4 injured after wall collapses at SR 99 tunnel project

http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/seattle/2015/02/12/sr-99-tunnel/23311865/

February 12, 2015

Worker loaded into ambulance at 99 tunnel site.

SEATTLE -- Four men working on an elevator shaft were injured at the north end of the new State Route 99 tunnel under construction, according to Seattle Fire spokesman Kyle Moore.
The construction site is located at 301 Aurora Avenue North.

The men appeared to suffer non-life threatening injuries, but were still being evaluated for internal injuries, Harborview spokeswoman Susan Gregg said.

"The good news is they're awake and alert and they're talking. It doesn't appear to be anything life threatening with any of the young men here," Gregg said.

The men arrived at Harborview just before 3pm. All four men complained of neck and back injuries, injuries consistent with this type of fall.

The four men are ages 23, 29, 31 and 36.

Moore said three of the men were rescued after they fell 25 feet when the wall of the elevator shaft collapsed.

"It was not easy to get in there," Moore said.

Three workers did walk out. The most seriously injured man had to be carried half a mile out of the construction area. He suffered a fractured arm.

The three other patients, including the man who walked out, were put onto back boards as a precaution and also taken to Harborview.

Washington Labor and Industries was launching a formal investigation into the accident and would look into the job site's history.

The Seattle Tunnel Partners and the Washington State Department of Transportation have made the point over and over that they want this project to be as safe as possible. Even with the project delays, both parties insist they won't drive the project any faster than is safe.

The incident occurred at the north portal of the SR 99 tunnel project, that when finished, will replace the aging viaduct along the waterfront.

Work at the north portal has been independent from much of the rest of the project. Moore said the walls of the tunnel were not impacted in the incident.

An operations building will eventually rise above ground level at the north end. It will include everything that WSDOT needs to ventilate and maintain that tunnel.

They are building elevator shafts to be able to start the construction of the building. The actual construction of the building won't take place until after Bertha finishes digging the tunnel.
An 80 foot deep pit is waiting for Bertha at the north end of the project, where the boring machine will be dismantled and removed.

Currently, Bertha, the world's largest tunnel boring machine, remains stopped about 1,000 feet into the job. Repairs are needed before Bertha can run again.

Most recently, workers constructed a cradle in the access pit dug to reach Bertha. The next step involves Bertha tunneling through the walls of the pit before its face is removed and brought to the surface for repairs.

Statement from Seattle Tunnel Partners:

This afternoon, five workers were installing rebar for a concrete wall at the tunnel's north portal work zone. The wall of rebar gave way, injuring four of the five workers. The injured workers were transported to Harborview Medical Center for evaluation. Emergency procedures were followed throughout the incident. Seattle Tunnel Partners is thankful for the Seattle Fire Department's assistance in evacuating the injured workers to Harborview. 

Statement from WSDOT:

We are still gathering information, but Seattle Tunnel Partners has informed us that an incident has occurred on the SR 99 Tunnel Project job site in the north portal area. Safety is STP's and WSDOT's number one priority. Right now, their field crews are focusing on making sure the site is secured. Emergency services were notified immediately and arrived on site after the incident.
We will provide additional information as it becomes available.

America's Infrastructure Crisis Is Really a Maintenance Crisis

Here's what we can do about it.

 http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/02/americas-infrastructure-crisis-is-really-a-maintenance-crisis/385452/

By Eric Jaffe, February 12, 2015


 

It's long been time to focus more on maintaining America's existing roads and less on building new ones. The National Highway System already connects virtually all of the areas worth connecting. Driving peaked circa 2004—and even earlier in some states. Traffic remains bad in many metros, but by itself expanding road networks can only temporarily alleviate the problem, and over time might even increase it.

And yet we build. We build without seeming to appreciate that every mile of fresh new road will one day become a mile of crumbling old road that needs additional attention. We build even though our pot of road funding requires increasingly creative (and arguably illegal) solutions to stay anything other than empty.

The numbers tell the story best. From 2004 to 2008, states dedicated just 43 percent of their road budgets to maintain existing roads despite the fact that they made up nearly 99 percent of the road system. The other 1 percent—new construction—got more than half the money. From 2009 to 2011 states did only marginally better, spending 55 percent of their road money ($20.4 billion) on expansion and just 45 percent on maintenance ($16.5 billion):

Smart Growth America

Predictably, over that same period, the country's roads got worse:

Smart Growth America

To keep the nation's roads in good repair would require about $45.2 billion a year, rather than the $16.5 currently spent on maintenance:

Smart Growth America

In other words, we need to use all the available road money each year to fix our roads, and then some, to prevent them from falling into a state of disrepair that endangers public safety. And the more roads we build, the more we need to one day fix.

Some States Do Better Than Others

The above charts come from a 2014 Smart Growth America report spotted by Streetsblog's Angie Schmitt in a thoughtful recent post on America's maintenance crisis. On average the situation is bleak. Though some states do better than others, some do much, much worse.

Washington state, for instance, spent 84 percent of its road funding on expansion between 2009 and 2011. Over that same time period the condition of its existing roads unsurprisingly fell. The share of its roads in poor condition went from 12 percent in 2008 to 27 percent in 2011.

And Washington isn't the worst offender. According to the Smart Growth report, Mississippi spent 97 percent of its money on expansion. Utah wasn't far behind at 93 percent. Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina (all 83 percent), and Texas (82 percent) were in a similar ballpark.

CityLab

Over that same period, road quality in each of these states declined in one form or another. The share of roads in poor condition in Mississippi rose from 18 to 30 percent, and in Utah from 7 to 11 percent, and in Arizona and North Carolina by a couple points each. Nevada's share of poor roads actually fell—but so did its share of road in "good" condition, from 62 percent all the way down to 24 percent.

CityFixer

Solutions for an Urbanizing World

Go

 

Compare these numbers to those for states that spend as much in road repair as they should. In 2011, California spent $1.44 billion to maintain roads, against a need of $1.3 billion—a habit that seems to pay off in road quality. California improved its share of "good" roads from 2008 to 2011, and decreased its share of "poor" ones. New Jersey followed a similar course: spending $1.1 billion in repairs against $225 million in needs, while watching road quality improve.
That's not to say places like California or New Jersey don't have infrastructure problems. They do. But, at least circa 2011, they'd also recognized that maintenance counts as infrastructure, too.

What To Do About It

The most logical plan to address the problem—one we've pointed out before, and Brad Plumer at Vox raises again this week—is the "Fix It First" approach outlined in 2011 by transport scholars David Levinson and Matthew Kahn. Under this philosophy federal highway money would be directed away from new construction and used instead to "repair, maintain, rehabilitate, reconstruct, and enhance existing roads and bridges."

There are loads of reasons to like this plan. The sooner repairs are made, the cheaper they are: every $1 in preventive maintenance saves between $4 and $10 in future repairs, according to Levinson and Kahn. The funding system could be weighted by road condition to favor those in the worst shape (below, a map of structurally deficient U.S. bridges). On the whole, preserving a road is "less-risky" than building a new one, because the demand for its use is far more certain.

DOT via "Fix It First"

Another great thing about this plan is that by making it harder to expand roads, metro areas gain an incentive to charge drivers for congestion. As we've pointed out before, Americans don't pay nearly enough in gas taxes to offset the social costs of driving—of which time lost to traffic is a biggie. As driving became more expensive over time, local agencies could meet additional mobility demands with new investments in public transportation.

Speaking of transit, prioritizing maintenance is just as important here, too. The recent deadly electrical malfunction on the D.C. Metrorail system seems to have stemmed, at least in part, from infrastructure in need or repair or replacement. Delayed maintenance also played a role in recent incidents on the Metro-North commuter railroad outside New York City.

Writing recently at the Transportationist, Columbia planning scholar David King suggested that local government should have to meet certain criteria before receiving money for new transit projects. These include promoting smarter development, limiting parking, and dedicating street space to car alternatives. Agencies should also recover a minimum threshold of transit costs through fares—ensuring that they have enough money to run and maintain an existing system before lobbying to build a shiny new one:

If cities do the hard political work they should be rewarded. If all they do is raise taxes based on specious claims, they should be held accountable. We currently have this backwards.

Tyranny of the Ribbon

The hard political work begins with the tyranny of the ribbon. Of the many reasons infrastructure repairs get snubbed for construction, big public ribbon-cutting ceremonies that come with fresh projects—but not with stale maintenance—is near the top of the list. By the nature of their limited tenure and uncertain futures, politicians care more about attaching their name to a new project than extending the life of someone else's old one.

 Smart Growth America suggests we "raise the profile of repair and preservation projects." That's easier said than done, and when done wrong the results can be disastrous. Take that time, in 2005, when then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to call public attention to road maintenance—by having a crew dig a pothole only to fill it:

 http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/0xrz39/the-hole-truth

In general, public ceremonies for maintenance just end up drawing little attention. During my recent conversation with MARTA chief Keith Parker, he said the Atlanta transit system had a tunnel ventilation project underway that may cost upwards of $200 million, and a radio system upgrade that will cost up to $50 million, and of course regular track enhancements and repairs—investments that, while necessary, will prevent the agency from doing what Parker called "sexier" expansion projects.

"When we tell people, 'hey, come out because we're going to have a celebration for the Clayton County expansion,' we expect a long line of people," he said. "When we say, 'hey look, we want to celebrate the tunnel ventilation project,' I don't think we'll get so many."

The media isn't blameless here. Just as politicians are loath to cut ribbons for infrastructure repairs, news organizations and bloggers prefer to hype new and shinier projects in the pipeline—or to wait until deferred maintenance causes a high-profile tragedy. There's no single or simple way to reverse America's growing infrastructure crisis, but reframing it as a maintenance crisis is a good place to start.


 

 

The End of Road Rage

Psychologists still don't fully understand driving-related violence. But technology and improved transit infrastructure offer solutions to minimize it.

 http://www.citylab.com/crime/2015/02/the-end-of-road-rage/385395/

By Kriston Capps, February 12, 2015

 



When Evander Holyfield was a young man, he was the victim of road rage. He was 17, he tells the Associated Press, and driving a car he described as "raggly." When it broke down suddenly in the middle of the road one day, it set off an older driver, who honked his horn, furious, and even left his car to confront the future Undisputed World Champion boxer. Even at that young age, Holyfield was already an amateur champion. This is the Real Deal we're talking about.

Fortunately for the other guy, Holyfield kept his cool.

Drawing on his early experience, the heavyweight boxer is now starring in a new public service announcement about road rage produced by Georgia law-enforcement agencies. In the video, Holyfield pulls out of a tree-lined driveway in his luxury SUV, only to cut off some bubba in a raggly Ford pickup truck by accident. Things don't go bubba's way.

"Everyone knows Evander Holyfield," Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens told the AP. "Everyone knows he's a former four-time heavyweight champion. And everyone knows they don't want to mess around with him."

Fair enough: Avoid fighting Evander Holyfield. (And whatever you do, do not get into a traffic run-in with Mike Tyson.) But what good does this message do for drivers? And what does it really say about violent or aggressive driving?

Vehicular assault, fist fights, stabbings, shootings: If the evening news is any indication, the nation's drivers are out to get you. Yet 20 years after road rage emerged as a concern, the core reasons for violent frustration behind the wheel remain poorly diagnosed. Looking back, the phenomenon seems both overblown and understudied.

A national epidemic—or a '90s media trend?

In a 1998 article for The Atlantic, Michael Fumento registered a surge in reports on behavior the public was calling "road rage." The phrase was coined a decade earlier, by newscasters at KTLA in Los Angeles, following a series of freeway shootings. Road rage didn't take off in headlines and scare stories, though, until 1994.

"'Road rage' replacing DWI as top problem," reads a typical headline in The Star-Ledger in 1997. "Nationally, there is an epidemic of 'road rage'—aggressive drivers running red lights and venting high-speed hostility toward other drivers, the law and perhaps toward the hand that life has dealt," offered George Will, in a 1998 column for The Washington Post.

Causes for road rage abounded. In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, John Larson, the late founder of the Institute for Stress Medicine in Norwalk, Connecticut, and author of Steering Clear of Highway Madness, blamed Hollywood. Larson specifically indicted a movie from the 1980s he called Road Warriors (perhaps referring to the 1981 post-apocalyptic classic, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior).

Larson also blamed road rage on advertising and high-performance vehicles. He wasn't alone in reaching for reasons. In his 1998 Post column, Will pinned road rage on identity politics and political correctness. 

Fumento wasn't buying any of it. His Atlantic article debunked the handful of studies and polls that served back then as evidence for an epidemic. As far back as 1998, he was condemning road rage as too broad a category, one that had expanded beyond driver-on-driver assault to include fights over parking and other conflicts. "The definition of 'road rage' now requires neither a road nor rage," he assessed, four years into the so-called epidemic.

No data could confirm an increase in the incidence of aggressive driving, Fumento concluded, except for the increased number of people noticing and talking about it. "How many more lives could be saved and injuries prevented if we focused on behaviors that cause accidents, rather than on media creations like road rage?" he writes.

History has partially vindicated him. The number of screaming headlines describing road rage appears to have fallen off sharply. In fact, a Lexis search for stories in recent years containing "epidemic" and "road rage" garnered many more false positives than authentic hits. For example, a columnist for the Montgomery Advertiser offered in October that Ebola should rank low among epidemics in the U.S., a semi-serious list including "gun violence, road rage, high speeds, high places, global warming, memory loss, and weight gain."

A scan of Google Books confirms the surge of road-rage interest in the 1990s, its plateau in the 2000s, and its relative decline since.

(Google/CityLab)

Yet road rage didn't fall off the map altogether. Anti-road-rage advocates, most notably the clinical psychologist Arnold Nerenberg, pressed the American Psychiatric Association to include road rage as an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. While the ever-growing DSM had listed "Intermittent Explosive Disorder" as a thing since the third edition (1987), only through subsequent revisions (in 1994, 2000, and 2013) did the definition for IED expand sufficiently to capture road rage. Domestic violence is also sometimes categorized under the same anger disorder.  

For his part, Nerenberg—who once maintained a website at roadrage.com, and sold his guide, The Handbook for Overcoming Road Rage, via a toll-free number, 1-888-ROAD-RAGE—was convicted last February for defrauding the federal government of nearly $1 million.

Working through road rage, clinically speaking

Aggressive driving, of course, never went away. But despite its quasi-official designation as a ubiquitous mental disorder, road rage is the subject of some pretty thin research.

For example, a study from Plymouth Rock Assurance released last September found found that 99 percent of surveyed licensed drivers in New Jersey had witnessed at least one road-rage incident. Yet only 35 percent of these drivers reported feeling "uncontrollable anger" themselves while behind the wheel. Maybe typical of bad driving studies, but not at all isolated.

More rigorous, less subjective analyses are out there, including a 2006 study released in Accident Analysis & Prevention on the groups of people who were more likely to engage in road rage. 

(Namely, it's the usual suspects: men, young adults, binge drinkers, people with trust issues, people arrested for non-traffic violations, and—worryingly—motorists with a gun in the vehicle.) 

"Despite the fact that IED, or some version of this diagnosis, has always been included in the DSM, changes in criteria in the various editions over the years have resulted in relatively little being known about the incidence or prevalence of IED either in clinical samples or in the general population," reads a 2007 survey from the Archives of General Psychiatry. At that time, only two prior published studies had grappled with the epidemiology of impulsive aggression. The 2007 survey concludes, in summary, that "IED is a much more common condition than previously recognized."

"While road rage is an intuitively recognized phenomenon for most of us, for research purposes, a consistent definition of the term appears to be lacking," ventures a 2010 report in Psychiatry. This study found that just 2 percent or fewer incidents of road rage ever result in physical damage to person or property. Even still, the actual figures for violent crimes might still be strikingly high, depending on the definition of road rage and whether it includes things like fisticuffs over parking spots.

Research that takes a step back can be illuminating. An experiment detailed in Environment & Behavior found that exposure to roadside vegetation (as opposed to manmade materials) can lead to higher tolerances for frustration among drivers. Mood and the presence of passengers plays a role in a teenage boy's willingness to engage in risky driving, explains a study in Transportation Research. These are efforts to understand complex driver behaviors, which might be more fruitful than approaching road rage as an epidemic.

Still, the problem is diffuse, according to the government. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration distinguishes between aggressive driving (a traffic violation) and road rage (a criminal offense). Of some 6.8 million automobile accidents every year, NHTSA attributes "a substantial number" to aggressive driving. That's as specific as the agency gets, though.

One solution for road rage: Ban all drivers

Experts appear to agree that road rage—to the extent that it exists outside of 1990s alarmism—is a catch-all term for complex psychological and environmental factors. Some of those psychological contributors include displaced anger, unrewarding jobs, and an inability to accept blame, according to relevant research. Those are tough nuts for policymakers to crack.

Among the environmental factors, though, are some areas where smart planning and legislation could make a difference in driver behavior. The number of miles driven per day, traffic density, and the presence of a firearm in a vehicle all appear to contribute to aggressive driving. Getting guns out of cars seems like a no-brainer for eliminating deadly driving conflicts (even if it's a non-starter politically).

Pulling drivers out of cars altogether might be another solution. The jury's still out on how or whether this could work. Even with the imminent opening of a testing district in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and ongoing tests in Mountain View, California, driverless auto technology is still far from a proven technology. It's not entirely clear yet that driver-free automobiles will improve the experience on the road. They might just make traffic that much worse. (For Google's part, its self-driving machines won't be designed to rage against us.)

Laws on aggressive driving are all over the map. In Virginia, aggressive driving is a separate (and lesser) offense than reckless driving. Several other states have passed sanctions targeting aggressive driving. California law specifies that courts can suspend the licenses of drivers who commit criminal vehicular assault.

More states should follow the lead of New Jersey, which passed an expanded assault-by-auto statute in 2012. Under the law, drivers who cause injury for reason of anger are subject to the same severe penalties as drivers who cause harm while under the influence. The growing prevalence of dash-cams (or bike helmet-cams) makes motive easier to establish.

If a solution is in the offing for violence related to aggressive driving, it's probably going to come from the technological or legal sphere, not better mental-health treatment. And any solution is likely going to need to address environmental factors that guide fundamental driving behaviors—factors such as traffic planning, speed limits, segregated bike lanes, and so on.

Perhaps nothing can solve road rage. But if violent crimes arise from conflicts that are built into street design and traffic planning, those crimes are preventable.

Whatever road is taken for highway funds, there's a need for speed

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-cap-drivers-fees-20150212-column.html

Los Angeles has Cancer and driving less isn’t going to cure it

https://medium.com/@StephenCorwin/los-angeles-has-cancer-4a00d2a04fe9

By Stephen Corwin, February 12, 2015

What they tell you about Los Angeles is that it’s a city for cars. They’ll tell you you can’t live here without one, and that being in one can be frustrating. They’ll tell you about bad drivers and parking problems and about how the meter maid has a stick up his ass. But none of that matters, because those things aren’t problems—they’re just annoying.

See, driving is like smoking. It’s fun in the beginning. If it’s not pleasant, it’s at least exciting. Maybe it gives you a little bit of a rush, but as time wears on, it becomes routine. That routine can get pretty annoying, but nobody ever stopped smoking because it was annoying; People stop smoking because they don’t want cancer. Well guess what:

Los Angeles has cancer.

Our experiences driving cars in this city are, for the most part, fleeting. We drive somewhere, we get out of the car, we close the door, and we walk away. But to think that we can escape the world that cars have created as easily as we escape the car itself is foolish. In fact, when we leave our cars, we walk into that world. We have to live in that putrid mess.

I’ve heard enough about traffic. I don’t care. People only complain about traffic because they don’t have the balls to talk about the real issue, which is that car culture is leeching away their quality of life, and there’s nothing they can do about it. We’ve spent more than enough time at this point talking about how being in a car is annoying. Los Angeles has cancer. Let’s talk about that.

Let’s talk about how Los Angeles is a city where construction projects can fence off whole blocks, including the sidewalks, without offering people on foot an alternative. Let’s talk about how when that happens, no one even considers converting one of the two car lanes into a temporary sidewalk, because dear god, that might cause slight inconvenience to people in cars. And let’s talk about how ironic it is that inconveniencing people in cars is the end of the world, but doing the same to people on foot is a non-issue. Then let’s talk about how when frustrated walkers decide to use the car lane rather than take the ridiculous detour, the city’s totally acceptable solution to that problem is not to concede space to those people, but rather to bolt permanent, metal signs into the middle of the sidewalk to keep them from doing so. That is cancer.

Let’s talk about how Los Angeles is a city where a new bridge is deemed ready to open the moment it can handle car traffic, and how our traffic engineers think painting the road with an image of a person on a bike should be considered safe, even on a one-lane bridge with a completely blind corner that handles so much car traffic that the stencil is worn off after less than 6 months. That is cancer.

Let’s talk about how in Los Angeles, the interests of the film industry are enough to sway the city counsel into making us the first city in the entire country to ever unpaint a green bike lane, despite its significant and measurably positive impact on safety. That is cancer.

 And most importantly, let’s talk about how when it’s 80 damn degrees in the middle of winter and I suggest going for a bike ride, the idea flops because no one can think of a place that’s safe enough to do so. Cancer.

 Let’s talk about how in Los Angeles, people will back their pickup trucks into a parking space for a bike, totally destroying it, and drive off without so much as an apology. That is cancer.

Let’s talk about how in Los Angeles, it’s not unusual when a friend calls me feeling anxious about starting a new job, not because of the job itself, but because she’s worried about the impact the commute is going to have on her quality of life. That is cancer.

 And most importantly, let’s talk about how when it’s 80 damn degrees in the middle of winter and I suggest going for a bike ride, the idea flops because no one can think of a place that’s safe enough to do so. Cancer.

 Over the last several years we’ve made a lot of progress toward getting people out of their cars, and we’re proud of it. We should be. Changing long-standing habits isn’t easy. But just like quitting smoking, driving less alone won’t cure our cancer. Fixing the world for people outside of cars will.

A Wonky Debate Over Metro Regional vs. Sub-Regional Funding

http://la.streetsblog.org/2015/02/12/a-wonky-debate-over-metro-regional-vs-subregional-funding/

By Joe Linton, February 12, 2015



 

 Metro’s map of subregions and regional facilities.

There is an item that was bounced around at the Metro Board last month regarding freeway projects and whether they are “regional” or “subregional” facilities. Lakewood City Councilmember and Metro Boardmember Diane DuBois is pushing for L.A. freeway-widening projects to be classified as “regional” rather than “subregional” projects. Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin raised some issues over this re-classification. The final decision is likely to come back to the Metro Board for a showdown in April. 

All of this is pretty wonky. It does have implications on transportation funding priorities, including how transit projects compete with highway projects over scarce flexible Metro dollars.

In Metro’s 2001 Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP), Metro divided L.A. County nine sub-regions (map above):

1. Arroyo Verdugo (Glendale, Burbank, and adjacent areas)
2. Central Los Angeles
3. Gateway Cities (Long Beach, and most of South East L.A. County)
4. Las Virgenes / Malibu
5. North Los Angeles County
6. San Fernando Valley
7. San Gabriel Valley
8. South Bay
9. Westside Cities

These sub-regions were mainly used for long term planning, but, since the 2008 Measure R transportation sales tax, the sub-regions have also been woven into the way Metro funds projects.

After Measure R passed, Metro adopted what’s called its Measure R Cost Containment Policy (the full formal name is the Unified Cost Management Process and Policy for Measure R Projects.) That policy bills itself as a “new step-by-step cost management process will require the MTA Board to review and consider approval of project cost estimates against funding resources at key milestone points throughout the environmental, design, and construction phases of the Measure R transit and highway projects.” These transit and highway projects, are, of course, often multi-billion dollar projects. Examples include $2.8 billion to extend the Purple Line subway four miles, and $3.3 billion to widen about 70 miles of the 5 Freeway. Multi-billion dollar projects are prone to massive cost overruns.

So, according to the cost containment policy, when a Metro Measure R project’s costs increase above what has been approved, the agency looks to take specific measures to either lower the costs or get money to cover the overruns. The policy specifies that cost overruns will be met through the following sources in the following order:

1. Value Engineering and or scope reductions;
2. New local agency funding resources;
3. Shorter segmentation;
4. Other cost reductions within the same transit or highway corridor;
5. Other cost reductions within the same sub-region;
6. Countywide transit cost reductions or other funds will be sought using pre-established priorities.

These are jargony. The crux of the matter is that item 5 (and, to an extent, items 2 and 4) means that when projects exceed their budgets, costs will be covered within the sub-region. One project’s overruns will reduce the budget for other projects in the same sub-region where the project is located.

In January, the Metro board established a special set of regional projects immune to the sub-regional cost overrun procedure. All airports, sea-ports, and Union Station are classified as “regional” projects (see map above), because theoretically everyone in the county benefits from, for example, LAX and Port of Long Beach improvements. For these regional projects “cost increases to Measure R funded projects… are exempt from the corridor and subregional cost reduction requirements. Cost increases regarding these projects will be addressed from the regional programs share.”

Metro boardmember, and Lakewood City Councilmember, Diane Dubois, along with boardmembers Don Knabe and Ara Najarian, introduced a motion [PDF] that would essentially classify “[i]nterstates, freeways or highways” as regional projects, hence “highway sub-regional funding will not be subject to the Unified Cost Management Process and Policy.” Though the motion requested that Metro staff analyze and report back, it clearly specified that highways would become exempt from the cost containment process in the meantime.


The DuBois motion asserts that, with highway projects managed by Caltrans, a state agency, Metro, a county agency, does not actually control highway project costs. While there is some validity to this, there is also quite a bit that local jurisdictions can do to hold the line on large project cost escalation.

At the January Planning and Programming Committee, David Yale, Metro’s Managing Executive Officer for Countywide Planning & Development, stated it pretty well ”some of what Caltrans is doing to define project scope is influenced by cities along the corridor.”

For example, if Caltrans decides to widen the 101 Freeway in Hollywood, and the project involves replacing roadway bridges over the 101, then the city of L.A. can insist that Caltrans rebuild bridges wider than they had been, and potentially fancier – demanding various bells and whistles. The same happens with transit construction; city, county, and state mandates (such as road widening) kick in and, to an extent, drive up transit construction costs.

With limited funding at stake, the stakes become political. Politicians push to steer more and more resources into areas they represent. Metro has a difficult time refusing. Costs escalate.

Billions of Measure R dollars at work widening the 5 Freeway. Metro’s orange sign prominent on the 5 in Southeast L.A. County.

DuBois represents the Gateway Cities sub-region (Southeast L.A. County), an area that focuses more transportation funding on highways than on transit. (The San Fernando Valley is in a similar situation.) Measure R has separate pots of money for highways and for transit, including separate contingency funding set aside for cost overruns for highways and for transit. But there is also some flexibility in some Metro funding, so, in some ways, whoever cost overruns first and most gets to suck up money that will not be available later for anything else.

DuBois’ motion, by exempting highways from cost containment that would still apply to transit, effectively prioritizes highway spending over transit spending. It is her job to do this, because it puts her highway-heavy sub-region at a slight advantage over more transit-heavy sub-regions.

At January meetings, Metro boardmember, and L.A. City Councilmember, Mike Bonin pushed back on DuBois motion. Though Bonin was one of the authors of carving out LAX as a countywide 
benefit, he expressed skepticism about lumping Metro highway projects into the regional category, effectively gutting Metro’s cost containment efforts. Bonin asserted that L.A. County’s rail system is no less regional than its highway system. Bonin supported Metro staff studying the highway cost containment exception, and bringing a policy recommendation back for a full Metro board vote.

In a statement to SBLA, Bonin clarified his position:

Protecting the funding of our transit system is vitally important to me; it is essential to making sure residents of Los Angeles get the multi-modal transportation system they need and deserve. I’m very wary of any approach that even hints at giving freeways priority over mass transit.  Any attempt to change funding formulas needs to considered thoughtfully, carefully, slowly and with lots of public input.

Right now, Metro staff are studying how this can be carved up. The matter is expected to return to the Metro board in April, with a possible showdown pitting highways vs. transit.

Huizar, Molina tussle over transportation and planning

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-huizar-molina-tussle-20150212-story.html