(Photo: eutrophication&hypoxia / Flickr)

How would you feel if you were shunned in the not-too-distant future for doing something we do every day now and don’t think twice about?

What if playing golf, going to a restaurant or mowing your lawn meant you would be treated as a pariah?

One man says it could happen if you drive a car.

The man is Jaime Lerner, described as “a visionary architect and urban planner” and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil’s eight biggest city with a population of over a million and some serious inner city population density.

Our car culture is going to become a thing of the past, he says. Car exhaust, he says, is the new second-hand smoke, and “the car is the cigarette of the future.” People will still use them, he concedes, but those people will be like the smokers huddled awkwardly outside of office buildings or restaurants and being frowned upon by the multitudes passing by.

CityFix’s Luis Gutierrez sees Lerner’s vision this way: “Imagine standing in a 50 square meter room with one person smoking a cigarette. Now imagine standing in that same room with 50 people all crammed in tight together, all smoking cigarettes, and you can’t leave. For Lerner, that might as well be the experience of being stuck in traffic: jammed in with no escape, forced to steadily breathe in exhaust fumes. But he predicts that the public backlash against increasing traffic is not far off.”

With the Olympic Games and soccer World Cup coming to Brazil, the country’s notorious big-city traffic jams aren’t going away just yet, and No Smoking signs won’t clear the air.

167 HOT lanes (Photo: WSDOT)

It appears some road planners in the Seattle area assumed that drivers would be willing to pay their way out of congestion.

It appears that this is not so.

A pilot project was designed for high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes at State Route 167 in metro Seattle. But the use projections were way, way off.  So can we use this data to expand the HOT lane debate?

The project created ten miles of tolled HOT lanes (the only HOT lanes in the Pacific Northwest). They were converted from HOV lanes in 2008 for $18 million. Five years later it seems the lanes are being used about two-thirds less than Washington DOT predictions. New HOT lanes may now be headed for a ‘hold.’

Income from the Seattle HOT lanes appears to be there, so the lanes are not being subsidized. But if usage is so far below projections we surely need to go back and rethink the basic premises of these lanes.

The base idea is, of course, that as regular lanes back up, drivers can slide over into the tolled HOT lanes. And then as the regular lanes back up even more, the HOT lane price goes up. The driver switching to a HOT lane pays (into state transportation coffers, if the deal works as it should) for a quicker ride and the congested regular lanes are not as congested as they might have been.

But if drivers would rather stay in the congested regular lanes (and a lot of these drivers make some really good money), rethinking is needed.

Less driving is also a factor. But if the projection were wrong here too, the whole HOT lane raison d’etre would seem to be shaky at best. The irony of course is that fewer cars on the road means less congestion so less need to drive in a HOT lane.

The data showing the shortfalls in HOT lanes is valuable stuff–the sort of numbers planners can get to grips with. We can’t deal with congestion by hoping less vehicles will be on the road; we need planning to find a way to fight the problem. Perhaps we need more lane miles.  So, Seattle guys, get to tweaking. If this way isn’t the best way, what is?

( Photo: POD Point / Flickr)

A recent article on CNN‘s website called attention to efforts by a handful of states to collect infrastructure revenues from electric vehicles (EVs), which operate without gasoline or diesel fuel and thus do not contribute to road and bridge budgets.

        The article detailed how Washington State legislators passed a $100 annual flat tax on EVs last year and several other states have similar legislation pending. Washington’s law omits hybrids from the flat tax.

        Government road agencies have fretted for years over the specter of declining fuel tax revenues resulting from the growing popularity of hybrids and electric vehicles, and the problem is coming to a head now as the overall fuel efficiency of the U.S. fleet is increasing while vehicle miles travelled are trending upward. Put another way, road and bridge revenues are flat or declining while usage (wear and tear) is increasing.

        While electric vehicles are a tiny part of the U.S. market at the moment, they have the potential to become a much more substantial part of the American fleet. General Motors has launched a highly publicized entry into the market and is currently working on a vehicle with a 200-mile operating range.

        The recently introduced Tesla has won acclaim from car critics and owners alike; it is a high-performance sports sedan that does 0 to 60 mph in less than 6 seconds (the ‘S’ version gets there in 4.2 seconds) and has a battery charge range of more than 200 miles.

        And as huge of a jump as the Volt and the Tesla are to the EVs of just a few years ago, there may be many more such leaps to come.

        BBC News recently profiled an electric car that had been entered in this year’s 24-hour Le Mans endurance race but was pulled in early June because its owners had not had sufficient time to test its durability.

        The GreenGT H2 prototype racer uses hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity to power its electric motors. The vehicle is said to have a maximum speed of 200 mph and would run 40 to 50 minutes at racing speeds between refuelings. The refueling process takes less than three minutes.

        With the potential for a rapid expansion of non-gasoline-burning vehicles using American roads, it makes sense to deal now with the issue of those owners paying their fair share of the cost of building and maintaining our roads and bridges. However, that notion isn’t universally popular. EV advocates fear taxes like Washington’s will discourage people from buying electric cars. They argue that, because of the EV’s smaller environmental footprint, there is a “greater good” argument for holding off on highway taxes until the technology is established.

        Judging from the spirited debate among readers in the posts following the CNN article, the subject is also good for a very pointed debate about who is entitled to what when it comes time to pay for the American transportation infrastructure.

FDOT wants jurisdiction over several streets (highlighted in blue) in Miami’s Downtown Historic District. In exchange, the City of Miami would gain control over Brickrell Drive (highlighted in red). (Photo: FDOT via Transit Miami)

It’s more wristwatches than sausages I think.

An ongoing dispute over whether the state of Florida or the city “owns” streets in Miami is a fascinating glimpse into the workings of a state DOT and a city government when it comes to responsibility and jurisdiction of roads.

I like wristwatches. I have drawers and a boxes of them, most now unused but not thrown away. And some have that see-through fascia that lets you watch the workings working.

This Miami contretemps reminded me that this ownership squabble (or maybe its better called a negotiation) is a process we rarely see at work. It’s more the stuff of bureaucrats meeting in nondescript rooms and talking in code and acronyms for hours. It’s interesting to watch.

It seems to be a clean enough process, although in this case, it certainly has the potential to get heated, judging by this TransitMiami.com post and related articles. It’s not an ugly process; it’s not like, for example, watching sausages being made. But when you think about it, this sort of turf war about road jurisdiction must go on all the time across the country.

As the article indicates, the stakes can be quite high, even if the public is largely unaware. Just who does have jurisdiction will influence everything from zoning to funding. And it will affect contractors looking for work and agencies working on macro plans for road management.

If there’s one thing this age of social media and endless blog and website outlets should be good for, it’s keeping us informed of processes such as this one that usually went unwatched by the public.

We could have watched it, but that would have meant hours of sitting in public meetings listening to way too much droning. Newspapers would let us know in small print, but usually in pages that largely went unread. So a spat between a state DOT and a large city over road jurisdiction would largely have gone unnoticed in the “old days.”

The idea, of course, is that the more the public knows the more it can be involved in the processes. Seems to be working in Miami. Taking these discussions to the streets might just help us have better streets.

It’s hard to see a time in the foreseeable future where we will have a solid supply of funding from any single source to fill the Highway Trust Fund (HTF).

That’s an asterisked statement of course because an increased gas tax could do it.

But that won’t happen in the foreseeable future. And neither will any other single form of funding become the savior of the HTF.

As long as that situation exists, looking for private money to spend on roads becomes an essential exercise. To some extent, the odds of it happening and happening effectively are secondary–it is an option and as such has to be, as the big guys on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are fond of saying of any possible funding option, “on the table.”

A piece from the American Enterprise Institute argues: “The record shows that such partnerships are more likely to be built on time and on budget, and that they offer greater value than conventional infrastructure projects.”

I’m not sure that this isn’t a fairly grand oversimplification, but nevertheless, the article does elaborate a number of arguments that should be kept front and center as we approach reauthorization.

I was in Washington, D.C., last week and I heard from some very powerful politicians in transportation infrastructure. All mentioned they had some ideas in the works that would boost HTF funding. Not one of them detailed those ideas. That’s a come on we’ve heard for more than five years now–and still no detailed proposal to fill the HTF with a “new” source of funding.

Even read with a somewhat wary eye, the piece does seem to provide some basic arguments, the building blocks of the pro-PPP people. These points need elaborating and examining, but to ignore the potential of private funding at a time like this is folly at best, an unprintable word at worst.

Take a look. And keep the Institute’s arguments in mind because it’s a more than reasonable bet that the surface transportation legislation that follows MAP-21–which expires September 2014–will be (like Map-21 itself) woefully short of adequate funding, and the more years we work with less than the funding we need the more our transportation infrastructure deteriorates at well beyond a reasonable rate. Arguably the next reauthorization bill is exponentially more important that MAP-21.

 There will be cases in various parts of the country where a PPP may be the difference.

(Photo: Diyan Nenov / Flickr)

Americans spend a relatively small part of their income on gasoline. But it’s unlikely to get any smaller.

It was just a bit less than 4 percent of income before taxes in 2012, the highest in nearly three decades.

Consider that the percentage has remained fairly near this number for some years, and that the high water mark of recent times was when that number was 5 percent in the 1980s and 2 percent at the tail end of the1990s, and you get some idea of a timeline.

The data come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which says that the average American household spent $2,912 on gas in 2012 (about $900 more than the 2009 family gas bill). There’s a triangular force at work here:

·      household travel has kept increasing since the 1980s

·      vehicles have become increasingly fuel efficient

·      gas prices have gone up significantly

A little perspective on these numbers comes from Jordan Weissmann writing in The Atlantic magazine, who says, “This is partly a story of scarcity beating efficiency.”

(Photo: naterade81 / Flickr)

We talk gas tax all day long in this industry.

We hear arguments that it should increase (I make many of them) or that it should remain where it is (largely because it would be political suicide to raise it).

But this Forbes piece is a short, succinct summary of the Federal gas tax from its first day on the job: June 11, 1932.

There’s a lot of value in this article for all of us who argue the gas tax. Knowing the circumstances of its inception and all of the changes made to it are invaluable tools in making a case that this is one of those times when the federal fuel tax needs to go up.

Nothing helps an argument as much as being able to put it into context and then being able to fight counter-arguments with facts and some logical thinking based on those facts.

The story also gives you–if you read between the lines–a broad idea of how politics drives such changes. Certainly it shows you that right now we are in a time that is comparable to the times other changes took place in terms of urgency or just plain need. But you could also take away the thought that it’s only the political will to push it and the circumstances any proposed hike runs into in Congress that determines win/lose. The country’s needs can easily appear to be incidental.

Also, I’m going to suggest that you forward this to your local news outlets. You’ll find the city desk or assignment desk on their website. Transportation reporters are usually generalists, and when it comes the fuel tax arguments I’m fairly certain most of them won’t know the background in detail. Help make them more aware and I think you’ll find them increasingly able to do a better job of understanding our industry’s arguments.

(Photo: Adam Fagen / Flickr)

Debriefing a number of contractors and agency folk who spent most of the daylight hours yesterday talking to politicians on The Hill last night was not a very uplifting experience.

They had gone to talk to members of Congress who are influential–some big-time, some not so–in funding transportation infrastructure. And most said they heard what they expected to hear from the members: nothing overly negative, but nothing to get excited about either.

A common theme they heard was that reauthorization is 16 months away, so we have time. Another was that virtually no politicians are prepared to talk about funding options, including gas tax hikes, but have mastered the doublespeak of “the are a number of options we are looking at.” Don’t ask what they are; you won’t get much of an answer.

The Hill visits were part of the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC) Fly-In, and the idea was to make sure our elected representatives in both chambers understand the problems, issues and urgency of funding. They do, to some extent, already know this. But adding some depth and local color is a valuable use of Hill visit time.

TCC is a partnership of 29 national associations and construction unions founded in 1996.

There seems to be a general (i.e on the Hill and elsewhere) acknowledgement at the moment that other issues are center stage and will stay there for some time (how long is an important variable). Among those issues are immigration, IRS scandals and debt, and lingering on the scene is Benghazi. Transportation is on the second tier if we are lucky. Basically, these visits are designed to keep it there. They are not particularly efficient; Congress members with any experience are adept at handshaking, head nodding and saying something that sounds like fire but tastes like warm milk.

So do the visits do any good? One very wise contractor from Kansas gave me what I think is the best succinct answer: “We probably didn’t make a lot of headway, but not to go is suicide.”

That is, if you don’t keep the transportation funding issue in front of the members’ minds with as much of a display of public support and sound argument as possible, it will slip down the list of priorities and some other issue will rise and take the members’ focus and attention. Then, when crunch time comes next year, the battle is already being lost.

It happened as good ol’ SAFETEA-LU lurched into its last days and began its cycle of extensions. I think the Kansas contractor is exactly right; it could be catastrophic for the industry to let funding slip down the members’ priority list. Keeping it on every member’s agenda, even if it is just idling in place, allows us to ramp up the pressure as reauthorization talks begin in earnest, probably early in the new year. If nothing is done until then–if no visits are made–in efforts made when needed (everything from getting members out to job sites, more Hill visits, email campaigns, media campaigns and so on) we will find it much harder to gain traction.

I’m also fairly sure that most members have some sort of radar, or employ radar-enhanced staff, to assess just which issues are most important (to them and to the country, and hopefully sometimes they coincide).

So keep contacting your Congressional delegation, keep reminding them that the time is coming when they will have to act. Keep reminding them of the jobs at stake and the failing bridges that need to be fixed. Remind them of the cost of congestion in their districts or the cost of repairing vehicles that are bouncing over bad roads–the skyrocketing cost of repairing roads and bridges if they are left for more years before the work is begun. When it comes time to build momentum, we will have a foundation to make it effective momentum.

Another factor is the way MAP-21 was put together. Reforms were made–good reforms, widely-supported reforms. From what I heard this week those reforms may be expanded and new ones may be put in place. Given the positive reaction to the MAP-21 reforms, I’d say it’s likely and they will generally meet with bipartisan support in both houses and have White House support too. What that means is the second half of the puzzle–the one that got such short shrift in MAP-21 (yes, FUNDING)–will be the main battleground.

And as my Kansas contractor pointed out, if you don’t keep pressing, our funding in any new legislation next year may be as miserable as MAP-21.

Catch up on coverage from this week’s TCC Fly-in in Washington, D.C.
Over the Top: Funding some D.C. tunnel work
Market report: Bridges good, pavement not so good
Market report: Weather factors into low highway market
Boxer: Transportation funding is “patriotic issue”
Shuster talks transportation funding, earmarks at TCC Fly-in
LaHood: Expect major transportation infrastructure announcement from Obama
Rahall: 2014 reauthorization to be different from MAP-21
Inhofe: Obama’s $500 billion to $600 billion reauthorization bill “not going to happen”

Jim Inhofe

Oklahoma conservative Republican Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who has “been through,” as a he puts it, eight reauthorization bills, said after hearing outgoing Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood say President Obama’s goal was $500 billion to $600 billion long-term reauthorization bill:

“It’s not going to happen.”

But, he said, a long term, well-funded bill is essential and it needs to be passed when MAP-21 runs out in September 2014. There is evidence, he said, that extensions of existing bills–and there were nine for the SAFETEA-LU Act that expired in 2009 before MAP-21 arrived, “costs us 30 percent; we lose 30 percent of the value of the fund if we do it by extensions.”

Inhofe also supported two potentially contentious issues as reauthorization approaches: earmarks and the use of the General Fund to supply the Highway Trust Fund (HTF).

On earmarks: “Our job [in Congress] is to appropriate and authorize. If we don’t do earmarks in Congress, the President will do it. You don’t save a penny. And the most egregious misuse of earmarks comes from the President and the bureaucrats.”

On the General Fund: “The General Fund is there to do things that people want done in government. We can go to the General Fund.” Inhofe read a laundry list of General Fund expenditures that he pointed out could be cut and would save enough money to significantly boost the HTF. Opponents of the use of the General Fund commonly argue that the biggest risk in using it is that nearly every other government program uses the fund and transportation infrastructure must then compete for funding every year.

Inhofe is the former ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (he is now the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee) chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Both Senators have spoken of the value of their bipartisan work on MAP-21 and their ability to work together to craft surface transportation legislation over the years.

But Inhofe says their working relationship on transportation bills including MAP-21 was no surprise. Even though he conceded he is one of the most conservative members of Congress, he said he has always been willing to spend in two areas: transportation and defense. Both are areas where government should be involved and both create jobs and a stronger America, he said.

So it really wasn’t that much of a surprise he worked well with Senator Boxer to pass reauthorization bills such as MAP-21. “Senator Boxer and I got along famously on this whether she was chairman or I was. We disagreed on everything else.”

From the same  foundation–that transportation is a legitimate and required government role–Inhofe was critical of ultra conservative Republicans who oppose transportation spending and lump transportation into a broad general argument where they claim the government should retreat in its role.

Inhofe was addressing the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC) Fly-In in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The TCC is a partnership of 29 national associations and construction unions founded in 1996.

Nick Rahall

Ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) committee and West Virginia veteran Congressman Nick Rahall (D-WV) believes reauthorization in 2014 will be a far different process than the contentious and almost-failed MAP-21 work of 2012.

Speaking to the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC) in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, he recalled years on the committee more than a decade ago when “most members seemed to understand the value of investment in America’s infrastructure.” But that consensus view was largely replaced with a mindset that “extended only to the next election.”

MAP-21 was a “disappointing product,” Rahall said. “For the first time since I got here, the leadership of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee abandoned the traditional way,” he said, and the committee leadership “seemed to be dedicated to good press releases rather than good work. Thanks to a new committee direction, I believe the foundation has been laid in the proper manner, and it is a foundation we can support.”

Rahal credits new committee chairman Bill Shuster (R-PA) from Pennsylvania with bringing back a primary focus to the needs of the country’s aging infrastructure. Chairman Shuster, said Rahall, “has been reaching across party lines. He is [also] bringing members of his party around to the idea that we need to have a federal transportation program.”

The chairman of the T&I committee during the MAP 21 process was Florida’s John Mica  (R-FL), and he and Rahall clashed openly on occasion.

Pointing out that the Highway Trust Fund will be depleted again in just over a year, Rahall said, “Chairman Shuster and I believe we don’t just need to talk the talk but to walk the walk. We both think all [funding] options should be on the table.”  But like Shuster, Rahall said that just because “all” options are on the table–obvious a gas tax hike would be one of them–”doesn’t mean I support all of them.”

But, said Rahall of a potentially higher gas tax, “the way gas prices go up and down today, who’s going to notice?”

Rahall pointed out that the I-5 Skagit River Bridge that recently collapsed in Washington State “did not just carry a road, it carries jobs and commerce.” Now, he said, “when the news cameras are turned off and the expedited repairs complete, what will happen? This was a wake-up call and we simply can’t afford to keep hitting the snooze button.”