To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net
America’s highway are in terrible shape, but when it comes to this maintenance crisis
its aging transit systems can give U.S. roads a run for their money. A
run worth about $102 billion, to be precise. That’s the estimated repair
backlog facing nine of the country’s largest (and oldest) transit
providers, according to a new report by the Regional Plan Association.
RPA’s analysis considered rail and bus systems in nine major
metro areas (below) that altogether account for 27 percent of the
country’s GDP and 21 percent of its population on just 2 percent of its
land. Transit ridership has grown steadily in these areas for years.
Together they now capture more than three-quarters of all U.S. transit
rail trips, in particular. RPABut
even as usage for these systems has soared, investment in them has
lagged. All told their maintenance backlog for capital transit
assets—things like tracks, storage yards, power systems, stations, and
vehicles—comes to $102 billion by RPA’s calculations, plus another $13
billion a year for “normal replacement needs.” (Since these figures
don’t include New Jersey Transit, the true totals are actually much
higher.)
That’s a huge problem for the future; here’s RPA:
Decades, and in some cases more than a century, of heavy
use has caused significant wear-and-tear, in addition to the impact of
natural elements and other weather events. … Many of their assets are
now beyond their useful life and the agencies are approaching a tipping
point at which unfunded capital needs will overwhelm their ability and
capacity to operate high-quality transit service.
The prospects for righting the situation are equally bleak.
In 2013, for instance, the transit agencies represented in RPA’s
analysis only received about $7.3 billion in funding for capital
expenditures, with just $6 billion of it going to system preservation
instead of expansion. That’s just a fifth of the $30 million a year that
RPA thinks these systems need to get back on track (so to speak),
assuming a six-year funding bill. RPANeither
long-term surface transport plan being considered in Congress right now
comes anywhere close to this figure. The House bill calls for $55 billion in transit funding over six years; the Senate bill does slightly better, escalating toward $12 billion a year. (Not that there’s money to pay for such legislation.) RPA concludes with a reminder of what’s at stake:
Inadequate levels of federal funding for transit state of
good repair needs has significant consequences in terms of achieving our
national transportation, economic development and sustainability goals.
It also has negative impacts on the metropolitan regions where a large
proportion of U.S. companies do business, and residents and workers
live, including some of the most disadvantaged populations.
Whenever a road project gets announced, the first thing
officials talk about is how it’s going to reduce traffic. Just last
month, for instance, the Connecticut DOT reported that it would be
widening Interstates 95 and 84, a project that would result in major
economic benefits from “easing congestion”:
The analysis found that adding a lane in each direction
border-to-border will save I-95 travelers well over 14 million hours of
delays by the year 2040. Likewise, the widening of I-84 will save
travelers over 4.7 million hours of delays during the same period.
Never mind that it’s unclear whether major highway projects
actually provide an economic boost (many of the supposed new benefits
are simply a relocation of existing business activity). Congestion
relief itself is a dubious claim when it comes to road expansions.
Transportation experts have repeatedly found that building new roads
inevitably encourages more people to drive, which in turn negates any
congestion savings—a phenomenon known as “induced demand.”
So it’s refreshing—and rare—to see the California DOT (aka Caltrans) link to a policy brief
outlining key research findings from years of study into induced
demand. The brief, titled “Increasing Highway Capacity Unlikely to
Relieve Traffic Congestion,” was compiled by UC-Davis scholar Susan
Handy.
Here are the highlights:
There’s high-quality evidence for induced demand.
All the studies reviewed by Handy used time-series data, “sophisticated
econometric techniques,” and controlled for outside variables such as
population growth and transit service.
More roads means more traffic in both the short- and long-term.
Adding 10 percent more road capacity leads to 3-6 percent more vehicle
miles in the near term and 6-10 percent more over many years.
Much of the traffic is brand new. Some of the cars
on a new highway lane have simply relocated from a slower alternative
route. But many are entirely new. They reflect leisure trips that often
go unmade in bad traffic, or drivers who once used transit or carpooled,
or shifting development patterns, and so on.
What’s significant about the Caltrans acknowledgement is that
induced demand creates something of a mission crisis for transportation
agencies that spend most of their money on building new roads. (The same can be said for peak driving.)
A 2014 assessment of Caltrans, conducted by the State Smart
Transportation Initiative, specifically cited induced demand as a
research finding that had yet to filter down “into the department’s thinking and decision making”:
For example, despite a rich literature on induced demand, internal interviewees frequently dismissed the phenomenon.
Ronald Milam of the transportation consultancy Fehr & Peers tells
CityLab that Caltrans has recognized the shortcomings of traditional
traffic models and tried to improve its analyses to better account for
induced demand. In response to new state laws designed to reduce vehicle
miles traveled and thus climate emissions—namely, Senate bills 375 and 743—the agency is updating and broadening that effort. New guidelines are currently in the works.
Eric Sundquist of SSTI said via email that it’s “notable” to see
Caltrans link to the policy brief, but adds that some DOTs have started
to address induced demand whether they call it that or not. The big
question, he says, is what policies get put in place to deal with its
effects. Pennsylvania’s DOT during the Ed Rendell administration, for
instance, “basically stopped building new highways and diverted
resources to upkeep and non-car modes,” Sundquist says.
That culture change isn’t so easy. Connecticut officials also seem to
understand that expanding roads won’t resolve the state’s traffic
problems. “You can’t build your way out of congestion,” Tom Maziarz,
chief of planning at the state DOT, recently told the Connecticut Post. And yet the interstate widening project moves forward.