Quick, what was the voter turnout for the Presidential election last year? The turnout for your latest Mayoral race or an election for another influential local official?

The exact number is not important. The fact that it was very low is important.

The rate was actually close enough to 58.2 percent, down from 61.6 percent in 2008. In the 1990s it dropped in the mid-50s.

We take a lot of what is important in our public lives for granted. For example, we assume our transportation infrastructure will be there, we expect it will be the best in the world and we expect it to stay that way. And generally it is and it does.

The Birmingham News is the biggest of West Alabama’s regional newspapers. It recently ran a half page story with headline, “Bridge replacement plans draw questions,” that begins like this:

“The Alabama Department of Transportation’s current proposal to rebuild the Interstate 20/59 bridges through downtown would make permanent alterations to nearby streets, and the idea has nearby residents and businesses fretting the impacts.”

It’s a story about public participation in the workings of the DOT and in this particular project. This sort of story is reasonably common in newspapers; the newspaper is carrying out one of its most important roles by keeping the public informed about of vital issues. But as newspapers begin to be less and less of a presence in our daily lives does the fact that we take so much of our infrastructure for granted mean we’ll just shrug if we see less and less of these sorts of stories?

Yes, “online” is there to deliver information whether it is a notice of public meeting from a DOT or blogs from people in a neighborhood who are up in arms about what a DOT proposes. But will we go look for it? Will we take the time? Can we be bothered? There is a something of the “shiny object” model at work here. Social media is king, tablets are cool, a watch that tells you where you are so you don’t have to look up and figure it out for yourself is increasingly a must-have.

jlatta@randallreilly.com

We have to promote the idea that the digital landscape is the new Town Crier and keeps the public informed about – or perhaps more importantly interested in – what is happening with our highways and bridges, and a place that lets them participate. There’s an old movie (“So Fine”, 1981) where an actor, new to Venice, wonders how all the roads got flooded. Let’s hope we don’t look up from our phones one day and wonder how all our roads fell apart.

The evolution of the magazine continues. Not just this magazine, but all of them are in a state of change in this digital, online, etc., age. Reports of the death of the magazine are, however, as Mr. Twain observed about his own obituary, exaggerations. New magazines are launched every month. Some existing magazines thrive and some adapt and dedicate themselves to a new definition of service. Magazines still rock.

The amount of information you can find online is expanding, it seems at the speed of light, and as it does it breaks down into narrow specialties and niches as if it had hit a prism.

Much of what you once looked for in magazines is now found more quickly and more completely online. And we deliver that with our website, www.betterroads.com. We’ve designed and redesigned it to make sure you can go to what you want, or need, and bypass what isn’t essential with the greatest of ease. And my Roadologist blog is housed there too.

We’ve added a short, sharp daily newsletter to our repertoire, another easy-in, easy-out production to keep you up to speed. And we’ve promoted Amanda Bayhi to online managing editor working with our construction media online editor Wayne Grayson. Social media is well covered too.

The print issue continues to develop its focus as a partner in the process of modern day information and support delivery. We know from all of our research that this magazine is a premium for you. We know you like and value having it in your hands. Our research is not that much different than the research that shows people love tablets and e-readers but don’t intend to give up the books and magazines they have loved longer. So we keep refining and redefining how best to have our print issue serve readers as part of a continually broadening platform.

John Latta,
Editor-in-Chief
jlatta@randallreilly.com

“Magazine” used to mean print. To us it means a multi-functional, collaborative delivery system (surely I should call this an MFCDS) in which we can provide you with more than we ever used to be able to do, through a variety of channels and formats, with different capabilities (think video or interactive exploded diagrams for example), with more responsiveness and a wider range of sources and templates.

And we will keep changing. In the current environment change is constant. It is not moving toward a fixed ending; it will keep happening and we will keep responding to it. Ironically, the base result is unchanged: We deliver to you, our audience, a lot of what you want and need to be the best you can be in this industry better than anyone else in the “magazine” field.

Before next month’s huge bauma construction equipment trade show in Munich, Germany, the world’s largest this year, was January’s two-day pre-bauma media dialogue.

It was wet, cold, snowy, windy and a blast. I have my favorite indoor and warm places there. Food is involved.

You cannot help but be impressed by Germany’s transportation infrastructure. It gets your attention. We should be so lucky, as they say. But comparing German apples and American oranges just doesn’t work.

The autobahns are superbly built and maintained. But the fuel taxes are wildly high and not dedicated to roads. Speeds are high, and that is a rush, but truck traffic is severely regulated on road use and that’s a counterbalance for freight movement with significant cost implications.

Munich airport is fun. Yes, fun. Easy to get into and out of, full of all sorts of shopping and dining and so much more hassle free than most American airports. But again the model has to be viewed from a distance. As with the roads, it’s an operation that we could learn from, cherry picking what might work for us, rather than a blueprint we should try to reproduce.

Rail and high-speed rail are extremely effective people movers in Germany. Arrive in Munich (or Paris or London for that matter) and trains slice you through the suburbs to the city center. But you realize that the rail right-of-ways expanded with the cities, they were not cut through existing buildings and other infrastructure. So again the mismatched fruit problem.

And it was rail travel that almost got me arrested. There was a Saturday protest march (uneventful) and fully equipped riot police were out in force. I spent the day being a tourist with my iPhone’s video camera and provided commentary for the family for one of those excruciating nights back home where they would relive my Munich trip with me. Yes they would. (Hey, I watched enough vacation slides as a kid to know how much fun this can be.)

John Latta,
Editor-in-Chief,
jlatta@randallreilly.com

Late in the day I was filming trains at the main railway station. I was tapped on the shoulder. I turned. Riot police. Five of them. The biggest guy said something in German. My German is virtually non-existent. English? Why are you filming the police? You know that feeling when your stomach hits the ground? Sure enough there they were in my trains video. I explained shakily that I was filming trains. They seemed unconvinced. Then I got a bright idea. I showed them the day’s rank amateurish home videos and suddenly unfunny commentaries. They smiled and left. My bumbling tourist persona had set me free.

By John Latta, Editor-in-Chief

I must say I do look forward to trade show season.

There are old friends, so many, and that is always something to delight in. And so many new products, from giant machinery to software and gadgets and everywhere in between. I’m like a kid at a fairground. Wow, look at this, wow look at that, tell me how it works, all day long. The ingenuity and engineering in so many of these products is head shaking, and how much fun is that. At seminars, press conferences, dining tables and in booths I constantly find solutions offered for industry problems, answers to questions that puzzle me, and technological explanations for things that, without help, would be well beyond my learning.

But there’s something else. Not quite an intangible, but something to do with all of the different people, the show events and after-show events, the show floor, the noise, the demonstrations and the sales pitches all running into a single feeling. It’s a show, not a meeting or a convention, and it’s exciting, it lights up and gets loud. Exhibitors “work” their booths and wander to every competitor’s booth, talking, analyzing, guessing and making mental notes, and their summaries, their highs and lows, will come out in discussions late in the day.

It is here, in this mix, that I can get a reading that is hard to find elsewhere. All of the people I’m talking to have talked to other people who have talked to other people and so on until we are in a sort of conversation soup. It is, to use such a modern word, interactive, but the interactivity here is people talking to people, thoughts compounding like interest and developing, changing and being rethought after each conversation. Pulses are taken, estimates, projections and assumptions are made and surprises are registered. On the more concrete side there are sales numbers and deal details. All will go into the soup.

There seems to be an accepted off-the-record approach, a consensus, that we talk about anything and everything, that we are perhaps a little less guarded, shoot from the hip a little more, we’re maybe willing to be unconventional, even daring, in our thinking. Not all the shows are in Las Vegas, but a lot of what happens inside those big convention center halls tends to stay inside those big convention center halls.

Or maybe it’s just an impression. Maybe we just have a good time and I make more of it than is there. But I’m looking forward to this year’s shows and I expect to come back from them with a feeling of having been loaded down with new ideas and understanding.

John Latta, Editor-in-Chief
jlatta@randallreilly.com

It’s not unreasonable to say that “new” media, “social” media and “digital” media rule lives. For older, working generations, the stuff is both essential and addictive. In the world of our young people, digital is the norm.

A lot of people are turning more and more away from traditional news media and relying more and more on their Twitter and Facebook accounts to know what is going on in the world that is important to them. And, increasingly, what is going on is only important to them if it has a quick impact on their actions or thoughts. There’s something of an “out of digitial sight out of digital mind” way of thinking developing.

So what is happening in Washington or in other national news is commonly filtered out and “news” is what someone finds on their Twitter feed or Facebook page. And much of that is determined by their own setting of their preferences and what their friends think is important. What we might call national “issues” can become something that concerns other people. Perhaps worse, we can see issues as one-dimensional, understood via a lazy television news sound bite then forgotten because we know all we need to know.

What should be of concern in this process is that something we call “transportation infrastructure” could become an idea so distant, so “what’s that got to do with me,” that the public support needed to keep adequate funds flowing – and the weakness of that support lead to an underfunded MAP-21 – could erode even further over time.

Sometimes when people ask me what we need to be sure we have an invested and interested public and willing politicians in our field my answer is very simple: “Angelina Jolie.” Yes, I know, cynicism is not very constructive. But give us a mega-star and watch front pages, evening news broadcasts and the best and worst of the blogosphere and social media turn their eyes to us.

We found, I believe, during the SAFETEA-LU extensionfest that logic and numbers, compelling as they were to us, did not rate very highly on the public’s “it matters” list. A key question for the year ahead then is how to change that, how to engage citizens. And I’ll keep trying to find ways to do that in this column all year.

For a start I’d like to see construction companies and industry groups, even DOTs, keeping local transportation journalists aware of their work.

It is, unfortunately, a common assumption that these journalists are aware of everything happening in town. Not so. You’d be surprised how valuable a call or email about a local road or bridge project is to a newsperson desperate for a good story.

And let’s try to engage schools more. After all, was there ever a better field trip that a road construction site?

By John Latta

From the days when SAFETEA-LU’s expiration was way in the future, until today, I’ve followed Washington’s every move on reauthorization and visited the capital regularly to talk to people that mattered, officially or unofficially, in the process.

John Latta, Editor-in-Chief, jlatta@randallreilly.com

You know the ugliness that came with SAFETEA-LU’s demise and zombie-like life extensions and the knock-down, drag-out battle among our finest in the Capitol working out the new surface transportation legislation, MAP-21. It was like watching a slow train wreck; and it was our train.

You probably know that in September 2014, MAP-21 is set to expire. Know also that a lot of insiders fear we’ll see the extension game come back to Washington, settle in and again be the reality-avoidance dance (disguised as work) of choice for our elected representatives. And they fear that whatever legislation eventually replaces MAP-21 would retain it’s core weakness – insufficient funds.

So what can de done differently? Well, if you are talking Washington, not a lot. But there is something back home where you are that can affect Washington on this issue. Some of the most knowledgeable and most strategically and tactically capable people in the transportation infrastructure lobbying business in D.C. privately agree that companies that get elected representatives out to jobsites make a difference.

I emphasize this: “make a difference.”

Here I am urging you to get your senator or congressperson out to the workface, and I do so only because it can actually influence the post MAP-21 legislation. Lobbyists tell me that when they visit an elected member of Congress they can usually tell if that member is familiar with the work that happens at road and bridge jobsites. That member “gets” it more often than not. That member, who will run for re-election one day, understands the job-creating and community-benefitting power he is seeing.

The SAFETEA-LU zombie period, the general reluctance among politicians to support the bill they eventually passed, had a lot to do with their unfamiliarity, their uncertainty with what happens at bridge and highway jobsites. But, apparently, if they see it, if they know it, if they understand the work and the people working, they can support spending and reforms for transportation infrastructure because they “get” its actual worth. They know that, in either party, they can position themselves as as a good local guy with that support.

So get them out there to the biggest, noisiest, nastiest job site you have. Get ‘em dirty. Get their hair full of smoke, their shoes covered in mud, their hands oily, their senses pounded by heavy yellow iron, their suits smeared with grease, and introduce them to your work, and your workforce.

By John Latta

This is a little bit of a tightrope act.

jlatta@randallreilly.com

I am writing this before the election. Why? So that I don’t let election results skew or tilt what I write just a tiny bit to make me look wiser.

MAP-21, our new surface transportation legislation, is a lot of things but certainly it is not one of the shining moments of the former Congress. The SAFETEA-LU extensions were equally weak. As that previous legislation ambled toward its final days, “bipartisanship” was a watchword largely because in the past transportation reauthorization had been built on it, and there seemed little reason to think it wouldn’t happen again. Eventually it sort of did. But the extension era in between shows that transportation bipartisanship is far more fragile than we thought.

Because MAP-21 expires in the fall of 2014, pressure is already on from lobbyists and other interested parties to shape its replacement. I hear a lot of voices saying they expect this round to be very much like the one we just went through.

The “raise the gas tax issue” must rear its head again and again in the interim, even if only to be whack-a-moled by Congresspeople old and new. But whatever is to be the main source of future funding for the Highway Trust Fund won’t be found by September 2014. And it’s unlikely that rampant borrowing for transportation will suddenly become popular. MAP-21 also showed how little we can really raise by sleight of hand, even though the Senate tried mightily. Which means that the single biggest factor in replacing MAP-21 on time with a long-term, adequately funded highway bill, save a hugely one-sided vote I did not foresee, is bipartisanship.

Much of the bipartisanship that pushed MAP-21 over the line was pragmatic, a need for both parties to show the about-to-vote public that they could agree on something this important to all of the American public and all of its sectors. But the fact that it took so long to emerge from a Congress happy to ignore the same principle, is disturbing.

It had dwelt safely on the top shelf, out of reach of grubby hands looking to grab something to hurl carelessly in Congressional food fights. It was something members held apart and wanted to keep from getting dirty, knowing it was equally, neutrally, valuable to all of them. And now, not so much. How much is up to this Congress.

You hear people talk these days about things that are “very unique.” Can’t be. It’s either unique or it’s not. Don’t modify it; doesn’t work. And don’t modify transportation issue bipartisanship by adding a “now and then” to it. Doesn’t work. All you get is a late MAP-21.

By John Latta, Editor-in-Chief

You know Parkinson’s Law and you know people who live it.

jlatta@rrpub.com

Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a 20th Century British civil servant (bureaucrat), naval historian and satirist famously wrote, after a lot of observation and experience, that “work expands to fit the time available to it.” His special focus was bureaucracy and its foibles. For example he is said to have observed that the British Royal Navy would one day have more admirals than ships, found that as Britain lost colonies the number of people employed to administer colonies rose, and noted that bureaucrats make work for each that has no other valuable purpose.

When you look at the amount of time and money it takes the highway and bridge industries to comply with government regulations, you can be forgiven for thinking about CNP. He would chortle and say, “I told you so.” I don’t think regulations are a bad thing, nor that paperwork (or perhaps nowadays paperless work) should not have to be done. But it’s legion in our industry that it can take 13 years for a road to go from idea to drivable And it’s also true that its takes far longer than it should, and much more money than it should, to comply with regulations and other form-filled processes.

What would Parkinson say?

I don’t think it’s the people behind the rulemaking and compliance machinery that are the prime problem. Certainly MAP-21 is trying to reform delivery times by finding efficiencies lost in years of writing rules. FHWA Administrator Victor Mendez is pushing his bold Every Day Counts agenda to do the same thing. But big, complex bureaucratic machinery tends to turn out big, complex bureaucratic paperwork.

As any editor will tell you, cutting back on words is a far more onerous process that adding words. The problem is that neither more words nor fewer words guarantee clarity, simplicity and pragmatism. The goal is just the right number, but to be fair that’s an almost indefinable quantity. On the whole, the tendency to fewer words will generally be the better option. But fewer-word documents can be scarier to publish because they can appear to contain drive-through loopholes. Not so if well written. Neither is the idea that more words will close those loopholes accurate; they may well just add others.

When mountains of outgoing paperwork from agencies require mountains of incoming paperwork from contractors, engineers, designers, etc., costs, delays and unnecessary work and procedures are apt to be the by-product.

A concerted effort to streamline, to minimize, to aim for simple clarity instead of exhaustive clarity in compliance paperwork and other rules, must surely benefit agency, contractor and public.

By John Latta, Editor-in-Chief, jlatta@rrpub.com

Better Roads’ production manager, Linda Hapner, sent me, as she does, a story idea. A wonderful read about a short-lived 1880’s bridge.

The ingenuity would be valued today, although the technology is obsolete. It felt like a modern story populated by modern people, the good, the bad and the others. It was about the power of the elements, about engineers, bridge designers and builders, townsfolk, financiers and railroads.

It’s from Spans in Time: A History of Nebraska Bridges, edited by James E. Potter and L. Robert Puschendorf (Nebraska State Historical Society, 1999).

In those days when railroads bridged rivers it was often only for their trains, no passage for horse-drawn and pedestrian traffic or livestock. Crude, unreliable ferries were the only choice. Sometimes, in deep winter, unpredictable ice could be crossed.

Summer 1888, and only the new Burlington railroad bridge spanned the Missouri River at Nebraska City. Colonel S. N. Stewart, of Philadelphia, offered to build a pontoon toll bridge if the community would subsidize it. Costing $18,000, the bridge opened August 23. It was proclaimed the first such bridge across the Missouri and the largest drawbridge of its kind in the world.

“The pontoon section crossing the main channel was 1,074 feet long, with a 1,050-foot cribwork approach spanning a secondary channel between an island and the Iowa shore,” writes Potter. “The roadway, including two pedestrian footways, was twenty-four-and-one-half-feet wide. Opening the “draw” (the V-shaped portion that could swing open for boats or flowing ice) provided a 528-foot-wide passage. Tolls for round trip crossings were set at fifty cents for double teams, forty cents for single teams, a quarter for a horse and rider, a nickel for pedestrians, and from ten to two cents each for horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs. The bridge was considered a significant engineering feat and was featured in articles published in the Scientific American and Harper’s Weekly.”

Mostly the bridge worked well. But it suffered major damage when the wild Missouri flooded and from wrecking-ball chunks of ice. It was in and out of service.

So in spring 1890 the city fathers planned a bridge bond election. A displeased Colonel Stewart threatened to remove his pontoon bridge.

The bond passed and courts upheld it against Burlington’s claim that it deserved the bond money. Colonel Stewart said enough. He sold his bridge to Atchison, Kansas, and floated it downriver to its new home. A month later, the U.S. District Court ruled the bridge bonds were invalid, writes Potter, and Nebraska City was back where it started. In 1891 Burlington adapted its bridge to carry non-railroad traffic.

I never tire of reading about the adventures of road and bridge builders. They make you feel good, don’t they?

Okay, no seventh-inning stretch; let’s get right back into action.

jlatta@rrpub.com

You have read (or at least I hope you have) my constant urgings throughout the past three years to get out and press politicians to pass a new highway bill. Now there is a broad acknowledgment that pressure from the provinces made a difference in creating our new legislation. It’s not much of a bill, but it is what we have to work with. And as you have probably become aware of, the battle now is to make the 2014 bill that follows this one something special. Because this one isn’t.

We have to make the new legislation work. If it works, the public, and the politicians, may just make the 2014 bill good enough to help bring the industry back all the way.

MAP-21, the new surface transportation bill that runs until the end of September 2014, brings to an end the limbo lives of agencies and contractors who lived through nine do-nothing extensions of sad ol’ SAFETEA-LU. It doesn’t deliver enough funds, and $40 billion a year is hopelessly short of enough. But the bill brings us work, jobs and reforms. We must make the most of them. We must show the public they benefit from them.

A few examples: MAP-21 reduces the number of highway programs by two-thirds, removing some soul-destroying bureaucratic black holes. It contains significant reforms in the environmental review and planning process, measures that will cut delivery times and costs. It creates incentives for states to use innovative contracting practices and new technologies. It integrates performance measures (to be developed with the U.S. DOT) to assess the condition of facilities and the operation of roads and bridges, and to establish performance targets. It greatly increases private-equity funding possibilities. It gives states more allocating and spending flexibility in both routine and emergency situations.

Even if these reforms are not enough, it is essential they work. First, they lead to more work for your company or agency which benefits the people of your region. Second, you can create success stories that help educate a public woefully uninformed on our highway funding and transportation infrastructure needs. And third, it gets the industry rolling in the new, post-recession age. The legislation is our new reality; we won’t be going back.

Make these reforms effective and you take a giant step towards convincing the public that transportation is the prime issue that both parties can agree on while still, for the most part, hating each other’s guts.

In the modern idiom, we have to leverage what we have been given into something more. If you need links to find the details of MAP-21, email me.