KCET –- With the one-year mark of President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan approaching last month, the White House selected 13 passenger rail corridors in 31 states to receive funding. High-speed rail projects in Florida, Illinois and California were the big winners.

KCET public television in Southern California — as a part of Blueprint America — reports on California’s plans to build a high speed rail system connecting major metropolitan areas in the Golden State. On one side, supporters say it will reduce gridlock (on the road and at the airport) and change travel in the state by moving commuters between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 2 hours and 40 minutes. On the other side, detractors, increasingly worried about cost (to the state and riders), say the project is on track to build a very big and very fast white elephant.

KCET — No longer is the argument for investment in renewable energy just about climate change. As America’s economy is in rescission, renewable energy could create a boom in good paying jobs — ‘green jobs’. KCET public television in California — as a part of Blueprint America — reports how some untypical students at an East Los Angeles school and an economically hard hit community in the Antelope Valley are hoping to make it in a green economy.

The current transportation bill first expired last September. And not unlike ‘The Bill‘ from the 1970s children’s program Schoolhouse Rock, it has been spending a lot of time sitting around Capitol Hill, waiting to be rewritten. That is why it’s the current transportation bill that expired last September.

“You sure got to climb a lot of steps to get to this Capitol Building here in Washington — But, I wonder who that sad little scrap of paper is…” || Schoolhouse Rock

But, to call it the current transportation bill is no longer technically correct. It expired, again, over the weekend and was not extended by Congress (one Senator from Kentucky was able to filibuster the vote) — technically there is no legislation governing the country’s transportation system on the books (at least for now).

Rewriting the bill, after all, is no Schoolhouse Rock song and dance — it’s politics. While there is no law today, more than 2,000 lobbyists have been spending millions in attempts to influence the lawmakers putting together what could be a $500 billion new transportation bill. But perhaps more than the money, the legislation has the potential to lay down the blueprint for a new American infrastructure. Then again, so have all the transportation bills that have come before.

Still, will Congress perpetuate a transportation system that funds roads and highways to the near exclusion of  mass-transit? Or, will environmental, housing and other community health decisions play a bigger role in the federal decision-making process? Change is in the air, as they say, and reform is on the table. But the special interest, ‘Bridge to Nowhere’-type earmarks still exist. And while reform is on the table, that is where it sits today.

Poor transportation bill — it’s going to be a long long road.

In the meantime, the bill that expired will be extended (shortly, presumably) and continue to be the law of the land. The talks are underway right now. As it has done in the past, Congress will keep extending it, until a new bill (earmarks and all) is negotiated. Nobody knows when that will happen. The last time the transportation bill reauthorization process got under way was September 2003. Then-President George W. Bush signed extensions of the expired law 12 times to keep the country’s transportation programs on track. The new law was finally approved in July 2005.

2005 transportation law signing. In attendance: Then-Republican Congressman and Current U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (far left); Then-ranking minority member and current Chairman of the House Transportation Committee Jim Oberstar (third from the left); Then-President George W. Bush (center); and then-Senator and current President Barack Obama (second row, second from the right and obscured) || House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee

So far, President Barack Obama has signed off on a one-month extension through last October, a seven-week extension through mid-December and then another through the end of February, as part of a Defense Department spending bill. How does transportation fall under defense? It’s Congress, don’t ask questions.

If the bill is not simply extended for the month of March, which was the plan until Congress stalled last week, here’s how the fourth or potentially fifth extension will work: Before adjourning for the holiday recess in December, House lawmakers passed a $154 billion jobs bill that would allocate nearly $36 billion for highways and transit similar to the recovery package approved earlier that year. The jobs bill, which has also been called a second stimulus plan, includes an extension of the current transportation law through the end of 2010. But as Schoolhouse Rock taught, the measure also had to be approved in the Senate. And that version passed (70-28) just last week with similar transportation provisions in place.

Still, the jobs bill vote signals just how hard it will be to pass comprehensive transportation reform. It was stalled for two-months as a result of the efforts of an emboldened Republican party — no longer facing a Democratic super-majority — calling any further infrastructure stimulus-type investment wasteful as it would only continue to raise the ever-growing national deficit. Amplifying this sentiment, with the one-year anniversary of the signing of the recovery package, has been the Republican line that President Obama can hardly claim credit for improvements in the economy over the past year with three million jobs lost, unemployment at nearly 10 percent and a deficit at $1.6 trillion. At the same time, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently reported that the recovery package had saved or created between 900,000 and 2.3 million jobs. In other words, it’s bad, but it could have been worse.

All along, the Obama Administration has been encouraging Congress to forget all the fancy machinations and create one LONG extension. The President would like to put off any formal debate on transportation reform until sometime in 2011 — after the mid-term elections have come and gone. Why postpone until then? It starts with ‘T’ and sounds like ‘dax increase.’

I.
HOW TO MAKE A BILL; or, welcome to the sausage factory

Blueprint America correspondent Miles O’Brien in a web report on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where at some point a new transportation bill will be debated and voted on.

The term ‘sexy‘ in the past decade in Washington has increasingly been thrown around when couching seemingly unpopular but necessary issues. Popularized in the media and often times echoed by lawmakers, ‘infrastructure’ is a classic example of an unsexy cause on Capitol Hill. That said, maybe no one has ever taken the time to take ‘infrastructure’ out, get a couple drinks into ‘infrastructure,’ turn on some Bob Seger — remember the first time you heard “Night Moves“? — and see where the night ends up. One group that has found the inner beauty of ‘infrastructure,’ however, is the online transportation news source Streetsblog.

Blueprint America correspondent Miles O’Brien with Streetsblog Capitol Hill reporter Elana Schor on why transportation legislation matters — especially as Congress will eventually put forward a new bill.

II.
THE MAN WITH THE PLAN

Maybe nobody in Washington is more frustrated with the standstill on transportation than Rep. Jim Oberstar (D., MN). In June of last year, three full months before the transportation law was set to expire, Rep. Oberstar, Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced The Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009 — it was designed to not just authorize a new transportation law but also overhaul all federal transportation programs from funding to practices. To a Washington outsider, and even most insiders, however, what does that mean?

This is where things get so sexy, it’s almost X-rated. (But, in actuality, R-rated. And, in the sense that the Full Monty was R-rated — old man nudity, which, in this case, is very similar to at least the demographic breakdown of the House Transportation Committee.) Now that you have pictured the Committee naked, it is time to come back.

The gas tax. It’s the third rail of transportation politics. Politicians fear raising it. Most would rather lower it. Remember the summer of 2008 when then-presidential candidate in the Democratic primary Hillary Clinton fell in line with Republican calls to suspend the federal gas tax temporarily when prices at the pump were around $4 per gallon? With the federal gas tax at 18.4 cents per gallon, the “holiday” would have saved each driver about $30, while costing the federal government billions in revenues to fund transportation. Turns out, the last time the gas tax was increased nationally was in 1993, by then-President Bill Clinton — a 4.3 cent increase on the gallon. Revenue gained from the gas tax has lost about one-third of its purchasing power since then due to inflation. Worsening returns further is the fact that Americans are driving less — with more mass-transit options and consumers counting pennies at the pump — and using more fuel-efficient cars.

Long story short: it’s the federal gas tax that funds the federal Highway Trust Fund (similar to a checking account that continually is in the red — in other words, most checking accounts) that funds transportation projects. At the same time the transportation law was expiring last summer, the Highway Trust Fund was also verging on bankruptcy (as the two go hand-in-hand). As a result, with each extension of the transportation law, funding for the Highway Trust Fund, which not only funds highways but also transit, has also been solidified. For example, when the jobs bill is finally signed, $20 billion in tax dollars will be transferred to keep the nation’s Highway Trust Fund solvent until the end of 2010 — effectively extending the current transportation law until the end of the year.

Still, the CBO has reported that if current transportation spending levels are continued — which the Obama administration hopes to do for at least the next year or more — the Highway Trust Fund would receive slightly less than $400 billion over the next 10 years, with $50 billion of that dedicated to transit. Yet, the fund would be obligated to pay $610 billion to state Department of Transportations across the country over the same period to keep transportation projects going. Transit spending would total about $90 billion, leaving a 10-year estimated deficit of $170 billion for roads and bridges, and a $40 billion shortfall for transit.

In short, the current federal gas tax is not cutting it — new funding sources need to be identified and put into law or the federal government will be forced to raise the national deficit to fund transportation. Otherwise, it will operate at a loss — needing further federal infusions similar to the jobs bill transfer of tax dollars.

Blueprint America correspondent Miles O’Brien with the man with the plan himself, Chairman Jim Oberstar of Minnesota on why his transportation bill is what America needs — especially during the Great Recession.

Still confused? What is an “Under-Secretary of Intermodalism” and should you be afraid of him, her, or… It?

Perhaps, this will help — how does the other side of the aisle feel about the Democratic Chairman’s plan? Given the deep partisan divide in Washington currently, the transportation bill is actually one of the few major pieces of legislation that doesn’t fall in line with politics as usual (calling the President a liar, leveraging one’s party at the expense of having a super-majority, incapacitating ‘hip-hop’ artists on airplanes with ‘condor’ grips, etc., etc.). Following the introduction of the bill last summer, the ranking minority member on the Transportation Committee, Rep. John Mica (R., FL), said this of the nature of the Committee:

“Well, I tell you though, if you’re on the Transportation Committee long enough, even if you’re a fiscal conservative, which I consider myself to be, you quickly see the benefits of transportation investment. Simply, I became a mass transit fan because it’s so much more cost effective than building a highway. Also, it’s good for energy, it’s good for the environment — and that’s why I like it.”

Of the 74 Committee members, 30 are Republican. And the majority of those representatives support the Chairman’s bill. Outside of the Committee, however, Republican support lessens considerably as the cost of the bill is projected at upwards of $500 billion (nearly half as much as the current law) with no identified funding sources outside of the gas tax, which does not currently earn enough revenue to cover the proposed legislation. Outside of deficit spending — and even as the reforms in Rep. Oberstar’s bill promise to trim the bureaucratic waste of the federal Department of Transportation — raising the gas tax is the only immediate way to fund such a large bill. Other options such as taxing drivers based on miles traveled and creating a national infrastructure bank to leverage transportation tax dollars to increase revenues are years away.

Blueprint America correspondent Miles O’Brien with the other man with the plan, Rep. John Mica of Florida on the transportation bill roadblock.

While it has almost always been the Republican line to not raise taxes — as the Chairman noted, President Ronald Reagan did raise the gas tax back in the 80s — the divide on the transportation bill this time around has not been Republican-Democrat but rather between a Democratic White House and a Democratic House Transportation Committee. Though that divide has become less contentious, it still comes down to a no new taxes understanding, which Rep. Oberstar has certainly come around to since saying the following to the Obama administration last summer:

“Delay is unacceptable — extension of time, extension of the current law is unacceptable. This is the moment to move.”

The new consensus — not in this economy.

Blueprint America correspondent Miles O’Brien with Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D., OR) on the other issues facing the transportation bill once Congress and the Administration come to terms on how to move forward.

III.
THE CONGRESS AND ITS CONSTITUENTS

It all started with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, creating the Highway Trust Fund — dedicating a 3-cent per gallon federal gasoline tax — to support the building of the Interstate Highway System.

The problem with this law, which remains to this day, is that a cents per gallon gas tax does not automatically adjust for inflation. As a result, Congress raised the tax in 1959 from 3 cents to 4 cents per gallon, but did not raise it again until 1983. Like today, the gas-crisis and recession of the 1970s made members of Congress unwilling to raise the tax.

The projected completion date for the interstate system, initially, was 1969. But due to inflation and higher than expected costs of construction, it was not finished until 1991, mainly as a result of the low level of the gas tax.

And, as the system neared completion in the 1980s, the Highway Trust Fund no longer needed to devote the majority of its revenue to interstates alone.

With federal money up for grabs, the practice of earmarking began. Congress first included earmarks in a transportation bill in 1982. Since then, earmarking has grown exponentially: from 10 in 1982; to 152 in 1987 (President Reagan vetoed the bill the first time around as a result of all the earmarking, but eventually was overruled by Congress — yet another Schoolhouse Rock lesson learned); 538 in 1991; 1,850 in 1998; and 6,373 in 2005 (President Bush threatened a veto, but had just youtube’d some Schoolhouse Rock himself and thought otherwise). The 2005 earmarks totaled almost 10 percent of the entire six-year authorization. In the scheme of things, 10 percent may seem insignificant, but, at the same time, why then did almost 1,800 special interest groups spend at least $45 million over the first six months of 2009 lobbying Congress on the transportation bill?

According to the Center for Public Integrity, the roster of special interests paying lobbyists in 2009 to influence either the transportation bill itself or the annual appropriations decisions that are made based on the bill’s framework includes:

* More than 475 U.S. cities and 160 counties in 44 states, the vast majority of which are seeking funds for specific projects that will be chosen by Congress;
* More than 55 local development authorities nationwide;
* At least 65 private real estate development companies;
* At least 95 transit agencies, 25 metro and regional planning organizations, a dozen individual states, and the national lobbying associations for all three groups;
* More than 75 road and auto organizations, from highway builders and car manufacturers to interstate coalitions and trucking interests;
* At least 65 construction and engineering groups, from cement and steel makers to domestic and foreign-owned builders;
* More than 45 rail organizations, 50 shipping companies and ports, and 45 additional transportation-centric outfits, from bicycle coalitions to research groups;
* More than 140 universities seeking funds for local projects or campus research centers.

Blueprint America correspondent Miles O’Brien closes with another interview with the Capitol Hill Streetblogger Elana Schor — in a look at the varying meanings of change when Congress takes up the transportation bill.

IV.
THE END OF THE RIDE

In the end, Rep. Oberstar’s bill might be the only transportation legislation introduced, but any number of transportation bills can be drafted by any member of the House and Senate. To complicate things further, while in the House the transportation bill is simply left up to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (policy) and the Ways and Means Committee (funding), in the Senate the bill travels through the Environment and Public Works Committee, Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. The President, too, can introduce a bill.

This sounds a whole lot better with our friend ‘The Bill’ putting it to song.

And, of all things to get in exchange for a vote, “Sen. George Voinovich (R., OH),” Elana Schor reported last week, “a longtime supporter of quick action on a new federal transportation bill, helped give Democrats a major victory… when he voted for the Senate’s jobs measure after securing a promise for transportation votes in the upper chamber this year.” Apparently, the Republican Senator from Ohio doesn’t want to see this transportation law have upwards of 12 extensions like the last one.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced on Wednesday the winning projects to be funded under their Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program, which was created to oversee the dispersal of $1.5 billion included in the stimulus plan a year ago. In other words, a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy. While the DOT’s function is to oversee the flow of transportation dollars from Washington, the TIGER program’s function is to do it better (as it relates to stimulus funding and as it relates to finally using an acronym that is also Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s nickname).

President Barack Obama with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood || photo: White House / streetsblog.org

The TIGER program put in place specific criteria designed to reward states and cities that came up with “great projects” that, under normal transportation funding laws and requirements, would otherwise have been overlooked. “TIGER grants will tackle the kind of major transportation projects that have been difficult to build under other funding programs,” said Sec. LaHood. “This will help us meet the 21st century challenges of improving the environment, making our communities more livable and enhancing safety, all while creating jobs and growing the economy.”

Outside of an earmark by a member of Congress, a typical transportation project is funded and selected according to formulas based on, among other things, population of an area, whether it is rural, urban or in-between, whether it is for highways (projects benefiting personal automobile transportation) or mass-transit (everything else), if there are matching local funds, if it is “shovel-ready,” and so on. In most cases, the merit of the project has nothing to do with it — it is a numbers game. And the number transportation advocates, be it for the open road or the fixed-rail, most often call on is 80/20 — 80 percent of federal transportation funding goes to highways while 20 percent goes to mass-transit. The DOT has in recent years tried to shift the focus of roads over rail through programs such as “New Starts” and “Small Starts,” which favor small, mass-transit oriented projects. While the TIGER program will still fund highway building, it continues a growing trend in Washington to find ways to award new-transit, especially if it is “green.”

The DOT, not surprisingly, was flooded with more than 1,400 applications from all 50 states, territories and the District of Columbia requesting funding for almost $60 billion worth of projects — 40 times the amount available through the TIGER program.

In the end, 51 projects were selected:

· Modern streetcar construction to support vibrant urban corridors in Tucson, Dallas, Portland and New Orleans and light rail in Detroit;

· Bridge replacements in Oklahoma, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Indiana that can support multiple modes of travel;

· Port and freight-rail projects to spur economic growth in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and Ohio;

· Innovative highway funding and operations in Texas, North Carolina, Colorado, South Carolina and Arkansas;

· Bicycle and pedestrian networks in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and a complete streets project in Dubuque, IA;

· The long-awaited rebirth of New York’s former Penn Station as Moynihan Station.

:::TIGER GRANTS (part one):::

:::TIGER Grants (part two):::

The following responses do not represent the views of Blueprint America. They were selected in an effort to encourage a diverse debate reflecting all viewpoints on the often contentious issue of transportation in America.

by Ben Fried, Streetsblog New York

by Adrian Moore and Shikha Dalmia, Reason Foundation

by Chris Leinberger, The Brookings Institution

by Elana Schor, Streetsblog Capitol Hill

by Chris Bedford, Sweetwater Local Foods Market (Michigan)

Even before President Barack Obama set aside $8 billion in federal stimulus funds last year for high-speed rail projects nationally, California voters in 2008 had already approved a $10 billion bond measure to begin construction of a statewide high-speed train network. California’s High-Speed Rail Authority is responsible for planning, constructing and operating a high-speed train system serving California’s major metropolitan areas.

Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City (Feb. 8 at 10 pm) follows several members of the California High-Speed Rail Authority to Spain, where they tour that nation’s extensive high speed rail

Visalia, California || photo:  Amtrak California

system and learn about the challenges they face as they try to get the first American trains up and running — from Los Angeles to San Francisco — by the end of the decade.

In addition to connecting California’s key cities — San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento — high-speed rail will link some 20 smaller cities throughout the state. Leaders from many of those communities lobbied to get a train stop placed locally. The potential for the trains to link local economies to state and regional economies drove those efforts — and no one wanted to be passed by.

The agricultural community of Visalia – located 44 miles south of Fresno and nearly the midpoint between Sacramento and Los Angeles – was one such city.

Blueprint America followed Mayor Jesus Gamboa as he lobbied the California High-Speed Rail Authority for a train stop for Visalia.

High-speed rail in California, in addition to connecting the state’s major cities, will link some 20 smaller cities to the industries and economies of those larger centers. And as train stops were determined, no one wanted to be passed by.

Blueprint America followed Mayor Jesus Gamboa as he lobbied the California High-Speed Rail Authority for a train stop for the city of Visalia. /wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2010/01/200×100mayorjesusgamboa.3.jpg ]]> http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/reports/beyond-the-motor-city/web-video-the-stop-at-visalia/879/feed/ 5 http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/reports/beyond-the-motor-city/web-video-the-power-house/911/ http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/reports/beyond-the-motor-city/web-video-the-power-house/911/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:18:07 +0000 tom mcnamara http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/?p=911 (View full post to see video)

Nearly one-third of the land is unused, and some 80,000 homes are vacant. In documenting the Great Recession, few images are used more than those of a broken down Detroit — a city built for two million people, now home to half that number. Still, the departure of 1 million residents did not happen yesterday, or even in the past decade. People started leaving Detroit in the 1950s when Detroit’s auto industry started its slow decline — fewer jobs, racial violence, drug wars and a series of other problems has kept the city spiraling downward.

The Motor City, though, has not been forgotten. In addition to the recent bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, the federal government in 2008 invested $18.4 billion in the city and the surrounding county. Still, the city is treading water. Locally, however, there is a whole host of people — some with grand schemes, others with more modest notions — who will not give up on the city.

PROJECT POWER HOUSE

Nearly five years ago, Mitch Cope and his wife, Gina Reichert, bought a modest house on Detroit’s north side. The working class neighborhood has not changed much since the 1920s, except that it is rundown — some houses are unoccupied and many have been foreclosed on.

Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert || Read the [POWER HOUSE REPORT]

Mitch and Gina, however, see potential. Recently, the couple purchased a second house down the street — for $1,900. It’s a fixer-upper they call the “Power House.” Their goal is to make the house a model for “off the grid” power generation. They are planning to hook the house up to solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Right now they only have three light bulbs going, but, eventually, they hope the house will be an electrical “source” for neighboring homes.

Still, just to take the house off the grid, will require an investment of some $60,000 (but, remember, they did pay $1,900 for the house).

While the Power House may not be the answer to turning around Detroit, it is representative of the potential within the city.

Sources: Brookings

/wnet/blueprintamerica/files/2010/01/house-2.200×100.jpg In documenting the Great Rescission, not many images are used more than those of a broken down Detroit. A city hit even harder by the financial struggles of the big three automobile companies, it has emptied — built for 2 million people, it now has half that number. Nearly one-third of the land is unused, and some 80,000 homes are vacant. Still, one local couple sees potential. They are building the ‘Power House’. ]]>

Following the announcement, forty states and the District of Columbia requested over $100 billion for high-speed train projects.

At the end of January this year, however, the White House selected 13 passenger rail corridors in 31 states to receive stimulus funding. High-speed rail projects in California, Florida and Illinois were the big winners.

— California: $2.3 billion to begin work on an 800-mile-long, high-speed rail line tying Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area to Los Angeles and San Diego.

— Florida: $1.25 billion to build a rail line connecting Tampa on the West Coast with Orlando in the middle of the state, eventually going south to Miami.

— Illinois-Missouri: $1.1 billion to improve a rail line between Chicago and St. Louis so that trains travel up to 110 mph.

— Wisconsin: $810 million to upgrade and refurbish train stations and install safety equipment on the Madison-to-Milwaukee leg of a line that stretches from Minneapolis to Chicago.

— Washington-Oregon: $590 million to upgrade a rail line from Seattle to Portland, Ore.

— North Carolina: $520 million for projects that will increase top speeds to 90 mph on trains between Raleigh and Charlotte and double the number of round trips.

Though any state could ask for federal funding for projects, the administration identified 10 potential high-speed rail corridors: California, the Pacific Northwest, Texas, the Gulf Coast,

The Obama High-Speed Rail Plan || Image: White House

Florida, a Southeast corridor, the Northeast Corridor, the “Keystone Corridor” through Pennsylvania, the “Empire Corridor” through New York, and a Midwest hub centered in Chicago. Anyone outside these regions will be hard-pressed for high-speed rail dollars.

That $8 billion is going to have to go a long way as, for example, building a system in California — the state furthest along in high-speed rail planning with construction set to start as soon as next year — will cost $42.6 billion alone (up from $33.6 billion just a year ago).

In addition to the stimulus investment, Congress has approved $2.5 billion more in high-speed rail funding for the annual federal budget this year. Still, that is budget to budget, year to year support for projects that take 10 to 20 years to build. And, if a system is implemented nationally, it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars — not counting inflation over the decades it will take to build.

By spreading the $8 billion among so many states (31), President Obama ignored calls from transportation experts and high-speed rail advocates who maintained that the only way to build support for the program would be to concentrate funding on only two or three projects — to not only accelerate construction, but also get those high-speed lines up and running to be seen as an example of success throughout the country. In the end, only the line in Florida (Tampa to Orlando), which received $1.25 billion on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars in local private and public funds already raised, is expected to be finished in the next five years.

HIGH–ER SPEED RAIL

Rep. John Mica of Florida, the ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee, complained that the Midwest lines awarded stimulus funds will achieve top speeds of only 110 mph and were “selected more for political reasons than for high-speed service.”

Still, “high-speed” has been a loosely used phrase in America.

Between Washington, D.C., New York and Boston, the Acela Express — Amtrak’s version of high-speed — can reach 150 mph, but only for short stretches and averages just 80 mph. The definition of “high-speed” in Europe, however, is trains that travel at least 155 mph with speeds that oftentimes exceed 200 mph.

[For more on financing a high-speed rail system, watch The Bank not Built]

Currently, applicants nationwide for the $8 billion in federal high-speed rail funding are planning medium-speeds of 90 to 110 mph and high-speeds of 130 to 150 mph. That said, as early as the 1930s in America, trains routinely reached speeds of 120 mph and higher.

California is the only state so far to propose a high-speed rail network with trains traveling up to 220 mph. A trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco, for example, will take about 2.5 hours.

BY PLANE OR BY TRAIN

Still, that 2.5 hour train ride is just over an hour by air. Then again, the train will take you to San Francisco’s city center from Los Angeles’ city center — connecting directly with mass-transit. Also, you will not have to owe your brother-in-law any more favors for picking you up from the airport.

The most likely determinate if people will get off planes and onto trains: cost.

Already, a one-way, rush-hour train ticket (purchased a week in advance) on the Acela Express from New York-Penn Station to Washington, D.C.-Union Station costs upwards of $155 for the 2.75 hour ride. That same route by air ranges in cost from $103 to $200 — roundtrip — for the 1.5 hour flight. Although, the Acela Express line was one of only three Amtrak lines to turn a profit in 2008.

But, if California is the bellwether for the future costs of riding high-speed rail, then it will be only slightly cheaper than the Acela Express. The projected average ticket on the high-speed train from San Francisco to Los Angeles is $105, or 83 percent of comparable airfare. Last year, the state said prices would be set at 50 percent of comparable airfare and predicted a ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles would cost $55.

Still, much of America’s high-speed rail plan is just lines on a map. It is 2010, and ground has yet to be broken anywhere.

Sources: Amtrak, California High-Speed Rail Authority, The White House

High-speed rail in Spain

When President Barack Obama introduced his high-speed rail plan last year, he pointed to Spain — not only as an example to follow, but also as a country America has fallen behind. “In Spain, a high-speed line between Madrid and Seville is so successful that more people travel between those cities by rail than by car and airplane combined,” said the President, “There’s no reason why we can’t do this. This is America. There’s no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders.”

Spain opened its first Alta Velocidad Española, or AVE (meaning “bird” in Spanish), high-speed train route in 1992 — the same line President Obama referenced. The network has spread out since, with trains traveling at speeds up to 218 mph over 1,242 miles of rail from Malaga (the south coast) to Barcelona (the northeast coast) and points in between.

Two years ago, the Madrid to Barcelona line opened. As a result, what was one of Europe’s busiest air shuttle routes lost around half its passengers to high-speed rail.

[For more on high-speed rail in America]

Following this success, Spain plans to build 6,200 miles more of high-speed track by 2020 — positioning nearly everyone in Spain within 30 miles of a high-speed rail station. In that same time, California, with a population about four-fifths the size of Spain’s, will have just opened its first high-speed route — 432 miles of track built over nearly a decade. Reaching speeds of over 200 mph, it will also be America’s only true high-speed rail in operation, with the Acela Express in the nation’s northeast traveling at speeds of 50 to 100 mph less.

Already, Spain has spent $130 billion on its current high-speed train system. In the next decade, it will spend over $100 billion more. At the same time, however, this substantial investment in high-speed rail infrastructure has come at the expense of the country’s freight-rail network. With little government investment, businesses have moved their goods to the road — resulting in an economy highly sensitive to changes in the price of crude oil.

Still, Spain has been able to leverage funds for its infrastructure — especially high-speed rail — to an amount the United States cannot currently match.

Norman Anderson, President and CEO of CG/LA Infrastructure (a Washington, D.C. based consulting group) — in an extended interview from Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City (Feb. 8 at 10 pm) — explains how Spain has been able to finance its infrastructure build out, and what America has to learn.

As President and CEO, Anderson focuses on infrastructure project creation, aimed at increasing the level of infrastructure investment, and the performance of existing infrastructure stocks, in developed and developing countries alike. He has overseen the development and execution of CG/LA’s proprietary analytic models, including: The Global and Latin American Annual Infrastructure Capacity Rankings; The “Eight Criteria for Assessing a Country’s Infrastructure Capacity,” and CG/LA’s 5 year and 20 year infrastructure demand models. Anderson recently completed a White Paper for the World Economic Forum on infrastructure in Latin America, and was subsequently asked to edit the companion series of papers on the U.S., China, India, Africa and Asia. In July 2008 he published “Outlook for Infrastructure” in The Future of North America 2025; Outlook & Recommendations,” a CSIS publication financed by the Canadian, Mexican and US Executive branches.

Sources: California High-Speed Rail Authority, Renfe (the Spanish rail operator), The Wall Street Journal, White House

Movements to advance American infrastructure, since the beginning, have been brought on by times of national crisis. In an extended interview from Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City (Feb. 8 at 10 pm), Eric Rauchway, professor of history at the University of California, Davis, makes the case that it was the Civil War that set the stage for the Transcontinental Railroad; that it was the Great Depression that made possible the public works projects of the New Deal. But, will the current American crisis — the Great Recession — advance infrastructure again?

THE CIVIL WAR MADE IT POSSIBLE TO BUILD THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

The Monkey System or Every One For Himself || “Walk in and see the new improved grand original American System!” says Henry Clay (far right). The cages are labeled: “Home, Consumption, Internal, Improv”. This 1831 cartoon satirizing Clay’s American System depicts monkeys, labeled as being different parts of a nation’s economy, stealing each other’s resources.

The country’s first national plan to see fruition was put forward in 1829 by Henry Clay, the U.S. Secretary of State, when he called for an “American System.” Using the nationalist sentiment of a United States that followed the War of 1812, Clay proposed a government program to standardize and bring together the nation’s agriculture, commerce, industry and infrastructure. The System: a tariff to protect and promote American industry; a national bank to foster commerce; and federal subsidies for roads, canals, and other internal improvements, eventually including the railroad, to further develop the country.

“Golden Spike” – the ceremonial final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, was hammered on May 10, 1869 in Promontory Summit, Utah.

It was this American school of thought that President Abraham Lincoln ultimately took up, implementing in 1862 the Homestead Act, granting 160 free acres to each family that could farm them, and the Pacific Railway Act (the Transcontinental Railroad), connecting rail from coast to coast. As a result, Americans moved west — settling along rail lines where they could work the land. And with settlers came commerce and, soon, industry — new communities were built. But, it was not until the crisis of the War Between the States that such Acts could pass. In 1856, a similar bill to the Pacific Railway Act never made it out of committee as the Senate lacked a consensus. What was different just six years later was a united Congress — with seven States seceding from the Union — led by a president making the argument for uniting the country again — and the Transcontinental Railroad, eventually, would do just that. In less than ten years, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of America were connected by rail.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION SET THE STAGE FOR THE PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS OF THE NEW DEAL

In reviewing the programs of the New Deal in 1939, a government report said:

Here was a country with a great and growing need for more schools, more highways, more bridges, more waterworks, more services of all kinds. Here was an army of men willing and able to build them. Here was industry hungry for orders for the needed materials. The idea was to bring all of them together. The job would have to be done some time, why not now?

After the Stock Market crashed in 1929, American unemployment soon rose to 25 percent. That number peaked in 1933, the year in which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office. There are just as many historians and economists that credit FDR’s New Deal policies with ending the Great Depression as there are that say they only made it last longer (A 1939 survey asked Americans to name the best and worst things President Roosevelt had done. The top answer to both questions was the WPA.)

By an unknown artist, 1936 || National Archives

While the country did not return to 1929 GNP levels for over a decade and still had an unemployment rate of about 15 percent in 1940, the New Deal — through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA)and the Public Works Administration (PWA) — put out of work Americans back to work and, at the same time, modernized a national infrastructure largely still of the last century — bringing running water and electricity to rural areas and putting in place the framework for what would later become the Interstate Highway System.

The WPA, for example, built or improved 651,000 miles of roads, 19,700 miles of water mains and 500 water treatment plants. Workers built 24,000 miles of sidewalks; 12,800 playgrounds; 24,000 miles of storm and sewer lines; 1200 airport buildings; 226 hospitals; more than 5,900 schools, and more than two million privies.

AND, THE GREAT RECESSION WILL…

When Congress passed President Barack Obama’s plan to stimulate the national economy in Feb. 2009, infrastructure projects, above all others, were supposed to be the fastest-acting pieces of the $787-billion package. While much of the law went to cover tax cuts, some $110 billion went to general infrastructure and energy improvements — of which $27 billion went to highway projects and $8.4 billion went to mass transit projects.

But, the effect has been up for debate.

As of July 10 of last year, for example, more than 3,600 of the 5,600 road projects approved by Washington — including six of the 10 largest approved projects — had not been been started. Lawrence H. Summers, the president’s top economic advisor, said the program shouldn’t be judged by short-term results — “the peak impact of the stimulus on jobs is expected not to be achieved until the end of 2010.”

President Obama, with Vice-President Biden, signing the stimulus bill into law last February in Denver. || Photo: The New York Times

Still, the White House calculates that every $1 billion spent on highway work will create 11,000 jobs, directly or indirectly. Private estimates are as high as 35,000 jobs per $1 billion.

At the same time, the Government Accountability Office recently found that 9,200 stimulus recipients reported no job creation, despite receiving a total of $965 million. Almost 4,000 other stimulus recipients, who are still waiting to receive funding, reported creating or saving more than 58,000 jobs. The end result: the ineffectiveness of tracking the stimulus — especially in job creation tied to infrastructure spending — will bring into greater question any future attempts of similar investments.

A second stimulus plan — a $154 billion jobs creation package — is in the waiting on the Senate floor. Though passed by the House in December, it was only by a vote of 217-212. The bill, entitled “Jobs for Main Street,” will spend $27 billion on highway projects and $8.4 billion on mass transit projects. Sound familiar?

All of this comes as the economy lost another 85,000 jobs at the end of last year — and the national unemployment rate remains at 10 percent.

Sources: American Public Transportation Association, The Associated Press, Government Accountability Office, The Los Angeles Times, National Archives, ourdocuments.gov, United States House Appropriations and Ways and Means committees, United States Senate, United States Senate Appropriations and Finance committees, The Wall Street Journal

This paper was commissioned by the Regional Plan Association in 2007 for the Rockefeller Urban Summit, and is courtesy of America 2050.

Robert Fishman

Professor Fishman teaches in the urban design, architecture, and urban planning programs at the University of Michigan. He has authored several books regarded as seminal texts, on the history of cities and urbanism including Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) and Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977). His most recent work is on exurbs.

Professor Fishman is also a featured interview in Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City (Feb. 8 at 10 pm).

1808 – 1908 – 2008: NATIONAL PLANNING FOR AMERICA

National planning in this country is widely believed to be an un-American activity, an exercise in bureaucratic hubris best left to the French. In fact, national planning is as American as the family farm, the transcontinental railroads, the great hydro-electric dams of the South and West, and the interstate highway system. Not only were these and other characteristic elements of our culture and economy the product of national planning; the federal government itself was created in large part to overcome the barriers to national planning that existed under the Articles of Confederation. Indeed, I would argue that no other nation has been so profoundly planned as the United States.

In this paper I will discuss the two great “campaigns” of national planning that have profoundly shaped this country: the 1808 “Gallatin Plan” of roads and canals whose themes guided long-term federal policy through the 19th century, and Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 set of conservation and transportation initiatives that guided the 20th century. My purpose is not merely to correct some myths about American history. As we approach the centennial anniversaries of these two great plans, we might ask: What elements in our tradition of national planning are still valuable and powerful? Where is the new vision for 2008 that can build on the achievements of 1808 and 1908 to reshape the nation over the next century?

The first great national plan bears the name of Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, although his 1808 “Gallatin Plan” owed as much to Jefferson himself as to Gallatin. It embodied perhaps the most revolutionary vision of any national plan: the creation of a truly democratic society through the planned settlement of a whole continent. The sale of federal lands would be organized to produce a society dominated by independent farmers, and this new continent of citizen-farmers would be connected to thriving cities and their world-wide markets by a federally-financed network of roads, and canals (and later railroads) to form the world’s most productive economy. This vision dominated the 19th century, reaching its climax during the Civil War years when Lincoln definitively linked the Jeffersonian ideal of the citizen-farmer to the new technology of the railroad. The 1862 Homestead Act promised 160 free acres of federal land to any family that would farm it, while massive federal land grants to the railroads financed a national rail system that opened up millions of acres for settlement.

Indeed, it was the very success of the Jefferson/Gallatin vision through the 19th century that prompted the second campaign of national planning, which began exactly a century after the Gallatin Plan in 1908 with Theodore Roosevelt’s great conservation initiatives. Haste had made waste, a whole continent of it, as the runoff from bare slopes denuded by massive timber cuts had turned fertile valleys into floodplains; eroded soil bankrupted farmers and choked rivers; plowing of semi-arid land threatened dustbowls; and a poverty-stricken rural population streamed into the already-overcrowded cities. Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” meant a re-assertion of “the common good” as the motive for national planning. This meant a coordinated effort led by the federal government at the scale of the great river valleys. Forests in the highlands would be protected (or replanted if necessary) to restrain flooding; agriculture reformed to minimize soil erosion; the great rivers tamed by dams that would also provide hydro-electric power. In the West, the dams would collect water to irrigate millions of acres and thus spur a new era of homesteading. If the railroads had concentrated industry and population in the cities of the East and Midwest, a new federal system of navigable inland waterways, irrigation and cheap electric power would reinvigorate the economies of the South and West to create a national balance of prosperity and equity.

As with the Gallatin Plan, the 1908 Roosevelt vision exercised its influence over the long term, eventually drawing on new technologies like the regional electric power grid and the automobile superhighway to achieve its ends. The climax of this era’s national planning came in the 1930s, when the New Deal responded to the droughts and dust bowls that accompanied the Depression with a heroic coordinated program of hydroelectric dams, rural highways, electrification and farm subsidies that saved the South and West from catastrophe and made possible their resurgence after 1945. Perhaps the greatest legacy of New Deal national planning is one that is rarely acknowledged: the interstate highway program. Theodore Roosevelt’s dream of an efficient national system of inland waterways to break the monopoly of the railroads was realized on land with the interstate highways that Franklin Roosevelt first envisioned in the late 1930s (and that Dwight Eisenhower finally funded in 1956.)

The interstates completed the regional restructuring that was implicit in the 1908 vision, helping to shift population from the rail-dependent cities of the East and Midwest to Sunbelt regions where systems of federally-financed infrastructure (water, electricity, roads, ports, housing) made possible the explosive growth that has re-shaped this country over the last sixty years. Of course, it is part of the mythology of the South and West today that their growth is due to private enterprise and “rugged individualism.” The great paradox of national planning is that Americans have practiced it so successfully while continually claiming it doesn’t exist.

Indeed, one might argue that the remarkable power of planning in this country is proportional to the strength of the barriers it must continually overcome. These include the continent-spanning scale of effective national planning; the centrality of private property and its rights in our economy and culture; and the federal system of government itself with its complex division of powers. National planning in this country has therefore always been innovative and opportunistic, exploiting the flexibility in the federal system to bypass opposition while constantly seeking new coalitions of stakeholders that can advance the goals.

When, for example, federal initiatives on the Gallatin Plan in the 1820s-1850s were stymied by the conflict between North and South, the initiative passed to the states that actually built the canals that Gallatin had envisioned. In the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt announced his 1908 conservation initiatives at a White House conference that brought together all the nation’s governors with members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and even included such “stakeholders” as the industrialist Andrew Carnegie and the populist William Jennings Bryan. Moreover, to carry out the initiatives, the federal government drew on the expertise and support of the great cities, where organizations like the Chicago Plan Commission and the Regional Plan Association of New York had already amassed the planning skills that national planning required.

Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps the first to recognize the special character of American planning in his classic Democracy in America. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he observed that the country lacked the top-down government bureaucracies that carried out planning in France, and yet, in the United States, much more was actually accomplished because the relatively open American system encouraged citizen activism and cooperation. “Democracy,” he wrote, “does not give the people the most skillful government, but it produces what the most able governments are frequently unable to create: a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it, and which may, however unfavorable circumstances may be, produce wonders.” [1]

1808: THE GALLATIN PLAN

Albert Gallatin

When in 1908 the Inland Waterways Commission published its landmark Preliminary Report, the volume that would set so many of the goals for American national planning for the rest of the 20th century, its authors included as an appendix the 1808 Gallatin Report. [2] This was not mere antiquarianism. Albert Gallatin’s Report on Roads and Canals had not only achieved over the course of the 19th century the deep influence on the country that the 1908 conservationists hoped to achieve in the 20th; but Gallatin’s Report remained in 1908 (and, I would argue, still in 2008) a model of long-term strategic thinking tied to national policy. The plan clearly identified a set of key infrastructure investments for the federal government, and related those investments to what were perhaps the two most important “policy goals” in the history of the early Republic. The first was Thomas Jefferson’s determination that the vast lands controlled by the national government beyond the borders of the original thirteen states be sold under conditions carefully designed to create a nation of independent small farmers. The second was George Washington’s determination that the newly-settled lands in the American interior be linked to the markets and Atlantic ports of the East Coast to ensure that the United States remained prosperous and united.

Indeed, one might say that not only the Gallatin Plan but the federal Constitution itself derived directly from Washington’s conviction that the new nation must have the capacity to engage in national planning. One of his greatest concerns after the victory over the British in 1783 was that the new nation might break apart because of the physical barriers to effective trade and communication, most notably the great barrier of the Allegheny Mountains that, in an era of water transportation, cut off the western territories from the port cities on the Atlantic. As he wrote to Jefferson in 1784, the settlers already streaming into the fertile Ohio Valley could market their products only by a water route from the Ohio River to the Mississippi and ultimately to New Orleans, then in Spanish hands. Similarly, the settlers along the Great Lakes would have to find their “natural” outlet through the St. Lawrence and British Canada. [3]

Washington’s solution to this problem was a coordinated system of canals and portage roads across the Alleghenies, especially one that would connect the Ohio River to a navigable Potomac River; Jefferson replied to Washington’s concept with the enthusiastic concurrence that “Nature then has declared in favor of the Potomac, and through that channel offers to pour into our laps the whole commerce of the Western world.”4 But nature required human assistance, especially canal locks around the Potomac’s five major waterfalls, and Washington soon discovered that even his preliminary efforts to extend navigation required a formal treaty between Maryland and Virginia and elaborate approvals from other states and from the Continental Congress. To settle this dispute Washington convened a meeting between Maryland and Virginia legislators at Mount Vernon in 1785; their dissatisfaction with the barriers that the Articles placed to interstate commerce and “improvements” led them to convene the Annapolis Convention in 1786 to which leaders from the 13 states were invited; the Annapolis Convention then issued the call for a Constitutional Convention to meet in Philadelphia in 1787. The Constitution is thus in a real sense a charter for national planning; the Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce to create, in the words of the preamble, a “more perfect union.” James Madison in his Federalist Paper #14 specifically defended the new Constitution as forming a government that would unite the country through new roads and canals. Nevertheless, the debts and conflicts accompanying the new federal government postponed such national planning until Thomas Jefferson’s administration. Although Jefferson, as we have seen, agreed with Washington’s goals, he had his own strong motives for a national system of roads and canals.

From the early 1780s, when the Continental Congress had won control of all the land in the western territories not in the original 13 states, Jefferson had seen this vast unsettled landscape as the potential site of a truly democratic society. He too put forward a plan perhaps even more ambitious than Washington’s: to sell the land in small units for family farms that would be the economic underpinning of a political democracy. He realized that the difficulty for such sales was a subtle one: the inability in an unsettled wilderness to provide clear title and boundaries to small plots. His solution had all the simplicity and rigor of the Enlightenment: a vast land survey to map the whole Western territories on a square-mile “continental grid” oriented to the cardinal points of the compass. Once the base-points had been scientifically established, every inch of land could then be accurately mapped and subdivided. Land to be sold would be grouped into “townships” six miles by six miles (the local political unit for the new territories), and the 36 square-mile “sections” that made up a township would be sold either as complete sections (640 acres), half (320) or quarter-sections (160 acres, thought to be the smallest unit that could support a family). Thus, with a simple set of measurements that even a neophyte surveyor could carry out, Jefferson proposed a “national plan” for a democratic society.

But this plan was incomplete, for exactly the reasons that Washington had foreseen: the lack of a transportation infrastructure to get crops to market. The Gallatin Plan in effect put Washington and Jefferson together: a national system of roads and canals would open up vast land tracts for sale by the federal government; the revenue from these sales would pay for the new infrastructure; and the Plan would ultimately create a new egalitarian society. The Plan therefore had two main components: (1) a set of roads and canals to improve transportation along the Atlantic coastline, including a north-south national turnpike road (the earliest version of Interstate 95) and canals cutting across Cape Cod, New Jersey from the Raritan to the Delaware, the Delmarva peninsula, and the Dismal Swamp to shorten intercoastal shipping routes; and (2) the more difficult, expensive but vitally necessary canal and road systems over the Alleghenies. Here Gallatin proposed four: an all-water route in New York State via the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers to a new canal to connect with Lake Ontario; and three water-and-road routes where the eastern river would be made navigable as far west as possible, and a road to carry goods the remaining distance over the mountains to a western river. These “hybrids” included Washington’s beloved Potomac with a road over the mountains to the Monongahela and Ohio; the Susquehanna and Juniata with a road connecting to the Allegheny; the James River with a mountain road to the Kanawha; and the Savannah River with a mountain road to the Tennessee. [5]

The Gallatin Plan, 1808, as reconstructed in D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. II (1993).

Having advanced a truly national vision, Gallatin was remarkably flexible about the exact federal role in these projects. All would be “private-public partnerships” with the federal government advancing loans or purchasing stock in the canal companies. His hope was that in each case federal funds would overcome the limitations of the private capital market to permit the rapid and coordinated completion of all these projects. That hope was not fulfilled. The War of 1812 drained away (as wars tend to do) the federal surplus that Gallatin hoped would be available for infrastructure. More seriously, the great divide between slave and free states made a truly National System (as Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams styled their later versions of the Gallatin Plan) impossible.

Here the supposed weakness of the federal system – its division of powers between the national government and the states – became an unexpected strength for national planning. With the federal government deadlocked, the states took the initiative, led by New York. Governor DeWitt Clinton saw the possibility of a canal far more ambitious than Gallatin’s: a 363-mile link through the Mohawk Valley between the Hudson River at Albany and Lake Erie at Buffalo. With strong support from New York merchants, this remarkable technological achievement was completed in 1825. In the absence of the other canal-road systems that Gallatin had advocated, the Erie Canal profoundly changed the political economy of the nation. As Washington had recognized in the 1780s, the “natural” route of commerce in the vast Mississippi Valley ran through St. Louis and New Orleans. Although New Orleans was now part of the United States, the nation’s river system still seemed to dictate that the nation’s greatest port city – the port that gave access to the vast commerce that would flow down the Mississippi – would be the great port of the slave system.

The Erie Canal in effect turned the nation’s commerce a full 90 degrees. The greatest natural port on the Atlantic – New York – now had direct water access through the Great Lakes into the heart of the very territory that Jefferson had designated for free settlement. Moreover, the Erie Canal gave a new meaning to a swampy village on the shores of Lake Michigan that happened to occupy the narrow ridge between the lake and the headwaters of the Illinois, a river that drained into the Mississippi. The village was called Chicago. With the Erie Canal, Chicago became the key central point on the continent, drawing goods from throughout the Mississippi River basin and transferring them to the Great Lakes system, the Erie Canal and the international trade of the port of New York. Thus the “commerce of the Western world” poured not into New Orleans, as Washington and Jefferson had feared, or into the Potomac ports like Alexandria as they had hoped, but into the capacious lap of New York. With other states joining the “canal boom” touched off by the Erie Canal, Gallatin’s and Jefferson’s national plan was realized in different form and by different actors. But the federal government regained its direct power over national planning in the 1860s, when the secession of the Southern states in the Civil War broke the deadlock that had paralyzed the national government. With the strong support of Abraham Lincoln, Congress in 1862 passed the Homestead Act that awarded 160 free acres of federal land to any family that would claim and farm it. In the same year Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing the first transcontinental railroad (completed in 1869).

Lincoln in effect brought to fruition the work of national planning that Washington, Jefferson, and Gallatin had begun. The Homestead Act was Jefferson’s 1784 Land Ordinance on steroids. Further, Lincoln tied this new tide of settlement to federal support for the most powerful technology of the 19th century: the railroad. The massive federal land grants that financed the completion of the national rail grid in the second half of the 19th century accomplished what Gallatin’s proposed federal loans and stock purchases never could: the rapid and coordinated completion of a national transportation system that completed the Gallatin vision at a scale and in a form that Gallatin himself could never have imagined.

Nevertheless, the very power of this alliance of the homesteaders, the railroads, and the federal government had unintended consequences that vitiated much of the democratic idealism that underlay the 1808 plan. The millions of acres of railroad land grants meant that most settlers in fact bought their land from the railroads, a process that concentrated wealth in the hands of an urban elite and left many farmers in a state of dependency that Jefferson would have abhorred. Moreover, the railroads became the leading players in an economy of extreme speculation, exploitation and waste that consumed whole forests, tore up fragile prairies for unsustainable farming, and polluted whole river systems. This was not what Gallatin had planned. After 100 years, his vision had run its course, to be replaced by a new national planning initiative.

1908: NATIONAL CONSERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT

The most decisive two days for American domestic policy in the 20th century were arguably May 13-15, 1908 when President Theodore Roosevelt convened a “Conference of the Governors of the United States” at the White House. A year earlier, Roosevelt had proclaimed, “the conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem that underlies almost every other problem of our National Life.” [6] In his call to the Conference, he drew the conclusion that “unless we solve [the conservation] problem, it will avail us little to solve all others. To solve it, the whole nation must undertake the task through their organizations and associations, through the men whom they have made specifically responsible for the welfare of the several States, and finally through Congress and the Executive.” [7] To carry out what Roosevelt understood was a new national plan, he had resolved to bring together at the White House Conference not only the governors of the forty-six states and four territories, but also leading members of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, government bureaus, learned and professional organizations, and the press. Only by the cooperation of all these “stakeholders” could Roosevelt forge the new relationship between the federal government, the states, and the public that the plan required. [8]

President Theodore Roosevelt (first row, center), governors and other notables in attendance at the White House Governors Conference, May 15, 1908. Notables in the first row include Andrew Carnegie (fifth from left) sitting next to William Jennings Bryan (sixth from left). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is seated fifth from right. From the conference proceedings (1908).

The agenda for this unprecedented meeting was set by a now-forgotten document whose unpromising title was the Preliminary Report of the Inland Waterways Commission. And yet this 1908 publication, more than any other, initiated the new era in national planning that would supersede the exhausted principles of the Gallatin Plan and offer a vision for the 20th century. This Report not only translated the progressive ideals of the conservation movement that had been building over the last decade into a coherent framework for national action that would put the “common good” over private profit. But the report also encapsulates a highly strategic understanding among the scientists who were its authors and the politicians who were its sponsors that the inland waterways were the strategic site for a comprehensive effort in national planning that had the power to conserve natural resources and bring prosperity to the neglected regions of the United States.

First, the rivers, as George Washington intended in 1787, are undeniably in the public domain – public resources for navigation and clean water, but also public menaces in conditions of flood and pollution. And, as government and hydrologists and foresters like Gifford Pinchot well understood, to “regulate” a river basin to prevent disastrous flooding meant conservation measures reaching far into its watershed: to the uplands where healthy forests alone could retain water; to the agricultural plains where scientific farming could prevent disastrous soil erosion that bankrupted farmers and choked rivers; to the industrial cities where proper sewage treatment could prevent pollution. Controlling a river also gave important positive benefits; a great dam not only held back flood waters and ensured safe navigation, but it also generated cheap electrical power for the surrounding region and stored fresh water for the irrigation of millions of arid acres. Finally, the clean, controlled, well-dredged riverways could serve as transportation corridors, efficient alternatives to the railroads with their “monopoly” rates. [9]

We have since learned the many environmental costs of dams and irrigation projects, but to Theodore Roosevelt and the other Progressives a great dam signified a triumph of the wise and daring use of advanced technology in the public interest. For them, the dams were the central monuments in a program of what we would today call “sustainable economic development” at a regional scale. A pervasive theme that would extend from TR’s “New Nationalism” to FDR’s New Deal was that the 19th century alliance of the federal government and the railroads had fostered “monopolies” that had concentrated development in the great industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest and, through discriminatory freight rates and other disincentives, had reduced the South and West to mere “colonies” providing cheap raw materials. This economic exploitation had in turn encouraged the inefficient exploitation of natural resources, as poor farmers were forced onto marginal lands, lumbermen overcut forests, and miners pillaged mineral resources to supply the great cities. Conservation for both Roosevelts and other Progressives thus meant fundamental economic reform to break the monopoly power of the railroads and the “trusts” and spread economic equity throughout the country.

The distribution of potential sites for dams and electric power generation through many of the poorest areas of the South and West seemed an almost providential circumstance for the national economic restructuring that was at the heart of the conservation ideal. The Preliminary Report of the Inland Waterways Commission had already put forward a detailed blueprint for focusing the national conservation effort at the scale of the river basin. The Governors Conference was intended to re-shape the federal government to operate effectively and in cooperation with the states at that scale. The Conference Declaration called for the creation of a permanent National Conservation Commission which would work closely with parallel state commissions as the national planning body for the conservation movement:

We agree that the land should be so used that erosion and soil-wash shall cease…that the waters should be so conserved and used to promote navigation, to enable the arid lands to be reclaimed by irrigation, and to develop power in the interests of the People; that the forests…should be preserved and perpetuated; that the minerals…be so used to prolong their utility; that the beauty, healthfulness, and habitability of our country should be preserved and increased; and that the sources of national wealth exist for the benefit of the People, and that monopoly thereof should not be tolerated. [10]

Despite the idealism, science, and political power that lay behind this Declaration, the new era of national planning it announced would be marginalized for the next twenty-five years. The successful implementation of the public dam-water-and-power concept at the appropriately-named Roosevelt Dam over the Salt River near Phoenix was completed in 1911, but Roosevelt’s successors mistrusted the use of federal planning power he had championed, and the private electric utilities in particular proved to be bitter enemies. As with the Gallatin Plan, the Roosevelt “National Conservation” plan fell victim to a deep split in American society, in this case over the proper boundaries between private and public enterprise. Only the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam begun in 1931 escaped this deadlock. And, as in the Gallatin Plan, the full potential of the plan was only realized decades later after a national trauma had broken the federal deadlock: for the Gallatin Plan, the Civil War, for national conservation and development, the Great Depression and the coming of the New Deal.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 20th century thus played Abraham Lincoln’s 19th role as the leader who finally implemented the national plan with the federal resources and authority it deserved. The combined environmental/economic crisis that reached its climax in the Dustbowl that consumed the western prairie states swept away opposition. The Tennessee Valley Authority took up the exact vision of the Inland Waterways Commission and made coordinated conservation/development planning the keynote of New Deal policy. And TVA was the template for a national effort of forest and farmland preservation and rivershed planning that saved the most devastated regions of the country from disaster. [11]

This dramatic map of “undeveloped water power areas” suitable for hydro-electric dams shows clearly the federal dam program as a development tool for “undeveloped” regions of the South and West.

With the enthusiastic support of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a veteran Chicago conservationist and progressive, Roosevelt even revived the 1908 idea of a national planning office in the form of the “National Planning Board,” better known under its 1939 title as the “National Resources Planning Board.”12 To lead this national planning effort, Roosevelt chose his uncle, Frederic Delano. This was no nepotism, for Delano had been deeply involved in urban and regional planning since his days as a railroad executive in Chicago. He had been a main sponsor of Daniel Burnham’s monumental 1909 Plan of Chicago. After moving to New York City in 1912, he brought with him the Chicago regional planning ideal, and helped to initiate the 1920s Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, serving as the first chairman of New York’s Regional Plan Association. Delano’s colleagues on the National Resources Planning Board had also been deeply involved in city and regional planning: political
scientist Charles Merriam had been the leading advocate for regional planning in Chicago and planner Charles Eliot II had played a similar role in Boston and Washington, D.C.

These city and regional connections were no coincidence. Just as in the early 19th century when the states took up the task of canal building when the federal government was deadlocked, so in the early 20th century, the nation’s urban leadership took up the task of planning for the new society, but at the city and regional level. The Chicago and New York plans were the best existing models for long-term intensive planning for conservation and development. These plans projected and coordinated massive infrastructure development for clean water, clean air, road and rail improvements, even the conservation of “forest preserves” and open space at their edge. Now this expertise would be used for national conservation and development.

This carry-over from the region to the nation was perhaps most clearly seen in the New Deal’s national highway planning that initiated the interstate highway system. Although the federal government through its Bureau of Public Roads in the Agriculture Department had been subsidizing rural “farm-to-market” roads and other projects since 1916, road-building through the 1930s had been primarily a city, county, and state responsibility. But, as we have seen, the 1908 Inland Waterways Commission had already identified an unbalanced transportation system dominated by railroad monopolies as a major source of economic inefficiency and regional imbalance. By the 1930s a new possibility for an alternative national transportation system had eclipsed the inland waterways: the express or “superhighway.” In 1937 Pennsylvania had taken the lead with its plan for a toll-financed Pennsylvania Turnpike, designed to be the 20th century equivalent of the Erie Canal and thus to funnel the east-west automobile traffic of the nation through Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Turnpike inspired a vision of a national network of “superhighways;” at Frederic Delano’s urging, FDR in 1938 charged the National Resources Planning Board and the Bureau of Public Roads with planning such a system. [13]

The resulting national highway plan, first published in 1939 under the title Toll Roads and Free Roads, was the equivalent of the transcontinental railway plans and land grants of the Lincoln years.14 The seemingly irrelevant title in fact was the key to the plan. After extensive research, the Bureau of Public Roads concluded that toll roads like the Pennsylvania Turnpike would be viable only in the heavily-traveled routes of the Northeast and Midwest. A system of toll superhighways would thus reinforce the dominance of those regions and perpetuate the pattern established by the railroads. This went counter to the national purpose that had been established since 1908 of using a new system of transportation to spread growth through the nation. So the Bureau of Public Roads and the National Resources Planning Board strongly advocated a true national system of “free” interstate highways as a key tool for balanced national growth. The map of a 33,000 mile national system published in Toll Roads and Free Roads thus became the key document for 20th century American national transportation planning, although implementation was delayed by World War II and the inevitable conflicts over funding until the 1956 Interstate Highway Act funded the 41,000-mile system proclaimed at the time as “the largest construction project since the Pyramids.”

The first map of a national interstate highway system. From Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939).

Just as Lincoln in the 1860s had allied the federal government with the most advanced technology of the time – the steam locomotive – to promote the settlement of the nation, so FDR had allied the federal government with the hydroelectric dam, the regional electric grid, the internal combustion engine, and the superhighway to develop the South and West. Bringing the most advanced 20th century systems of power and transportation to the relatively “backward” regions of the country was indeed wonderfully effective in re-structuring the geography of population and economic growth. Indeed, I would argue that this massive exercise in national planning gave American capitalism its “second wind” after the Depression and World War II, and has been the most important initiative in creating the country we know today.

CONCLUSION

As I have tried to show in this paper, national planning in the United States is difficult but it works. Twice in our history our leaders have managed to overcome the inevitable constraints – regional and sectional divisions, private-public conflicts, divisions of power, the sheer magnitude of the task of transforming a continent – and crafted national plans whose visions have had the galvanizing power to coordinate action over the long term. I have used the dates 1808 and 1908 as shorthand for these two great national efforts.

In October 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt led an extraordinary study-tour of the Mississippi aboard the USS Mississippi. Accompanied by his Chief Forester and conservation visionary Gifford Pinchot and the members and staff of the Inland Waterways Commission, Roosevelt saw first-hand the results of wanton destruction of forests and the inevitable soil erosion, flooding, and rural poverty that followed. Where Mark Twain in the 1850s had recorded a bustling commerce carried in hundreds of paddle-wheelers, the group saw virtually no river transport at all, due in large part to railroad policies that suppressed alternative and more efficient means of transportation. Discussions aboard the Mississippi inspired Roosevelt to disembark at Memphis to issue the call for the 1908 Governors Conference that would begin a new era in national planning. The conference, Roosevelt observed, “ought to be among the most important gatherings in our history, for none have had a more vital question to consider.” [15]

A century later, we await a new vision and a new call.

President Theodore Roosevelt and then Chief of the Forestry Service Gifford Pinchot aboard the U.S.S. Mississippi on the historic 1907 cruise down the lower Mississippi undertaken by the Inland Waterways Commission that led to the 1908 Governors Conference. || Source: Library of Congress Conservation Collection

ENDNOTES

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Richard D. Hefner (New York: New American Library, 1956; original published in 1835 and 1840), p. 108.

[2] Albert Gallatin, Report to the Senate on Roads and Canals [April 1808], reprinted as Appendix 17 in Preliminary Report of the Inland Waterways Commission (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1908), pp. 535-581.

[3] Washington to Jefferson, March 15, 1784, Jefferson Paper, “American Memory” website, Library of Congress.

[4] Jefferson to Washington, March 29, 1984. op. cit.

[5] Gallatin Report, pp. 535-560. See especially Michael J. Lacey, “Federalism and National Planning: The Nineteenth Century Legacy,” in Robert Fishman, editor, The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000). Pp. 89-146. Anyone who knows this remarkable essay with more than a book’s worth of thought and research, will recognize my debt to Lacey, who served as Director of United States Studies at the Wilson Center.

[6] Theodore Roosevelt, Address to the National Editorial Association, June 10, 1907. Roosevelt Papers, American Memory Website, Library of Congress.

[7] Theodore Roosevelt, “Call to Governors Conference, Memphis, October 3, 1907. Loc. Cit.

[8] Proceedings of a Conference of Governors in the White House, Washington, D.C. May 13-15, 1908 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909). Henceforth cited “Governors Conference.”

[9] Preliminary Report of the Inland Waterways Commission, pp. 1-32.

[10] Governors Conference, p. 193.

[11] Philip Selznick, TVA and the Grass Roots (New York: Harper Torchbacks, rev. ed. 1966).

[12] Alan Brinkley, “The National Resources Planning Board and the Reconstruction of Planning,” chapter in Fishman, editor, The American Planning Tradition, pp. 173-192.

[13] John H. Crider, “$8,000,000,000 Highway Project Wins Encouragement of Roosevelt, New York Times, Feb. 7, 1938, p. 1.

[14] Toll Roads and Free Roads (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939).

[15] Theodore Roosevelt, “Call to the Governors Conference,” loc. cit.

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