The contributions of the Obama Administration to the investment in improved transportation alternatives have been significant, but it was clear from the President’s State of the Union address last night that 2012 will be a year of diminished expectations in the face of a general election and a tough Congressional opposition.

Mr. Obama’s address, whatever its merits from a populist perspective, nonetheless failed to propose dramatic reforms to encourage new spending on transportation projects, in contrast to previous years. While the Administration has in some ways radically reformed the way Washington goes about selecting capital improvements, bringing a new emphasis on livability and underdeveloped modes like high-speed rail, there was little indication in the speech of an effort to expand such policy choices. All that we heard was a rather meek suggestion to transform a part of the money made available from the pullout from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts — a sort of war dividend whose size is undefined — to “do some nation-building right here at home.”

If these suggestions fell flat for the pro-investment audience, they were reflective of the reality of working in the context of a deeply divided political system in which such once-universally supported policies as increased roads funding have become practically impossible to pursue. Mr. Obama pushed hard, we shouldn’t forget, for a huge, transformational transportation bill in early 2011, only to be rebuffed by intransigence in the GOP-led House of Representatives and only wavering support in the Democratic Senate. For the first term at least, the Administration’s transportation initiatives appear to have been pushed aside.

Even so, it remains to be seen how the Administration will approach the development of a transportation reauthorization program. Such legislation remains on the Congressional agenda after three years of delays (the law expires on March 31st). There is so far no long-term solution to the continued inability of fuel tax revenues to cover the growing national need for upgraded or expanded mobility infrastructure. But if it were to pass, a new multi-year transportation bill would be the most significant single piece of legislation passed by the Congress in 2012.

The prospect of agreement between the two parties on this issue, however, seems far-fetched. That is, if we are to assume that the goal is to complete a new and improved spending bill, rather than simply further extensions of the existing legislation. The House could consider this month a bill that would fund new highways and transit for several more years by expanding domestic production of heavily carbon-emitting fossil fuels, a terrible plan that would produce few new revenues and encourage more ecological destruction. Members of the Senate, meanwhile, have for months been claiming they were “looking” for the missing $12 or 13 billion to complete its new transportation package but have so far come up with bupkis. The near-term thus likely consists of either continued extensions of the current law or a bipartisan bargain that fails to do much more than replicate the existing law, perhaps with a few bureaucratic reforms.

In the context of the presidential race, Mr. Obama’s decision not to continue his previously strong advocacy of more and more transportation funding suggests that the campaign sees the issue as politically irrelevant. If the Administration made an effort last year to convince Americans of the importance of improving infrastructure, there seems to have been fewer positive results in terms of popular perceptions than hoped for. Perhaps the rebuffs from Republican governors on high-speed rail took their toll; perhaps the few recovery projects that entered construction were not visible enough (or at least their federal funding was not obvious enough); perhaps the truth of the matter is that people truly care more about issues like unemployment and health care than they do for public transit and roads.

This does not mean an end to the beneficial shifts in national policy that have for the first time in decades really made transportation a tool for the improvement of conditions in cities large and small. This, ultimately, is the success of the Department of Transportation under Mr. Obama: Making livability and density primary goals of the mobility system. Even if little gets done in 2012, it is hard to see these ideas disappearing from the popular discourse.

» Congress isn’t able to do much in terms of passing new legislation — but the Department of Transportation hasn’t hesitated to move forward to fund intercity rail projects.

Americans are frustrated with the Congress: Over 80% of the population disapproves of the job the national legislature is doing. And no wonder. With the unemployment situation out of control and the economy still on the skids, this is the time for government action.

All we seem to be getting, however, are repeated demands from Republicans to reduce spending drastically — and meek replies from Democrats worried about upsetting the electorate. President Obama’s Jobs Bill, introduced twenty days ago, would provide a real, albeit too small, stimulus to the economy, specifically through the construction and refurbishment of infrastructure.* But the legislation has yet to be introduced in either house of Congress. Meanwhile, getting any transportation spending approved other than short-term extensions of the previous multi-year bill (which expired 729 days ago) has been impossible thanks to disagreement between the parties and a general reluctance to identify funding sources.

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives early this year, they promised to fight to eliminate previously approved grants for states across the nation to invest in intercity rail projects. Facing a Democratic Senate, that would not be an easy proposition, but the intense effort to reduce government spending over the past year could have meant the loss of funds already promised to states — but for projects not quite ready for prime time.

In the meantime, the Department of Transportation has been pushing grants out of the federal government’s hands as quickly as possible so that they can not be rescinded.

In September alone, the Federal Railroad Administration has approved hundreds of millions of dollars for intercity rail upgrades nationwide: $149 million for New York State, $116 million for New England, $49 million for Texas, $48 million for North Carolina and Virginia, $35 million for the Northeast Corridor, $31 million for Washington State, and $13 million for Oregon, among others. Earlier this summer, hundreds of millions of dollars were appropriated to California and the Northeast. Unless states turn back the money, unlikely considering that the projects have gotten so far and their pro-rail sponsors, these funds cannot be taken back by Congress.

It’s worth questioning how ready most of these states are to use these funds now that they have them, or how quickly they’ll be able to get construction started. The first high-speed rail grants were announced in January 2010; other than the project to upgrade tracks between Chicago and St. Louis, has any major construction begun?

The DOT, perhaps, wouldn’t be rushing these grants out to the states if it were completely confident that the high-speed and intercity rail funding program were alive and well. Under an Obama Administration and a fully Democratic Congress, that would be likely.

But the Senate came very close a week and a half ago to approving a fiscal year 2012 budget that had no money at all for high-speed rail — and Mr. Obama seemed ready to go along, in the spirit of budget-cutting bipartisanship. The compromise that was eventually reached last week saved $100 million for the mode (a pittance compared to years passed), though even that could face considerable obstacles in the House.

Though Republicans now seem willing to spend a bit more money on transportation than they did a few months back because of an outcry that set in once it became clear that initial plans would reduce funding (and therefore transportation-related jobs) by 30%, their investment strategies would do little to increase the annual federal appropriations now spent on mobility. We are at a standstill, unable to make a big move.

What has been made manifest over the past few months is that President Obama’s efforts to alter American transport policy have been far from universally accepted, that their long-term effect on U.S. mobility is unclear, and that the DOT has been forced to descend into a defensive mode in which it has no choice but to push grants out as quickly as it can for fears that legislators will change their minds mid-stream.

Mr. Obama’s affection for high-speed rail is well-known, and he has included it as an integral element of his transportation plans from the beginning, unlike former President Bill Clinton, who said he cared about intercity rail during the 1992 campaign but then proceeded to forget about it. Yet, possibly because of low approval ratings stemming from other issues, the current Administration has been unable to convince other politicians — especially many Republicans — that such projects are worthy of investment. Mr. Obama’s message, rebooted several times (first as a way to “win the future,” then as part of the Jobs Bill), simply has not come across loud and clear.

These difficulties, along with the GOP-Governor-forced destruction of three marquee projects in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, has once again reinforced the idea that Americans simply cannot handle the idea of spending government funds on intercity rail — despite the quite positive effects it has produced abroad. The fact that the Congress continues to debate transportation investments in terms of mode, with a certain pot of money reserved for roads, another pot for transit, etc., suggests that few in power have taken seriously the concept that transportation decision-making should be mode-neutral and oriented towards providing the best-possible mobility, economic, and environmental benefits. The fact that future rail investments are predicated on getting specific outlays for that mode is a sad reflection of the way we currently invest in our travel corridors and in our cities;  we seem to be considering mostly vehicles, not the passengers in them.

So the DOT moves forward, articulating a strategy to distribute the funds it does have as quickly as possible. This is not a long-term approach and it is not a sustainable one.

* The U.S. Department of Transportation recently announced how Mr. Obama’s Jobs Bill dollars would be distributed: $27 billion for rebuilding roads and bridges; $9 billion for rebuilding transit systems; $5 billion for TIGER-like competitive grants; $4 billion for high-speed rail projects, $3 billion for aviation improvements; and $10 billion for an infrastructure bank.

Image above: Albany-Rensselaer Station, set to receive aid from the Federal Railroad Administration for improvements, from Flickr user mava (cc).

The Obama Administration’s planned announcement of a jobs stimulus will not be welcomed by the anti-investment Republicans in Congress, but in a country desperate for jobs and with disintegrating infrastructure, it seems wholeheartedly necessary. Throughout his Presidency, Mr. Obama has argued strongly for using federal funds for upgrading the nation’s highways and transit networks, so he seems likely to further his push for federal expenditures on capital programs such as these.

What the proposals likely will not match are the hundreds of billions of dollars for all sorts of mobility-enhancing programs over the next few years the Administration promoted with great fanfare this spring, only have them fall apart as it became clear that the White House had no proposal for actually funding the program and the country became obsessed with a completely wrong-headed effort to cut the deficit. More recently, Mr. Obama’s big dreams of an Eisenhower-like infrastructure effort seem to have collapsed almost entirely: This week’s news that he will back an effort to extend the existing transportation funding program rather than immediately expand it because of a lack of agreement in Congress about where to go from here suggests that he understands the limitations of his bully pulpit.

Is that such a bad thing, especially if states and cities play a more significant role in funding their own transportation programs? Would Washington be doing the most with its limited funds by continuing to invest in infrastructure, or should it focus on direct service provision?

The stimulus bill passed in early 2009 did increase the number of jobs available; while it was not perfect, the current weakness in the economy is more a result of that original legislation being too small than a reflection of poor government decision-making. A new jobs-centered stimulus would likely improve the unemployment situation and expand the economy as a whole.

While the stimulus made a number of major investments in infrastructure possible — virtually all of the nation’s recent spending on intercity rail and the advancement of several major transit capital projects — it did so as transit agencies were suffering tremendously from the consequences of declining local tax receipts. While cities could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new rail lines paid for mostly by Washington, hiring thousands of construction workers, they were forced to cut back on essential pre-existing transit routes mostly funded by municipal taxes and fire thousands of drivers, maintenance workers, and other service-providing personnel. For the jobs situation, this environment was decidedly mixed. For the transit-using customer, the environment arguably got worse because most of those capital investments will only pay off years from now.

If President Obama is serious about investing in a proposal that not only increases the number of jobs available but produces a valuable benefit for the public, a focus on paying for transit service rather than infrastructure could arguably be the best approach. By ensuring that public transportation agencies are able to provide adequate, day-to-day bus and rail operations, the federal government would be not only guaranteeing fewer job losses in the public sector (local governments have lost about 500,000 jobs since the official end of the recession) but also making it more feasible for the average person to rely on transit, since increasing frequencies makes it far more appealing.

Some might argue that the federal government should not be getting involved with the subsidy of local transit services, since this would set a dangerous precedent in which municipalities are unable to fend for themselves. But imagine a shift in which Washington takes over far more of the costs of operations, and localities assume the obligations for capital expenses. For the average rider, dependent on transit service recession or not, this would be an improvement, since the federal government is able to assume a deficit during economic declines, while local governments are not.

For sure, at the moment big improvements like new rail lines are unlikely to be pursued just about anywhere in the United States without an infusion of new dollars from the feds. With its large receipts from the nationwide gas tax, Washington is able to distribute funds to projects across the country and allow construction to occur far more quickly than would be possible were states and localities to go at it alone. The use of federal funds prevents a fight to the bottom in which a competition over lower and lower taxes intended to attract business from other parts of the country create a less-than-optimal provision of public services. In addition, the concept that the federal government is the primary investor in the funding of roads and transit projects is too engrained for a quick transition to another model.

But for the sake of actually spurring job creation and providing the types of services people need, a transition of federal government spending priorities away from capital projects and towards transit operations could be an important step forward.

With everyone from Mitch McConnell to Barack Obama arguing — no matter the evidence to the contrary — that the federal budget must be constrained in order to save the American economy, it is perhaps no surprise that the long-expressed hopes of a greatly expanded transportation bill have fallen to the wayside.

The revealing today of House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair John Mica’s (R-FL) plan for a six-year, $230 billion reauthorization bill is the latest evidence that support in Congress for expanded investment in the U.S. transport network is weak. Though the bill is by no means final — Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA)’s own two-year plan, slightly larger (and with $12 billion in missing revenues), was partially revealed yesterday — the writing is on the wall: At least for now, expecting any improvement in federal funding for transit or even highway programs is unrealistic.

The current federal transportation authorization legislation, SAFETEA-LU, has already been extended several times and will expire on September 30th this year.

Mr. Mica’s proposal would provide $35 billion for surface transportation in fiscal year 2012, rising to $42 billion in 2017. Existing funding provides $51.5 billion, so this would represent a draconian one-third cut in federal spending so that expenditures on transportation match the funding received from federal fuel taxes. It has been clear since last November that the GOP would push for this funding cut once it took control of the House.

Mr. Mica argues that a loosening up of red tape and increasing private investment would make up the difference, a questionable assumption.

The specific distribution of funds to transit or highways has not been enumerated, but the current shares (about 20% for transit and 80% for highways) will be maintained. This would mean a cut from about $11 billion for transit today to about $7 billion. What does this mean? Fewer dollars in the urban formula program means fewer new buses and rail cars for transit agencies across the country. Less money for state of good repair means a decline in the number of renovations of aging railway tunnels and viaducts or bus depots. A loss for the New Starts program means the end of several major capital expansion projects nationwide.

The Administration’s high-speed rail program, already under siege by a siderodromophobic GOP, is axed in the proposal. Livability grants, too fuzzy for the mobility-oriented Mr. Mica, also appear to have been taken out of funding consideration.

Compared to the heady days of early 2009, during which the Congress approved billions of dollars in additional funding for transportation in the stimulus bill, this represents quite a turnaround. And even early this year, President Obama announced that he would push for a $556 billion six-year transportation bill that would more than double annual national expenditures on public transportation (he wanted $128 billion in 2012 alone) and introduce significant support for a high-speed rail program. Though Mr. Obama continues to articulate support for a major infrastructure initiative, he has been unable to put forward a proposal that would fund such a project.

Democrats, sitting in the minority on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, were quick to lambaste the proposal. They argued that the significant reduction in spending on transportation that the Mica proposal would entail would result in a significant loss of jobs. And indeed they would. But in Washington, where the mood has shifted sharply away from the idea that government might be able to aid the advancement of the economy, even these committee Democrats were unwilling to propose a funding mechanism that would actually finance the bill they would introduce if they were able.

This is ultimately the handicap that has restrained any increase in expenditures on transportation; as is made explicitly clear in the document that adjoined the bill, the Highway Trust Fund — the fuel tax-filled bank account that finances surface transportation in this country — is broke, and the situation is worsening. While it might make sense for Mr. Obama and Ms. Boxer to propose larger bills simply because the country’s infrastructure is in a deplorable condition, without any way to finance them, how can they be approved by the Congress? Both have relied on promises of future “revenue sources” but ruled out an increase in the gas tax or the implementation of a vehicle miles-traveled fee. When cherished entitlement programs are on the cutting block because of a general unwillingness to expand the nation’s debt, how can an increase in the deficit to pay for transportation be defended?

Stuck with limited resources, then, Mr. Mica’s bill is the only approach that seems realistic. But even ignoring the overall spending amounts, the bill is quite problematic.

Though Mr. Mica’s specific approach is not yet apparent since the full legislation has yet to be released, the bill outline does state that “The percentage of available formula funds for transit programs that benefit suburban and rural areas” would be increased. The low down: Urban transit systems — the agencies that serve the vast majority of transit users — would suffer the ridiculous indignity of having their already smaller pot of funds be cut even further to benefit the less cost-effective, least valuable public transportation systems.

Eliminating red tape in the federal approval process is another of Mr. Mica’s priorities, and indeed, there may currently be more studies and years required to move forward with a transportation project than necessary. But it is difficult to believe that cutting off a few years from the planning process for new road or transit projects will make up for billions of dollars in lost financing for new buses or trains.

Bemoaning the lack of funding for transit and transportation in general is a worthwhile endeavor, but the real challenge continues to be whether any significant group of politicians of any stripe can be convinced of the need for revenue generators. In other words, without new taxes to fund the transportation program, the argument that the nation’s infrastructure is inadequate will never really matter.

If leaders in Washington have failed to advance on these matters, local and state leadership could fill the gap — if they so desire.

Though Mr. Mica’s bill would not introduce an infrastructure bank (one of Mr. Obama’s repeated goals since he entered office), it would expand funding for TIFIA grants and loans, offered by the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act. One billion dollars would be appropriated annually to use federal dollars to leverage private-sector investments, which would then be paid back either through user-generated fees or dedicated taxes applied at the local level.

The value of this approach was demonstrated yesterday, when Los Angeles announced that it had received a $640.8 million low-interest TIFIA loan to begin work on its Westside Subway project. The money will eventually be paid back by sales tax receipts collected in L.A. County over the next 30 years. The extension, which would bring trains eight miles from the existing Wilshire/Western station to the V.A. Hospital in Westwood, will cost a total of $5.3 billion, so the loan is just a starting point, but it is a good one, since if all financing is lined up, it will allow completion in 2022, instead of 2036, the soonest possible without any sort of loan.

Would this program, in association with Mr. Mica’s plan to open newly built federally funded Interstate highways to tolling, be enough to “double” funding for transportation, as he has suggested? It seems unlikely — at least in the long term. While the TIFIA loans will make it possible to advance construction more quickly, they will have to be paid back eventually, using local sales taxes — which won’t be usable for projects twenty years from now. Some private investors may choose to jump on board, but getting private sources to contribute to public transit projects while saving money overall has been a notoriously difficult process in our day and age.

Mr. Mica’s proposal is not the law yet, but more endowed alternatives to it have yet to have their funding sources adequately described by Congresspeople willing to raise the specter of increasing taxes. We’re waiting.

» The American freight rail system is often cited as a world model that must be protected from the intrusion of passenger rail networks. But comparisons with passenger-heavy Europe are not as meaningful as have been suggested.

Among those who argue against the public funding of improved intercity passenger rail in the United States, the notion that such improvements would reduce the viability of the freight rail system is frequently cited. The argument goes like this: Passenger and freight rail are in competition for the same infrastructure, so encouraging people to ride the trains would make it more difficult to transport their goods. The end result could be a minor improvement in passenger mode share towards the railways and a significant mode shift of freight away from the railways, to the highways.

The American freight rail network, it is argued, is one of the best in the world, able to move more goods over a longer distance than trucking can, partially because in most of the country, rail passenger services are basically nonexistent. The decreasing use of intercity passenger rail in the second half of the 20th Century appeared to correspond with an increase in freight by train.

Similarly, the comparison with Europe, where passenger rail has a far higher mode share, seems particularly informing: There, rail accounts for less than ten percent of freight ton-miles, compared to 38 percent in the U.S., according to a 2005 Harvard study by Jose Manuel Vassallo and Mark Fagan. Since 1995, the rail share for freight in Europe has declined from 20 to 17% while it has increased from 33 to 38% in the U.S. The European emphasis on passenger rail suggests a negative influence on freight rail, which implies that if the U.S. wants to maintain its freight system, further investments in passenger networks could be counterproductive.

Yet a closer read of the available data suggests that this story is specious. Though trucking accounts for a larger percentage of freight shipments in Europe, the U.S. actually moves a larger amount of goods (by ton-mile) by road than its European peers (1.7 million ton-miles versus 1.3 million), despite having a smaller population (310 million vs 380 million). How can this be? In order to consume what we consume, Americans rely on goods that are moved longer distances. And U.S. inhabitants are also larger consumers of material goods that require shipping; indeed, the country’s 6.5 million annual ton-miles of freight dwarf the 3.1 million in Europe.

Most significant perhaps is the American reliance on coal as an energy source; it accounts for almost half of overall power production in this country, compared to about 16% in Europe overall (and even less in some countries like France and Spain). Related is the fact that Europeans simply consume less energy — less than half as much on a per-capita basis and almost as little even in the wealthiest countries like Germany. For historical and logistical reasons, coal can be moved more efficiently by train, which explains a large share of the difference between American and European freight transport patterns. The coal moved by American railroads alone — about 1.5 million ton-miles, representing 23% of American goods movement — is equivalent to about half of all European freight shipments, according to the Harvard study, based on 2000 information.

More recent data suggests that the emphasis of American freight railroads on coal shipments has only become more pronounced, accounting for 47% of tons moved on the railways in 2007. Wyoming, of all states, is the leading state for outbound shipments of freight… because of the coal that originates there.

So the U.S. reliance on an incredibly polluting, inefficient power source has upped the use of trains for freight. But that is no success story in itself, since renewable forms of power production require no forms of material movement to and from production facilities. Less transportation — if not needed — is more efficacy from an economic and environmental perspective.

The Harvard report also indicates that the fact that European rail networks are sometimes not interoperable — Spain and France, for instance, have differing track gauges — structurally reduces the appeal of shipping freight by train, even though trucking is quite expensive (because of relatively high fuel taxes and frequent tolls). The ease of moving goods on the European coast means far more goods there move on the sea than in the U.S.

Thus this data does not demonstrate that Europe’s low freight rail mode share was “caused” by the continent’s excellent passenger services, the argument so frequently cited by campaigners against passenger rail investment. Rather, the evidence suggests that the reasons for Europe’s differences are multifarious in origin, with the effects of access by passenger trains only playing a minor role. In other words, the lack of a really strong freight rail system cannot be easily attributed to the existence of well-performing passenger trains.

On the other hand, the evidence for Europe’s differences do not “prove” anything about the feasibility of an improved passenger rail network in the U.S. nor does it discount the considerable investments the American freight railroads have devoted to improving their infrastructure, much of which occurred with little public aid. Implementing improved passenger rail networks on existing corridors cannot be done easily, nor should it interfere with the ability of existing freight companies to operate (even if they are transporting coal…). And European countries need to do more to guarantee the movement of freight on railways, which are more efficient than their truck-based counterparts.

Nonetheless, when it comes to freight rail, the comparison between the U.S. and Europe is inappropriate.

Image above: Intermodal freight in Indiana, from Flickr user vxla (cc)

» A House Committee holds a hearing on privatizing passenger rail, but recommendations are likely to be difficult to implement.

Three weeks after Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) cancelled the Tampa-Orlando intercity rail project — a decision that seems increasingly foolish considering newly released projections of profitability on the route — members of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials held a hearing today on the potential for increased private sector involvement in the funding and operations of intercity passenger rail service. The stated goal is to consider how to make intercity rail less expensive to run, at least in terms of government subsidies.

For Republican supporters of passenger rail, as few and far between as they are nowadays, getting non-governmental actors into the business is a major priority. Yet the ability to do so has been previously handicapped by other members of the GOP, most recently by Mr. Scott, whose decision to reject federal funds for his state’s project came before companies had the chance to respond to an offer to operate the line that would have required them to absorb construction and operating risks. And the whole goal of encouraging private investment may be troubled by the fundamental deficits in American rail infrastructure.

Nonetheless, the goal of increasing private participation in what for now is a government monopoly in the United States has long been a favorite of House Infrastructure and Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-FL). In December 2008, Mr. Mica announced that the government would solicit private companies for their ideas for how to improve the nation’s rail system, and by February 2009, the government had received more than 100 responses. Notably, French national rail company SNCF produced a stunning report revealing plans for corridors in the Midwest, Texas, Florida, and California. These plans have gone nowhere so far.

There is quite a bit of precedent for private involvement in rail services: The United States’ passenger rail system, which was once impressive, was largely built by companies. More recently, European Union liberalization rules have encouraged the growth of huge multi-national transportation companies that are increasingly playing a role in moving people on commuter and intercity rail lines.

And the American freight rail system, which transports a large percentage of the nation’s goods, is self-supporting. In fact, its operators plan to collectively spend $12 billion on improvements this year alone.

Whether or not it is a good idea to replace monopolistic public sector ownership with private companies and competition is worth evaluating in the passenger rail sector. As Edward Wytkind of the AFL-CIO stated today accurately, privatization in the U.K. has resulted in numerous difficulties and arguably an increase in public subsidies. But an even more serious question is just how realistic privatization is at all in the American context.

Mr. Mica, who referred to Amtrak as a “Soviet-style” passenger rail service because of its reliance on subsidies and lack of competition, argued today that routes be put up for competition, implying that private companies would be able to provide similar services at a less expensive rate for the government.

But there will continue to be very limited interest in “attracting private sector capital,” as Mr. Mica put it, unless there is a significant increase in public investment in intercity rail. The problem is that outside of the Northeast, most rail corridors are owned by the freight railroads, and they offer only limited capacity for increases in passenger operations. These freight companies have been largely uninterested in investing in passenger rail (their ancestors, after all, abandoned such services decades ago), and the Congress cannot simply expect other companies to be able to operate trains on those tracks. The law allows Amtrak, as a public company, to run along freight tracks, but it would be very problematic to extend similar rights to private companies, as Stephen Gardner, Vice President at Amtrak, said today. Would it be fair to force private freight companies to allow other private companies to run on their tracks?

States that subsidize their in-state passenger rail services, including California and North Carolina, among others, have the right to contract intercity rail services out to companies other than Amtrak, but they have not done so so far — part of the problem, apparently, is that few or no companies have expressed their interest in doing so.

Moreover, because the existing infrastructure is so decrepit — too few double-track corridors and poor stations are only the start of the problem — it is hard to see why many private companies would want to become involved in this process, because there are very limited margins for increased profitability.

On the routes where Amtrak currently is not operationally profitable — those outside of the Northeast Corridor — private companies would almost definitely require subsidies. This is not an exception to the rule: In the U.K. and in other countries, private operators often compete for subsidized contracts. Joseph Szabo, head of the Federal Railroad Administration, said today that his agency would move forward with competitive bidding for services along two current Amtrak corridors, but why any company would want to bid out for the three-times-a-week Sunset Limited, for instance, is unclear.

Indeed, the whole discussion about increasing private investment in intercity rail implies that Amtrak has been unreasonable and inefficient in its use of funds. But the fact that Amtrak loses money does not mean that private companies would, or that they would require fewer subsidies. Indeed, Amtrak’s losses are mostly a result of the fact that its routes run along corridors that have suffered from public disinvestment: With capital expenditures along its lines, it would likely do far better. That is what the Administration’s $53 billion intercity rail program is supposed to do, but the Republican Party majority in the House has been largely opposed to any such investments.

The Northeast Corridor, which is the only rail route in the United States that has received significant investment, may be the only good candidate for private involvement because of its high capacity, high ridership, and even higher ridership potential with improvements. The problem with that idea is that Amtrak owns the line and is making money on its operations there. Would competition there be reasonable? Wouldn’t that simply reduce Amtrak’s ability to cross-subsidize its other operations into the future?

Advancing the cause of privatization and competition in America’s passenger railroads paradoxically requires an increase in public investment in infrastructure. That spending could be coordinated with private partnerships, but no company is likely pay for the entire cost of a new line. The European decision to allow liberalization only came after decades of upgrades along intercity corridors and parallel increasing ridership. Only after the government has opened up new lines for service — Florida’s high-speed rail line was an excellent example — will there be significant interest from companies.

Image above: A train in the Netherlands operated by private contractor Veolia, from Flickr user Reinout van Rees (cc)

» The fact that street space is about more than just automobile movement has yet to be recognized by a big swath of the population.

The recent furor over the installation of bike lanes along Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West is indicative of the myopic perspective too many people continue to hold on to in regards to the use of the most basic transportation resource, the street.

Even in a city as progressive and transit-friendly as New York, the work of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan to reapportion a very limited portion of total street space to pedestrians, bicyclists, and buses — usually in areas where people in automobiles are outnumbered — have been greeted by lawsuits and calls for the commissioner to resign.

The absurdity of these efforts is difficult to comprehend. Already, the majority of public space in this country is devoted to the circulation of automobiles. Is the integration of a few complete streets in a network of usually single-use roads so tough to accept?

Try taking a toy away from a child and telling her that — after years of playing alone — from now on she must share. That, in effect, is how automobilists must feel about their precious rights-of-way. Convinced of the importance of driving from place to place, they cannot imagine a world in which the street’s purpose is broadened to include fulfilling the needs of people relying on other vehicles. Who cares about the inefficiency of the fact that they hog the street all day and night? What difference does it make if other transportation modes are pushed away or greatly inconvenienced? The street, after all, is designed for the car.

If transportation alternatives must be offered, this crowd says, buy another toy — put them underground, out of sight, no matter the costs. The street must be preserved for the car’s advance.

This attitude must be fought. People who live in dense parts of cities like New York, or Boston, or San Francisco are pedestrians at heart. Their residents face the sidewalk and they rely on neighborhood stores for their daily needs. And yet too often they suffer the daily indignity of the poorly designed street. As automobiles pass in every direction, they are confined to sidewalks often too small and a dearth of public space. When they hop on their bikes, hoping to extend their trips, they are caught between fast-moving and dangerous cars, despite their pollution-free form of travel. When they get on the bus, they are stuck in congestion despite the fact that they take up far less of the overall travel corridor than their driving peers.

These are the problems that policies like those that have been implemented in New York are attempting to address.

For those reading this article, these points are likely more than obvious, and yet it is clear that the motivation for opening our streets to users other than those stuck behind the wheels of their private vehicles remains murky for a significant percentage of the population. Even in New York, where most people have corner stores to which to walk and transit lines on which to ride, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are desperately convinced that if you were to remove a car lane and replace it with something else like a pedestrian plaza or a bike lane, chaos would result: Congestion would overtake the streets.

The removal of automobile traffic from parts of Manhattan’s Broadway including Times Square has been delightfully trouble-free.

Compounding this problem is the fact that people who drive, despite often constituting a small percentage of overall users, frequently command a high degree of influence thanks to their greater wealth, which allows them not only to drive but also to pay lawyers able to sue transportation commissioners for doing their jobs well.

All this hoopla, however, may be just a predictable slowdown in what is inevitably a slow process. It may be obvious to some that bike and bus lanes are beneficial, but many will remain attached to their automobiles and fight any attempt to reduce their dominance for years to come. There is opposition to these improvements today, but there will be less of it as more and more people experience the benefits of good biking facilities, effective bus service, and comfortable pedestrian street space.

Image above: Mock up of a contraflow bus bike lane, from Boston Complete Streets

The message from the White House on transportation financing over the past few weeks was ambiguous at best. President Obama, frustrated by Florida Governor Rick Scott’s rejection of federal aid for a high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando, suggested that it would be foolish for states to abandon investment in infrastructure, arguing that these projects are essential to the advancement of the American economy in the 21st Century. In a year filled with discussion about how to reduce the federal deficit, the Administration has been a major supporter of increasing funding for new transportation projects that it hopes will help the U.S. “win the future” — starting with a proposed $53 billion for high-speed rail over the next six years.

At the same time, the White House and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood have been remarkably opaque in describing their conception of how the federal government will pay for these projects. Even as the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget suggested that transportation programs would be funded without burying the country deeper into debt, Mr. LaHood was unable to describe for skeptical senators how exactly that could be done considering the current and future expected limitations of the federal fuel tax, which has been set at a low 18.4¢ per gallon since 1993. He repeated the Administration’s recession-based argument against increasing that tax or implementing a vehicle miles traveled tax, the only user fee that is a realistic replacement for the fuel tax. Other potential funding sources, like selective tolling or public-private partnerships, will provide only marginal expansions in funding.

Though certain members of Congress have promoted doing as much, there is no majority support for such tax increases in the Democratic-controlled Senate and even less in the GOP-led House. If there was once a sense that the government has a responsibility to guarantee the good condition of the nation’s roads and rails, that feeling has evaporated from the consensus.

All that seems to be acceptable is passing continued extensions of the existing transportation bill, first approved in 2005 and in theory supposed to be replaced in 2009. That funding is by most estimates too limited to account for the nation’s continued population growth and the age of its existing infrastructure, which is rapidly falling apart due to funds being too thinly spread around. The now-popular concern about the ballooning national debt has taken its toll, and the nation’s mobility systems will suffer.

To make matters worse, states — which conservatives claim they want to take more power — have abdicated responsibility. The decisions by Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and Wisconsin governors to give up on major rail improvement projects says something about those conservative politicians’ feelings about spending on any ground transportation other than highways, but this problem extends beyond the matter of transport mode. Indeed, most states have kept their respective fuel taxes at relatively low levels even as their own needs have increased. Calls for reducing taxes continue to define the national political scene, despite the fact that as a percentage of gross national product, taxes are the lowest they have been in 60 years. This inconvenient fact, however, does not seem to bother many policy-makers.

The private sector, whose ability to solve all of our problems is frequently promoted by politicians across the spectrum, has unsurprisingly not swooped in to save anything.

Indeed, the only actors who appear to be taking any responsibility on these matters are the citizens of municipalities across the country who have supported sales tax increases over the past few years to pay for improved transportation. While federal and state actors have mostly kicked the can around — defunding some things to pay for others, relying on debt to fill gaps — the inhabitants of cities and counties from Los Angeles to Charlotte to Denver have approved increases.

With diminishing aid from higher levels of the government, these cities have few choices other than looking to increase their local taxes. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants federal loans to speed up by 20 years L.A. County’s 30-year transportation investment plan — a reasonable idea since in the long term it would do nothing to the U.S. treasury — but the nation’s second-largest metropolitan area will need more than that, especially in those latter twenty years, since even the 30/10 program Mr. Villaraigosa has advocated will not do enough to resolve Southern California’s transportation woes. Will cities like L.A. be able to convince their voters to take even more of the burden?

States could play a far more important role in assuming the costs of upgrading transportation systems, but they are frequently handicapped by the dominance of rural and exurban interests, especially after 2010′s Republican wave.

Which leaves the federal government. The Obama Administration’s attempts over the past two years to make the argument that government investments in infrastructure have had bipartisan support for more of the past century has arguably backfired in the face of a stridently anti-government-investment Tea Party and its apparent backers in the Congress, many of the increasingly conservative members of the Republican Party. Attempting to differentiate themselves from the Democrats, the GOP has taken a no-compromise approach and will fight any increases in spending.

Without persuasively arguing for a tax increase to pay for such transportation improvements, the White House sounds depressingly like the Bush Administration when it was defending the Iraq War by arguing that it could be accomplished with no public sacrifice. President Bush, rather, encouraged us to increase our personal consumption, as if that would somehow compensate for the massive tax cuts his Administration had pushed through a cowardly Congress. We now suffer from the resulting consequences. Does Mr. Obama think he can get away with the same thing, when his Administration cannot identify a sound funding source?

Investments in transportation, as cities have proven, are popular. If provided a compelling argument, voters are willing to pay more to get access to better roads, transit systems, and railways. The question for the Obama Administration is not so much how much it wants to spend, but rather what defense it will mount (if any) for increasing taxes to pay for that spending. Whatever the current political atmosphere, we are not going to substantially improve the nation’s transportation system without doing so.

» Debating growth limits in a downtown? Consider transportation.

Washington, D.C. is a lucky city: Its downtown has been filled up with new construction over the past few decades to such an extent that it has virtually no space for new office buildings. Some, like Matt Yglesias, have suggested that one way to resolve this problem would be to increase densities by ridding the city of its height limit, which in essence makes it impossible to build structures in the city that are over about 10 stories. Lydia Depillis, another local commenter, has argued that the municipality still has plenty of developable sites which, though they may not be directly downtown, still offer opportunities for more office space.

What would be the manifestations of these different approaches? How can we weigh the advantages and disadvantages of upzoning the center city for more office space? Is our goal to produce vital, walkable, and dense downtown districts, or simply to expand new construction there, no matter the use?

The missing ingredient in this discussion is transportation. When we discuss the demand in downtowns like Washington’s for more office space, we sometimes make an assumption that the transport network will be able to handle whatever is thrown at it. In fact, there is a direct relationship between a downtown’s growth and the transportation provided to it. In general, businesses want to locate their offices in places that are accessible and that provide the benefits of agglomeration, and this sometimes means downtown, but not always. If the trip to and from the center — by whatever mode — becomes too arduous, there are significant reasons to locate outside of it. How does this fact apply to a place like Washington?

Once a downtown — which I will define as a traditional single-use American CBD — reaches a certain size, once it provides employment for a certain number of people, it has three basic options:

• One, it can do nothing to its transportation network, in which case the downtown has no capacity to absorb increasing growth. In these cases, residential uses become more important since the relative land values demanded for office space decrease (as it is harder for more people to enter into the downtown from elsewhere and there is more interest in walking to and from work). This is arguably what has happened to places like Chicago’s West and South Loop, where almost all recent development there has been in the form of residential towers despite the close proximity to the downtown core.
• Two, it can expand or improve transportation through the highway network, in which case parking lots become increasingly valuable and may displace existing buildings. This was the choice cities like Houston took since 1950, sacrificing what had once been walkable neighborhoods for an automobile-dominated core.
• Three, it can expand or improve transportation through the transit network (bus and/or rail), in which case higher densities become increasing valuable and taller buildings may replace shorter ones or parking lots. This has happened in Washington, D.C. since the construction of Metro beginning in the 1970s.

The discussion in Washington has hinged around the opposite side of the conversation, focusing on land use instead of transportation. The argument, asserted by people like Stephen Smith, suggests that the problem is that the government is exerting inappropriate control over densities by limiting heights and the result is that rents in the office core are increasing far higher than they would were there to be skyscrapers.

The problem is compounded by the fact that downtown Washington’s growth is limited, notes Ryan Avent, by the fact that outlying neighborhoods are stuck to one- or two-story buildings (and there is little push to challenge that condition), so the Paris approach, in which the entire city is made up of 6 to 10 story buildings, is not much of an alternative, either.

These arguments are compelling: mini-downtowns in the suburbs, such as along Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, can absorb some of the growth, but there is clearly strong demand for continued concentration in the center city.

Whether this is a long-term phenomenon, however, depends on the transportation provided into the downtown. Imagine that the height limits in Washington were lifted — or, at least, buildings twice as high could be built. In the short-term, this would surely produce the desired effects, allowing downtown to absorb more of the region’s job growth, reduce office rents, and aiding in the continued gentrification of the city as a whole.

In the longer-term, however, as the city’s downtown building stock is gradually replaced, the worker density in the center of the city would roughly double. Would this be sustainable?

If the city’s transportation network remains as it is, mostly relying on the existing Metro network and a functioning, if not great, bus system, this would cause significant problems. Here’s why: Much of the Metro system is already at capacity during peak hours. In essence, today’s transportation network is designed with a capacity roughly equivalent to what is generated under the current height limit.

Moreover, road expansion is simply not an option, not only because there is no room for new highways into downtown but also because, as already stated, a focus on roads-based transportation encourages downtowns to be transformed into automobile-based neighborhoods.

As the transit system becomes more congested, because of job expansion and a lack of transportation improvements, the cost of transportation into the core — in terms of time and money — will increase. This will reduce the appeal of locating offices downtown and encourage new construction to be residential rather than office-based. Is this desirable for Washington? Does the city want a mixed-use core or a office-based one?

The alternative is allowing an increase in zoning along with an improvement in the transportation network. This may seem obvious, but Washington has not yet committed the funds to an expansion of the Metro network or serious improvements to the bus corridors, putting in question the viability of a lifting of the height limits. The downtown’s growth must be approached by considering transportation and land use in complement with one another.

Image above: Downtown Washington, DC from Flickr user Ken Lund (cc)

» An early scoping report suggests that a subway replacing the Red and Purple Lines in Chicago’s North Side could cost less than an elevated modernization program.

Elevated rapid transit — like any kind of physical infrastructure — degrades over time.

Faced with decades of carrying hundreds of thousands of people daily in a notoriously extreme climate, the rail line that runs local Red and express Purple trains north from Chicago’s Belmont Station to Linden Terminal in Wilmette Evanston along 9.5 miles of track has seen better days. While much of the rest of the elevated and subway system operated by the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has been renovated in recent years, this section of rail corridor and the stations associated with it has continued to degrade, resulting in slowed-down, unreliable trains and damaged structural conditions. Of the 21 stations concerned by this corridor, only 6 have handicap access. That’s bad news for the about 125,000 daily users who take advantage of the line every day.

Thus last month the CTA began holding public meetings on what it calls the Red & Purple Modernization Project, an initial step towards the eventual creation of an Environmental Impact Statement, which in turn allows the CTA to apply for federal funds to renovate the corridor.

In this case, there will be no easy options for the city’s transit authority. Certainly nothing will be cheap. But what might be expensive elsewhere — a subway — could turn out to be the most cost-effective solution for Chicago.

In preparation for public events this year, CTA planners have performed simple evaluations on a number of potential options for the corridor, summarized in the chart above.

The CTA has four fundamental options: Maintain the track in its current condition, allowing it to degrade, slowing trains and requiring constant upkeep and high operating costs ($280 million); Rehabilitate the track, putting it into a state of good repair for a short period of time (20 years) and potentially introduce new transfer options from express to local trains ($2.4-2.9 billion); Build a new elevated line along the Chicago section of the corridor, either with three or four tracks, and rebuild the embanked Evanston portion ($4-4.2 billion); and Construct a subway along the southern half of the line, eliminating the existing elevated portions there ($4 billion).

The second pair of options would require removing some existing stations, a possibility that is making some locals nervous already. Some stations on the current line are less than 1,000 feet apart. CTA planners argue that the construction of a new elevated or underground track would reduce travel times and that the insertion of new stations with multiple access points (today most stations only have one entrance) will, on the whole, reduce average walking time to and from transit.

The fact that the subway option may cost about the same as an elevated alternative is a surprise, but these are preliminary alternatives that will be compared in more depth if the CTA finds the funds to advance the study over the next two years. Chicago mayoral race front-runner Rahm Emanuel has suggested that his top transportation priority for the city is to modernize this portion of the Red Line and also extend it south to 130th Street. Even so, neither project currently has any funding specifically devoted to it.

Nevertheless, ridership on this corridor — possibly the densest 10-mile strip in the Midwest — is growing along with a booming residential population. These people need good access to Chicago’s downtown. What choice does the city have but to find the means to pay for the renovation of the line?

Chicago has completed renovations of several of its transit lines in the past, including the Brown Line in 2009, the Dan Ryan stretch of the Red Line in 2007, the Pink Line in 2006, and the South Side Green Line in 1996. Yet the closest comparison to the project may be the renovation of Philadelphia’s Market Street El, which wound up in September 2009. There, the local transit agency spent $740 million effectively turning a 100-year-old, 2-mile line into a brand new two-track corridor, replacing all track, all of the support structures, and all of the stations. At an average cost of $370 million per mile, it is no surprise that Chicago’s planners estimate estimate at least a $4 billion cost ($421 million/mile) for the replacement of their two to four-track line.

Maintaining the status quo or a basic rehabilitation will do little for the city, resolving few of the existing problems and simply postponing needed repairs to a date not so many years off.

Thus a serious, long-term approach to handling the structural conditions of the North Side elevated will require either constructing a new elevated viaduct or building a subway.

From the perspective of maintaining existing operations along the line, the first solution would be extremely difficult since it would require shutdowns of the portions of the line in which the new elevated structure is being built. Chicago rebuilt the South Side Green Line in the early 1990s — by closing it for two years. That is not much of an option along this corridor, where there is no alternative (unlike the South Side, where the Red Line runs just a few blocks from the Green) and where far too many people rely on these rail services to cut them off entirely. It would be extremely expensive from an operations perspective to introduce a bus service capable of carrying hundreds of thousands of people along the corridor, and the result of such a construction period — it could last years — could be thousands of permanently riders lost.

On the other hand, the subway option offers a distinct advantage in this regard because it could theoretically be built even as operations continue on the existing elevated above, much as Boston’s Big Dig added a highway tunnel underneath the city’s downtown expressway, ensuring permanent road access throughout the construction period. That comparison, however, raises the question of whether the underground alternative is really as good of a deal as the planners comparing it to the elevated route seem to make it, since the Big Dig’s cost escalated exponentially over the course of its development.

Moreover, while fewer stops, fewer curves thanks to the new alignment, and more reliable track would speed the underground trains much faster than today’s elevated, the subway would only have two tracks, versus the four now offered. This would eliminate express Purple Line trains between Howard and Belmont Stations — a service that saves commuters almost half their travel time compared to the local Red Line (12 versus 22 minutes) — and require everyone to take the local. On the other hand, all local commuters in the areas now served by both the Purple and Red Lines would then get generally quicker travel times. Planners estimate that this could attract more riders than the other options. Could this be an acceptable trade-off?

The tunneled train alignment does offer one possibility that the city should study very seriously: The option of selling the development rights to the parcels where the elevated trains once ran. Unlike in many places, where elevated trains run directly over a street, on this corridor, the trains run in the middle of blocks. If a subway were built below, a long stretch of real estate would suddenly be available for sale. This could offset construction costs tremendously.

It is sad, perhaps, that Chicago will have to spend so much money on the renovation of an existing line rather than the construction of a new one — if not now, then sometime in the next twenty years. With a large expansion program in the works, the CTA will have to rely on a generous federal commitment to make any of these projects work. In today’s difficult political environment, finding those funds may be difficult.

Image above: Options for CTA North Red and Purple Line Renovation, from CTA