This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

[c1ue]

A beautiful example of how 'it' gets done:

1) The public face: addressing high gas prices and the proles' economic suffering
2) The temporary funding at fixed levels so that no one can say the program is being killed
3) The magical expansion of the overall budget so that future deficits can be noted as 'drains on the public purse'

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/op...bill.html?_r=1

The list of outrages coming out of the House is long, but the way the Republicans are trying to hijack the $260 billion transportation bill defies belief. This bill is so uniquely terrible that it might not command a majority when it comes to a floor vote, possibly next week, despite Speaker John Boehner’s imprimatur. But betting on rationality with this crew is always a long shot.

Here is a brief and by no means exhaustive list of the bill’s many defects: ¶It would make financing for mass transit much less certain, and more vulnerable, by ending a 30-year agreement that guaranteed mass transit a one-fifth share of the fuel taxes and other user fees in the highway trust fund. Instead it would compete annually with other programs.

¶It would open nearly all of America’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, including environmentally fragile areas that have long been off limits. The ostensible purpose is to raise revenue to help make up what has become an annual shortfall for transportation financing. But it is really just one more attempt to promote the Republicans’ drill-now-drill-everywhere agenda and the interests of their industry patrons.

¶It would demolish significant environmental protections by imposing arbitrary deadlines on legally mandated environmental reviews of proposed road and highway projects, and by ceding to state highway agencies the authority to decide whether such reviews should occur.

In 1982, with President Ronald Reagan’s blessing, Congress agreed to apportion 80 percent of the highway trust fund revenues to highways, bridges and tunnels, and 20 percent to subways, bus lines and other forms of mass transit. In 2010, this meant around $32 billion for highways, bridges and so on and $8 billion for mass transit.

The House bill would direct all the trust fund money to roads and bridges. It would authorize a one-time payment of $40 billion over five years for all the other transportation programs, including mass transit and smaller initiatives to improve air quality and ease congestion. That means that mass transit would have to struggle with others for yearly appropriations — and would almost certainly get less than the $8 billion it received in 2010.

Where that $40 billion will come from is also unclear. The idea that oil revenues from increased drilling will provide it is delusional. Even if new leases are rushed through, oil will not begin to flow for years, and neither will the royalties.

In any case, none of this is good news for urban transit systems, including New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which, in 2010 alone, received about $1 billion from the trust fund.

Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary, rightly calls this the “worst transportation bill” he has seen in 35 years of public service. Mr. Boehner is even beginning to hear from budget-conscious conservatives who believe that relying on user fees is the most fiscally responsible way to pay for all transportation programs.

Perhaps the House speaker will listen to these warnings and send the bill back to the relevant committees for the wholesale revision it needs. If he does not, and it passes, then the Senate must stop it.

[don]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

In the burg I'm leaving, cars are a way of life - it's all strip malls, parking lots, etc. Nothing new. If you travel on foot you feel at risk. The retired locals enjoy counting heads on the infrequent buses, mocking their low occupancy. This "attitude" has been sold to them in toto. Never a discouraging word about car dependency. Only SF in the Bay Area has a vibrant mass transport, excepting BART which has been a resounding and under appreciated success.

[jiimbergin]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

In the burg I'm leaving, cars are a way of life - it's all strip malls, parking lots, etc. Nothing new. If you travel on foot you feel at risk. The retired locals enjoy counting heads on the infrequent buses, mocking their low occupancy. This "attitude" has been sold to them in toto. Never a discouraging word about car dependency. Only SF in the Bay Area has a vibrant mass transport, excepting BART which has been a resounding and under appreciated success.

And that is true almost everywhere. I grew up in Pittsburgh using mass transit. But today, although there are a couple subway lines in the south hills area, mass transit (busses) are simply not used much. Where I live now, Hickory NC, they are almost non existant. Unless energy costs force us to change, I personally don't see that spending lots of money on mass transit makes much sense.

[gwynedd1]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

I can hardly even look Americans in the eye any longer on their "free market" sentiments while they compare transportation systems. They would pat themselves on the back to suggest rider fees pay for it all being so market conscious and fiscally responsible. Never do they see roads, signs, highway patrols, stop lights, wrecks and hospital bound carnage as a cost.

[lektrode]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

....Only SF in the Bay Area has a vibrant mass transport, excepting BART which has been a resounding and under appreciated success.

uh.... there's another exception that you might appreciate too: http://www.rideuta.com/ = best metro public transit eye have seen/rode so far

http://www.rideuta.com/uploads/saltl...2011_large.jpg when they get the airport connected to the trax lightrail, it will be truly world class functional

why i'm looking for a fixerupper somewhere along this:
http://www.rideuta.com/uploads/skisy...2011_large.jpg

as my goal in life is to achieve a car-optional lifestyle and SLC is one of the best places, IMHO, to do it - at least on a seasonal basis (read: this is MY (fave) season, tho dunno about the summers there, seems the air gets as bad as LA....)

oh - and also because of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/us/30gold.html?_r=1

[don]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

“When I moved from Poland to the U.S. in 1997, I got my driver’s license and I gained 20 pounds,” said Gosia Kung, an architect and co-founder of Walk Denver.

By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER — Quite a few of the frighteningly fit live around here. On a balmy Saturday, or for that matter a frigid winter weekday before dawn, an army of them emerges to run and bike. And in their intimidating long strides and whirring spokes, they underscore why Colorado is the least obese state in the nation.

But walking to get somewhere? Different story.

People like Gosia Kung and Dr. Andrew M. Freeman are trying to change that. In very different ways and for different reasons — she is an architect, he a cardiologist — they are trying to reincorporate physical activity into the sinews of a place that, despite its fantastic body mass index, lost touch like most American cities with the idea of walking as transportation.

Last year, Ms. Kung co-founded a nonprofit group called Walk Denver, which is trying to get the city certified as a “Walk Friendly Community.” It is also an advocate for a previously voiceless group, the ordinary walker — whispering into the ears of city planners, or nagging if need be, and preaching to the public.

It is the physical space of a city, Ms. Kung said on a recent walk through downtown, that creates a pedestrian’s view of the world. Ample sidewalks are crucial, she said, but they provide only the means of access to an environment that must then reward walkers through attractions like shopping and entertainment that cater specifically to foot traffic.

More walkers, whether strolling or striding, in turn reinforce an old idea that Ms. Kung said many cities have forgotten: better public health and improved economic life go together.

“I’ve always been interested in urban design — how we interact with built environments and how it affects us,” said Ms. Kung, who grew up in Krakow, Poland, and never got over the example of its dense and tangled medieval walking streets. Her experience in America, in turn, was immediately intertwined with the downside of the car culture.

“When I moved from Poland to the U.S. in 1997, I got my driver’s license and I gained 20 pounds,” she said.

Dr. Freeman leads a group called Walk With a Doc, which encourages patients to get out, once a month or so, to stroll the city with their physicians. The group’s most recent walk, in January — walkers can be hard-core, too, no matter the season — drew 135 people, including 10 doctors.

“Gosia is working on making it easier and getting people inspired to do walking,” Dr. Freeman said. “We’re out there because exercise is the best medicine. It’s free, and there are no side effects.”

An added appeal to patients in an era of time-stressed medicine, he said, is the idea of extended time with a doctor, right there walking at one’s side. “We chat,” Dr. Freeman said.

But can a walking city really be made? Or is it luck? Manhattan, almost certainly the most pedestrian-dominated urban place in America, never planned for such an outcome; density and the constriction of island life made it just happen as the city grew. Many other cities got so split up or sealed off by the explosion of road building after World War II that pedestrian life all but died, or was never even born.

Denver, founded in the 1850s during the Colorado gold rush, went a third way that city planners said gave them great hope that walkers here could find their feet again.

Certainly, the car culture left its mark, carving out concrete arteries across the city and cleaving neighborhoods where people once walked to the market or their jobs. But the underlying city grid, laid down around the streetcar system that defined Denver’s early years, created a dense ring of nearby “streetcar suburbs” that walkers say could, with luck, one day be stitched back together by transit or pedestrian bridges.

The state’s broader outdoor culture — with its traditions of hiking and skiing that have helped keep obesity rates lower than in the rest of the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although they are higher than they used to be — also raises hopes that urban walking can make a big comeback.

Denver city planners had already set a goal of having 15 percent of residents get to their jobs on bike or on foot by 2020, up from about 6 percent according to the most recent census survey. They said they were grateful that Ms. Kung and her volunteers were keeping the pressure on.

“There are strong biker advocacy organizations in the city, but there hasn’t been one primarily focused on pedestrians,” said Cindy Patton, a senior city planner at Denver Department of Public Works. “We need organizations like that to push us.”

For the moment, Ms. Kung said, her goal is not an all-out mobilization of the city’s would-be pedestrian army, but rather the creation of structures that would, over time, create that army.

She is working, for example, with four elementary schools to start a “walking school bus” program next year. Children and adult leaders would walk home together, burning a few calories and maybe absorbing a new habit.

In June, Walk Denver and a coalition of other groups plan to descend on a run-down block in north Denver for a weekend to show — if only for a couple of days — how economic life and foot traffic could go together. The idea, called the Better Block Project, was pioneered in Dallas around the idea that brief makeovers can pave the way for permanent change.

In the Denver demonstration project, temporary businesses selling ice cream or art will be installed in empty storefronts. Outdoor cafes will rise like flash mobs, there for a weekend and then gone, leaving an echo for inspiration. Live music will beckon people to the neighborhood, organizers say.

Money for making America, or Denver, more pedestrian friendly is not exactly falling from the sky these days. Two transportation bills now in Congress, for example, would sharply reduce or eliminate programs to foster more biking and walking. Ms. Patton at the Public Works Department said the need for grants, or “O.P.M., other people’s money,” as she put it, was more crucial than ever.

But the flip side is that walking itself can save money in gas or bus fare and cost nothing but shoe leather. The Denver Walk With a Doc Web page, for example, uses the word “free” three times, in all capital letters, in case anyone should confuse with it with a regular office visit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/us/denver-pedestrians-promote-walkings-urban-potential.html?scp=1&sq=in denver, a pedestrian idea&st=cse

[Thailandnotes]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

The Decline of Walking and Bicycling

Not long ago, children routinely moved around their neighborhoods by foot or by bicycle, and that was often how they traveled to and from school. That is no longer the case. Whether looking at the total proportion of children walking and bicycling to school, the proportion of children who live within a mile of school or the proportion of children living within one mile of school who walk or bike, the decline is apparent.

In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age walked or bicycled to school. [2]
In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age walked or bicycled to school. [2]
In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
88 percent of these children walked or bicycled to school. [3]
In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
38 percent of these children walked or bicycled to school. [2]

http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/intr..._bicycling.cfm

[Thailandnotes]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

In 1990 Bangkok was so polluted walking long distances along the street quickly produced respiratory problems, and yet traffic was so gridlocked it was often faster to get out of your cab and hoof it. The taxi companies were controlled by the mafia and rates were double or triple what they are now 20 years later. Two stroke engines were the norm. With huge amounts of public money, everything changed, and now Bangkok is often held up as a model for other Asian cities to copy. The air is cleaner, the traffic flows. Two stroke engines were outlawed. New buses and all taxis run on natural gas. The sky train and two subways systems make it easy to get almost anywhere quickly.

[doom&gloom]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

They are building a new 'lite rail' system across the I-90 Bridge from Seattle up into downtown Bellevue (coincidentally ending close to the larges shopping mall of course).

I got a flyer in the mail proudly trumpeting the fact that this will be done in.... (drum roll please....) 2023!

It's gonna take them over a decade to build a choo choo that runs roughly 15-18 miles, mustly on public right of way. We won WWII in less than 1/6th of the time. I am sure loads of money is gonna get tied up in useless studies and mitigating fees and all kinds of crap that allows the connected to suck off the taxpayer.

I am all for public transit and light rail, but this kind of thing just makes me sick.

[lektrode]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

...
....
I am all for public transit and light rail, but this kind of thing just makes me sick.

+1 (esp when its cost effective)
y'ought to see what they're scheming on out here..
5 or maybe 7 or hey, 10 BILLION wouldnt be out of the question, for appx 20miles of _heavy_ elevated rail, that would give perhaps 1or2% of the commuting public (and only those on the west end of town) an option vs the freeway that consumes upwards of an hour or more - to travel appx 15mi? (on a good day)
never mind that 'conventional' wisdom holds that the city cant afford ONE billion to fix the sewage system that pukes 50million gals/day of liquid... uh... 'ice cream' into the ocean - 30years after the EPA filed suit, it "will bankrupt the city" - but 5 or 10bil for a train that 1% _might_ ride? "we get plenny money for dat, brah..."

vs SLC adding over 70 miles to their existing lightrail system, for 1.3 billion (last i knew), that already functions for the majority of the county (instead of the "1 %" )

[doom&gloom]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

SLC is run by Mormons, and they appreciate the value of a dollar well spent.

[lektrode]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

and so far, eye havent seen why thats a bad thing... (and no, i was born a catholic ;)
city streets are clean, neighborhoods(most of em) are tidy, parks well kept, crime is relatively low and prosecuted, altho they are seeing an influx of gang warfare activity most of which appears to be coming in from LA (up the 15 via 'los wages', i'd guess)
and since they (the repubs) keep a tight lid on .gov expenditures, the social safety net is experiencing problems - just like every other major metro area.. but electric rates are still quite low = good for industry/jobs, motor fuels relatively cheap (used to be cheaper, but they've apparently had to jack up fuel taxes, but if its to more effectively utilize public transport, is money _invested_ vs flushed down the pork barrel) and i wont even start on how low food/housing is, tho that does mean wages are same... but all in all, IMHO, UT is a pretty well run state (unless of course one is a .gov dependent type, then i'd guess one would agree with the loud/foul-mouths in the SLC tribune blogs, who constantly bash nearly everything about the place - would also guess most of em are from CA, OR, WA )

and the biggest attraction fer yers truly? (its on the license plates, kinda like NH's 'live free or die' ;)

The Greatest Snow on Earth
and most of it conveniently located/close/accessable by public transport from downtown and the airport...
vs, say... most of CO and/or CA (and/tho jackson hole is only about 5hours)

[BK]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

A couple of observations about Public Transit in the Northeast -
1. All Transit systems Have Massive Debt - I think Boston Area MBTA has the highest debt load.
2. I like Public Transit - but, it's often more expensive than traveling by car for a Family.
Wages that have risen faster than inflation and Massive debt are driving costs.

I would love to be able to use Public Transit regularly - sadly, its built on the same Debt Bubble as everything else. I'm sure the Feds will bail them out.

[lektrode]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

it would be _very_ interesting to compare the bluestate transit schemes with utah's - dcarrigg game for that project? (since he's so very good in this sort of data collection/presentation, which eye for one appreciate greatly, as he keeps the discussion/debate honest with the facts)

and not surprised the BOS/MBTA is wallowing in the debt sinkhole - havent heard much lately on the Big Dig fiasco, but that no doubt contributed

[c1ue]

Re: This is how politics works: A long term plan to attack public transportation funding

All Transit systems Have Massive Debt - I think Boston Area MBTA has the highest debt load.

That's not actually true. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system in the Bay Area has both a positive budget and positive asset vs. debt load.

The above is technically true for MBTA, but MBTA has $5 billion in outstanding notes which BART does not have.