Our unity as a nation is sustained by communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods. Together, the unifying forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear — United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.

–President Eisenhower, 1955

When Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, and began talking eloquently about connecting America by road, it was by no means a revolutionary idea. The Public Roads Administration had already created an interstate system and dreamed up the idea it might one day extend over 40,000 miles. What Eisenhower did was make that dream a reality by coming up with a plan for funding its construction. He garnered national support with these helpful explanatory videos:

Eisenhower pushed forward the famous Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 which, armed with a financial plan, passed with overwhelming congressional support. And the end results were extraordinary—42,795 miles of standardized roads, 54,663 bridges over 1.6 million acres of land at the projects completion in 1991.

But the path to the finished interstate system was as bumpy as the old roads it replaced. Although the interstate system had been very popular with national and local interests alike when the act was passed, opposition soon mounted, particularly among the cities that were forced to accommodate these new super highways.

After only one year, critics began to call for the construction of urban highways to be suspended for the purposes of re-examining land use development. Eisenhower’s vision came into doubt. After two high-ranking highway officials spoke about the interstate at a conference in 1957, one witness expressed anxiety about the project, as, “neither of these administrators had the slightest notion of what they were doing.”

When the government decided to pump more money into the program after a recession in 1957, fiscal accountability was called into question—the term “ninety-itis” was bandied about, indicating that highway officials were spending recklessly knowing the federal government covered 90% of their costs.

Congress seemed to turn against the program, as representatives began to make speeches on the floor blaming a shortage of government funds on unnecessarily wasteful highway budgets. The Wall Street Journal was quoted in 1960 as describing the interstate highway system as “[a] vast program thrown together, imperfectly conceived and grossly mismanaged, and in due course becoming a veritable playground for extravagance, waste and corruption.”

And opposition wasn’t limited to rhetoric: in Boston resistance broke out when a super highway through the city ravaged historic districts and pushed many residents out of their homes. In Baltimore, a grassroots movement rose up to challenge, and defeat, the decision to divide the city between the wealthy and the working class. The urban roads were usually slated to go through the poorest parts of town—which often happened to also be the blackest, thereby stirring the already-boiling pot of race relations. After a massive riot in 1967 in Detroit, Michigan, which resulted in 43 dead, Governor George Romney cited the freeway construction as a major catalyst.

The interstate highway system came about with fits and starts—it was a “Grand Plan,” but also at times a painful and mistrusted one. Yet, even before it was finished, it had changed the rhythm of American life. It built upon and delivered the American dream of a house and a car; populated suburbs and made vacationing easier; brought the masses McDonalds and Holiday Inns; offered easier transport of goods to regions outside of cities; and trucking became one of America’s stalwart industries. Which is not to say it’s been all fun times and road trips. The interstate also gave us sprawl, exhaust pollution, and, of course, McDonalds. While not all of these changes were for the better, what would America be like without it?

President Obama’s similarly expansive vision–a network of high speed intercity rail trains–has already fallen victim to criticism. His opponents suggest that passenger interest doesn’t warrant such a large investment ($8 billion in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act) and will result in a system financially bloated and underused, a blackhole of taxpayer dollars to upkeep.

And for others, his plan is too measured. It focuses on improvements to existing Amtrak lines, raising speeds, but not to the 220 miles per hour that would match bullet trains in Europe. Rail proponents would prefer larger investments in just a few corridors where distances are long enough to allow for higher speeds, and where ridership has high projections. The pro-rail community is concerned that any failed lines will provide fodder for critics.

Perhaps the lesson here is that any big plan is bound to have its share of critics and opponents. But how close in comparison is Obama’s plan to Eisenhower’s interstate? In broad strokes both aim to knit together the country with a state of the art transportation system, but beyond that it’s hard to tell where the similarities begin and end.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Producers Fae Moore and Tom McNamara, editor David Kreger and special correspondent John Larson for Blueprint America

JOHN LARSON:
27-year-old Nimia Larcia lives in a suburban housing complex just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. She moved here from Honduras six years ago in search of a better life.

Suburban America used to be synonymous with good living, not the least of which was because its streets were so much safer than those in the city. Not anymore.

Every morning when Nimia walks from her apartment to her minimum-wage job at a jewelry store, she has to cross one of the most dangerous roads in Georgia: Buford Highway. People in cars race back and forth, many if not most exceeding the 45 mile per hour speed limit.

For people on foot, it is seven lanes of fear.

NIMIA LARCIA:
Sometimes I am scared, but I have to do.

JOHN LARSON:
Nimia Larcia and suburban America represent what is more and more becoming a great American mismatch. Communities like hers were built for people with cars.

The problem is many here can’t afford cars. And so these areas by design have become lethal for far too many people.

REPORTER 1:
…a five year old girl killed. Her older sister seriously injured.

REPORTER 2:
Police say a man was hit at Buford highway and Dresden around 2 o’clock this morning. His body was then dragged nearly two miles to Buford and Afton lane…

REPORTER 3:
The number of injuries and fatalities along Buford Highway is three times higher than any other road in the state.

JOHN LARSON:
Technically this person, by law, is supposed to stop, right?

MICHAEL ORTA:
Yeah, this guy’s supposed to stop. But he’s not.

JOHN LARSON:
Michael Orta works for PEDS, an organization that’s trying to improve pedestrian safety in and around Atlanta.

MICHAEL ORTA:
Buford Highway is just a posterchild for this issue. There are tons of roadways out there just like this.

JOHN LARSON:
The state acknowledges that fully eight of Buford Highway’s 30 miles are hazardous for pedestrians. And roads just like it can be found in nearly every state in the country.

According to a recent report, by two national transportation groups, about 43 thousand pedestrians were killed in the U.S. in the last decade; “the equivalent of a jumbo jet going down roughly every month.”

Nearly 30 of them died right here on Buford Highway. At least 250 more were injured.

MICHAEL ORTA:
This is a typical Buford Highway bus stop here. It’s just a pole in the dirt right next to the roadway, just a few feet away. I wouldn’t want to have my kids here. A lot of people wait up here, they’re got little rocks so they can sit up on the hill.

JOHN LARSON:
So that’s like the bus stop up here?

MICHAEL ORTA:
Yeah, kind of. People sit up here on the hill.

JOHN LARSON:
Demand for transportation is so high here that taxis, freelance car services and private buses race down these roads competing for customers with the public transit system, often using the very same stops.

People rushing to and from buses account for one in four of the accidents here.

MICHAEL ORTA:
This girl just got off at the stop like anyone else would, and she needs to get across the street. Of course, she’s going to do what most people do which is wait for a gap in traffic this way, stop in the middle suicide lane. And then wait for a gap in the other half of the road.

JOHN LARSON:
Plus, it’s right behind a hill.

MICHAEL ORTA:
It’s really bad visibility. I mean, drivers can really see folks here.

JOHN LARSON:
Orta says long stretches of the road don’t have enough crosswalks or stoplights for pedestrians. In some places they’re spaced a mile apart.

Could you say to these people, “Listen, we know the crosswalk is a long way down the road, but your life is in danger here, so walk to the crosswalk, you know, go the extra half mile. Whatever it is.”

MICHAEL ORTA:
Forget it. You can’t tell people to walk a half mile to a crosswalk. You wouldn’t do it. The police officers wouldn’t do it. Nobody does that.

JOHN LARSON:
Ellen Dunham-Jones is a Professor of urban design at Georgia Tech, and co-author of a book called “Retrofitting Suburbia.”

Dunham-Jones says suburban communities across the nation need a major re-think.

ELLEN DUNHAM-JONES:
The stereotypes that we’ve held about who is in the cities and who is in the suburbs have started to change. And change really quite dramatically.

JOHN LARSON:
Immigration, the recession, and other economic realities have all contributed to a remarkable trend. For the first time in history there are more people living in poverty in the suburbs than in the cities. In Atlanta, 85 percent of low income people now live in places like this. But the suburban mismatch is not just about the poor.

ELLEN DUNHAM-JONES:
Basically, the baby boomers are the generation who really built most of the suburbs. But they’ve built an environment that is not going to allow them to age in place very gracefully.

JOHN LARSON:
Demographers are warning that millions of older Americans living in car dependent communities could be left isolated, unable even to get to the grocery store. Dunham-Jones is hoping the country will design its way out of these problems. Even Buford Highway, she says, could be transformed with medians, trees and buildings set closer to the road. Changes that are known to slow traffic. But outside of the ivory tower, change does not come easily. Or quickly.

Last year Georgia spent more than two billion dollars on transportation, but only a tiny fraction, less than 1 percent, went specifically to pedestrian safety.

JOHN KING:
Look at this. This right here is just– this is what makes me cringe as Police Chief. “Senora, por favor tenga cuidado!”

JOHN LARSON:
Doraville Police Chief John King has spent nearly a decade asking the state highway department for help.

JOHN KING:
We’ve been at this for years now. Every chief of police almost in this country is a type-A personality. We see a problem, we want to fix a problem.

JOHN LARSON:
King and his allies got some action back in 2007, when the state installed four sets of crosswalks and pedestrian-activated lights on a one-mile stretch of Buford Highway.

The problem was they didn’t always work.

REPORTER 4:
We tested the cross walks… Pushed button after button after button –

JOHN LARSON:
Recently new lights were installed to replace the broken ones. But as of today, they still haven’t been turned on.

While we were in town part of Buford Highway buckled in a heat wave.

REPORTER 5:
Driver after driver was forced to turn around after a 42-foot section of Buford Highway bubbled up two feet.

FEMALE DRIVER:
That’s nuts!

JOHN LARSON
State crews fixed that problem over night. But there are no overnight fixes for pedestrians, says Kathy Zahul, Traffic Engineer for Georgia’s Transportation Department. Reconfiguring an infrastructure built for cars, she says, means untangling decades of bureaucracy. So much so, that even a simple question turns out not to be.

Why don’t you just lower the speed on Buford Highway?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Nationally, it’s accepted that the appropriate speed limit for any route is around 80– where 85 percent of the population is comfortable driving.

JOHN LARSON:
So basically it says the people driving the cars set the speed limit. I mean I know that’s not exactly right, but that’s what you’re saying?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Well, they set the operating speed.

JOHN LARSON:
In this type of situation where the issues really have become pedestrian oriented, couldn’t that be rethought?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Well, by law, um, Georgia Department of Transportation is required to set the speed limit on all routes in the state at the maximum reasonable and safe speed.

JOHN LARSON:
It’s a catch-22 that drives pedestrian advocates nuts.

MICHAEL ORTA:
It’s horrible. It’s horrible. They can’t just lower the speed limit. They have to go out and make design changes to the road that would force people to drive slower and then be able to justify that they’re lowering the speed limit because these design changes made people drive slower.

JOHN LARSON:
Zahul showed us plans for some design changes that are in the works. But the transportation department says construction won’t start until 2012.

So, according to the plans on the books at least, eventually the rest of Buford Highway will have sidewalks?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Yes.

JOHN LARSON:
And eventually there’ll be more crossing, safe crossing areas?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Absolutely.

JOHN LARSON:
And the only question really is, is how long is eventually?

KATHY ZAHUL:
Correct.

It’s kind of our turn, so to speak.

That’s what Phillip Wiedmeyer, a leading advocate for Birmingham’s Northern Beltline, said when I asked him why taxpayers in California or Illinois should pay for the 52-mile road through the hills north of the Alabama city. (Roughly 80 percent of the road’s cost –- or about $2.5 billion –- will be covered by taxpayers who don’t live in Alabama.) The explanation behind Wiedmeyer’s claim is complicated. According to several highway funding experts Blueprint America interviewed, it’s also inaccurate.

Wiedmeyer is head of the Coalition for Regional Transportation (CRT), a group formed last year by the Birmingham Business Alliance (formally known as the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce) to advocate for “fast-track” construction of the city’s Northern Beltline. Wiedmeyer is also a former vice president of Alabama Power. He now runs an Alabama energy research center, but his official email address remains at The Southern Company, a parent of Alabama Power. CRT is one of two groups pushing explicitly for the road; the other is the Business Alliance for Responsible Development (BARD), a coalition mostly made up of large landowners, real-estate developers, and construction firms who vehemently oppose Birmingham-area environmental groups. We initially approached BARD for a pro-Beltline interview; BARD set up our interview with Wiedmeyer instead.

Let’s look at an exchange Wiedmeyer and I had early in our interview. Note that the clip is unedited, except to cut from his camera to mine:

Wiedmeyer makes a number of questionable claims in that clip.

Starting near the top, when he says:

There’s a formula that the Appalachian Regional Commission uses for developing the highways that they designated and so under the formula we get our share of it.

Wiedmeyer implies that the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) “designated” the Northern Beltline project –- in other words, that bureaucrats or experts in Washington vetted the idea of building a 52-mile loop of highway through the countryside north of Birmingham and added it to the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS). That’s false. ARC experts didn’t evaluate the need for the road, according to spokesman Louis Segesvary. “It was added to the system by legislative fiat,” he said –- that is to say, when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) added the designation to a 2004 appropriations bill, as we report in our story.

When Wiedmeyer refers to “a formula”, he’s talking about how the ARC divvies up its budget –- how much each state eligible for subsidies receives. And the Northern Beltline’s $3.327 billion budget threatens to overwhelm that formula, according to a Capitol Hill staffer with detailed knowledge of the dispute who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to comment publicly. Alabama’s share of ADHS funds prior to the authorization of the Beltline was six percent, according to the Hill staffer; with the Beltline added to the list of ADHS projects, Alabama will get 34 percent of that money. In other words, of the 13 states that are eligible for ADHS funds, one of them –- Alabama –- will eat up more than a third of the program’s available money. And again, most of that money is provided by taxpayers who live outside of the Appalachian region.

If it’s built, the Northern Beltline “will suck a lot of air out of the ADHS,” the Hill staffer said. “It’ll eat up project funds and keep other states from completing their own projects.”

That may be why House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN) proposed capping the Northern Beltline’s federal funding at $500 million in his draft of the Transportation Reauthorization (PDF; see page 168). The Hill staffer said that would force Alabama officials to seek the remainder of the funding through regular Federal Highway Administration channels, which would bring more federal oversight to the project. “The idea is to put Corridor X-1 [the Northern Beltline] back into the regular order” of federal highway programs, the staffer said.

Let’s move along in the clip. Wiedmeyer later says:

[T]he gasoline that’s bought in Alabama generates a certain amount of federal excise taxes, and those go to the Highway Trust Fund, and then those funds are then used to build the roads and bridges across America. And until recently we’ve been a donor state – in other words, we sent more than what we’ve gotten back….

This is what is known in highway policy circles as “the donor-donee problem” –- and it’s long been a source of debate and the topic of think-tank reports.

As I point out in the clip, federal data do not back up Wiedmeyer’s claim. According to a Federal Highway Administration document published in 2001 (PDF available through the Government Printing Office), Alabama has occasionally been a donor state –- in 11 of the past 35 years. Experts told me that’s typical, because states receive larger subsidies when they are in the midst of big highway construction projects and smaller ones when they are merely maintaining roads that already exist.

More recently, the data show that in 2007, Alabama actually got $1.20 in highway subsidies for every dollar its drivers paid in gas taxes. Over the life of the Highway Trust Fund, the state has received a subsidy of $1.12 for every dollar in taxes paid. That ranks Alabama 28th among all states and the District of Columbia –- right in the middle of the pack.

That actually undercounts how much of a subsidy Alabama receives, according to Ronald Utt, a senior research fellow for the conservative Heritage Foundation, because it doesn’t include subsidies for Appalachian Development Highway System roads. As a result, federal money for the Northern Beltline, I-22, Alabama State Route 24, U.S. Route 72, and I-565 make Alabama even more of a donee state.

When I point out to Wiedmeyer that Alabama is not, in fact, a donor state, he quickly changes tack:

Jefferson County –- where the Northern Beltline is going to go –- we have gotten 34 cents on the dollar from what we have sent in. So we have been –- this is a donor area.

I didn’t have county-level information at hand during the interview, so afterwards, I started digging. The Federal Highway Administration doesn’t track county-by-county data. Neither does the Internal Revenue Service. I asked Wiedmeyer to provide some backup for his claim. He sent along two documents (1 || 2) to make his case.

Four highway-funding experts who I asked to review the documents didn’t find them –- or Wiedmeyer’s argument –- persuasive.

Utt said the data, which covers the 1990s, is too old to be meaningful. “As a matter of course, if there’s only data that’s that old, I don’t use it,” he said. “I’d be skeptical about it.”

Others said the data didn’t answer the underlying question of whether Alabama deserved more in federal highway subsidies. “They’re mixing apples and oranges,” said a high-ranking highway analyst who works for a watchdog agency of the U.S. Government in Washington and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The documents look at state gas taxes and state highway expenditures. That has almost nothing to do with federal taxes and federal spending.”In other words, Wiedmeyer is conflating local and federal data.

Nothing in the data Wiedmeyer provided has anything to do with highway policy in Washington, according to a highway funding expert affiliated with a public land-grant university who spoke on condition of anonymity because he serves as a consultant to various states’ departments of transportation. “The bottom line is that to the extent [Birmingham-area officials] have a beef, they have a beef with the state, not the federal government,” he said.

Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agreed. “I have no doubt that Jefferson County is a net donor,” Puentes wrote in an email exchange after reviewing the transcript of the interview and my email back-and-forth with Wiedmeyer. “But note that the county status is not really the result of the federal law. The federal law puts so much discretion in the hands of the state that it is really an indictment of the state.”

What is more, experts said it is in urban areas’ interest to subsidize highways in rural areas. “If every county got ‘its share’, there’s not going to be enough money to maintain roads in areas where there are fewer people,” the highway-funding expert affiliated with the land-grant university said. “It’s not at all unusual for urban areas to subsidize roads in rural areas.”

In other words, “even if you don’t live there, you still have to drive through there,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Utt.

Utt and Puentes agreed that the Northern Beltline probably does not deserve billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

“I am highly suspicious that the Northern Beltline will do anything positive to help the region meet any kind of economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability, or social equity goals,” Puentes wrote. “It will likely further serve to decentralize an already decentralizing metro area which flies in the face of [Wiedmeyer's] donor/donee argument. Just giving a metro area its fair share is not enough. There needs to be rigorous cost/benefit analysis applied to all projects.”

Utt said that if the road is built, only a select group would gain. “I’ve found that behind every road project is a landowner or developer who stands to benefit,” he said.

The most vocal opponents of Birmingham’s Northern Beltline have been environmentalists. They’re concerned that the highway will lead to sprawl and spread air pollution to the mostly-undeveloped land north of the city. But they’re especially worried about the effects that the road will have on two river basins –- the Cahaba and the Black Warrior –- which together provide most of the metropolitan area’s water supply.

Blueprint America spent an afternoon with Nelson Brooke, executive director of Black Warrior Riverkeeper, walking along Patton Creek, beneath Birmingham’s existing Southern Beltline. The stream is a tributary of the Cahaba, joining it downstream of the intakes for Birmingham’s water supply. Nonetheless, Brooke said it offered a good overview of the effects that highway construction –- and the commercial development that it causes –- have on streams and rivers.

Brooke and other environmentalists don’t want what’s happening to Patton Creek to be duplicated in northern Jefferson County. And they say the federal government is on their side: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrote in 1997 that the chosen alignment for the Northern Beltline “has the most impacts on natural resources” of any of the alternatives that the State of Alabama considered –- disrupting streams at 14 crossings, impacting more that 4,000 acres of forest, and destroying 68 acres of wetlands.

Advocates for the highway have taken aim at environmentalists: A coalition of businesses that pushes for the Northern Beltline calls the green groups “no-growthers” who want “onerous regulations”. Nelson Brooke denies the charge. “I’m a strong advocate for low-impact development,” he told me. “The type of development we are seeing around our Interstates is the exact opposite of that. It’s sprawling. It’s in total disregard of the natural environment and how it’s disrupting it. And so I would say I am anti- that sort of development, but not anti- any and all development.”

One alarming example: Mass transit. Cities and states, strapped for money, are cutting back on mass transit even as it becomes more popular with Americans. At the same time, President Obama is calling for increased mass transit as a necessary step toward energy independence.

Blueprint America — with NOW on PBS — reports from North Carolina to see what the future holds for the country’s mass transit systems in these financial times.

[Transcript]

BRANCACCIO: More people around America are using mass transit than ever before—and that’s good, says President Obama, because it points us toward energy independence. But there’s a problem—cities and states, strapped for money are cutting back on mass transit. The elephant in the room is the president’s big stimulus package. But are states ready to take the money and ring in a golden era of mass transit? Senior Correspondent Maria Hinojosa and Producer Dan Logan have our report from North Carolina, part of a PBS-wide series on the country’s infrastructure that we call “Blueprint America.”

HINOJOSA: Pat McCrory is the seven-term mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. He’s a Republican… one of the most prominent conservative politicians in a very conservative state. He’s pro-life and a proud fiscal hawk. But two years ago, he put his entire political career on the line to build this light rail line in Charlotte. It was the one of the most expensive public works projects in North Carolina’s history, costing almost a half-a-billion dollars. And it almost cost McCrory his job.

You’re a Republican. You’re a conservative Republican. Most people don’t think of conservative Republicans as being big supporters of mass transit.

MCCRORY: I caught a lotta heat from my political right when I became a very strong advocate for mass transit in Charlotte. It was though I had lost the label of you’re no longer a conservative if you support mass transit.

HINOJOSA: The mayor was vilified by fellow conservatives over the light rail, who called him a tax-and-spend liberal. The project became known as the “McCrory Line” and that wasn’t a compliment.

MCCRORY: My opponents said McCrory’s lost his mind. And this is going to be a boondoggle and no one is going to ride it. I was scared to death.

HINOJOSA: Opponents tried to pull the plug on the project by repealing the sales tax that was paying for the line. The referendum on the tax repeal—and the mayor’s own re-election bid—came just three weeks before the line was supposed to open.

MCCRORY: I was afraid I was gonna have to leave town for fear that, you know, five people would arrive and three of them would be homeless and the other two would be criminals.

HINOJOSA: But much to everyone’s surprise, voters backed the transit tax overwhelmingly, the mayor was re-elected and the light rail, now a year old, has turned out to be hugely popular. Thousands more people are riding the line every week than were expected, and big cities like Orlando are sending delegations to see what all the fuss is about. In the heart of the south, where people love their cars, McCrory’s light rail line is winning hearts and minds.

FEMALE RIDER: This is the best thing that’s happened to us.

HINOJOSA: Why?

FEMALE RIDER: Why? Because, I don’t have to worry about the traffic. One night I sat for three hours on 77 to get home. I don’t now.

HINOJOSA: Mayor McCrory would like nothing better than to expand mass transit in Charlotte. In fact, he says he has a $300 million plan to build a new commuter rail that he says is “shovel-ready”. He’s hoping that means he’ll get a share of the $789 billion stimulus package that President Obama was pushing this week.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on our nation’s congested roads and highways, crumbling bridges and levees, and crowded trains and transit systems.

HINOJOSA: But when it comes to stimulus projects, McCrory is not very optimistic about how the dollars will get spent.

What are you worried about here in North Carolina?

MCCRORY: My fear is money being spent based upon politics and not common sense, and power and not sustainability.

HINOJOSA: And what does that look like?

MCCRORY: It looks like—checks bein’ written with no qualitative sustainable analysis being complete before the check is spent.

HINOJOSA: Are you saying that you’re concerned that there might be a road to nowhere, a bridge to nowhere in North Carolina?

MCCRORY: In every city and county and state in the United States.

HINOJOSA: There’s a catch with the stimulus package. While President Obama urged Congress to keep the bill free of pet projects, most of the $50 billion for transportation will go directly to the state governments to fund whatever shovel-ready projects they want. When it comes to pet projects, state politicians can be just as irresponsible as their colleagues in Congress. Here in North Carolina, many believe that stimulus spending will have little to do with common sense… and a lot more to do with politics.

MCCRORY: First of all, there’s big money in transportation. I mean, there’s a huge infrastructure investment. And there’s a lotta political involvement of big money in transportation.

HINOJOSA: When you think about transportation in North Carolina, is it always intimately tied into extraordinary politics?

MCCRORY: North Carolina—transportation and politics have been intermingled for decades. North Carolina’s Department of Transportation oversees the state’s roads, bridges, and railways. It’s been criticized over the years for being nothing more than a bankroll for projects favored by its board members. The 19 member board that has approved funding for projects has been mostly made up of politicians and political fundraisers not transportation experts.

HARTGEN: The state does not use objective criteria in evaluating projects. We don’t compare projects head to head. Even within district, but let alone between districts.

HINOJOSA: Professor David Hartgen studies transportation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He says that each board member represents a different part of the state… so traditionally, to get projects funded in their own region, they agree to vote “yes” for each others’ projects.

HARTGEN: As far as I know, the transportation board has never had a no vote on any single project in the last 15 years.

HINOJOSA: That shotgun approach to funding projects is a problem that seems to extend far beyond North Carolina. Phineas Baxandall and his colleagues at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group have been pouring over the states’ wish lists for the stimulus money and he says that in many states, there are projects seem almost arbitrary.

BAXANDALL: What we know from looking at these wish lists is—that the states sometimes have abysmal, terrible plans on these wish lists.

HINOJOSA: Take a look at Missouri, for example. In the initial list that the state department of transportation drew up for the stimulus, there were no projects listed for the entire city of St. Louis.

BAXANDALL: St. Louis was missing in the Missouri wish list. And that’s kind of amazing to talk about transportation without St. Louis and Missouri.

HINOJOSA: And in North Carolina, the state Department of Transportation’s own employees are on the record saying that historically, funding decisions have been influenced by petty politics. In a recent report commissioned by the state, one employee said, “What we work on depends on who’s screaming the loudest.” Another asked, “…why are we doing random political projects?”

It wasn’t always this way with transportation policy… our country used to have a clear, national vision for how we spent money. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Interstate Highway System, which connected the entire country and boosted the economy for decades. But now that America’s cities have been connected, there’s no national vision that addresses our current needs.

BAXANDALL: If we’re being serious about transportation now, we’d be focusing on, you know, what are our needs. We need to be reducing our consumption of oil. We need to be reducing our congestion. We need to be reducing the amount of global warming poll—pollution that we create. These are the kind of, you know, screaming national priorities that we should be focused on.

HINOJOSA: President Obama talked about creating a national infrastructure bank that would boost funding for smart projects…but that’s still on the drawing board. Mayor McCrory would like to push the President think bigger.

MCCRORY: I would recommend that the president develop a plan, a vision of how our infrastructure will look for the next 50 to 100 years in the United States. Whatever we spend the money should be part of our 25 to 50 year plan. That you’ll know the impact not just next year, but you’ll know the real impact 50 years from now. And the people 50 years from now would go, “You know what, they were pretty smart to build this thing.”

HINOJOSA: And the smart vision for an infrastructure of tomorrow, McCrory argues, starts with mass transportation. Transit advocates say that we need to take a moment to consider our future population growth. In the next forty years, America will add over a hundred million people our roads simply won’t be able to handle all of those cars. They say mass transit allows us to shape that growth. Instead of continuing to sprawl out beyond our cities, Americans would have the option to live in a walk-able urban environment. Charlotte will add the equivalent population of the city of Pittsburgh in the next twenty years so they’re trying to get ahead of the curve. So far, the results are promising.

MCCRORY: Downtown Charlotte was basically an 8:00 to 5:00 office park. People came in at 8:00, went inside, got in their cars and went out into the suburbs.

HINOJOSA: And now?

MCCRORY: And now, it’s an area of incredible—vitality, entertainment, and work environment.

HINOJOSA: The light rail makes it easier to get around Charlotte without a car… rolling right by the basketball arena… the football stadium… and the children’s museum.
The mayor is especially excited about a new building near the line.

MCCRORY: This is the NASCAR hall-of-fame.

HINOJOSA: In case you forgot, we are in NASCAR country.

MCCRORY: You gotta understand NASCAR around here. It’s serious stuff.

HINOJOSA: But the most interesting area that’s developing around the light rail is a ten-minute ride from the center of town. The South End is at the heart of Charlotte’s hopes for urban renewal around transit… after a history of blight and decay.

So when people in Charlotte used to talk about the south end like, you know, 10-20 years ago—

MCCRORY: The term south end didn’t even exist.

HINOJOSA: It was a neighborhood you didn’t go to.

MCCRORY: This was a neighborhood with no name.

HINOJOSA: In the early 1900s, the area was home to Charlotte’s industrial mills. But in the years that followed, businesses abandoned the area and it became one of the worst neighborhoods in Charlotte. Now, there are restaurants… apartment buildings… and new construction everywhere. The city has worked hand-in-hand with the real estate developers to build up the area.
It hasn’t always been easy.

FINCH: I think one of my—greatest memories is trying to sell transit and talking to a bunch of real estate brokers who use their car all the time, and, you know, run around and say, “Eh, that’s not gonna work. I need my car.”

HINOJOSA: Tracy Finch works for Harris Development Group, a real estate firm wooing suburbanites to live near the light rail. It’s taken some time and effort…but people are coming around.

FINCH: When people ride it and they’re amazed at, you know, the diversity—people are riding it. How clean it is, how easy it is. They start to become believers really quick. I read in the paper all the time somebody saying, you know, “I can read the paper on the way in.” That has value to people.

HINOJOSA: The economic downturn has had an impact on the South End real estate market. But unlike other areas of the country, construction here still continues.
A firm from Texas is building the area’s first multi-storied luxury apartment building. They think they’re going to make a lot of money.

FINCH: They wanted to put the—11 stories, 310 units on there, and some of the highest rents that we’ve seen in Charlotte. Because they think that the district with the line in it, and the proximity to uptown, everything that’s going on here, it was—it was the place to be.

HINOJOSA: And there are many other developments in the works.

MCCRORY: Mass transit’s not just about transportation, it’s also about economic development, creating jobs and making money. And that’s why a conservative like me supports it.

HINOJOSA: But the light rail is not only lifting up high-end real estate developers. It’s also revitalizing low-income neighborhoods.

PARKER: We’ve had relatively struggling communities be transformed by it.

HINOJOSA: Keith Parker is the head of the Charlotte Area Transit System, or, “CATS”, which runs the light rail. He points to the Wilmore neighborhood in the south end…one of the most distressed areas of the city, with high crime and not much in the way of desirable real estate as late as 2006. Now, in 2009…

PARKER: Property values went from about $92,000 to $195,000 in this economy. And just overall, you’ve seen a neighborhood absolutely transformed. And this—these are not millionaires, and so on. These are blue collar, working class people.

HINOJOSA: But transit alone doesn’t transform neighborhoods. The key is the way you connect those neighborhoods to the train stations with well-planned sidewalks that create a walk-able community.

MCCRORY: That’s part of the total package of land use design. It’s not just the rail or the train it’s what you do off the rail and train so the customer gets the fulfillment of, I can walk to a place to get a sandwich, I can walk to go shopping, I can walk to go live. Many cities you get off and the ’70s and ’80s development there’s no sidewalk so their not going to ride the train.

HINOJOSA: When it is successful, transit can even foster social change. You’ll see a diverse mix riding the rails… and many credit the popularity of the light rail with connecting the inner city and the suburbs like never before. Ultimately, the mass transit experiment in Charlotte is about redefining a city… while retaining its original character.

There are some people that are gonna say, Mr. Mayor, you want to turn Charlotte into New York City, with all this mass transit? We don’t want that.

MCCRORY: No, I’ll tell ya, what we want in Charlotte is we want big city opportunity, but we want to keep a small town environment and quality of life. So we’re still seeking the best of both worlds.

HINOJOSA: But with the economy in freefall, Charlotte’s successful urban experiment is facing serious challenges. Remember, its revenue comes from the sales tax… so with consumer spending at a standstill, Charlotte transit will have a quarter of a billion dollars less to work with than they had expected over the next ten years. Next month, they’ll be cutting back on service… and Charlotte is not alone. Over sixty communities nationwide are reducing seeing fare hikes and less service, even as more Americans are riding transit than in the last fifty years.

PARKER: What we’re struggling with is an economy that’s really screaming for us to have low-cost transportation. While—revenues are in a place where we can’t give them all the things that we would like to.

HINOJOSA: And despite its huge price tag, there are no guarantees that the stimulus dollars will solve Charlotte’s problems. For one thing, the money can’t be used to cover operating costs. So the fare hikes, layoffs and service cuts will continue. But more importantly, these new stimulus dollars won’t change the old-school way of delivering transportation money to the states. That’s not the wholesale change transit advocates had hoped for.

BAXANDALL: Epical change is epical for a reason. It doesn’t—it doesn’t happen easily. All the stars have to be aligned and—and the stimulus here, there may be half-aligned.

HINOJOSA: Why? Because, says Baxandall, the federal rules work like this: the more roads a state builds and the more gas people guzzle, the more federal money a state receives.

BAXANDALL: What that means, in effect, is that if you are a state that is trying to do the right thing in terms of reducing our dependence on oil, you’re gonna be getting less money. So we have the incentives which are punishing people for doing the right thing. And that’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.

HINOJOSA: And there are lots of other obstacles to funding mass transit projects, says Baxandall. They have to pass more rigorous environmental reviews than roads and are forced to compete against projects from other states—not the case for road money.

BAXANDALL: If you’re a governor, if you’re, you know, a mayor, you wanna have certainty about—I’ve invested these resources, I’ve invested this time, I’ve invested maybe my political career on something and if you can’t have that certainty, that is—I mean that is just a huge disincentive.

HINOJOSA: And transit planners say there’s another roadblock to mass transportation projects… this one stemming from the policies of the Bush administration.

KING: I do not believe the Bush administration believed in the growth-shaping characteristics of transit, so they were not looking forward, they were looking back.

HINOJOSA: David King heads regional transit service in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina… known as the research triangle. He says that policies under Bush’s U.S. Department of transportation discouraging transit have made less “shovel-ready” projects available for the stimulus.
King has personal experience dealing with the administration. Four years ago, he tried to bring light rail to the triangle to anticipate the population boom expected in the region over the next twenty years. But his proposal was rejected by Bush’s Department of Transportation… because, they were told, not enough people lived there.

KING: They were looking at, “You don’t have the density today,” when in fact what you’re trying to do is shape the growth so that the—the density and the development opportunity comes to the transit.

HINOJOSA: Now, with shovel-ready projects in demand for the stimulus, transit advocates are upset because they say the federal pipeline for projects has dried up over the last eight years.

KING: The conflict is between ready to go projects and the need to spend money quickly. And there’re not many because we’ve had eight years of those projects being systematically discouraged.

HINOJOSA: Are you frustrated with that? Are you just saying, “Gosh, if only the past eight years we had known what to prepare for, that we would have a different administration with a different perspective on mass transit”…

KING: Oh, surely. Surely it’s frustrating.

HINOJOSA: King has also been frustrated with how little North Carolina spends on mass transit… last year, only 3% of its transportation budget.
But times might be changing at the department.

CONTI: Transportation in North Carolina has been very road-focused, highway-focused. We need to continue to maintain that system and expand it, where appropriate. But we also need to look at these other modes in a much more serious way.

HINOJOSA: Gene Conti is North Carolina’s new Secretary of Transportation. He was hired by Governor Bev Perdue, who narrowly defeated Pat McCrory last fall. With the department getting so much bad press, she made transportation reform one of her big campaign issues.

You want your governor to be reelected in four years, so how do you measure the politics then of a huge stimulus package?

CONTI: This may sound naïve, I don’t think it is. But good policies are good politics. So, we’re concerned about good policies.

HINOJOSA: On the governor’s first day in office, she issued an executive order taking power away from the Board of Transportation to de-politicize the funding process. Much of that authority now resides with Conti, who has thirty years experience as a transportation administrator.

Transportation has been controversial in the state of North Carolina. Are you convinced that the governor’s reforms—will actually make a difference this time?

CONTI: I absolutely believe they will make a difference. But we’re gonna have to prove that to people. I think there’s a lot of justified skepticism and a lot of concern among the public. So, we’re gonna have to do our jobs well and we’re gonna have to do them openly and transparently so people understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and they can judge the results.

HINOJOSA: Is your understanding that the transportation board, with the governor’s reforms will now be more fact-based, what they decide to support?

CONTI: I think they will be. It won’t be people getting in a dark room somewhere and making decisions at the last minute.

HINOJOSA: But Mayor McCrory will believe it when he sees it.

MCCRORY: I hope. I hope he’s right. But, based upon past history—politicians will get involved.

HINOJOSA: With his transit budget in shambles and the city clamoring for more service, the mayor is still waiting to hear from the Department of Transportation about getting money for a new commuter rail in Charlotte.

The time has come, says McCrory, for our country to make smarter choices about transportation… or else, he says, our economy will be choked with congestion in the future.

MCCRORY: You can wait until the pain arrives and implement change then. It will be an easy sell, but mostly likely you’ve waited too long and it’ll be too expensive. Or you can anticipate the pain and change now. And most likely, the change will work and it’ll be less expensive. But it’s gonna be one hell of a sale.

BRANCACCIO: After this story you may want to consult a crystal ball about the state of public transit where you live. Well, we’ve got one- use an interactive map to see if fare hikes and service reductions are being planned in your state. It’s all on our website.

And that’s it for NOW. From New York, I’m David Brancaccio. We’ll see you next week.