine, 1/2/2012, p.33)

Or public programs can be inclusive and welcoming, connecting people with each other and empowering them to work together to meet collective needs, thereby reinforcing our societal bonds – our willingness to emphasize our similarities rather than our differences.

This is a very different way of understanding public programs from the Conservative position that they are primarily about dependency versus independence.  Portraying government as “the problem” leaves us without any non-violent defense against the forces, groups, and people who would (intentionally or incidentally) harm or exploit us – the criminal, the ruthless, the powerful, the robber barons.  And it leaves us without any method for democratically solving the problems that inevitably arise from the complexities of human interaction and our need to wrest resources from the natural world.  Without methods of communal decision-making – without government – we are dropped into a jungle of all against all, a descent into the brutality of the stateless regions of the world whose massacres and disasters repeatedly show up in our headlines, a world in which violence rules.  There is no anarchistic paradise of either the Ann Rand egoist or the Romantic “natural order” varieties waiting to emerge from that chaos – just insecurity and fear that cries out for authoritarian rescue.

And the start of that race to the bottom is the belief that we don’t owe anyone else anything we choose not to donate.  The Tea Party is at least honest about where they are coming from with their slogan that “you are not entitled to what I earn” and the statement made at one meeting that sick people without their own health insurance should be allowed to die.  Mitt Romney’s juxtaposition of the need to choose between an “Entitlement Society or an Opportunity Society” is a slicker, but no less slippery, path in the same direction.  It is just one step from Ebenezer Scrooge’s reply to a request for Christmas charity:  he asks if the prisons and workhouses are in operation and, when told that they are so brutal that many people would rather die than go, he says:  “I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.  If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides, excuse me, I don’t know that.  It’s not my business. It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.”

Why are our trains and transit options so meager and poorly funded?  Why is health promotion and disease prevention given such a small part of our health care budget?   Why is our government so unable to effectively address the crises that we face?  How do we nurture the continuing cohesion of our wonderfully diverse society?  How can we foster the combined feelings of shared destiny and mutual respect that is the foundation of successful democracy?  Perhaps, as current attacks on immigrants seem to suggest, we’ve forgotten that all of our families were once strangers in this strange land.  Perhaps we need to remember the Passover prayer to “let all who are hungry come to our table” – if only metaphorically.    Perhaps we need to find ways to reinforce the spaces and politics that contribute to our sense of ourselves, collectively, as “we, the people.”

Happy New Year….may the coming months bring health and happiness to all, “every one!”

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Other relevant posts include:

* ReDEFINING TRANSPORTATION: from Moving Vehicles to Place-Making

* AVOIDING “NIMBY” – Navigating Between Fear and Greed

* THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT AND ADVOCACY: Movement Building, Institutional Reform, and Organizational Development (Part I) and (Part II)

* MOVING URBAN INNOVATION BACK TO THE FUTURE: Reclaiming the Village and the Street

* DEMOCRACY, DEMAGOGUERY, AND BICYCLING: Stop The Boston Herald’s Vigilante Campaign

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.”   “I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost

The two most important things about relatives, my mother used to say, are that you don’t get to choose them and that they take care of each other.  Back in the day, when most families were extended, you had no choice about going to grandma’s for Sunday dinner and you simply accepted that Uncle Al was loud, that Aunt Sarah was obnoxious, that Cousin Bob told bad jokes, and that each of the other people in the room were just who they were.  There was no option – family was your world:  for some of us, a significant part of our social life was the regular meeting of our “cousins’ club.”  At family gatherings, you learned not only that everyone was different but that it was possible to tolerate those differences and still share a meal – one of the fundamental understandings that underpin both families and democracy.

Today, despite some trends to the contrary and some lucky anomalies, most of our families are smaller and more scattered.  Many of us have compensated by creating alternative families of close friends, often forming when everyone in the group is first having children.  And those children, as they grow up, are now using email and social networks to maintain those connections, staying close to childhood and college friends.  But these extended friendship circles are composed of people we’ve chosen to be with.  Wonderful as they are, they do not force us to accept the validity of random differences.

So where do we learn to accept the uncomfortable other – which is what people from different social networks or groups often feel like – as a legitimate part of our daily lives?  Where and how do we learn that we’re all in this together?

Schools, mass culture, and the workplace provide some social mixing.  But the space were we interact with the widest variety of others, the place most essential to fostering democratic respect in those interactions, is the public built environment  – the places where we walk, drive, shop, play, and hang out.  But space is not merely a physical phenomenon.  Government programs and policies are also a kind of space within which we function and interact with others.  In fact, the public sector is the most important space we have because it shapes both the built environment and the social context that shapes our lives.

There is a complete circle aspect of all this – acceptance of others is one of the bedrock cultural requirements for democracy; democracy is one of the drivers of good government; good government programs shape the spaces that influence our daily life and the cultural attitudes that emerge from it, including the acceptance of others.

————————————————

Schools, Culture, Workplaces

Schools can play a role, especially sports which tends (at least for boys) to be a mixing ground; although our habit of moving into neighborhoods with people like ourselves combined with the growing inequalities in our society is leading to increasingly homogeneous educational settings (and more polarized politics).  The growth of private or home-school options just adds to the self-segregation. And school is just for kids – it doesn’t encourage adults, fewer of whom have young children anymore, to engage in regular, informal mixing across social categories.

More powerful than school is pop culture – entertainment, music, movies – where the commercial imperative to stay noticeable and titillating leads to the absorption of fringe trends and a normalization of the presence (and humanity) of outsiders.  The multi-racial, multi-gendered, and multi-national nature of youth culture is one of the reasons so many young people were open to Barak Obama during the last election.  (However, the rest of the digital world is too virtual, self-centered, and self-controlled to foster social integration.  We can “unfriend” anyone who gives us a hard time, automatically send emails from people we don’t like straight to Trash, only read articles and blogs we agree with, only listen to music we already like.  For all its information, from a values and human inter-action perspective, most of the Internet is more of an echo chamber than a call for maturity.)

The workplace is our society’s most important adult-education center.  And it is probably one of the more integrated parts of our society – although that tendency only reaches significant levels in the military, government agencies, parts of the service industry, and some urban companies (especially low-end manufacturing, to the extent it still exists in this country).

The Built Environment As A Social Force

But there’s another place that we need to take seriously as a meeting place, a common ground, where we learn to get along:  the public built environment.   Sidewalks, roads, busses and subways and trains – as well as the retail shopping areas, parks, and recreational areas we get to via these transportation systems.  Boston’s Main Streets areas, Cambridge’s Central Square, Somerville’s Union (and even Davis) Squares – in some ways, these are a contemporary replacement of our grandmother’s living room.

Shared public spaces are, these days, where we most regularly see – and to varying degrees interact with – the rest of the world.  People with salaries we’ll never earn; people without homes.  People much older and much younger than us; better looking and more homely; nicer and nastier.  People whose faces and families are nothing like our own.  We see them.  They see us.  If we’ve been lucky enough to live or work in the same place for long enough, we may even say hello and ask how they are.  (My wife had what she described as a “relationship” with the person who asked for spare change every day on one of the corners she passed coming home from work.)

You may dismiss all this as superficial, more about reducing the friction of busy streets than making meaningful connections.  However, even this level of public equality is a relatively new historical phenomenon. Think of the street scenes depicted in any of Dickens’ books, or the “whites only” signs that some of us experienced first-hand very few years ago.  In contrast, today there is a general acceptance that everyone has the same right to be on the sidewalk, the same legitimacy to be at the front of the line no matter what their race or wealth or physical ability.  Today, retail stores train employees to greet all customers with smiles, to say “have a good day,” to offer to help us find things or even to carry our packages to our car.  And even here in the colder northeast it feels like people are more likely than in years past to say hello as they pass.  No one is expected to deferentially step out of the way of their “betters.”

Our culture has changed.  But an equally powerful influence on our behavior is our physical surroundings – the way our buildings and the spaces between them are designed makes it more (or less) likely that we will go into public areas, more (or less) likely that we will meet others, and more (or less) likely that we will feel comfortable enough to hang around and talk.

This is not a new insight.  Years ago, Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”  He was right:  progressive architects and city planners have long understood that their job was not simply to create beautiful and efficient spaces, but to also amplify the normal human desire to be together with others – to make it easy to socialize.  This is not “feel-good” blather by those professions. The hard cash of increased sales has made retail businesses confirmed believers in the power of special design to change behaviors.  And the business press is full of stories surging smart businesses to change their office layouts to encourage informal cross-departmental interactions in order to spur innovation and problem-solving.

Unfortunately, the other major profession with significant influence over the design of our built spaces, transportation planners, has been much less sensitive to this larger significance of roads.  Traffic engineers still mainly focus on the level of service provided to cars, with much less attention given to the impact of their work on the quality of life.  It is one of the deeper tasks of Advocates to address this gap.  (See SUCCESSFUL ADVOCACY: Lessons of the BU Bridge Campaign)

Government And Public Programs As Public Spaces

 “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own—nobody….You built a factory out there? Good for you. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory…because of the work the rest of us did….God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”  Elizabeth Warren, campaign interview

There is another place where we come together, where we experience the reality that our individual well-being is intimately tied to our common wealth:  the public sector.  James Carroll has written that our quadrennial presidential election ritual is a major renewer of our feeling of “commonality.”  But, as Carroll admits, elections are only episodic and mostly about hope, which runs into “the inevitable compromises of the officer holder….and therefore always disappoints.”

In contrast, on a day-to-day basis we live within the public programs and services that define the baseline of so many Americans’ reality – from road construction to Social Security, from garbage collection to the police, from public health to education.  The public sector is not just a safety net to protect us from smashing our faces when we suffer the inevitable stumble, merely a form of insurance through which we reduce the risk of personal disaster by aggregating small amounts of our collective resources.  It is also the foundation from which we build our lives and families, the resources and tools from which we create our society and our wealth.

Even more radically, public programs are both created by and the creator of our feelings of shared citizenship.  They are a public space that shapes our perceptions and attitudes about each other as concretely as the built environment.  If we believe that everyone is contributing and getting back a fair share, if we know that our security and wellbeing depends on our continued collective willingness to treat each other’s basic needs as legitimate as our own, if we understand that we rise or fall together – then we are laying the foundation for mutual acceptance and respect across all the otherwise difficult social barriers.  We are also maintaining the conditions that allow democratic government to exist.

It is not just the existence of government programs, but their nature.  Respect for others is undermined when government programs are designed to stigmatize or punish those who use them, when Government programs reinforce “the force of the blows levied on poorer people by our culture of insult….from religious doctrines that treat good fortune as a sign of heavenly favor and poverty as the reverse, to the insult implicit in the inability of people living on the edge to share in the obsessive shopping and consumption that constitute so much of our daily life.”  (“A Proud, Angry Poor” by Frances Fox Piven, The Nation magazine, 1/2/2012, p.33)

Or public programs can be inclusive and welcoming, connecting people with each other and empowering them to work together to meet collective needs, thereby reinforcing our societal bonds – our willingness to emphasize our similarities rather than our differences.

This is a very different way of understanding public programs from the Conservative position that they are primarily about dependency versus independence.  Portraying government as “the problem” leaves us without any non-violent defense against the forces, groups, and people who would (intentionally or incidentally) harm or exploit us – the criminal, the ruthless, the powerful, the robber barons.  And it leaves us without any method for democratically solving the problems that inevitably arise from the complexities of human interaction and our need to wrest resources from the natural world.  Without methods of communal decision-making – without government – we are dropped into a jungle of all against all, a descent into the brutality of the stateless regions of the world whose massacres and disasters repeatedly show up in our headlines, a world in which violence rules.  There is no anarchistic paradise of either the Ann Rand egoist or the Romantic “natural order” varieties waiting to emerge from that chaos – just insecurity and fear that cries out for authoritarian rescue.

And the start of that race to the bottom is the belief that we don’t owe anyone else anything we choose not to donate.  The Tea Party is at least honest about where they are coming from with their slogan that “you are not entitled to what I earn” and the statement made at one meeting that sick people without their own health insurance should be allowed to die.  Mitt Romney’s juxtaposition of the need to choose between an “Entitlement Society or an Opportunity Society” is a slicker, but no less slippery, path in the same direction.  It is just one step from Ebenezer Scrooge’s reply to a request for Christmas charity:  he asks if the prisons and workhouses are in operation and, when told that they are so brutal that many people would rather die than go, he says:  “I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.  If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides, excuse me, I don’t know that.  It’s not my business. It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.”

Why are our trains and transit options so meager and poorly funded?  Why is health promotion and disease prevention given such a small part of our health care budget?   Why is our government so unable to effectively address the crises that we face?  How do we nurture the continuing cohesion of our wonderfully diverse society?  How can we foster the combined feelings of shared destiny and mutual respect that is the foundation of successful democracy?  Perhaps, as current attacks on immigrants seem to suggest, we’ve forgotten that all of our families were once strangers in this strange land.  Perhaps we need to remember the Passover prayer to “let all who are hungry come to our table” – if only metaphorically.    Perhaps we need to find ways to reinforce the spaces and politics that contribute to our sense of ourselves, collectively, as “we, the people.”

Happy New Year….may the coming months bring health and happiness to all, “every one!”

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Other relevant posts include:

* ReDEFINING TRANSPORTATION: from Moving Vehicles to Place-Making

* AVOIDING “NIMBY” – Navigating Between Fear and Greed

* THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT AND ADVOCACY: Movement Building, Institutional Reform, and Organizational Development (Part I) and (Part II)

* MOVING URBAN INNOVATION BACK TO THE FUTURE: Reclaiming the Village and the Street

* DEMOCRACY, DEMAGOGUERY, AND BICYCLING: Stop The Boston Herald’s Vigilante Campaign

After years of effort, instead of holes in the sidewalk and pavement through which you could see the river below, the BU Bridge now has solid surfaces and (drum roll….) bike lanes!  It is a major victory for the Better Bridges campaign.

True: the bridge isn’t any wider than it was before, so the sidewalk is still too narrow.  There still isn’t a way to get from the Boston-side steps, over Storrow Drive, to the Charles River embankment.  On the Cambridge side, there still isn’t a way to safely walk under the bridge along the river bank rather than having to add to the confusion of the crazy Memorial Drive traffic circle.  The sudden incline on the curving entrance to the bridge from the stop-line on the Cambridge side is still dangerous for cyclists; and it would have been better if there were flexible bollards on the span separating the car and bike lanes.  Traffic congestion on the bridge isn’t significantly lower than before, but it’s clearly no worse despite there being only three car lanes instead of four – there is now one lane entering the bridge from either side, two lanes exiting on the other end.  (Advocates have been saying, for years, that the problem is in the intersections leading to the bridge, not the bridge itself – turns out we were right.)

But in many ways the area is both safer and more welcoming to a broader range of users than ever before – walkers, cyclists, people in wheelchairs, as well as those driving cars.  The extra right-turn lane off the bridge on to MIT-bound Memorial Drive is gone, no longer allowing cars to speed through a hidden crosswalk even when pedestrians thought it was safe to step out.  The lighting works, illuminating both the span and the river for the benefit of night-time rowers.  The view remains totally magnificent.  And the !bike lanes!  Amazing!! What an improvement!!!

Winning Campaigns

This victory didn’t happen by accident, or simply through the generosity of government officials.  Advocates fought long and hard to gain this “Better Bridge.”  How did it happen?  How did we win?  There are some key lessons from this phase of the multi-year “Better Bridges” campaign, both about how to fight and what we are fighting against.

As with most of life, successful advocacy requires balancing.  Advocates need to be involved with both movement building and organizational development.  They need to both mobilize public anger and channel it into support for negotiated partial-victory compromises.  The more urgent the issue they’re dealing with the more they need to demand immediate action while understanding how long it takes to push through significant reforms when the situation hasn’t yet reached crisis levels.  They need to work within coalitions while finding ways to build their own group.  They need enough technical expertise to critique official plans while developing trusting relationships with people inside the same agencies they are agitating against.

The following divides key BU Bridge Campaign lessons into three overlapping areas.  The first two discuss Advocacy strategy and the third examines the engineering assumptions that still underlie most transportation planning.

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It’s both a cliché and a powerful insight to remember that the solution you come up with depends on which problem you are trying to solve.  A road builder sees problems in terms of the need for movement – usually meaning car capacity – and comes up the road expansion solutions.  A transportation planner – as well as a livable communities developer – sees problems in terms of using the built environment as a way to improve peoples’ quality of life and comes up with solutions that stress human interaction.

The elevated section of the McGrath/O’Brien Highway from the Cambridge border to Somerville’s Highland Avenue is old and deteriorating.  Working with people from the more than 20 land development and road planning efforts already happening along the corridor,   LivableStreets Alliance coordinated discussions that endorsed five core value/vision statements for what should happen in this area:

• Reunite neighborhoods cut apart by the highway.
• Humanize the space by lowering traffic speeds, reducing noise and pollution, narrowing lane width, and reducing the current six (or more) lanes to four.
• Make traveling across and along the corridor safer and more inviting for pedestrians, bicyclists, and bus riders.
• Add more trees, grass, storm-water drainage, and other green features.
• Encourage local retail and job-creating businesses; including crafts-based and green-economy enterprises.

To its credit, MassDOT (through its consultants) is also involving the community in a detailed analysis to decide what to do.  Called “Grounding McGrath,” the study is trying to ground future plans in both facts and desires and potentially represents another sign of “the new MassDOT” evolution from a one-dimensional focus on increasing car capacity to an understanding – and practice – based on the interaction of transportation systems with community wellbeing.

Or not.

At the same time that it’s conducting the Grounding McGrath study, MassDOT is also about to spend million hiring a contractor to “repair” the overpass segment of the McGrath/O’Brien highway – a repair intended to keep the current road functional for another 10 to 20 years.   This significantly undercuts the value of the community-involving study process (and insults the citizens who are donating their time to work on it) by making it impossible to implement the study results using the currently-available Accelerated Bridge Program funding.  And if the repairs are actually just as “temporary” as MassDOT says, it is a waste of precious money that could be used to push the study forward and begin making some of the transformational improvements to the corridor’s roads that just about everyone agrees will be needed no matter what future alternatives are selected.  Worst of all, given the current  fiscal realities, it’s not clear if “kicking the problem down the road” will dump it into a period when there is insufficient money to do anything – and then we’ll really have to start dealing with falling concrete, if not falling cars.

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This post was meant to be about three of the old highways now falling down and the increasingly bitter policy disagreements within nearby communities over what to do about it.  But as I thought more about these debates, it became clear that a significant secondary theme is that so few people trust the traffic engineers or their organizations – starting with total lack of belief in the validity of the traffic prediction models being used by MassDOT.  The models feel like such opaque black boxes of unknown facts and hidden formulas that they simply feel like fantasy projections of agency desires – and there is little trust of those desires either.  Applauding the projections that support one’s position and denouncing the rest is neither useful, logical, nor fair. The problem is that without analysis it’s all guesswork and power plays, which is not likely to end up creating optimal outcomes either.

The distrust is so deep that people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater – refusing to accept that the models’ results have any usefulness, even in situations where they actually can help compare alternatives.  The three projects each involve analysis of comparisons, and in comparison situations it doesn’t matter if the numbers are wildly inaccurate – each alternative will be distorted in the same manner giving some legitimacy to the analysis of the differences, if any, between the options. Maybe it is a local result of public disgust at the Big Dig.  Maybe it’s that American culture is simply anti-government, a tendency the Tea Party car worshipers have successfully tapped. Maybe it’s that we’re in the middle of several levels of global transition from the automobile age into something else, and Transportation Departments around the world still represent so much of the archaic and destructive past practices.  Whatever…. The sad result is that MassDOT’s efforts to open up the public process all the way back to the conceptual stage – at least in locations where advocates are active and vocal – have degenerated into shouting matches between the already-convinced partisans.

The danger is that we become so divided that we seem to have lost our collective ability to push past those with a stake in maintaining the car-centric past; that we end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars – and ultimately billions of dollars – recreating the roads that we already know will not carry us into a better future.  Former Secretary of Transportation Jeff Mullan once said that in addition to creating one agency out of the five that were pushed together as part of transportation reform, one of MassDOT’s key challenges is regaining the trust of the public.  The merger has happened.  MassDOT has shown a new openness and ability to be innovative in both construction and operations, saving money while improving performance.  There is, of course, more to do – perhaps finding ways to open the black box of prediction and decision-making should be next.

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Q: Why do people live in cities?

A: Because that’s where all the other people are.

It’s really wonderful that Mayor Menino has a special group of “urban mechanics” finding ways to put new information technologies to work for the city.  Technology is very cool.  And fun.  And useful.  And has a huge impact.  I spent part of my life in high tech and even wrote a book ‘way back in 1996 called Civilizing Cyberspace:  Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway about how the emerging digital networks could be used to enhance or stifle democracy

But when it comes to the most important qualities of urban life, the future is behind us.  I don’t mean that we should return to the disease-ridden, economically brutal cities of the past.  Despite the Tea Party’s desire to dismantle our public safety nets and return to the competitive jungle of the pre-Progressive era, our world is much better because of the intervention of governments to provide clean water, require sewer systems, and to reduce the massacre of human wellbeing caused by unregulated markets.  But there are important aspects of past urban life that are worth preserving or recreating that emerge from the presence of both cohesive neighborhoods and unstructured diversity.

The basic fact is that we’re social beings.  We like being with each other; we need to be with each other – people kept in isolation go insane.  Although many people are eager to escape the social confines of small town stagnation, once in the city they seek community and alternative forms of extended family through friendship networks, church membership, or workplace social connections.

At the same time, because they are full of people from many different backgrounds, cities are where the action is…the new ideas, the jobs, economic opportunities, the chance to try new things and even re-invent yourself.  Cities are the engines of civilization, prosperity, and innovation.  Cities are where we bump into new people, people different from ourselves, and have our world’s expand; where new ideas emerge from the clash of differing opinions and facts; where capital and markets meet in the search for ways to profit from new needs.  Cities thrive on social friction – the sparks that emerge from the density of our interactions as we scrape against each other (a process hopefully softened by access to parks and other greenery).

Despite nearly a century of assumption that cities were dying and the more prosperous future lay in suburban growth, despite the horrendous urban destruction caused by the effort to make our landscape serve the needs of moving cars rather than socializing people, despite all the techno-stupid predictions that the Internet would make cities obsolete, urban populations continue to grow.  Cities are still where it’s at, in transportation as well as other fields.

And the cutting edge of urban innovation recaptures those qualities that make cities the center of civilization, the launching place for both personal growth and commercial profit.  Farmers’ markets that reconnect local agriculture with urban shoppers and that get expanded into kid-centered “play streets.” The spread of pedestrian malls and “shared space” with lots of benches to sit on and small shops that revitalize downtowns.  Bike sharing programs along with Community Greenways and bicycle boulevards that extend the tree canopy and parks deeper into neighborhoods, creating safe places for family recreation and everyday commuting.  Reforming parking space requirements.  Think of how the once-empty Kennedy Greenway began to fill with people when the emphasis changed from building edifices to food trucks, carousels, concerts, and play areas.  (Now, we need to get the city to make space for separated bike paths as well!)

Cities are the source of innovation partly because today’s problems are so multi-dimensional.  The location and type of housing and commercial development, shaped by zoning and building codes, impacts the ability of residents to access healthy foods and have daily opportunities to be physically active, which impacts their willingness to spend money in local stores as well as their family’s health and medical bills, as well as….  There is a complicated but incredibly powerful converging of issues – transportation, community development, education, environmental protection, public health, business promotion – and cities are both small enough to allow the cross-departmental interaction essential to addressing situations and large enough to have enough resources to begin doing something about it.

Cities (and states) are especially important these days because of the immobility of the federal government.  The rise of the radical right has ended the past century’s trend of moving innovation upward to centralized national authorities whose distance from local elites allowed for greater flexibility.  (Creating nationwide reforms also prevented business from playing states and cities against each other in a “race to the bottom” that Conservatives now seem to see as essential for competitive freedom.)  Today, once again left on their own, cities and states have once again turned into the laboratories of democracy, although within the increasingly tight limits allowed by the collapse of federal support.

It’s time to make lemon-aide from the sour fruit falling off the federal table.  It’s time to push forward — creatively, boldly, radically – at the local level.

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In the two weeks since I posted Part I, discussing the role of mass movement in creating the political space for issue-oriented advocacy, some of the Occupy Wall Street groups have begun digging in for the long haul by setting up systems and expelling troublemakers (something the New Left should have done before the FBI infiltrators led the way into violence).  At the same time, right wing commentators have begun trying to paint them as hooligans, if not agents of the devil.  (As usual, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby places himself at the bottom of the pig pen by asserting both – see “A Sinful ‘Occupation’” from 11/2/11.)

But no matter what happens to the Occupiers – whether they dribble out over the winter or explode into civil disobedience demonstrations – they have opened the door for more.  It may be less open-ended or idealistic, but the next phase will be translating the Occupy vision into a series of specific demands, then turning those into systemic reforms at both the policy and operational levels.  And accomplishing that will require sustained, organized effort – meaning strong, sophisticated organizations.

Advocacy requires developing the political will for government (or other key groups) to act in the desired manner, helping public agencies acquire the technical capacity to plan and implement the action, and then mobilizing public support behind the vision and program.  This doesn’t happen just because it ought to.  It takes slow, careful, exhausting work.

So this installment, Part II, describes the other two prime directives of social change – creating sustainable organizations and winning long-lasting, institutional reforms.

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(This was written in response to a challenge from MassDOT’s new chief, Transportation Secretary Richard Davey.  But it’s really about what all service, public sector, and non-profit organizations need to keep in mind when they begin a goal-setting process – and the types of goals that outside stakeholders and advocates should be insisting upon.)

A Sales VP in a high-tech firm I once worked at told his staff that “effort only counts in elementary school.  In the adult world, all that matters is results.”  Of course, the real issue is the nature of the results you are seeking in life, which I would maintain should include more than dollar-denominated bottom lines.  But the core idea, the value of numerically describing what you are trying to achieve, has a lot of merit.  Especially for organizations.

So I was very impressed when, during the Q&A session following his talk at the recent MassDOT “Moving Together” conference, newly appointed Secretary of Transportation, Richard Davey, boldly said that he wanted to move beyond general statements that MassDOT would “increase” or “promote” or “encourage” to explicit performance goals that his organization should aim for.  Setting specific performance targets is a powerful strategy – it focuses energy, prioritizes activity, and can prompt improved agency-wide collaboration.

It is also a courageous and risky move.  It can increase transparency and accountability – two things that most organizations do their best to avoid.  It forces you to be more honest and visible about your strengths and your weaknesses, your successes and your failures – there is less room to hide.  It creates a potentially more productive but a definitely more challenging managerial context – particularly because establishing the wrong types or targets can skew operations in extremely damaging ways.

Secretary Davey seemed not only willing to accept the challenge, but eager to raise the bar even further:  He then challenged the audience to help MassDOT define and set the goals it needs to reach.  If he is really serious about this, it is quite incredible – a huge statement about how far the state’s Department of Transportation has moved from the Big Dig era of incompetent arrogance since Governor Patrick was elected.

Of course, it’s easy to stand on the sidelines and give advice – including what follows, below.  But I’m sure that if Secretary Davey is open to it, the advocacy community would be very willing to partner with MassDOT to constructively help with the hard work needed to develop appropriate performance goals.

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Grass roots movements are the soil from which advocacy eventually grows.  As I write this, it’s not clear if the current wave of “Occupy Wall Street” groups will continue expanding to new cities, or if the arrests in NYC, Boston, and elsewhere have capped its growth.

For all my admiration of the Occupy movement, for all my hope that it grows and spreads, I have no illusions that it will amount to much in the short term. The movement is appealingly non-specific, although energized by enormous creativity and personal sacrifice.  At the same time, I have no doubt that it is the most important progressive political event of the past several years; the first major opening in left-of-center political space since post-Obama election disappointment sucked the life out of the remnants of the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, women’s, youth culture, and other movements that energized his campaign. It may be incoherent and ephemeral, but it is a significant crack in the ground underneath the marauding right-wing forces.

A true mass movement is amorphous, surprising, and uncontrolled.  It combines the deeply personal with the largest global.  It is a festive outpouring of popular feeling and creativity, combining hundreds of distinct threads of belief and demands into a temporarily beautiful flag that an unanticipatedly broad swath of the population begins to wave.  It exemplifies the collective self-organization of mutual support that anarchists dream about.  But its strengths are its undoing.  I sincerely hope the current Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow.  But at some point its lack of organization and focus, its existence at the fringe of most people’s daily lives no matter how supportive they may be, its inability to strategically formulate specific demands and negotiate acceptable compromises – not to mention the approaching winter – will cause it to lose steam.

No matter.  Now that the thick air of hopeless inertia has been dissipated, this upsurge will be followed by others.  As one of the early signs at Liberty Plaza in New York said, “The Beginning Is Near!”  The Occupy phenomena will energize other organizing efforts, such as the New Bottom Line coalition of unions, community groups, and progressive religious fighting the banking industry’s efforts to evict the homeowners they previously exploited.  Eventually, existing or new Advocacy groups will pick up the themes and translate them into well-defined goals, drawing on the participatory energy to give muscle to their own negotiations with decision-makers.  Politicians will shift their rhetoric and votes to accommodate the new constituency.  Artists will incorporate the look and feel of the movement into their work, and advertisers will use the images and words to attract customers.  What will be lost is the communal nature of the fun, the inclusiveness, the spontaneity, the individualized combination of personal and political, the open-ended promise of possible better futures.

These loses may be sad and their loss grieved, but they are inevitable.  Those of my generation who were fortunate enough to be involved with the movements of the 1960s and 1970s – civil rights (and the successor liberation) movements, anti-war (and the more complicated anti-imperialist) movements, the counter-culture (and more problematic sexual liberation) movements, the women’s and gay liberation movements, the anti-nuclear and deep ecology  movements – know that they transformed us both personally and politically.  For many of us, it was a permanent change that has shaped the course of our lives ever since.

But the dissipation of a movement’s personal transformative power is an inherent aspect of its growth, an unavoidable part of the process that moves dreams from hope to reality.  Movements, like waves, grow then subside as they hit the shore-line of the real world.  The nature of the post-upsurge reality – the degree to which it reflects the aspirations of the original movement – depends on the strength of that movement and the skill of the allied Advocates.  And their success depends on their ability to create sustainable organizations and win institutional reforms.

(This is Part I, discussing Movements and Movement Building.  Part II, to be posted in two weeks, will discuss Institutional Reform and Organizational Development.)

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We’ve all heard the argument: narrowing traffic lanes or removing parking will hurt local businesses.  And we’ve all read the research headlines that show the opposite is true:  widening sidewalks, adding trees, including bike lanes, expanding transit facilities, and making public space more multi-modal, people friendly, and environmentally rich increases the number of customers and the amounts they are willing to pay.  (WalkBoston has a wonderful tri-fold pamphlet called “Walking Is Good Business” that contains a treasure of statistics and citations, some of which I’ve used in this post.)  But we need to go beyond these generic arguments to focus attention on the three specific situations where Complete Streets provides significant support for economic development, and be able to articulate what those benefits may be.  The three are:

• Suburban Business and Adjoining Residential Areas
• Urban Neighborhoods
• First Generation, Inner-ring Highways

However, taking advantage of these opportunities requires that we also understand that Complete Streets is not a stand-alone strategy of including some combination of design elements in our transportation plans.   Complete Streets works for three reasons:

• added multi-modal facilities for users with all types of abilities using universal design techniques,
• improved aesthetics for a more inviting user experience, changing the “look and feel” of a space to be more inviting to come to and then linger within, and
• lower traffic speeds, not only through increased numbers of walkers and cyclists but also through the use of traffic calming techniques.

From a traffic engineering perspective, Complete Streets is simply inconceivable without at least some amount of Traffic Calming using road diets (reducing lane numbers and widths), tighter corners, bumps, chicanes, bulb-outs, intersection tables, and other self-enforcing structural features.  The point is that speed kills no matter if you are walking, cycling, or driving.  A recent  analysis in the British Medical Journal of 20 years of accident frequency on London roads using traffic calming to restrict speeds to 20 mph found an overall “41.9% reduction in road casualties….the percentage reduction was greatest in younger children …[with]no evidence of casualty migration to areas adjacent…Casualties of car occupants fell by half.”

In addition, Complete Streets is as much a community engagement and design process as a road layout result.  And it only works when complemented by appropriate parking, land use, environmental, resident stabilization, and other policies.

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We create ourselves and our society with what we’ve inherited from the past – from genes to hierarchies, from culture to social status.  Most important are the stories, the myths, we’ve been given that help give meaning to the physical world and prepare us for an unknowable future.  As those stories float between generations, among their anchors are the historic artifacts surrounding us in the built environment which embody our collective heritage and trigger our personal memories.

But obsessively preserving the past can be a barrier to dealing with today’s realities or preparing for tomorrow’s challenges.  While architects and preservationists seem to have come to some mutual understanding, it seems that the same is not true in the transportation sector.  As we begin dealing with the physical collapse of the infrastructure built for the passing automobile age, we face potentially damaging, and stupid, fights over what to do with its still-in-use artifacts.  To what extent can we change historic bridges and roadways so they can safely and efficiently serve pedestrians, bicyclists, and buses as well as the cars they were designed for?  To what extent can we acknowledge that the environment surrounding an old bridge has changed since it was constructed so that retaining walls that once served to hide polluted rivers can be changed to allow passers-by to see the now-beautiful water?

Some of these issues will need careful analysis and long discussions.  But for the bridges currently being rebuilt through the state’s Accelerated Bridge Program, the time is now.  It is going to be hard enough to create a 21^st century transportation system without fighting over the value of dysfunctional relics.  It is going to be important enough to remember where we’ve come from without mindlessly ripping things down.  We need to talk this through.  Soon.

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Compared with traffic engineers’ traditional focus on moving many cars as fast as possible, adoption of a “Complete Streets” policy at the state or local level is a huge improvement.  Designing streets to serve all modes and all types of users within those modes turns out to create a safer and more movement-efficient transportation system for everyone – including fewer car accidents and injuries!

(The key reason is that while a well-designed multi-modal road doesn’t significantly reduce car throughput – the number of cars passing through a stretch of pavement in a given time period – the presence of different kinds of users and the narrower lanes lead drivers to feel more comfortable going at lower speeds.  Meaning, as my mother used to say, that there is less “racing to the next red light.” And slower speeds equal fewer injuries – for everyone.)

But going from policy to reality requires several additional steps.  First, traffic engineers need to learn how to design a complete street – which requires an unsettling change from what they were once taught was best practice and what they’ve been required to do for their entire previous career.  Second, the design, approval, and construction processes need to be changed so that creating Complete Streets is the default approach in every project, with exceptions allowed only after high level approval for very limited and documented reasons.  Third, transportation agencies and governmental oversight groups need to set up meaningful accountability systems so that people at every level involved in road construction are held accountable for the final results.  Finally, in Massachusetts, where Complete Streets already is a state policy (as expressed in the 2009 Transportation Act that created MassDOT and in the state’s Highway Design Guidelines) the state needs to use all its leverage and power to get municipalities to move in the same direction despite their official exemption from Highway Design Guidelines for local projects funded under Chapter 90.

MassDOT has begun a Complete Streets training program for its own staff and, hopefully, municipal traffic officials.  But education is only the first step.  Next, MassDOT – like transportation agencies in every state trying to move into the 21^st century – has to find ways to move from knowledge to practice.

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“Health In Everything” is an important slogan, pointing out that personal and social well-being is impacted by every public policy and every aspect of our built and cultural environments.  Partly based on this insight, there is increasing interest in creating Health Impact Assessments (HIA) as part of the preparation for all kinds of policies and projects that don’t traditionally fall within the purview of public health – from transportation to commercial development, from agriculture to public safety.

For example, the 2009 enabling law creating the new Massachusetts Department of Transportation states that MassDOT “shall…institute and establish methods to implement the use of health impact assessments to determine the effect of transportation projects on public health and vulnerable populations for use by planners, transportation administrators, public health administrators and developers…”

The public health world has (for obvious reasons) happily embraced this trend, as have advocates in other fields looking to marshal the moral and police-power authority of public health to support their issues.  This enthusiasm is based on two assumptions:  that doing the “right thing” (meaning what the advocates are supporting) is also the “healthy thing.”  And that creating an HIA is a useful way for identifying, gain political traction for doing, and then making sure that the “healthy thing” is actually implemented.

The first assumption is usually true.  But the second needs a lot more discussion: the impact of an HIA depends on how a variety of questions get played out.

• What kind of HIA is being done?
• Why is the HIA being done?
• How formal and open is the evaluative process?
• What is being measured?
• How are things being measured?
• How will the HIA be used?

Depending on the answers, a Health Impact Assessment can be a powerful tool for collecting meaningful data that helps build support for positive decisions and actions, as well as provides a benchmark against which to measure how well the end result meets its stated goals. Or it can be a waste of time and energy, a bureaucratic way to defend decisions that were probably going to be made anyway, and that ends up diverting advocates limited resources from more useful strategies while providing cover for bad decisions and projects.

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The state has, once again, announced a multi-year delay in completing the Green Line Extension, from 2014 to 2018 or 2020 or even later.  Somerville is already mobilizing to fight.  But they should not be fighting alone.  All of us, around this entire region, have a deep stake in the outcome.  As national transportation policy gets warped by the Tea Party’s opposition to anything besides unregulated automobiles, and national transportation funding remains hostage to the right-wing goal of dismantling government, letting the Green Line Extension get “kicked down the road” will weaken our ability to push dozens of other pending transit projects to completion, whether they be rail road, subway/trolley, bus, and even off-road shared-up paths.  It will make our entire regional economy weaker, our environment dirtier, our options fewer.

We’re all in this together.  We need to unite to demand no more delays.  In fact, given that both construction and borrowing are cheaper now than they’ve been (or probably will be) for decades, it makes sense to speed up implementation and push all the way to Route 16 near Medford Square.  Putting construction off until only makes it more expensive – even the state estimates that a half-decade postponement will increase the estimated billion bill by at least 20% — about 0 million!

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Dear All:

To my surprise and pleasure, this blog has been selected as a finalist in the “Local Affairs” category of CBS Boston’s annual contest for “one of Boston’s most valuable blogs.”

But to get to the next step, I need people to vote for it.  You don’t have to be a Boston resident, or even a regular reader.  But according to the contest rules you can, and should, vote once every day!  Voting opened on 8/16 and runs through 9/9.

(Does this remind you of the Florida presidential election?)

Just go to:

http://boston.blogger.cbslocal.com/most-valuable-blogger/blog/1327-the-public-way-transportation-health-and-livable-communities/

And thanks.

Steve

It’s been fascinating and infuriating watching the Boston Herald try to conjure up anti-bicyclist hysteria.   Day after day, they throw out feelers, venomous outbursts testing the appeal of one angle after another: government waste, arrogant elites riding roughshod over ordinary people, preferential treatment of a minority group, discriminatory ticketing of car drivers while letting law-breaking cyclists get away with warnings, out-of-control youth treating the elderly with contempt….I’m sure that there is more to come.

Pandering to resentment is the Herald’s stock in trade.  Of course, it’s not them alone.  The modern model of nastiness was created by AM radio’s talk hate shows and spread to other media (and other countries) by Rupert’s Fox-media conglomerates.  They’re all anti-government, and jumping on the anti-immigrant bandwagon.  If this was any place beside Massachusetts we’d also be getting heavy doses of gay-bashing – but here the legalization of same-sex marriage has made it a non-issue.  (Has your marriage been having any extra trouble lately?  Has anyone you know suddenly woken up attracted to a different gender?)

My concern is not with the Herald itself – it’s been spewing garbage for years.  And I’m not even deeply concerned that its regressive views will significantly impact our state’s transportation agenda.  Unlike New York City, where anti-Bloomberg factions of the power elite are using opposition to bike lanes as a way to attack Mayor Mike, no important sectors of the local establishment see demonizing cyclists as a way to gain votes.  In fact, the importance of the health care industry in this area means that there is huge institutional support for the public health benefits of “active transportation” — which may be one reason why most area politicians and businesses are big bike supporters.  So far, only Congressman Capuano has publicly opposed road designs that divert unneeded road capacity into bike or pedestrian space.

(The lack of local elite opposition to active transportation may be why the Globe backed off from its own forays’ into anti-bicycling nonsense, which probably were just an effort by local editors to please their superiors in the New York Times which seems to be leaning towards the anti-Bloomberg faction in the Big Apple’s intra-elite faction-fights.)

Continue reading →

Massachusetts’ public mass transportation system is about to go broke.  It is being dragged down by over .6 billion of debt (including an inappropriately huge chunk of the Big Dig costs), decreasing federal aid, and the unwillingness of state government to raise revenue.  The MBTA’s capital spending plan lists .7 billion worth of projects needed for safety or reliability, while the agency only gets to spend between 0 and 0 million a year.

Like transit systems around the country, the MBTA is caught in a downward spiral.  Cultural changes and hard times have increased demand, which is growing at a faster rate than highway vehicle travel.  But decreasing revenue means less service and higher fares. According to the American Public Transportation Association, more than 80 percent of the nation’s transit systems are considering or have recently enacted fare increases or service cuts, including reductions in rush-hour service, off-peak service and geographic coverage.  Locally, T riders are facing potential increases of 25 cents for each bus/subway ride, about 0 a year.  But these cutbacks drive away riders and reduce revenue while also setting the stage for public criticism and reduced public support, which further undermines efforts to get political support for the desperately needed investment.  The result is an increasingly unreliable and unsafe system, with anti-government right wingers crowing that “the government can’t do anything” or attacking the very idea of non-car transportation.

Somehow, the fact that mass transit needs subsidy is a disgrace.  The fact that our highways and car industry is massively subsidized is simply good capitalism.

The ultimate solution will require bold political leadership.  Until that emerges, the only way out of this trap is to find low-cost ways to increase ridership. Just as with roads, user fees such as gasoline taxes and trolley fares won’t cover the system’s full costs – although the share of operating costs born by riders in Massachusetts have dramatically (and regressively) increased from one-quarter to one-half of per-ride costs.  But increased usage will help create a more favorable political climate for demanding real solutions.  Spikes in the cost of gasoline and the increased congestion of our roads promote some amount of increased transit use, but the T needs to (and is trying to) go beyond passive strategies.  One approach is to make it easier for people to get the “last mile” to/from their homes and destinations to/from the T when they commute, socialize, or shop.  As our population ages, this will have increasing political relevance, but it needs to start now and have a very inclusive vision of who it might impact.

“Safe Routes To The T” (SR2T) is a strategy for making it safer and more inviting for people to walk, bike, or car-pool to and from train, trolley, subway, and bus stations and stops.  It would work with the expanding Hubway Shared Bicycle System, which is most accurately seen as an extension of the public transportation system.  And it would work with municipalities to extend the catchment area within which people might leave their cars at home, reducing local congestion, pollution, and car accidents.  One of its appeals is that using the T can save people a lot of money.  The American Public Transportation Association reports that Massachusetts residents who use public transport instead of a car can save ,575 annually – the second highest amount in the nation (after NYC).  Needing to use a car requires money that could be better used in other ways, especially if you are poor – the poorest fifth of Americans who do own cars have to spend nearly double the national percentage of their limited income on automobile ownership.

And focusing on increasing pedestrian and bicycle access to public transit is a strategy that works.  A recent survey of people using the MBTA’s new “Park & Roll” bike parking areas shows a significant increase in their use of the T since the creation of the bike sheds.  The planned expansion of bike parking facilities at other commuter rail, trolley, subway, and bus stations should continue this growth and hopefully create a broader constituency for the needed revenue reform.

Continue reading →

There is little or no zoning in many parts of the United States.  It is condemned as the intrusion of government rules on what you want to do with your own property.  Live free or die!

But, historically, it was precisely the unregulated freedom of property owners to do whatever they wanted that was the cause of death.  Zoning was a way to separate deadly land uses from residential areas.

Unfortunately, over the years, in many communities zoning has become a mind-bogglingly complicated bureaucratic mess, totally opaque and highly vulnerable to back-room dealings as well as political-business collusion.  In many cases, it has become so ossified that zoning categories neither address market realities nor capture sufficient value for the public good.

However, zoning is still one of the most important tools society has to promote (in the words of a proposed Massachusetts Zoning Reform Bill) “the orderly and sustainable growth, development, redevelopment, conservation, and preservation of a city or town.”  Zoning shapes the built environment and sets the boundaries on what kinds of transportation system is viable, or even possible.  It also has a direct impact on the “livability” of neighborhoods and the health of the people who live or work there.  The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) points out that a “growing body of research reveals a strong relationship between the built environment1 and a wide spectrum of public and individual health issues such as asthma, cancer, obesity, mental health, substance abuse, crime exposure, cardiovascular disease, and social and health inequity.”

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Massachusetts is behind many other states in efforts to update its zoning laws.  One land-use attorney describes Chapters 40A and 41, the zoning laws, as “nationally considered Neanderthal for zoning.”

However, a new reform effort if underway and needs the support of everyone who advocates for better transportation, health, environmental protections, water usage controls, and urban living.  The proposed legislation is titled support the “Comprehensive Land Use Reform and Partnership Act” affectionately known as CLURPA — S.1019.

Over a decade of negotiations among a wide range of stakeholders, coupled with a supportive Governor, makes this Legislative session a unique opportunity to move from talk to action.  But unless the appropriate Committee chairs make it a priority, time will run out before the bill will be able to come to a vote.  And we will have wasted our best chance in a long time to get this done.

Let your voice be heard:  call or email the chairs of the Joint Committee on Municipalities and Regional Government (info below) and tell them to act now.

Senator James T. Welch
State House, Room 416A, Boston, MA 02133    Phone: 617-722-1660,    Email: James.Welch@masenate.gov

Representative Michael F. Kane
State House, Room 540, Boston, MA 02133    Phone: 617-722-2090,     Email: Michael.Kane@mahouse.gov

Continue reading →

Will Boston’s inner ring of old suburbs – Somerville, Charlestown, Roslindale, even Dorchester — be able to build on residential upgrading to become economic growth nodes as well?  Or will they continue to be left out, with growth focused either in downtown Boston or the still-expanding outer rings of suburban towns around Routes 128/95 and 495?

The answer partly depends on the types of transportation system that gets built over the next twenty years – not only what happens to mass transit but also what is done with the older highways that run through the area.  McGrath/O’Brien, Rutherford Ave., Casey (Rte 203) – these were once vital arterials bulldozed through the inner ring to connect the outer suburbs with downtown.  Building them required the destruction of working class neighborhoods.  But they kept the wheels of commerce rolling as the tide of growth moved outward.

Today, the Interstates provide more direct access.  And with today’s rising gas prices traffic counts on these old highways have significantly dropped.  McGrath traffic dropped by nearly 25% once the Zakim Bridge created a more direct alternative, with the remaining traffic no heavier than city streets like Commonwealth Avenue near BU or Mass. Ave. in the Back Bay.  (See http://mhd.ms2soft.com/tcds/tsearch.asp?loc=Mhd&mod= for more on traffic counts.) The future opening of both the Green Line to the north and the new Fairmont line stations to the south promise to further reduce traffic on these no-longer essential commuter routes.  And not only are the old speedways underutilized, they’re falling down.  The Sullivan Station overpass was so decrepit that the state had to tear it down before they had a chance to decide what to replace it with.  The Casey Overpass has already had its outer-most lanes closed to traffic.   The McGrath overpass, from Cambridge into East Somerville, is approaching the same state of deterioration.

So what should be done?  One idea is to rebuild them as highways – continuing to prioritize their function as regional commuter routes for people driving through the inner ring.  Another idea is to redesign them as city streets, perhaps even as urban greenways, using them as levers for local economic development and prioritizing ways to reconnect the neighborhoods that the highways used to divide.  The first approach emphasizes throughput, car capacity, truck traffic, and unimpeded fast driving from outer areas to downtown jobs.  The second emphasizes slower speeds, neighborhood quality of life, increased pedestrian/bicycle facilities, local retail and employment opportunities, and positive environmental impact.

The battle over these competing visions has already started.  Several dozen community groups are already involved in often separate planning processes in Charlestown, Somerville, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, and elsewhere.  Almost all of them are pushing – often separately and not totally successfully – for a more community-orientated design of their stretch of road or real estate.  But there are strong interests pushing to retain highway-style car capacity. The outcome will determine whether the inner ring communities share in future regional prosperity or are once again left on the sidelines.

Continue reading →

Short Answer:  No money is being lost or returned.

Short Explanation:  Congress “appropriates” less money than government is “authorized” to spend.  States have great freedom to allocate the appropriated funds among different programs.  States typically use as much as they can for roads.  Massachusetts has the dubious honor of spending the lowest percentage of any state or territory of its Transportation Enhancements (TE) authorization and other programs typically used for bike/ped facilities.

For bike/ped-favoring programs such as TE and Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ), the disproportionate allocation process creates an “unobligated balance” between the authorized ceiling and the obligated (to be eventually spent) amount.  This “authorized-to-obligated” gap accumulates every year.  Every now and then, Congress cleans up the books by “rescinding” some of the unobligated amounts.  States have great freedom in deciding which programs’ unobligated balances are used for the rescission – they typically use the bike/ped programs for this purpose.

Short Conclusion:  Unless state priorities change, the fact that bike/ped programs were under utilized in the past is a good indication that they will be under utilized in the future – so loosing the old balance may be aggravating, but is unlikely to make much difference in actual spending.

Short Call To Action:  We need to push states to use more of their appropriated federal transportation funds for programs funding bicycle and pedestrian facilities and off-road paths to avoid creating the large unexpended balances that set the stage for disproportionate rescissions.

But all this just scratches the surface of the story.  Every now and then word begins to circulate that the Feds are “rescinding” billions of dollars in many different spending areas, including transportation.  Emails start sending warnings that funding for bicycle and pedestrian programs is being reduced and that people should contact Washington to protest  The League of American Bicyclists, Bikes Belong, and others have said that “At the very least, rescissions should be fair and proportional.  All funding programs should receive equal consideration to others: they should be spent proportionally and rescinded proportionally. Programs favorable to bicycle and pedestrian projects should not be targeted more than others.”  See:  http://www.advocacyadvance.org/site_images/content/Rescissions_FAQs.pdf

While every opportunity to demand modal equity is worth taking, fighting rescissions is focusing too late in the process.  The cows are already out of the barn.  At both the federal and state levels we need to move “upstream” and demand policy changes that make bike/ped projects more likely to be funded in the first place.

We need to protest, to advocate, to partner.  But we need to understand what’s going on so we can use our limited advocacy resources in the most efficient manner.

—————————————

Authorization, Appropriation, and Allocation:

Every year (in some cases, every few years), Congress authorizes a certain amount of spending.  They set an overall “authorization ceiling” as well as specific authorization ceilings for broad areas (such as transportation) and even program areas within that issue (such as the Surface Transportation Program, mostly used for roads, and Transportation Enhancements, which is a major source of funding for bike/ped facilities).

But no one actually gets to spend the full authorization ceiling.  Rather, Congress then “appropriates” the actual total available to be “obligated” (and eventually spent) in that year or period – and this appropriated amount is (almost) always lower than what was authorized.  In transportation, each state’s authorization/obligation ceiling is what they are actually allowed to spend in that time period.

However, in the name of flexibility and state’s rights, each state is relatively free to allocate or divide up the total appropriated amount for a broad area (e.g. transportation) among the various programs and subprograms in any way it wants.  Except where explicitly required by Congress to do otherwise, a state can use as much (or as little) of its allocation as it wants for any particular program or subprogram — up to the “authorization ceiling” for that program or subprogram.

Key Fact:  Almost every transportation program, including the Surface Transportation program (STP), can be used to fund bike/ped facilities in some way.  Under the federal and state Complete Streets policies, every road should have the maximum feasible accommodations – including things such as wide sidewalks, buffered bike lanes, and protected bike parking spaces.  But nothing is technically out of bounds — including (in addition to TE, CMAQ, and STP) High Priority Projects (HPPs), Safe Routes to Schools

(SRTS), Recreational Trails Program (RTP), Highway Safety Improvement Program

(HSIP), Section 402 State and Community Highway Safety Grant Program.  See

http://americabikes.org/Documents/AB-Federal-Program-Factsheet.pdf for more.

Unobligated Balances and Rescissions:

Since the total authorization amount for all transportation programs added together is higher than the appropriated amount, if a state allocates the full authorization amount for one program it means that there will be a lot less available to be allocated to other programs.  For example, almost every state spends its full authorization for highways and roads.  This means that almost every state spends a lot less than the authorized amount on programs typically used to fund bike/ped projects – Massachusetts is simply the most embarrassing example.  The impact of these choices is multiplied by the fact that road programs (e.g. STP) are much larger than the bike/ped programs to begin with.

For those less favored programs, this creates a “gap” between the annual authorization ceiling and the amount actually spent (or *obligated* to be spent) in those other programs.

Key Fact – in most cases, the entire amount that the state is appropriated is spent — nothing is left “on the table” or returned to the feds.

Over years, assuming that the same pattern of lopsided allocation/obligation continues, the unobligated balance – the gap between the authorized ceiling and the actually obligated amount – continues to grow in the less favored programs.

This is where rescissions come into the picture.  Accountants and budget makers do not like the kind of lingering “authorization to spend” that very large “unobligated balances” create.  In addition, any state that lets a gap grow year after year after year is clearly saying that it really isn’t interested in spending for the underfunded programs.

Key Fact:  a state could, if it wanted to, make up for past underfunding by allocating more and more of its future overall authorization total to those historically neglected programs — up to the full amount of the historically accumulated gap.  This flexibility was built into the law to allow states to use an unusual percentage of their funds for short-term special projects and then make it up as they go forward.

So every now and then the feds demand that states cancel (or “rescind”) some amount of their long-term authorization-to-obligation gap. The total rescission amount is distributed among the States in the same proportion as the funds subject to the rescission were apportioned to the States for some appropriate fiscal year.  (For the text of the federal announcement, see http://www.bikeleague.org/blog/2010/08/return-of-rescissions/)

Disproportionate Impact and Advocacy Priorities

It should not be surprising that most states tend to assign most of their required rescissions to the programs with the biggest unobligated balances — meaning those of least value to car traffic.  This means that most states disproportionately use Transportation Enhancement (TE) and Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ) programs for rescissions:  while those two programs received 7.3 percent of federal appropriations, they were the source of 44 percent of the 2010 rescissions.

But this is really only a paper cancellation of a future possibility — the elimination of the ability to divert huge amounts of future transportation money from historically favored programs into the historically disfavored ones.  In fact, it is unlikely that states would ever allocate that much money to these programs.  So the loss of the possibility of such an equalizing allocation is mostly irrelevant.

Of course, it worth taking advantage of every possible opportunity to demand modal equity.  But rescissions aren’t really the issue.  We need to find ways to make bike/ped projects more likely to be funded in the first place.  And we need to find long-term, equitable ways of funding the needed improvements and transformation in our transportation infrastructure while encouraging a shift to more sustainable and safe vehicles.

======================

For More About Rescissions:

http://www.advocacyadvance.org/site_images/content/Understanding_Rescissions_%282011%291.pdf

http://americabikes.org/Documents/AB-Federal-Program-Factsheet.pdf

Or check the National Transportation Enhancements Clearing House to get a state profile about authorization, obligation, and rescission amounts:  www.enhancements.org/Stateprofile.asp

Related Previous Posts:

UPDATE on TRANSPORTATION ENHANCEMENTS in MASSACHUSETTS: From Hope for Better to Concern for Worse….?

TRANSPORTATION ENHANCEMENT IN MASSACHUSETTS – Better, But Not Fixed

CHANGING THE RULES OF THE ROAD: National Transportation Reform

Why Transportation Policy Is (Finally) Changing

Short Answer:  No money is being lost or returned.

Short Explanation:  Congress “appropriates” less money than government is “authorized” to spend.  States have great freedom to allocate the appropriated funds among different programs.  States typically use as much as they can for roads.  Massachusetts has the dubious honor of spending the lowest percentage of any state or territory of its Transportation Enhancements (TE) authorization and other programs typically used for bike/ped facilities.

For bike/ped-favoring programs such as TE and Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ), the disproportionate allocation process creates an “unobligated balance” between the authorized ceiling and the obligated (to be eventually spent) amount.  This “authorized-to-obligated” gap accumulates every year.  Every now and then, Congress cleans up the books by “rescinding” some of the unobligated amounts.  States have great freedom in deciding which programs’ unobligated balances are used for the rescission – they typically use the bike/ped programs for this purpose.

Short Conclusion:  Unless state priorities change, the fact that bike/ped programs were under utilized in the past is a good indication that they will be under utilized in the future – so loosing the old balance may be aggravating, but is unlikely to make much difference in actual spending.

Short Call To Action:  We need to push states to use more of their appropriated federal transportation funds for programs funding bicycle and pedestrian facilities and off-road paths to avoid creating the large unexpended balances that set the stage for disproportionate rescissions.

But all this just scratches the surface of the story.  Every now and then word begins to circulate that the Feds are “rescinding” billions of dollars in many different spending areas, including transportation.  Emails start sending warnings that funding for bicycle and pedestrian programs is being reduced and that people should contact Washington to protest  The League of American Bicyclists, Bikes Belong, and others have said that “At the very least, rescissions should be fair and proportional.  All funding programs should receive equal consideration to others: they should be spent proportionally and rescinded proportionally. Programs favorable to bicycle and pedestrian projects should not be targeted more than others.”  See:  http://www.advocacyadvance.org/site_images/content/Rescissions_FAQs.pdf

While every opportunity to demand modal equity is worth taking, fighting rescissions is focusing too late in the process.  The cows are already out of the barn.  At both the federal and state levels we need to move “upstream” and demand policy changes that make bike/ped projects more likely to be funded in the first place.

We need to protest, to advocate, to partner.  But we need to understand what’s going on so we can use our limited advocacy resources in the most efficient manner.

—————————————

Authorization, Appropriation, and Allocation:

Every year (in some cases, every few years), Congress authorizes a certain amount of spending.  They set an overall “authorization ceiling” as well as specific authorization ceilings for broad areas (such as transportation) and even program areas within that issue (such as the Surface Transportation Program, mostly used for roads, and Transportation Enhancements, which is a major source of funding for bike/ped facilities).

But no one actually gets to spend the full authorization ceiling.  Rather, Congress then “appropriates” the actual total available to be “obligated” (and eventually spent) in that year or period – and this appropriated amount is (almost) always lower than what was authorized.  In transportation, each state’s authorization/obligation ceiling is what they are actually allowed to spend in that time period.

However, in the name of flexibility and state’s rights, each state is relatively free to allocate or divide up the total appropriated amount for a broad area (e.g. transportation) among the various programs and subprograms in any way it wants.  Except where explicitly required by Congress to do otherwise, a state can use as much (or as little) of its allocation as it wants for any particular program or subprogram — up to the “authorization ceiling” for that program or subprogram.

Key Fact:  Almost every transportation program, including the Surface Transportation program (STP), can be used to fund bike/ped facilities in some way.  Under the federal and state Complete Streets policies, every road should have the maximum feasible accommodations – including things such as wide sidewalks, buffered bike lanes, and protected bike parking spaces.  But nothing is technically out of bounds — including (in addition to TE, CMAQ, and STP) High Priority Projects (HPPs), Safe Routes to Schools

(SRTS), Recreational Trails Program (RTP), Highway Safety Improvement Program

(HSIP), Section 402 State and Community Highway Safety Grant Program.  See

http://americabikes.org/Documents/AB-Federal-Program-Factsheet.pdf for more.

Unobligated Balances and Rescissions:

Since the total authorization amount for all transportation programs added together is higher than the appropriated amount, if a state allocates the full authorization amount for one program it means that there will be a lot less available to be allocated to other programs.  For example, almost every state spends its full authorization for highways and roads.  This means that almost every state spends a lot less than the authorized amount on programs typically used to fund bike/ped projects – Massachusetts is simply the most embarrassing example.  The impact of these choices is multiplied by the fact that road programs (e.g. STP) are much larger than the bike/ped programs to begin with.

For those less favored programs, this creates a “gap” between the annual authorization ceiling and the amount actually spent (or *obligated* to be spent) in those other programs.

Key Fact – in most cases, the entire amount that the state is appropriated is spent — nothing is left “on the table” or returned to the feds.

Over years, assuming that the same pattern of lopsided allocation/obligation continues, the unobligated balance – the gap between the authorized ceiling and the actually obligated amount – continues to grow in the less favored programs.

This is where rescissions come into the picture.  Accountants and budget makers do not like the kind of lingering “authorization to spend” that very large “unobligated balances” create.  In addition, any state that lets a gap grow year after year after year is clearly saying that it really isn’t interested in spending for the underfunded programs.

Key Fact:  a state could, if it wanted to, make up for past underfunding by allocating more and more of its future overall authorization total to those historically neglected programs — up to the full amount of the historically accumulated gap.  This flexibility was built into the law to allow states to use an unusual percentage of their funds for short-term special projects and then make it up as they go forward.

So every now and then the feds demand that states cancel (or “rescind”) some amount of their long-term authorization-to-obligation gap. The total rescission amount is distributed among the States in the same proportion as the funds subject to the rescission were apportioned to the States for some appropriate fiscal year.  (For the text of the federal announcement, see http://www.bikeleague.org/blog/2010/08/return-of-rescissions/)

Disproportionate Impact and Advocacy Priorities

It should not be surprising that most states tend to assign most of their required rescissions to the programs with the biggest unobligated balances — meaning those of least value to car traffic.  This means that most states disproportionately use Transportation Enhancement (TE) and Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality (CMAQ) programs for rescissions:  while those two programs received 7.3 percent of federal appropriations, they were the source of 44 percent of the 2010 rescissions.

But this is really only a paper cancellation of a future possibility — the elimination of the ability to divert huge amounts of future transportation money from historically favored programs into the historically disfavored ones.  In fact, it is unlikely that states would ever allocate that much money to these programs.  So the loss of the possibility of such an equalizing allocation is mostly irrelevant.

Of course, it worth taking advantage of every possible opportunity to demand modal equity.  But rescissions aren’t really the issue.  We need to find ways to make bike/ped projects more likely to be funded in the first place.  And we need to find long-term, equitable ways of funding the needed improvements and transformation in our transportation infrastructure while encouraging a shift to more sustainable and safe vehicles.

======================

For More About Rescissions:

http://www.advocacyadvance.org/site_images/content/Understanding_Rescissions_%282011%291.pdf

http://americabikes.org/Documents/AB-Federal-Program-Factsheet.pdf

Or check the National Transportation Enhancements Clearing House to get a state profile about authorization, obligation, and rescission amounts:  www.enhancements.org/Stateprofile.asp

Related Previous Posts:

UPDATE on TRANSPORTATION ENHANCEMENTS in MASSACHUSETTS: From Hope for Better to Concern for Worse….?

TRANSPORTATION ENHANCEMENT IN MASSACHUSETTS – Better, But Not Fixed

CHANGING THE RULES OF THE ROAD: National Transportation Reform

Why Transportation Policy Is (Finally) Changing

Propose to add bike lanes or narrow traffic lanes or even to install corner bulb-outs in either a suburb or an inner-city neighborhood, and you’re likely to run into the rejection chorus from long-time residents:  “You’ll just make congestion worse.” “Cars will short-cut through our neighborhoods.”  “This discriminates against the car driving majority.”

The issue isn’t the technical details – the size of the bulb-outs, the width of the bike lanes, the height of the speed bumps.  Neither does it usually seem to be about the need to make it safer to walk, bike, or take transit.  Everyone agrees that the roads aren’t as safe as we’d like.  And often it isn’t really about bicycling, or buses, or whatever else has triggered the opposition – many people will tell you that “I’m all in favor of …; but this is just not the right place for this kind of project.”

Still, it’s amazing how quickly these discussions turn into emotional explosions, that rational discussion turns into apocalyptic fury.  In middle class Arlington, for example, one opponent to proposed traffic-calming changes has spent over ,000 of his own money proclaiming that bike lanes will destroy the local economy and cause huge numbers of injuries.  In once-working class Charlestown, long-time residents demanded the removal of in-town bike lanes and are fighting reducing lane widths on Rutherford Ave. as if these were attacks on their community by subversive outsiders.  In both communities, as in many others, public meetings ended up in angry shouting matches.

Remember “The Music Man” when the traveling salesman got the town in a frenzy about how the new pool tables were “the first big step on the road to the depths of degradation…trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble…” (I was in my high school’s performance – the last time anyone let me sing in public!)  What makes new things so scary?  How can we diminish the NIMBY response, perhaps even turning potential opponents into supporters?  And is there something special about transportation issues that we have to take into account?

It’s too easy and shallow to say that people just don’t like change, or at least change in their own community.  It’s true – but not really the point.   Of course, people have learned to deal with the status quo, for all its faults, and change threatens whatever feelings of comfort and security they may have, however tenuous that may be.  But its not change in general that is scary; it’s certain types of change.  And those of us who think that change is needed have to figure out how to deal with that opposition.

The first thing we need to acknowledge is that transportation is a foundational issue.  Along with land-use, transportation is one of the fundamental shapers of social, economic, and physical space – of our neighborhoods and lives.

Second, we need to understand that what worries the “townies” is not the bike lanes – it’s us; or rather, the fact that we are threatening to replace them as creators of local culture and norms.  They fear that the bike lanes, like the groovy coffee shops and fancy restaurants that come with us, are the visible advance guard of a demographic invasion that will disrupt old social networks and probably displace them.  And they may be correct.

Third, we need to deal with the reality – especially in working class or lower middle class areas – that the locals may be correct because those cultural changes also announce that the real estate market is about to devour their neighborhood, raising prices and replacing familiar small businesses.  As in Somerville’s Davis Square, the lucky ones will get to sell out; the majority will just get pushed out.  But the community will be gone.

In order to soften – or even prevent – this NIMBY blowback, which is often strong enough to slow and sometimes to even stop, efforts to upgrade our transportation system to meet the safety, sustainability, and multi-modal requirements of the 21^st century, we need to address our opponents displacement fears and find ways to control (or at least soften) the speculative impact.

This posting focuses on transportation, but the principles discussed are applicable to almost any issue.  To avoid NIMBY, we need to “do it right.”

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Parks have many functions.  Urban parks were originally seen as oases, cool and green antidotes to the noise and density of the city; a place for quiet walks, meditation, and observation of nature’s wonderfulness.  Over the years, a growing working population with limited opportunity to escape the city demanded that parks also be used for family fun and active recreation: picnics, kids’ games, adult sports and exercise.  More recently, we’ve learned that green areas are the lungs and sponges of our environment, cleaning the air, absorbing water run-offs, lowering the temperature, and providing a vital tool for dealing with the globe’s escalating climatic disruptions.

But what if parks were also treated as building blocks for a regional healthy transportation network?  What if they were nodes in a web of connected greenways with multi-use paths designed for non-motorized use for both families at play and weekday commuters?  What if the vision was to improve access to local parks by neighbors as well as to facilitate movement between and through the parklands by everyone?

Boston is uniquely suited to the implementation of such a vision – especially if we include our other types of green and open space: the parkways, river banks, beaches, woods, playgrounds, even some of the cemeteries.   Of course, the routes would occasionally have to use the street grid; but in those areas the off-road feel could be preserved by the upgrading of sidewalks and the creation of cycle tracks – bike lanes that are physically separated from traffic.   The goal is not to turn the parks into roads, but to turn the entire city into a park, to lace the city with green.

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Several times each day, most of us move from one place to another using one of the many options available – walk or drive, take the stairs or the elevator, bike or bus, taxi or limousine.  Most of the time, most of us don’t really think about it; we just do what we’ve usually done, what everyone else usually does, fall into the default behavior:  we drive, take the elevator, call a cab.

What creates the default?  What nudges so many of us in the same direction?  Not an act of nature or of god.  Behavioral defaults are not inevitable or inescapable.  They are created by the surrounding context – the structure of our buildings, the nature of the transportation system, the attributes of high social status, the cultural assumptions that make some things feel normal and others unthinkable.  One way to understand the decision-making context is to examine the “Four Cs” of Convenience, Cost, Comfort, and Coolness.  Which method of movement is easiest to access?  Which feels like a good value?  Which requires the least effort to use?  Which is the most appropriate for people of our (self-imagined) social standing and style?

None of these default-creating factors occur by “accident.”  They are the aggregated product of past human decisions and actions.  And that is the good news — if the Four Cs are the factors that create our society’s defaults in transportation and many other areas of daily life, and if they are themselves created by human action, then we can use our power over them to change our “ordinary” behaviors.  We can design the Four Cs to create defaults that generate the most overall value from public infrastructure investments, maximize personal and public health, create the safest and most livable neighborhoods, and other social and individual benefits.

Of course, we can not create a brand new transportation system from scratch, no more than we can shape our land use patterns as if nothing already occupied the land, or improve public health as if evolution had not programmed us to crave sugar, fat, and salt.  We have to start from what exists.  But we are not condemned to simply replicate the past.  Using our creativity, mobilizing our political forces, and finding ways to tap our society’s immense resources – we can move ourselves towards a better future.

It’s true that this is a hard time for progressive reform, efforts to create a more humane world for all.  It is, rather, a time when insecurity undermines public understanding that we rise and fall together, leading to policies that move us towards the barbarism of “all against all” and the kind of malignant inequality that creates even more insecurity.  In such a time, it is vital to keep the visionary hopes alive while focusing on the pragmatic victories, the specific improvements, the local actions that we can win.

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Winning isn’t everything; but being last should be embarrassing.  The Transportation Enhancement (TE) component of the federal Surface Transportation Program (STP) is the major source of federal funding for pedestrian/bicycle facilities and rail-trail conversations.  A recent post pointed out Massachusetts’ worst-in-the-nation status in percent of potential-to-actual money spent on TE projects.

The post applauded the (slightly) simplified application process MassDOT was instituting for TE projects as well as the creation of financial incentives for the state’s 13 regional transportation planning groups (MPOs) to approve TE projects.  It also approvingly noted the criteria that MassDOT was considering using to evaluate TE project spending, giving priority to projects that would connect high-population areas or close gaps in existing bike routes.

(STP requires that TE funds be used for “travel related” projects, usually meaning that they connect discrete destinations rather than serve purely recreational purposes.  Rural or “non-travel” paths are supposed to be funded through the Recreational Trail Program, RTP, another federal program for which Massachusetts pathetically owns the worst-in-the-nation standing in percent of potential-to-actual money spent.)

But I may have spoken too soon.  It now appears that the state will cut a million dollars a year (almost a quarter of the total) from the promised amount, and that already locked-in road project obligations will prevent the incentives from having any effect until at least 2015, if not much later.  In addition, the recommendations submitted by MassDOT’s high-cost consultant about prioritizing projects eligible for the matching money incentives have not been publically issued.  Finally, no action seems to be forthcoming to relieve rail-trail projects from having to use the same expensive and time consuming processes set up to ensure that roads meet national construction standards – despite the fact that these paths will only, and very occasionally, have to carry ambulances, fire vehicles, or even (we should be so lucky) snow plows and street cleaners.

The most tempting way for Massachusetts to “solve” the problem is to change the labeling — to count all sidewalk and bike lane and bike trail work as Transportation Enhancements.   But this would be a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of both federal guidelines and MassDOT’s own principles, dangerously undermining its legislatively-mandated Complete Streets policy. Rather, “regular” STP funds should be used to pay for any project in which the car-carrying pavement is being touched in any way, and every one of those projects should incorporate the maximum feasible accommodations for walking and cycling.

In contrast, TE funds should be reserved for situations where pedestrian and bicycle facilities would simply not be constructed otherwise — mostly meaning (1) adding ped/bike facilities to roads whose car-carrying surfaces are not being repaired or upgraded, (2) off-road paths such as rail-to-trail conversions, and (3) addressing other gaps in equity or support needed for the growth of non-motorized movement.

If the state is to live up to its multi-modal aspirations – and its legal requirements under several state laws and policies – it needs to:

• More aggressively implement its Complete Streets policies to require every road repair, upgrading, or new construction project to provide the maximum possible ped/bike accommodations (or at least go beyond the standard minimums), even if that means putting some of the space limitation burden on car movement and parking;
• Fully funding the Recreational Trail Program (rather than diverting about half the potential funds to other purposes);
• Ensure that at least 10% of Surface Transportation Funds be used for TE-eligible walking or cycling facilities in appropriate situations, by –

• • reserving the money for centralized state programming, or
  • requiring that MPOs spend 10% of the STF money on TE-eligible projects, or
  • Somehow restructuring the incentive program to have a bigger and more immediate impact.

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The Back Story

States are allowed to reserve up to 10% of its federal Surface Transportation Program (STP) money for TE projects – either by reserving it for use by the state Department of Transportation or by requiring that it be spent by the regional Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) who set transportation spending priorities in their areas.  Up until now, Massachusetts simply forwarded STP money to its 13 MPOs and allowed the regional groups to do what they wanted – which was mostly road upgrading.  (MassDOT has one or more seats on each of the MPOs, so it does have influence, but it didn’t push very hard to change those priorities.)  As a result, while Massachusetts’ yearly Congressionally-authorized potential TE spending hovers around million, the actual amount “obligated” to be spent on TE projects has wavered from almost nothing to about million, usually in the lower half of that range – the lowest percentage of “authorized-to-obligated” annual TE spending in the nation.

It was very good news in 2008 when Transportation Secretary Bernard Cohen acknowledged that the state’s TE program needed improvement and announced that he was hiring the Partners Collaborative (for 0,000!) to suggest changes.  The next year, his replacement as Transportation Secretary, James Aliosi, announced at his agency’s annual Moving Together conference in October, 2009 that “MassDOT will increase the statewide annual TE funding allocation pool from the current {content}.5 million to .5 million in FY2011, .0 million FY2012 and .5 million in FY2013. MassDOT will further increase the effectiveness of this funding by using it to match funds programmed regionally in order to create incentives for MPOs to program TE projects.”

The match was designed as a “1 for 2” contribution: MassDOT would add another dollar to every two dollars an MPO programmed for TE projects, a 50% bonus.  Unfortunately, the consultants’ suggestions for process reform didn’t go beyond eliminating the expensive and time-consuming double application process – once to be approved as a TE project by the Regional Planning Agency (RPA) and then again as part of the regular road project evaluation via the MPO.  (Some other states are able to approve TE projects in less than two years, a discomforting contrast to the decade-long effort it often takes in the Commonwealth.)

Problems not addressed by the consultants include:

• the inability to use TE or RTP funds to secure control of rail-trail property;
• the requirement that localities cover up to 10% of the total cost (the state provides another 10% and the rest is covered by federal money);
• the dividing up of long corridors into multiple small trail projects each of which requires the same amount of work to get approved;
• the tendency of MassDOT to require trails to meet too many road-focused design and process-approval requirements even though almost no motorized vehicles will use them;
• the lack of a method to track progress on previously approved TE projects, some of which have been languishing for years, others of which began with TE funding but shifted (often partly because of frustration with TE delays) to Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality funding (CMAQ) or received a Congressional earmark;
• and the lack of dedicated staff at the state DOT to move the process forward.

In addition, the consultants updated the state’s 1997 Bicycle Plan to propose a 740-mile, seven-corridor Bay State Greenway (BSG) network consisting of on-road and off-road (multi-use path) facilities, as well identifying about 100 miles of priority segments (the BSG-100).  Supposedly, the BSG-100 segments were selected using the excellent criteria the consultants devised for identifying matching-money-eligible TE projects – although the connection isn’t always obvious.

MassDOT Backtracking…

Of course, all this was before Wall Street speculators squandered our national surplus and anti-government conservatives gained veto power over fiscal policy.  As public funds have evaporated, MassDOT has cut back.  At the 2010 Moving Together conference, the next Transportation Department Secretary, Jeffrey Mullan, said that MassDOT would use million of the FY2011 money for a special project in Worcester and .5 million for the matching offer, with .5 million used for matching in future years – both giving the bonus program a lower first year amount and locking the top level at a million dollars a year below the original promise.

Even more significantly, transportation funding is typically scheduled years in advance, partly because there is such a huge backlog of projects competing for such inadequate amounts of money.  The regional and state-wide Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) list — on which a project must be placed before it can be implemented – is short.  And while it can be amended, there are currently no major pedestrian or bicycle projects included on the short list of pending projects.

There are no federal or state laws that prohibit or inhibit the inclusion of non-auto-centric projects on the state TIP.  To the contrary.  Current law requires that roads built with federal money provide “due consideration” for pedestrians and bicyclists.  Under the Obama Administration and the leadership of US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) recently issued a “policy guidance” letter saying this means that “bicyclists and pedestrians should be included as a matter of routine, and the decision to not accommodate them should be the exception rather than the rule.”

Of course, this progressive move provoked a backlash from the highway lobby.  The D.C.-based leaders of AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, objected – saying they preferred the old interpretation that only required non-motorized facilities “be considered, where appropriate.”  But there was enough pushback from state transportation officials – 23 of whose departments have adopted Complete Streets policies – that AASHTO lobbyists had to back off (at least until more pro-car Republicans get elected).

All Roads Should Be Complete Streets

These retreats and slowdowns raise concern that MassDOT will take the easy, but extremely damaging, way of lifting itself out of the TE performance basement by simply changing its accounting system to define all money spent on planning or constructing sidewalks and bike facilities associated with regular road repair or upgrading as TE expenditures.

Reclassifying sidewalks, traffic calming, road diets, bike lanes and other on-road improvements done as part of a regular road project as TE costs rather than as part of the “regular” STP budget will be a disaster because it will fatally undermine the state’s Complete Streets policies – as well as its GreenDOT commitments and Healthy Transportation Compact mandate.

In the long run, creating a multi-modal road system requires that every road project include the maximum possible pedestrian and bicycle accommodations as a core component of its design and budget.  Every time a street is being improved, or even significantly repaired, the design should automatically include – should prioritize – including lane reductions and narrowing, traffic-calming and intersection-tightening, sidewalk widening and street furniture additions, bike lane, cycle track, side-path, transit amenities, and other facilitators of “active transportation.”

Pulling these elements, or any subset of them, out of the regular design process or the project engineer’s basic responsibilities – which is what will inevitably happen to some degree once they are moved into a different budget category – will fundamentally undermine the state’s commitment to Complete Streets as well as its other goals.

Even if MassDOT is somehow able to dodge this bullet, treating pedestrian and bicycle (and transit) accommodations separately from the “road” violates both the spirit and practice of Complete Streets.  Multi-modal accommodations should be treated as the required starting point for every transportation plan, not “extras” or supplementary additions on the edges of the “real” road.  It should be inconceivable to build a road that only serves cars.  Every road build with Surface Transportation Program (STP) funds should be a Complete Street.

What should Enhancement funds be used for?  TE funds should be reserved for adding pedestrian and bicycling facilities or programs where they wouldn’t otherwise appear:

• adding sidewalks, crossing bridges, cycle tracks, side-paths, and other ped/bike accommodations in locations where no other major road work is occurring;
• creating off-road pedestrian, bicycling, or multi-use paths such as rail-to-trail conversions.  (STP/TE rules require these paths to be “travel related” rather than purely recreational, which are supposed to be funded through the Recreational Trail Program, or RTP – another program that Massachusetts pathetically owns the worst-in-the-nation standing in percent of potential-to-actual money spent.)
• supporting other parts of the “six Es” such as education, encouragement, enforcement, evaluation, and equity.

If the state is to live up to its multi-modal aspirations – and its legal requirements under several state laws and policies – it needs to:

• More aggressively implement its Complete Streets policies to require every road repair, upgrading, or new construction project to provide the maximum possible ped/bike accommodations (or at least go beyond the standard minimums), even if that means putting some of the space limitation burden on car movement and parking;
• Fully funding the Recreational Trail Program (rather than diverting about half the potential funds to other purposes);
• Ensure that at least 10% of Surface Transportation Funds be used for TE-eligible walking or cycling facilities in appropriate situations, by –

• • reserving the money for centralized state programming, or
  • requiring that MPOs spend 10% of the STF money on TE-eligible projects, or
  • Somehow restructuring the incentive program to have a bigger and more immediate impact.

It’s hard to know if you are heading in the right direction if you don’t know where you are going.    In today’s context of fiscal constraint, it is vital to justify expenditures or to choose among competing options by evaluating how much they are moving us, or potentially will move us, towards our goals.  This is particularly true for public policy and action.

The Healthy Transportation Compact, a component of the 2008 law creating today’s Massachusetts Department of Transportation, commits the agency to “support healthy transportation…reducing greenhouse gas emissions…improving access to services for persons with mobility limitations, and increasing opportunities for physical activities… increasing bicycle and pedestrian travel…[creating] complete streets for all users…”

The state’s 2008 Global Warming Solutions Act commits MassDOT to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector, which currently produces over a third of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.  The agency’s GreenDOT program goes even further.  Its three “primary goals are to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; promote the healthy transportation options of walking, bicycling, and public transit; and support smart growth development….[as well as] incorporate sustainability into all of its activities.”

How are we doing?  It’s hard to know – despite the fact that one of the requirements written into the Healthy Transportation Compact is to “develop goals…and measure progress.”  First, these rather general and abstract goals have to be quantified in both amount and time frame.  Second, we need to select indicators that evaluate progress towards those goals, either directly or through some appropriate surrogate.  And, third, we need to actually do the measurements and announce the results.

As good educators know, the value of a report card is not just its snapshot of current status but, even more, its ability to motivate and guide future effort – to serve as an annual review’s progress report rather than as an exit interview’s termination agreement.

Picking indicators that serve both purposes requires that they are relevant, available, transparent, actionable, sensitive, educational, benchmarked, and dramatic. In addition to meeting these criteria, indicators should describe three different categories of information:  outcomes, enabling factors, and inputs/processes.  And within each of these, at least some of the indicators in each category should evaluate possible disparities among key subpopulations.

This post explores these criteria and categories in the context of proposing indicators that might be used to evaluate bicycle and pedestrian travel at the state level.  However, this approach should also be valid for examining transportation, public health, community development and other issues at the local, regional, and national levels as well.

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There actually is a common theme running through all three of this week’s seemingly unconnected items:  how to deal with the changes in transportation choices that people will make as gas prices continue to rise, urban population expands, and congestion gets worse.  Or, as my carpenter brother says about his tools, “the trick is keeping everything in its own place.”

SEGWAY IN THE WAY – Reclaiming Sidewalks for People

CHARLES RIVER BRIDGES – Part of the Path or the Road?

BIKE LIGHTS AT NIGHT – “Fix It” Enforcement

The first one applauds Boston’s effort to plan ahead for the influx of electric and low-powered vehicles – such as scooters, mopeds, electric bikes, and Segways – that people will increasingly use.  If you agree, contact your favorite Boston City Councilor and urge a quick, positive vote for the proposal.

The second delves into the complications of bike and pedestrian movement around and over the River St., Western Ave, and Anderson Bridges.  Despite having spent several years arguing for bike lanes on the bridges, the more I examine the situation the more appropriate – even necessary – it seems to create two-way, separate-from-traffic, corridors for bikes on both sides of each bridge.  Read my own musings and leave a comment with your own thoughts.

Finally, the other night I was almost knocked off my bike into traffic by an idiot cyclist wearing black and without any lights who came flying down the bike lane going the wrong way on a one-way street.  So I spent a little time searching for effective “get the light” strategies.  Cambridge and Boston have “Be Bright; Use A Light” efforts, although neither have been of sufficient scale to fundamentally change local culture.  But the Portland, Oregon program seemed really good and, with some adjustment, greatly worthy of emulation.  Does anyone know of other highly effective campaigns?

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Arriving late is every emergency worker’s nightmare. EMTs and firefighters know that new construction materials – plastics and composites – burn fast and release unpredictable clouds of toxic fumes.  It is estimated that people have about 3 minutes to escape the heat and smoke once a fire starts, down from nearly 17 minutes forty years ago.  Response speed spells life or death not only for the residents but also for the fire fighters, whose ever-larger ladder trucks and pumpers need to fight through traffic congestion and tight intersections.   In fact, given our increasing awareness of the potential need for mass evacuations under catastrophic conditions, creating a transportation system that allows emergency movement is a matter of both public safety and national security.

So it’s not surprising that fire chiefs in many communities have fought for wide traffic lanes and intersections – a concern often shared by bus drivers and snow-plow agencies.  But this has repeatedly brought them into conflict with the growing public demand to slow traffic and create more livable streets whether under the label of “Complete Streets”, “New Urbanism”, “Traffic Calming and Road Diets”, or “Creating Better Balance Between Car, Bike, and Pedestrian Facilities”.

The good news is that there are many ways to make streets more inviting to pedestrians and cyclists of all ages and levels of traffic tolerance while also keeping them accessible for emergency vehicles (and for buses and snow plows, too!).

Rather than leave emergency responders, transit agency, and public works managers, out of the transportation planning process, forcing them to annoy everyone by angrily objecting to road designs at the last minute, those of us on the road redesign side of the process need to get them involved earlier – and show them that livable streets are actually safer (and healthier!) as well as more enjoyable.

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While we’re waiting for the big transformations needed to deal with climate change, resource depletion, dietary distortions, inequality, and the other despair-evoking problems we face, it’s good to remember that incremental improvements are still possible – and may be all we can gain at this particular moment in history.  The first five items in this post applauds small but significant steps forward while pointing out some additional actions that are still needed.

The fifth item picks up a previous post’s theme – the need for bicyclists to discipline their own community about dangerous and anti-social behavior.  As our streets are redesigned for pedestrian and cyclist safety, we will have to confront an inevitable backlash as car owners protest the loss of their once-privileged status and businesses worry (mostly inaccurately) about decreased access for truck deliveries, parking-dependent customers, and car-commuting employees.  The last thing we need at this time are stupid cyclists (or jay-walkers) providing good reasons to oppose continued change.

And, finally, despite all my assumptions, I recently learned that federal law does not prohibit adding pedestrian and/or bicycle facilities to Interstates.  Even more, current federal policy requires the inclusion of walking and cycling accommodations in most federally-funded projects – including on bridges!  Maybe the bigger transformations will come….

• Bike Lanes on Mass Ave. – Incredible! But A Gap Remains…
• Intersections:  Walk Signals and Bike Boxes…..
• Ghost Bikes and Memorial Signs Promote Safer Behavior….
• Bikes on the T – Breaking the Commuter Peak Barrier….
• Hubway Bike Share:  A Game Changer…
• Drive Nicely, No Matter What Your Vehicle…
• “There are no Federal laws or regulations that prohibit bicycle use on…or that prohibit shared use paths along or near Interstate highways or other freeways.”

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