Not too long ago it appeared that the United States was gaining steam in the pursuit of high-speed rail. We finally had a White House that made passenger rail a high priority. With Obama calling for $8 billion in 2012 and $53 billion over six years for passenger rail projects, and a goal to provide 80 percent of Americans with access to high-speed rail in the next 25 years, governors and the transportation industry were licking their chops.

And then we hit the skids. Florida Governor Rick Scott, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, all newly elected Republicans, abandoned high-speed passenger rail projects, rejecting a combined $3.6 billion in federal funds in the process. That figure is more than the gross domestic product of some small countries, like Fiji, Somalia or Guam.

And then Congress eliminated about $1 billion that Obama wanted in the current budget for rail projects, and $400 million from the $2.4 billion already set aside for high-speed rail in Florida.

It “makes no sense” Obama said, referring to the abandoned rail projects. He’s right. Transportation infrastructure projects help the country stay competitive. And they create jobs. The abandoned rail plans would have generated at least 35,000 jobs combined, according to news reports. That squandered opportunity was a bitter pill for some lawmakers in Florida, where the unemployment rate is 12 percent. The state had not even received bids on their project when the governor decided to turn down $2 billion in federal dollars earmarked for an 85-mile high-speed link between Tampa and Orlando. Among the disappointed were U.S. Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican and new chairman of the Congressional House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.  Another 26 state senators rebuked the governor for turning down the money, writing in a joint letter, “Politics should have no place in the future of Florida’s transportation.”

Gov. Scott’s decision, announced in February, was a slap in the face to the Obama Administration, coming a little more than a week after Vice President Joseph R. Biden unveiled the president’s rail plans. The Florida project was a centerpiece of those plans. It was one of two high-speed lines already approved by Congress. Like his fellow governors who rejected federal rail aid, Scott argued that his state might have been liable for billions of dollars, claiming that ridership estimates were too optimistic, and worried that taxpayers would be left with a  $3 billion tab to pay if the line wasn’t successful.

Scott’s pronouncement was described by Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, who, according to The Florida Times Union, compared the rail project to the interstate highway projects of the 1950s. “Can you imagine if the governor had tried to kill Eisenhower’s interstate highway system? That’s what we are facing today,” Nelson was quoted as saying in the newspaper. The senator raises a good point. Some of our nation’s greatest infrastructure was built in precarious financial times.  The United States Congress approved construction of the transcontinental railroad – one of America’s great technological achievements – during the American Civil War.

The governors who turned down the billions in high-speed rail may be making short political hay out of their decisions. Their states may feel the sting of jealously, as the funds they snubbed are funneled to other states eager to create jobs and build a world-class transportation network for the future.

In California, which received the largest portion of redirected money from the abandoned projects in Wisconsin and Ohio, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the time, was only too happy to take the funds. California voters have already approved almost $10 billion in bonds to build a high-speed rail system from San Francisco and Sacramento to San Diego. They’re going to need a lot more to meet the anticipated $45 billion price tag.

There were plenty of others vying for those $2 billion in abandoned Florida high-speed train dollars.  In fact there were 90 proposals from 24 states, the District of Columbia and Amtrak. “This is a knock-down drag-out fight over who is going to get it,” said Kevin Brubaker, Deputy Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. Among the eleven Republican governors seeking a slice of the pie was Gov. Walker of Wisconsin, who would have liked to get back $150 million of what he had initially rejected. “We’re glad that Gov. Walker has recognized the value of high-speed rail to the Midwest,” Brubaker said, “and is seeking funds to support it.”

Recently Ray LaHood, the federal transportation secretary, announced that Amtrak and 15 states will be awarded the $2 billion that Florida gave up. The biggest slice of that money, about $800 million, will be used to improve train speeds on the Northeast Corridor, as well as improve the reliability of commuter lines.

The New York projects may not sound sexy but they are the type of projects that need to be done to get us on the right track to high-speed rail, according to Darnell Grisby of Reconnecting America. “Part of the problem with American passenger rail is that a lot hasn’t been improved in many years and getting us to high speed requires getting us up to the speed of other countries,” he said. We need to improve existing rails so that they can handle high-speed trains.

The good news, Grisby says, is that about half the states that applied for the rail money are states governed by Republicans. “Opponents of high-speed rail may have been more successful about getting their message out, but it’s not entirely factual information. There is still demand for high-speed rail and it’s bipartisan in nature,” he said.

Why do we need high-speed rail? Because, Grisby says, with gas rising above $4 per gallon, Americans need more convenient travel options. High-speed rail will also relieve stress on our roads and airports. Small communities, like those in upstate NY, will benefit from rail lines that allow residents to commute to the big cities where the jobs are, without abandoning their hometowns. Those communities that know how to market themselves can leverage a new high-speed rail line into a big economic plus for the local economy. And let’s not forget about job creation. As Grisby points out, Brazil, Russia and Southeast Asia are building high-speed rail right now and if America can build a high-speed rail construction industry, we can export our products, creating long-term jobs.

The industry needs proof that that our nation has a long-term commitment to high-speed rail and the best way to do that is to include funds for it in the next transportation reauthorization bill. Congress really needs to step up.  Over the next four decades the U.S. can expect our population to grow by 100 million Americans. With our current transportation infrastructure, Grisby says, we cannot accommodate that growth.

Our nation needs to have a long-term strategy for our transportation network, a strategy that transcends politics. If not, we will pay for shortsightedness and veer off track while other countries speed ahead.

Samuel I. Schwartz is a former New York City Traffic Commissioner who currently writes the Gridlock Sam column for the New York Daily News and is CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering.

Every time I drive over the General Pulaski Highway in New Jersey I am reminded of the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis.  Both bridges were designed as “fracture critical,” meaning that if just one beam fails, the bridge collapses – there is no redundancy.  If there were just two bridges designed that way it would be no problem to monitor them.  But, as pointed out in a new book, Too Big to Fall by Barry LePatner, there are tens of thousands of fracture critical bridges in the United States and nearly 8,000 are structurally deficient, which is a recipe for disaster.

Using the tragic collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis as a starting point, Barry LePatner lays out how our nation has neglected a majority of our 6,000 spans. LePatner presents a complete, well-researched story about the nation’s transportation infrastructure. This book is a must read for anyone in engineering, construction, architecture, and planning. Frankly, it is a must read for any American who is concerned about the continuing strength of our economy and our quality of life.

What’s particularly compelling is not just the history of our road and bridge building and maintenance, infrastructure funding, and local decision-making, it is also the story we have yet to write. LePatner presents a thoughtful review of elements, which can create a well functioning, financially (and structurally) solid, efficient national transportation system.

LePatner rightly raises the fire alarm for the nation’s spans with nearly a quarter of the nation’s 600,000 determined to be structurally deficient or “functionally obsolete.” Even scarier, as I pointed out in my opening, are the 7,980 “fracture critical” bridges that are structurally deficient.

Getting the money is the most pressing concern (although in the long term, if we spend wisely on capital reconstruction and properly maintain our bridges, total costs will go down). You’ve heard about the $2+ trillion price tag necessary to repair and maintain the nation’s infrastructure.

Freedom Fees, which I’ve written about in a previous No. 13 Line column, are one part of the mix. We need to dust off and polish up some familiar strategies for raising transportation funds. These include the gas tax, which should be raised and pegged to inflation, and tolls, which should be increased where necessary and expanded to cover more essential, yet underfunded roads, bridges, and tunnels.

Less familiar strategies include a charge for vehicle miles travelled, emissions charges, and congestion pricing, which are necessary to expand funding options and also reduce congestion.

Once we get the money, how do we get a bigger bang for our buck? Too Big to Fall delves deeper than Freedom Fees and tackles the problems in our process for distributing funds on a state and federal level, and our delivery method for implementing maintenance and repairs.

LePatner points out that we need more accountability on the part of our states to use federal transportation funds a) for transportation projects and b) in a manner that provides the most long-term benefits of our money.

In 2004, the Government Accountability Office found that the rate of increase in federal investment in highways was nearly twice the rate of increase in state and local investment in highways. That means that after the passage of ISTEA in 1991, states were moving their dollars for highways to fund other things and substituting federal dollars into their highway budgets.

After the passage of TEA-21 in 1998, the rate of state and local investment had actually decreased, indicating that even more local funds were being shifted out of highway budgets. That may look good on the books, but it doesn’t fix our bridges and fill our potholes.

Several strategies exist to increase accountability, which need to be given thoughtful consideration. A National Infrastructure Bank can provide investment opportunities to projects which fill the most pressing gaps in our transportation network and which give the best return on investments.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are another way help close transportation budgets and oftentimes obtain better efficiency and maintenance quality out of our roads and bridges. The Federal Highway Administration has reported that PPP’s can save anywhere from 6% to 40% of the cost of construction, and limit the potential for cost overruns.  And PPPs can keep maintenance costs in check as well, by incorporating life-cycle costs of projects.  A survey of PPP’s in the UK concluded that private partners build higher quality facilities in order to reduce the long-term costs of operating and maintaining those facilities.

As you can read in the book, I’ve had my own experiences with the hard choices that engineers must make in the face of inadequate funding for maintenance and repair. We need to stop digging this hole that we are in and free engineers and planners from having to consider the price and the politics in making crucial repairs and regular maintenance.

LePatner does a great job of describing the dysfunctional financing maze which engineers are confronted with, which lead to faster deterioration and higher life cycle costs of our roads and bridges. They stem from the lack of accountability of federal funding requirements, outdated bridge inspection and reporting, and the management structure of our cities and DOTs which continually discount the professional opinion of our road and bridge engineers.

Anyone who cares about the health or our cities, states, and country should become familiar with the situation we’ve put ourselves in. As LePatner points out, there is no silver bullet. But we can be smart about the choices we make.

Morgan Whitcomb contributed to this article.

Samuel I. Schwartz is a former New York City Traffic Commissioner who currently writes the Gridlock Sam column for the New York Daily News and is CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering.

How can we at once reduce our dependency on foreign oil, improve our environment, reduce the need to be at war in the Middle East, improve relations with the rest of the world and demonstrate our patriotism? The answer is simple: Freedom Fees.

Freedom Fees are what I propose we call those things that raise revenue for our world class (but poorly maintained) transportation system in the United States, including gas taxes, road tolls, emissions, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) charges and all the other methods we employ or may employ to pay for our country’s roads, bridges, tunnels, highways, transit and aviation infrastructure. It must also be a “lock-box” system which guarantees the fees would be used for transportation only and there be no concomitant reduction in existing government contributions to transportation. The fees must be free from the grips of the bean counters, who would play three-card Monte with the funds and treat it just like a tax!

This isn’t simply semantics. This is about taking a politically toxic concept like a gas tax hike and fundamentally changing the way we think about it. A gas tax has the negative connotation of a burden, whereas a Freedom Fee reflects the true reward for the price we pay. Freedom from foreign oil. Freedom from air pollution. Freedom from increased carbon footprints and global warming. Freedom from crumbling highways and bridges. Freedom from traffic jams.

The phrase Freedom Fees may sound a lot like Freedom fries, and that’s the point. Remember Freedom fries? That’s what Americans started calling French fries as a symbol of their anti-French sentiment when France frowned on the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Others led campaigns to boycott French goods. It was considered patriotic to stop selling French wines and change your restaurant menu to include Freedom fries. Even Congress changed the cafeteria menu to include the renamed fries. It was all a relatively symbolic sacrifice compared to the gas rationing during World War II, but the idea is the same: we all need to sacrifice for a better future for our country.

What we need today is that same political and patriotic will to do what a number of congressionally mandated bipartisan panels have concluded: raise the gas tax now and develop a long-term financing plan for the future. Supporting a higher gas tax, or imposing Freedom Fees, I would argue, is as patriotic as eating Freedom fries or gas rationing. An increase in the gas tax would not only generate the financial resources we need to keep our transportation infrastructure globally competitive, but would also encourage us all to consume less fuel, making us less dependent on the oil-rich Middle East countries that threaten our interests, as well as petroleum-rich dictators like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Freedom Fees could pay for the development of alternative energy technology, also further weaning us off our oil dependency. In the words of George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union address, “America is addicted to oil.” It’s about time we kicked the habit.

The refusal by Congress to raise the federal gas tax, which has been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993 (the last two increases were under President Bill Clinton in 1993, by 4.3 cents per gallon; and by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, raising it 5 cents per gallon) despite proposals from both political parties to do so. The National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission has recommended a gas tax increase of 10 cents per gallon and 15 cents per gallon for diesel, both indexed to inflation. Late last year, President Barack Obama’s bipartisan National Debt Commission also recommended a gradual 15-cents-per-gallon increase in the federal gas tax. Also, Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio) last year proposed a 25-cent per gallon tax increase – one cent per month for 25 months – suggesting that 10 cents of the tax hike should go toward debt reduction and the rest should fund transportation infrastructure. There has also been a call in the states to raise state gas taxes. In New Jersey, the Sierra Club, New Jersey Future, and other groups have urged Gov. Chris Christie to raise the gas tax. In Arkansas, a blue ribbon commission on highway finance recommended indexing gas and diesel taxes.

During the last fuel crises in 1979 President Jimmy Carter recommended a 50-cents-per-gallon gas tax to get us weaned off foreign oil and get more efficient in transportation. The nation didn’t take his advice. Imagine if we did.

We need to catch up to developed nations around the world. Currently in the UK, the petrol tax is about $3.50 USD per gallon, not including a 20% VAT on top of that. With today’s price of fuel, these taxes make up about 175% of the cost of fuel. Not only does the UK peg fuel taxes to inflation, they have, since 1993 enacted a Fuel Price Escalator, where the price of fuel rises ahead of inflation. There are also tax reductions for trains, buses (local and long distance) and for some construction and farm vehicles. The average tax on gas in Canada is about $1.20 (USD) per gallon, which makes up almost 1/3 of the cost of gas. We shouldn’t be afraid to increase our own much lower gas tax.

Freedom Fees could include much more than gas consumption fees. They can include a package of tools used to generate funding for transportation infrastructure and to reduce fuel consumption. A vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) charge could be one type of Freedom Fee. This much-debated tax method would harness the power of modern technology by using onboard tracking devices such as a Global Positioning System (GPS) to count the miles a car is driven. Other Freedom Fees could be in the form of gas emissions charges, expanded road tolling or congestion pricing. There is also pay-as-you-drive insurance, an idea proposed recently in New York that would charge drivers insurance based on the number of miles they drive. A Brookings Institution report found that if drivers paid for insurance by the mile, total driving would drop by eight percent.

It is a critical time for the nation’s transportation infrastructure. With a change in balance of power in the newly elected Republican Congress, transportation experts are predicting a slashing of the federal transportation program. High-speed rail projects, livability programs, uncommitted stimulus funds and executive earmarks could be on the chopping block. The proposed National Infrastructure Bank won’t likely be getting approval by this new Congress.

Freedom Fees are something the new Congress can embrace. It’s a fiscally sound, politically palatable, patriotic idea that many Republicans and Democrats can support. Freedom fees are as American as baseball and apple pie.

Ana Maria Lima and Morgan Whitcomb contributed to this article.

Samuel I. Schwartz is a former New York City Traffic Commissioner who currently writes the Gridlock Sam column for the New York Daily News and is CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering.

When I travel to East Asia these days as a civil engineer I feel pangs of envy. I find myself at a new gleaming airport or I ride a high-speed train that makes our Amtrak look like the Pony Express. The countries I visit seem light years ahead of the United States when it comes to transportation infrastructure. Clearly I’m not alone in my sentiment. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote that, “We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. China is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification. They save, invest and build. We spend, borrow and patch.” I couldn’t agree more.

The rapid expansion of China’s roadways, railways, metro systems and bridges over the past two decades has astounded and inspired me. Yet it is a constant reminder how behind the times the United States has fallen with our crumbling bridges, train delays, and poorly maintained roads and highways.

Even in the most rural parts of China you can see the bulldozers crawling the hillsides as new development springs up. The country has plans to build some 80 mass transit rail lines over the next five years, and is planning more new airports in addition to the multi-billion dollar airport they built for the Olympic games. The Beijing Airport looks like something straight out of a science fiction movie with shiny marble arched glass ceilings. The new bus terminal in Kunming is “hyper-modern” with light-up displays above commuter bus-loading areas that give riders real-time information about where each bus is going. Even some of the smallest towns have modest, yet adequate bus terminals, with ticketing, waiting areas and restrooms.

When it comes to alternative transportation, China has been a bicycle culture for a long time, with wide bicycle lanes and facilities. While on my recent trip to China I was disappointed to see how they have squeezed the bike lanes to make more room for cars, the country is still way ahead of us in this mode of transport.

It’s not just China that’s speeding ahead of us when it comes to transportation infrastructure. The Swiss are building the longest tunnel in the world at 35.4 miles. Scheduled to open in 2017, the $10 billion Gotthard Base Tunnel system will run high-speed passenger and freight trains through the Alps. Swiss voters each paid $1,300 for the tunnel. Could you imagine that happening here in the U.S.? In the UK, bridge systems are being retro-fitted with dehumidification systems to prevent corrosion, a prevention strategy to help decrease the need to replace bridges and rehabilitate them – a technology that was first used on the Kaikyo Bridge in Japan.

It was in Japan, in fact, about two decades ago, where I learned an important lesson about how impeccably they maintained their bridges and how little tolerance they had for anything less than perfection. In Tokyo I acted like a typical Westerner, which translated into an embarrassing faux pas. After inspecting about ten bridges, I was very impressed with how superbly maintained the structures were and thought I’d make that point after seeing a tiny smudge of graffiti on one bridge. I casually offered my version of a high complement by noting, “This is the first graffiti I’ve seen in Japan,” to a high-level Japanese official. Much to my surprise, and consternation, the bridge engineer was reassigned. I felt terrible, but the story has a point: The Japanese treat their bridges like an obsessive compulsive would take care of her living room.

It’s time that we started to own up to the fact that other countries are passing us by. We need to swallow our pride and take their approach. We can learn from their ingenuity. We don’t need to reinvent things. We can emulate them as they did us. If we look carefully we find it was the Asians and Europeans who learned from the U.S. post World War II. We don’t need a war to study their successes with high-speed rail, livable streets and intelligent infrastructure. I’m convinced we can do it better.

Let’s face it, we’ve lost our competitive edge, our “mojo.” Let’s get it back. One way to do this is to increase spending on infrastructure. America only spends about two percent of its GDP per year on infrastructure investment, while China spends between 9 and 12 percent, and Europe spends about 4-5 percent. India is set to double its infrastructure spending next year. Here in the United States, it would take a shift of increasing our expenditures by just one or two percent of our GDP to see dramatic results. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has reported we need a five-year investment of $2.2 trillion in our nation’s infrastructure. That may sound like a lot of money but it’s not much more than the government spent in the past couple of years to bail out the banks and stimulate the economy. (By the way, only 17% of the stimulus plan was ever designated for infrastructure.) Imagine what our country would look like in a decade if we could put those kinds of dollars into our roads, bridges, rails and mass transit systems.

If Congress really wants to take our infrastructure seriously and stop this country from falling behind in the global market, it will support the bi-partisan and President Obama-supported proposal for a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would invest more than $50 billion in transportation infrastructure, including high-speed rail, highway improvements, and mass transit to be leveraged into $500 billion or more. If we fail to act, we will continue to lose investors to the rest of the world. Right now, public-private partnerships of non-American firms are taking the lead in transportation infrastructure spending. The U.S. private market needs more incentives to participate. With their partnership, we can hope to achieve the bipartisan plan’s goals to rebuild 150,000 miles of road, lay and maintain 4,000 miles of rail track, restore 150 miles of airport runways, and improve air-traffic control technologies.

I am very proud of our country and what it stands for. I just want to make sure it has solid and gleaming girders to stand on.

Ana Maria Lima and Morgan Whitcomb contributed to this article.

Samuel I. Schwartz is a former New York City Traffic Commissioner who currently writes the Gridlock Sam column for the New York Daily News and is CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering.

The bad news for infrastructure continues as the Associated Press reports that while Americans want the nation’s aging highways, bridges, and rail systems improved, they really don’t want to pay for it. And local officials across the country have noticed with plans to shut down or postpone huge public works projects (especially with the Nov. 2 election looming).

And with the World Series just a win away for the Texas Rangers and San Francisco Giants, a report from Bloomberg takes note that while professional sports stadiums may be green in terms having a bus stop, most are turning their backs on pricey solar panels.

It’s so easy to get on the bandwagon: lower my taxes, smaller and more efficient government, don’t touch my liberties, throw the bums out, etc. But what if that bandwagon has to cross a bridge? And what if that bridge hasn’t been maintained in years?

The Tea Party has captured the imagination and spirit of many Americans and may very well turn that into a powerful voting bloc come November. But, that bloc may not have a leg or girder to stand on as our nation’s infrastructure continues to crumble. I am very concerned, from what I have read so far, and what has been ignored to date, that the Tea Party movement will throw our public works overboard with the tea.

The Tea Party stands for smaller government. I’m not going to argue with that. There are things that the government can’t repair all by itself. We can argue about laissez faire vs. public intervention when it comes to poverty or jobs. But, there isn’t much arguing that not painting a bridge leads to corrosion. Or that 100-year-old water mains need attention to protect them from leaks or worse – collapses. Infrastructure is not going to repair itself without government leadership and intervention (which to date has gotten only a D from the American Society of Civil Engineers). And the responsibility is on all politicians regardless of party affiliation. A broken bridge isn’t going to distinguish between a Democrat, Republican or Tea Party candidate driving by when it crumbles. As Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, a Republican, was quoted recently in the New York Times: “The infrastructure needs are real. We can argue about how to pay for it.”

A fiscal conservative must look at the short and long-term costs. Study after study, including Fragile Foundations commissioned by President Ronald Reagan’s National Council on Public Works Improvement, found that deferring maintenance led to much higher costs down the road (if there were a road left). It’s like your car: if you don’t get the oil changed regularly, the bearings will eventually seize and the engine will fail, forcing you to buy a new car – a much pricier option that could have been avoided. Similarly, allowing a bridge to corrode to a danger point and then building a new bridge is the far more expensive route. I’m worried that discussions about transportation issues are essentially absent from the Tea Party rhetoric. There is a startling lack of specific solutions. As New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently wrote, the Tea Party movement is “…all steam and no engine. It has no plan to restore America to greatness.” Tea Party candidates like to speak in one-liners, outdoing opponents with promises reminiscent of “no new taxes” on their lips. That could be dangerous if they win and voters hold their feet to the fire.

Public works industries and all concerned citizens need to start engaging Tea Party candidates like Rand Paul, the Kentucky Senate nominee, Christine O’Donnell, the Delaware Senate nominee, and Tea Party cheerleader and GOP darling Sarah Palin. We need to start a conversation with the Party about the critical importance infrastructure plays in our nation’s economic future, and how important funding is. Why? Because if elected, Tea Party candidates will influence the actions of the next Congress, which will most likely take up the long overdue reauthorization of the multi-year surface transportation law. The law, known as the 2005 Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETY-LU), is the current authorization of federal transportation policy that expired in 2009. Congress has been dragging its feet on the bill. Looking for ways to fund the measure, Democrat Rep. James Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has wisely proposed an increase in the federal gas tax, which hasn’t been raised since 1993. Maybe he should stop calling it a tax right now, and start calling it a user fee, because Tea Partiers would not vote for a hundredth of a penny increase in the gas tax. We have to get them over the idea that no tax is a good tax, or tweak the semantics.

When it comes to our nation’s transportation infrastructure, we are in deep trouble. In his new book, Too Big to Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward, author Barry B. LePatner makes a compelling case for funding to fix our roads and bridges that every candidate should read. He examined the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis in August 2007, which killed 13 people and injured 145 others, showing us that the tragedy could have been prevented. He also warned that it could happen again at thousands of bridges across the country, with more than 50 percent of our bridges past their intended lifespan. In a recent conversation, LePatner posed a question for Tea Party candidates, turning an issue too often seen as one about bricks and mortar into a question about life and death. He asked, “If I tell you that your children, your grandchildren, and your nieces and nephews are going over bridges that are `structurally deficient’ and `fracture-critical,’ which any engineer will say can go down at any minute, does that mean anyone can tell you you’re safe? Absolutely not. Are you telling me you don’t care because you are trying to shrink the budget?”

If the Tea Party wants smaller government, they may turn to corporate America to pay for our roads, bridges and rails. The concept of privatizing transportation infrastructure was recently touted by Clifford Winston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He wrote that privatizing infrastructure would “help cut the federal deficit by raising revenues and reducing expenditures.” But the government should be wary of taking this route, or it could wind up like the driver who blindly follows his GPS onto a recently closed bridge and ends up in deep water. As my friend Joe Giglio, a Professor at Northeastern University, who has written extensively about transportation issues, and served as the chair of Reagan’s National Council on Public Works Improvement, puts it, “Privatization is as American as handguns or bourbon and branch water.” But don’t be fooled, he adds. The big argument for public-private partnerships is that private corporations have “skin in the game,” while in fact many companies are as shortsighted about revenue as the politicians are. “What is a CEO concerned with? Long-term profitability or short-term?” Dr. Giglio asks. Too often, it’s the latter goal, and that’s not good for the public when we’re talking about transportation infrastructure that’s supposed to last lifetimes. That’s not to say there aren’t times when privatization won’t work. When it comes to projects involving new technology and financial risk, let the private sector do it, Dr. Giglio said. But we must be careful about selling off our highways and roads, lest willy-nilly tolling schemes lead to unintended traffic congestion. If Americans are grumbling now about a 5 cent/gallon gas tax increase, just wait until privately managed companies start charging market rates for using roads. The year 2010 will be known as “the good old days.”

If we can’t appeal to the Tea Party’s good sense, then perhaps we could try appealing to their sense of history. This is a party, after all, whose main reference point is the Boston Tea Party. Craig Ruyle, an engineer at NYS Department of Transportation who is a history buff, points out that the conservative parties actually have a history of supporting funds for transportation infrastructure. In the pre-Civil war era, he notes, it was the Democrats who were against anything they considered “internal improvements” like building railroads and canals, claiming it was unconstitutional. It was the Whigs who pushed to invest in transportation. Why? It was all about commerce. Merchants had to move goods and prosperous commerce was vitally important for the country’s future. President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, authorized the Transcontinental Railroad. And don’t forget, a century later, it was Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower who fathered the Interstate Highway System. Fellow GOP President Ronald Reagan later imposed a five-cent-per-gallon gas tax hike for the Highway Trust Fund.

The Tea Party candidates have adopted the historic “Don’t Tread on Me,” Gadsden flag for their cause, a bright yellow flag with the coiled timber rattlesnake poised for attack. But let’s remember that this flag has been known as a symbol of patriotism as well as conflict with government. Hopefully we can harness the Tea Party’s patriotism without losing support for those things that make this country so great, including a world-class transportation system.

Samuel I. Schwartz is a former New York City Traffic Commissioner who currently writes the Gridlock Sam column for the New York Daily News and is CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering.

For too many years cities have been paying for transportation projects with their hands out to Congress, lobbying for dollars even as funding bills grow moss stuck in the sluggish legislative process. It’s time to stop all the bellyaching! There are good reasons to push for funding, but sitting back and waiting for the federal government to cough up the money isn’t going to fix infrastructure very quickly. There is however, an excellent model of innovative transportation funding that we can all learn from if we look to our friends on the West Coast, where Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is championing the 30/10 Initiative. His funding plan to extend light rail, subway and rapid bus lines promises to change the face of his city and the rest of Los Angeles County. With the support of Congress, the initiative has the potential to be one of the most transformative transportation programs for cities since President Dwight D. Eisenhower fathered the Interstate Highway System.

The 30/10 Initiative is essentially a plan to use funds raised through a half-cent sales tax increase to secure federal loans for transit projects to pay for 30 years worth of construction in 10 years (hence 30/10). The first part of the plan, known as Measure R, required a public referendum whereby a two-thirds majority vote was needed to levy the tax. Mayor Villaraigosa launched a herculean lobbying effort convincing 68% of the voters to pass the tax and improve the Los Angeles transportation network. The mayor was successful because he pushed for a countywide plan, rather than one focused his city or a particular county neighborhood. The vote showed that Angelenos, tired of bottlenecks, recognize the need for transportation improvements and are willing to tax themselves for transit, not roads, to get there – no small feat in the region known as the car capital of the world. But the projected 30-year construction plan for the transit projects wasn’t fast enough for the mayor, so he proposed the 30/10 Initiative to leverage the tax revenues in order to build a dozen critical transit projects in a decade rather than the projected 30 years.

This bold initiative promises to revitalize Los Angeles, create jobs, reduce greenhouse gases and traffic congestion, and save money. The plan has won over important supporters including California’s United States Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. During the mayor’s campaign for Measure R, he put together a broad coalition of business, labor and environmental leaders, a testament to the initiative’s broad appeal. Officials estimate some 166,000 jobs will be created by the projects, a promising lifeline in this sour economy. By speeding up the construction schedule, officials have estimated they can cut the construction costs to $14 billion from $18 billion, and the savings could be higher. With construction work at a snail’s pace right now, bids are coming in at 5 percent to 25 percent below original estimates, according to transportation officials. And when it comes to the environment, the project’s annual impact on traffic and pollution could be dramatic according to official estimates: 77 million more transit passengers; 521,000 fewer pounds of mobile source pollution emissions; 10.3 million fewer gallons of gasoline used and 191 million fewer vehicle miles traveled.

To properly appreciate Mayor Villaraigosa’s vision calls for a trip back in time. His city, now famous for its highways and car culture, was once considered a transit Mecca. In the early half of the 1900s, the Pacific Electric Railway’s “Red Car” system of streetcars, light rail and buses connected Los Angeles to Southern California cities in Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties. The system inspired some memorable dialogue in the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” when a child asked the character Eddie Valiant “Hey, mister. Ain’t you got a car?” to which Valiant replies: “Who needs a car in L.A.? We have the best public transportation system in the world.” That famous system, however, was slowly dismantled, and tracks paved over to make way for superhighways where people could travel faster in their cars, until there were so many vehicles, the city became infamous for its traffic jams.

Today, some may wax poetic about the Red Cars of yesteryear, but Villaraigosa isn’t exactly lobbying for a journey back to the future. His ideas for transit are rooted in his experiences growing up poor with a single mother and taking public mass transportation, by rail and bus, to get around the city. Later in life, during his three campaigns for mayor, he would crisscross his congested city, becoming even more familiar with the transportation system. He sits on the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which recently posted his comments from a city hall meeting where the mayor, who has three years left in his term, indicated that the 30/10 Initiative could become his legacy. “I’ve got three years left, I’m not going out on a cot here,” the mayor said. “I want to go out on a train.”

Among the dozen projects that would be on the fast track include light rail extensions to Los Angeles International Airport; a long-envisioned subway extension to the city’s Westside providing a high-capacity, high-speed alternative for the 300,000 people who travel to the L.A.’s “second downtown” every day from throughout the county; the Crenshaw Corridor light rail line; a Metro Green Line extension in the South Bay; an Eastside extension of the Metro Gold Line from East Los Angeles; and transit projects serving the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valley.

The mayor has done a terrific job building support for such a creative plan. Now it’s Congress’ turn to come up with a novel way to help fund it. There’s no reason to hesitate. The mayor’s bold plan is a bargain and comes at a time when transportation funds are dwindling due to a reduction in gas tax revenues. Under the mayor’s initiative, the Measure R sales tax would generate $5.8 billion over the next decade, but another $8.8 billion is needed for the total cost of the 12 projects. The mayor wants to use the future sales tax revenue as collateral for low interest loans or long-term bonds, and then repay those debts over the next two decades. One way Congress can step up is to support a national infrastructure bank to make federally funded low-cost loans available to local governments for transportation projects. President Barack Obama recently revived the idea as part of his plan to spend $50 billion next year on highways, airport and railway construction. What better project to invest in than the 30/10 Initiative? This is a county that is trying to help itself! Another way Congress can step up, a potentially faster way considering the opposition that the infrastructure bank idea is up against, is to support the use of Build America bonds for Los Angeles’ transit projects. These special municipal bonds, created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, provide a federal subsidy of 35% of the interest paid on the bonds to the issuer.

The 30/10 Initiative may be a gamble, but it’s one worth taking. Los Angeles has the opportunity to create a new model of transit funding as our country careens toward a crossroads on transportation. Metro areas that are car-centric risk eventually choking themselves to death, both economically and environmentally. As Christopher Steiner discussed in his new book, “$20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better,” gas prices are bound to rise dramatically based on a gas supply and demand relationship where demand is directly tied to the size of the middle class. The world’s middle class is expected to quadruple by 2020 largely due to China’s emergence into the consumption world. Gas prices may quadruple themselves to $20/gallon by 2020. Cities that have modern mass transportation transit infrastructure in place are sure to have a competitive edge in the future. We applaud Mayor Villaraigosa’s efforts to make sure Los Angeles is among them and to track the way for a new model to get there.

In this week’s news of, ‘That sounds crazy… are you sure that’s a good idea, Canada? What the hell, do it anyways,’ CTV reports, “A 3-D image of a young girl chasing a ball into the street is the newest effort to prevent pedestrian accidents in West Vancouver.”

You might be thinking, ‘3-D — sounds bad-ass.’ And so was I.

CTV even went as far to title the article, “Hologram of girl warns B.C. drivers to be alert.”

Hologram. No way. Awesome.

However, the following line gave me some pause, “The $15,000 illusion, paid for by Preventable.ca, will be installed for a week…”

Maybe 15,000 in future space credits can fund a hologram for a week, but $15,000 — even Canadian dollars — is not putting a hologram on a West Vancouver street for even 30 seconds. Nice try CTV.

Take a look at the supposed hologram (credit: Handout/Preventable.ca)

Apparently, the ‘hologram’ is just a painting of a child on pavement. It will appear to be three dimensional when cars get within 100 feet (with the intention of simulating a potential pedestrian accident scenario).

In all seriousness, and according to Preventable.ca, most child pedestrian-related injuries occur in the fall at the start of each school year. Every week, the group says, two children die from being hit by a car in British Columbia alone.

Still, the campaign is just another example of that good old fashioned Canadian out of the box (extreme) thinking. For instance, a few years ago a similar Canadian group, Prevent-it.ca, produced the following public service announcements for on the job safety. A tradition continued of scaring you safe.

This column is told in the first person of the late Dwight D. Eisenhower, our 34th president, as a viewpoint proposed by Sam Schwartz.

As the father of the Interstate Highway System, I was recently asked to look down on Earth from up here in Heaven and offer my opinion on the state of things. I am delighted to see that the system

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, father of the Interstate Highway System, coming to you in Technicolor

I fathered more than 50 years ago is so beloved by the American public. Look at all those cars and trucks zipping along ribbons of roads, 45,000 miles of limited access highways crisscrossing the continental United States, the largest infrastructure program in the world! At the same time, I am shocked and dismayed that many of our roads and bridges are in such a deplorable state of disrepair. I am deeply concerned about how the country is not adequately funding the system, and I am worried that the country is not planning and modernizing for the future.

Some things have changed for sure. Tail fins are out and hybrids are in. I never could have imagined the lifeline that the highway system has become, handling about a quarter of all vehicle travel in the country and roughly half of all large commercial truck travel. And it’s about twice as safe to drive on the federal highways than other roads. Nor could I have foreseen the highway system’s impact on the American psyche. Look at all the songs it inspired, from “Highway to Hell,” to “Midnight Highway.” The nation has come a long way since I was president. Look who’s in the White House now! It’s too bad my old VP Nixon isn’t up here with me to look down on this.

The Interstate Highway System exceeded my expectations, yet at the same time, I am very disappointed. Highways and bridges have been neglected. Some chunks have been sold to private entities. Other parts slice through urban areas; I never really meant for my highways to destroy center cities. Sadly, the system simply isn’t paying for itself as intended. The congestion is troubling. Forty-one percent of the nation’s urban Interstate Highways and ten percent of the nation’s rural Interstates are considered congested, according to TRIP, a nonprofit national transportation research organization. All of these vehicles are consuming alarming amounts of fuel and spewing harmful pollutants into our environment. The nation’s dependency on oil puts all Americans at risk in the long run.

The situation calls for imagination and modernization. I would like to offer my humble advice on how to make the federal highway system world-class once again. We need to turn this gridlock mess into something better, because our national security and commerce depends on it.

First fix the roads. It is clear that the increase in congestion and neglected maintenance has taken its toll on the decades-old bridges and roads. Four percent of Interstate Highways are in poor condition and an additional 13 percent are in mediocre condition, according to TRIP. More than 2,000 bridges on the Interstate Highways are in need of an overhaul, according to Frank Moretti, TRIP’s director of research. Deficient roads and bridges cause traffic jams and cause accidents, or worse. In 2007, the I-35 bridge collapse took 13 lives and injured 145. Substandard roads cost time, money and diminish our quality of life. 1955, when I was championing the creation of the Interstate Highway System, the poor road conditions cost American drivers a total of roughly $39 billion a year in today’s dollars. It’s sad to discover that not much has changed. In fact, the situation is worse. Today, the deplorable roads cost drivers $67 billion each year, according to Road Work Ahead! I believed at the time, that the Interstate Highway System would work to relieve Americans of this financial burden and increase mobility, but it seems like maintaining the roads I championed hasn’t been a priority since I left office.

Hey, I know what it’s like to get stuck on the road. In 1919, when I was a lieutenant, I crossed the country from Washington to San Francisco in a military truck convoy. The trip was extremely slow, taking 62 days. We encountered dirt roads, narrow roads, sandy roads, and other practically impassable routes. In a report to Chief Motor Transport Corps in November of that year, I wrote: “In western Utah, on the Salt Lake Desert, the road becomes almost impassable to heavy vehicles. From Orr’s Ranch, Utah, to Carson City, Nevada, the road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits, and holes.” We had 230 breakdowns and incidents. The trip got me thinking about “good, two-lane highways,” I later wrote in a memoir. Many years later, as Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, I experienced firsthand Germany’s autobahn network of superhighways. Even after heavy bombing of German roads during World War II, military convoys managed to get through because of the design of the autobahn. These two experiences had a great influence on me, and with the backdrop of the Cold War, I urged Congress to enact the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, creating the Interstate System, which is today called the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. I once said, “This was one of the things that I felt deeply about, and I made a personal and absolute decision to see that the nation would benefit by it.”

Here is some more advice: fix the funding. The country should not be going into debt to pay for the Interstate Highway System, and it should not be building new roads before it fixes what’s broken. As a fiscally conservative, socially liberal Republican president, I knew that a federal highway program should be able to pay for itself, and I also recognized the high costs of maintaining this road infrastructure. In a message to Congress in 1955, I said, “A sound Federal Highway program, I believe, can and should stand on its own feet, with highway users providing the total dollars necessary for improvement and new construction. Financing of interstate and Federal-aid systems should be based on the planned use of increasing revenues from present gas and diesel oil taxes, augmented in limited instances with tolls.” I supported the use of the Highway Trust Fund, not the General Fund, to maintain roads.

Today the Highway Trust Fund pays states 90% of the cost of building and maintaining the Interstate Highway System and is funded by primarily the Federal fuel tax and also by taxes on vehicle and tire sales, diesel etc. In 2008, the Highway Trust Fund had depleted and Congress dipped into the General Fund to pay states for highways. I do not support this. The government needs to raise the fuel tax immediately and peg it to inflation. The federal fuel tax has not been raised since 1993 (currently at 18.4 cents/gallon). Also, adopt fix-it-first policies. Tie these policies to funding requirements for the states, and provide more oversight to close existing loopholes in “repair and maintenance” funds that are often used to expand roads. If you are feeling really progressive, create a tax based on VMT (vehicle miles traveled). This way, drivers are taxed regardless of how efficient their car is. Electric cars may reduce oil dependency but do nothing to relieve congestion. Until a VMT tax system is created, road tolling should be expanded wherever necessary.

My final advice is to modernize. When I took my cross-country road trip in 1919, the railroad reigned supreme. But at the time I was looking ahead. As a military man, I knew that what was good for commerce was good for the military, and good roads were associated with great empires. I also thought every family should own a car, and I thought this would liberate Americans and give them earning power and better quality of life. But that was at a time when fuel was more plentiful and affordable and trains didn’t go as fast as they do today. Today our dependence on oil will diminish our quality of life in the long run, both environmentally and economically, and, as many politicians have recently pointed out, it is a matter of national security. I always said that the highways couldn’t be widened forever and that congestion would choke our productivity and mobility. Now, our leaders need to look into their future, and the future is high-speed rail.

Consider this: one passenger train has the potential to remove 500-600 cars from the road and one freight train can eliminate up to 200 trucks. By decongesting the highway system, we can transport goods more easily by both rail and truck. A national rail network can also aid the military transport of freight and people, in the event of a national defense crisis or natural disaster. Also, becoming less dependent on oil will go a long way to lessen our dependence on foreign nations for our mobility and livelihood. One way to achieve a national rail network is to utilize the existing right-of-way used for the highway system. The land is a national asset that should not be squandered.

My fellow Americans, after more than a half of a century in the service of your country, the Interstate Highway System needs your help. I urge Congress to create a bipartisan panel to study the system and come up with innovative, responsible solutions for the funding, maintenance and modernization of this national asset. If we realize that we shouldn’t spend what we don’t have, we could get support for a much-needed gas tax increase in the near term. Look to the future. Whether it’s roads, rail or runways, remember that a world-class transportation system is the key to great commerce and national security.

A note of thanks to Dan McNichol, author of The Roads That Built America.He was an invaluable source in researching this column, and my inspiration for the connection to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1919 trek came after I heard Mr. McNichol speak.

How can transportation support rural livability? This is one of the most vexing questions facing the transportation industry in the 21st Century. But before we can answer that question, we first must answer the fundamental question: what is rural livability? Unlike urban or suburban living, each of which give rise to instant and consistent images within us, rural life is hard to pigeonhole into one set typology.

Is rural life typified by a family farm in Nebraska, Iowa or Mississippi?

Is it living on an unpaved road in an isolated part of northern Vermont?

Is it living in a small village on the mid-coast of Maine, the bayous of Louisiana, the lakes region of Minnesota or the foothills of the Sierras?

Is it living in one of the 19 Native American Pueblos of New Mexico?

Or is shopping, visiting or even living in one of the many great small cities that support rural living, such as Santa Fe, Charlottesville, or Portland, Maine?

The reason defining rural livability is such a challenge is that many of the places mentioned above, plus many more, exemplify rural livability. Rural areas function as systems — not as one hierarchical unit like a tree with an anchoring trunk and connecting branches, but more like a forest of trees with overlapping canopies and intertwined roots. In urban areas, the “forest” is denser and easier to perceive as an integrated entity. The connecting “root systems” that make up rural communities spread out over much more space, making it harder to clearly define their boundaries and relationships. But the connections are no less real, and farms depend on villages, which depend on each other, which depend on small cities, which depend on farms, which depend on tourism, which depend on local business.

Everyone knows what a city or a suburban town looks like, but rural life resists quick stereotyping. Compounding this is that in rural America, it is far more necessary for life to adapt to the local environment and realities: how families deal with water for instance, is very different in the high desert of New Mexico versus the verdant hills of northern Vermont. In cities and in suburbia, the economics of large scale development allow us to overpower nature, bring water into cities, reshape mountains and watercourses, bring all ranges of food into our homes at all seasons. In rural America, the definition of community is much more closely tied to the confines of the landscape, and folks more closely embrace local realities.

So is it any wonder that transportation experts are struggling to decide how we will support rural livability? If you can’t define it, how can we support it? Furthermore, since rural living

Phoenix, 1885 || Image: Gary Toth

encompasses a wide range of formats, our industry’s tried and true “one size fits all” project driven approach of building more roadway capacity just doesn’t fit into rural America — not all of it anyway. And we are just beginning to accept that the “one size fits all” formula applied after World War 2 to America’s “urban/suburban” areas produced unintended consequences and may not be sustainable in the long run. After all, much of what now comprises metropolitan Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver and other major metro areas was considered rural just 50 years ago.

In the midst of this vacuum, officials representing “rural” states are pushing back on the Obama Administration’s Livability program. They fear that “Livable Transportation” applies only to urban areas which means no more funding for transportation in their districts and states. This fear is understandable, since most of the solutions that have been developed to adjust 21st Century transportation involve de-emphasizing auto travel and fostering walkability and transit. Doesn’t that mean no more roads for Kansas, Iowa, Alabama and South Dakota?

In a word: NO! Or at least it shouldn’t.

But, it also doesn’t automatically mean YES. If by “yes” we are continuing to assume that building more highways is the only transportation response for supporting rural areas. In the 21st Century, rural America is presented with an opportunity that was not available to transportation and community planners of the 1950s, 60s and 70s: a body of knowledge from which to draw lessons learned — both good and bad — about where our 20th century approaches worked and where they didn’t, and the unintended and undesirable consequences can be avoided in the future.

One of the biggest lessons that we learned was this: if transportation and land use are planned separately, the high speed mobility fostered by major roadway expansions will lead to auto oriented community development with remarkably consistent metrics:

-High consumption of open land and rural landscapes
-Cookie cutter development which bears no resemblance to existing towns, farmsteads, geography or natural assets
-Separated land uses, which make transit or walking all but impossible
-Loss of the sense of uniqueness of the existing place
-Loss of the opportunity for everyday socialization that typified rural communities and those that have recently been built for cars (the Project for Public Spaces would describe this as the disappearance of the art of placemaking)
-Congestion, congestion, and more congestion
-High infrastructure costs for new roads, new sewers, schools, new sources of water, etc., caused by the spreading out of development leading to inability to leverage what has already been built

Is that what rural America wants? The photo below shows a scene now all too familiar in rural America, where housing built to satisfy the America dream (for some) destroys the pastoral dream that they were seeking by moving there. It also alters the

American Suburbia || Image: Gary Toth

dream for the original residents. The institutionalization of suburban style subdivisions has not only altered the landscape forever, it has severed the connections between the roots and canopies that made up the rural community “forests.”

Yet instinctively, when well-intentioned rural officials react to the current transportation debate, it is natural for them to push for more roads. Why not? The strategy of building more roads to support quality of life — whether it works or not — has essentially been the only approach that today’s leaders have ever experienced. We have come to believe that transit is too costly and inefficient to be useful in rural areas, brought on by the belief that there have been marvelous consequences to building new roads. Most of these apparent benefits are direct and easily understood during our daily lives: trips to beaches and resort areas become day trips; purchasing a home in the “country” while still commuting to our job was made feasible; travel to shopping centers for diverse and inexpensive goods became available. We were able to eat tomatoes in the North in winter, get fresh seafood every day in the Midwest, and so on. The problem is that we are only just beginning to get the feeling that the costs of these benefits to rural areas has been too high.

So in places like Central Illinois, the legislature mandated that the state Department of Transportation widen US 50, and did so BEFORE a study of the consequences was made. In South Carolina, a study is continuing of a multi billion-dollar extension of Intestate 73 to the low country. In New Mexico, officials successfully obtained a TIGER grant to widen US 491, although staff will privately admit that the traffic numbers don’t support the need for more lanes. This is inevitable, and as the saying goes: “if the only tool you have is a hammer, then all of the world looks like a nail to you.”

There is another saying, often attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Most of the negative consequences — congestion, skyrocketing costs of infrastructure, environmental damage, etc., are experienced indirectly and build slowly over time. People do not clearly link the negative outcomes that we face today to the transportation choices we made 20, 30 and 40 years ago. We ignore the growing body of evidence revealing that a single minded focus on building more highway capacity ultimately destroys the very rural environments that they were supposed to serve.

The good news is that transportation and community planners — rural and urban alike — now have the tools to help us better understand how different transportation and community investment programs can shape the way they will live in the future. What these tools reveal is that with a thoughtful approach to integrating transportation and land use we can have our cake and eat it too: we can have growth and yet maintain the lifestyle that we like. We can take the best of our 20th Century planning and investment practices and adapt them to help us succeed in the 21st Century.

Scenario planning tools, for example, can forecast the consequences of investment in different modes of transportation, investment locations and pricing strategies. When combined with visualization tools, citizens in every region can define in words,

Visualization of how “business as usual” growth would fill the Utah countryside with development || Image: Gary Toth

pictures and numbers what rural livability means to them. They can them shape their transportation investments and strategies and community and land use plans to create the outcome THEY want. They can come to understand that doing the same thing that many of us did in the past will create the same outcomes, and that the biggest threat to rural landscapes and lifestyle is an uncontrolled business as usual approach to growth.

Scenario planning is in its infancy but when it has been deployed, it has been fabulously successful. The statewide “Envision Utah” process conducted public values research, held over 200 workshops and involved more than 20,000 residents in deciding their own future. Since the completion of the vision several years ago, they have continued to partner with the participating communities to monitor and steer the rural and urban growth into patterns that the residents themselves desire.

Similar scenario planning efforts have been successful in regions such as the central Virginia region around Charlottesville; the mid coast of Maine; Sacramento; and in rural northwest New Jersey. In each process common themes emerged: residents viewed sprawl as a threat to their rural communities and came to realize that a single minded focus on expansion of highways as the primary way to use transportation to support rural areas was a major contributing factor to the threat. The best types of transportation investments blended improvements across a spectrum of modes and were strategically located to encourage a more sustainable, livable pattern of regional growth.

So how can transportation agencies and professionals support rural livability? There is no one answer. But the support starts with the industry helping both professionals and elected officials to understand that precanned or preconceived solutions, whether they are roadway expansions or walkable mixed use development, can be equal threats to rural areas if those solutions are not sensitive to the context. And the only way to properly learn the context is to engage residents of rural areas in planning initiatives that help them clearly define their desired future with a full understanding of what that means. Professionals must help communities facilitate their self-determination instead of dictating outcomes. To accomplish this, a number of fundamental principles need to be followed:

-Both politicians and professionals must ween themselves off of their craving for one big solution to “address the problem once and for all.” In rural areas, transportation solutions will need to be packaged in ways that address the communities unique context and desires for the future. These could range from simple wayfinding to building a bus shelter to rightsizing a Main Street to safety improvements to regional roads to even widening highways.

-Solutions MUST be Context Sensitive! For example, widening or realignment might be appropriate in between villages but not within the village core.

-All system expansion, whether it be highway or transit, must be carefully examined to consider its potential to shape future development patterns –- for better or for worse.

All of the above must be grounded in well designed planning processes that engage residents in the region, commuters, businesses, private developers and public agencies.
Placemaking is the key to creating great communities. Design and planning must support the social connections that are essential to the identity and quality of communities of all shapes and sizes.

Politicians and professionals must understand that transportation is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. The end result which we must strive for is a livable, sustainable community that is supported by its transportation system, not defined by it.

So back to the original question: how can transportation support rural livability? While there is no one answer, the above principles must be used to develop a portfolio of transportation solutions sensitive to the unique contexts of rural communities and mindful of how the secondary and cumulative effects of those “solutions” will affect the long term quality of life of the people throughout the region. Sometimes we will need to shrink roads and slow down traffic; sometimes we will need to widen them and speed up traffic. Sometimes we will need to invest in bus service and sometimes we will need to build new rail. One size will not fit all. A single minded mission to channel most of rural transportation investment into bigger and faster highways to create “accessibility” will be as damaging if not more so than building no new roads at all.

ABOUT

GARY TOTH

An experienced transportation professional, having worked over 36 years in transportation, and environmental planning, and the integration of both into land use and community planning. He has been a leader in Context Sensitive Solutions since the beginning of the program in the 1990s. Now retired after a long career at the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT), he is the working Senior Director, Transportation Initiatives with the Project for Public Spaces. As a member of the T4America Coalition, the Sustainable Urban Design Working Group of the American Public Transit Association, the Strategic Highway Research Program’s Technical Coordinating Committee for Capacity, and FHWA’s ITS Advisory Committee, he remains in the middle of transportation reform in America. In 2008, Gary authored the Citizen’s Guide for Better Streets, a stakeholder oriented guidebook intended to share insider transportation tips with citizens. The Citizen’s Guide was used as the basis for a webinar series that he delivered in 2009 in support of the AARP’s Livable Communities program. He is the primary instructor for PPS’s Streets as Places training program, held at PPS in Manhattan, as well on the road. He has also developed a Healthy Living by Design training module for the Center for Disease Control’s Strategic Alliance for Health, as well as a Streets as Places training module for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street program.

HANNAH TWADDELL

A Principal with the Charlottesville, Virginia office of Renaissance Planning Group. With 21 years of public and private sector planning experience, she specializes in helping communities to envision and plan their desired future by coordinating strategies for economic development, environmental preservation, transportation, and urban design. She has developed regional and corridor-level transportation plans for a wide variety of places, ranging from older industrial cities in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey to growing regions, towns, and rural communities in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. At a statewide scale, she recently assisted Virginia with the update of the statewide transportation plan, and designed a web-based toolkit on transportation and land use planning for the Montana DOT.

At the national level, she co-authored a study of best practices in rural land use and transportation planning for the National Academies Transportation Research Board; helped develop a nationally distributed course on land use and transportation planning for the National Highway and Transit Institutes; and assisted AARP with a research project on “complete street” design for older drivers and pedestrians. She speaks regularly at national conferences, provides occasional research and training assistance to the Federal Highway Administration, and serves on the Metropolitan Planning and Policy Committee of the Transportation Research Board.

1940s WPA poster, showing various infrastructure projects that could benefit a community at the time || Unknown, WPA

Tom McNamara, Blueprint America

The Dallas Cowboys left town for a new stadium before the start of last year’s season. And the Dallas suburb of Irving, where the NFL team played from 1971 to 2008, is planning for life after football with a new transit-oriented development. At the same time, a new stadium just down the road has no transit access at all — except for a one-day, temporary rail line to be built for Super Bowl Sunday next year.

TRANSIT: ‘THE TALL T’ IN TEXAS

With a population around 200,000, Irving is a part of the North Texas Metroplex (nearly 7 million live there) — sprawl-land, U.S.A., to an outsider, but a part of the country that also has been building one of the most extensive mass-transit systems outside of the Northeast Corridor. That said, Texas was seen as the big loser when federal (stimulus) high-speed rail dollars were awarded earlier this year. It only received a $4 million grant for planning a project in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (with Irving in-between) as opposed to the hundreds of millions to even billions other states won.

When Texas Stadium is razed April 11, plans are already in place to redevelop the 80-acre site (with an additional 320-acres surrounding) located at the busy intersection of Texas highways 183 and 114, which about 150,000 cars pass through daily.

With new construction a least two years out, a city-contracted developer is looking for tenants in the meantime. And with the site’s proximity to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit light rail line to be installed next year, the area is primed for high density development — with plans for housing and condominium towers, a corporate or medical campus and an entertainment venue already in the works.

TEXAS TEA IS OIL, TOO

Older professional sports stadiums typically were built around highways and parking. Old Texas Stadium is a perfect example. But as the years went on, local mass-transit connected fans not wanting to pay big bucks for parking (or wanting to knock back a few drinks) to their teams. It happened in Irving and it happened in most sports-towns across the country. At the same time, almost all newly built stadiums now incorporate mass-transit, biking and walking (Target Field, the new Minnesota Twins stadium in Minneapolis, for example).

Don’t even ask how much the pizza costs || Arlington, Texas

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, however, built a $1.2 billion, 80,000-seat stadium 15 miles outside of Irving in the Dallas suburb of Arlington — the largest city in the country (population nearly 400,000) without a public transit system. The city recently tried a commuter bus system, but it met with little success. Arlington has even voted against tax increases several times in the last two decades that would have financed some form of public transit. Still, the city did increase the local sales-tax by a half cent in 2005 to pay for the new football stadium. On game day, as a result, area fans can spend hours in traffic and pay upwards of $60 for parking. And that’s just to get to the game — tickets to watch the game are even more expensive.

The lack of transit in the city can be seen in other ways, too. Rail connects Dallas to the east and Fort Worth to the west, but goes out of its way to avoid stopping in Arlington. And when the city hosts the Super Bowl next February, it will divert freight rail lines to set up a one-day rail stop — at a cost of $250,000 for a temporary public transit line, moving a projected 10,000 fans to the big game. The following day: Arlington will again be the largest city in the country without a public transit system.