Mary Peters, Bush administration Secretary of Transportation, in an August, 2007 TV interview:

“You know, I think Americans would be shocked to learn that only about 60 percent of the gas tax money that they pay today actually goes into highway and bridge construction… bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure… there’s about probably some 10 percent to 20 percent of the current spending that is going to projects that really are not transportation, directly transportation-related. Some of that money is being spent on things, as I said earlier, like bike paths or trails.”

Ray LaHood, Obama administration Secretary of Transportation, yesterday on the the USDOT blog:

“On Earth Day, it seems appropriate to talk about bicycling, not only as recreation, but as an environmentally sound commuting option… When I told the League of American Bicyclists National Bike Summit that “Cyclists are important users of America’s transportation systems, ” I meant it. And, when I wrote that “With DOT, bicyclists have a full partner in working toward livable communities, ” I meant that as well. President Obama has challenged us to transform the way transportation serves the American people by creating more choices and encouraging less carbon-intensive transportation, and we are working hard on that challenge… Earth Day is today, but we’ll need the sustained engagement of bicycle commuters and their advocates in the weeks and months to come to help keep the wheels of bicycle-friendly legislation on the road.”

There is still a lot of institutional bias towards cars and against alternatives like transit and cycling, but it’s only a matter of time until those biases are torn down (the upcoming federal surface transportation legislation could be a major turning point), and there is no better ally than a DOT boss who understands that the words “transportation” and “infrastructure” are not mere synonyms for “highways”.

For the record, lest I be accused of partisanship, Peters was a career DOT bureaucrat while LaHood is a former Republican Congressman.

“If service levels are to be maintained, additional revenue will have to be found”

That’s the sad truth, according to regional transportation guru Chris Zimmerman (on the Boards of WMATA, NVTC, NVTA, TPB, VRE, and Arlington), who laments that the Federal stimulus will focus on creating new jobs while not working to save jobs that transit agencies all over the country are being forced to slash as their budgets collapse due to the recession (900 from WMATA alone). Furthermore, history shows that transit agencies hurt themselves when they cut service, since lower service often leads to fewer riders. Raise fares, and customers complain but stick around. Cut service, and more of them leave.

Unfortunately, this probably means that Metro will have to raise fares. If the alternative is infrequent trains and shuttered entrances, I hope they do.

I haven’t commented on Mayor Fenty’s hiring of former ZipCar exec Gabe Klein as new DDOT boss because aside from the fact that he worked for ZipCar I don’t know much about him, and don’t have anything to add that hasn’t already been said. He seems like a progressive choice, but without a background in policy, how do we know?

Well, somebody knows. In Klein’s role at ZipCar he interacted with Chris Hamilton, Commuter Services Chief for Arlington County, manager of CommuterPageBlog, and one of our region’s most forward-thinking transportation experts. Hamilton is as dedicated to multi-modalism as anybody; his department is behind the awesome car-free diet ad campaign. On CPB, Hamilton has this to say about Klein:

Mr. Klein, who lives in the Columbia Heights neighborhood, understands that people living, working and playing in a great urban place like Washington, DC expect more of their transportation system than just focusing on cars.

With Gabe Klein leading DDOT, one can imagine a future in which the District is mentioned along with cities like Portland, Seattle and NYC for innovative, multi-modal, people (not car) oriented transportation solutions. This is going to be fun.

Having known Gabe since 2003 when Arlington partnered with Flexcar and his Zipcar to pioneer the use of orange-poled, on-street carsharing spaces here on the east coast, we know that Gabe is the consummate entrepreneur and builder of public-private partnerships.

I trust a guy like Chris Hamilton to know what he’s talking about. Having never worked for a public DOT, Klein will no doubt go through a learning curve, but if Hamilton is on record saying Klein is the guy to lead DDOT into a new multi-modal future, I believe him.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the Bible of urbanism. It is the most articulate case for what makes good cities good and bad cities bad that has ever been written in the English language.

President-elect Barack Obama has read it, and is a fan. See for yourself:

… Judging by his seemingly interested flipping-through, maybe Biden has read it by now too.

What this means for cities is that Obama 1) cares about how they function, and 2) understands. Even if he can’t make every decision from the urbanist perspective, that’s probably more than any prior president can claim.

The urbanist blogosphere has been atwitter with disappointment about the number of road projects likely to be included in Obama’s infrastructure stimulus package. The exception has been the economist Avent, with whom BeyondDC agrees.

With the stimulus, it seems some are expecting not-yet-President Obama to take the first big step away from the roads-first mentality of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, that is probably not possible given the nature of what the stimulus is all about.

The stimulus package is not intended to change anything except the economy. To have an effect on the economy, it needs to provide immediate jobs. To provide immediate jobs, the stimulus package has to target projects that are already totally through the planning process and ready for construction. The federal planning process takes years. If we wait for new projects to go through it, it will be too late to make any difference to the current economic situation.

Given the nature of transportation planning over the past decade, there are a lot of road projects ready to go and not very many transit projects. This is unfortunate, but it’s not Obama’s fault, nor is there anything he can do about it. Obama may be the country’s first urbanist president, but he’s not a wizard. He can’t travel magically back in time and change planning that happened last year. Thus, the stimulus package is necessarily full of road projects.

If anyone disagrees with the need for an infrastructure stimulus package in the first place, that’s reasonable. But if we are to launch such a package, a lot of road projects will necessarily be included, because road projects are what’s ready to go right now.

Next year Congress will take up the issue of infrastructure spending over the next 6 years via its authorization of the next TEA bill. *That* bill is where Obama and the transit camp have room to move. *That’s* where we should focus our attention, as urbanists. Getting too upset about the stimulus package including roads is unrealistic, and needlessly costs Obama political capital he will need when it comes time to write a bill that actually can move in the right direction.

Now, on the subject of being disappointed with Obama, tapping a rural Republican for DOT boss might be a better reason. BeyondDC doesn’t know much about this LaHood character, except that he’s a moderate from rural Illinois and is supposedly a supporter of Amtrak. If it’s fair to say the pick is at least probably a big step up from Mary Peters, it’s also fair to say the pick isn’t as progressive as we’d hoped.

BeyondDC was there on election night.

This is why the presidential election was relevant to urbanism, and why Barack Obama got the BeyondDC endorsement:

plans are underway to establish a White House Office of Urban Policy in order to better coordinate federal efforts to help America’s cities, according to Obama transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett.
– Washington Post

It’s about time an American President noticed that cities are important. We haven’t had such a leader, from either party, in a long time. OUP may or may not be what our cities need, but at the very least Mr. Obama has cities on his agenda, and that’s a good thing.

According to The Overhead Wire, in defending his vote against the recent Metro funding bill, Senator McCain said “With the serious financial situation facing our nation, this commitment of taxpayers’ dollars can [be] dedicated to addressing far more important national priorities.” So just to be clear, supporting transit, which leads to healthier cities (the engine of the American economy) and reduces America’s dependence on foreign oil, is not an important priority of John McCain.

Conversely, in last night’s debate Barack Obama said energy independence would be the highest priority of his campaign.

‘Nuff said.

USDOT thinks you shouldn’t ride the train so much.

Apparently it’s berate the Federal Government day at BeyondDC. From Streesblog, via Avent:

Like a burned-out addict stealing to support a meth habit, U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said yesterday that due to declining gas tax revenues, the Highway Trust Fund would need to borrow money from its mass transit account to pay for road projects. Today’s big news story was buried at the bottom of page A17 in the New York Times:

Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.

The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases.

So in the crazy world of Mary Peters, it’s a big problem that Americans are driving less and riding transit more, because that means we can’t build so many roads. Her even crazier solution to that non-problem is to take money away from successful, increasingly popular transit programs and use that money instead to fund more of the same roads on which people are no longer driving. BeyondDC doesn’t know what ridiculous world that is, but it ain’t the one we live on.

Earth to Mary Peters: Your job is not to build roads. Your job is to move people. Stop putting the needs road builders ahead of the needs of the American people. Whatever credibility you had, you have lost thanks to this ridiculous proposal.

But energy and transportation are essentially the same issue. Our heating and gas bills have a direct impact on our freedom to move around. The governor and legislators, looking at the state’s 2009 elections, will be hunting for nice, cheap, easy ways to show that they are green and caring people. But resolutions supporting recycling and incentives to build more energy-efficient buildings are mere niceties. By the time we’re shelling out $6 for gas, the public’s eagerness to see real movement toward energy independence and real alternatives to getting in the car will be far more powerful than it is today.

The rest of the column, in which Fisher attacks Virginia Republicans for blocking a transportation deal, is an entertaining read.

Also…

1) The first draft of the National Capital Framework Plan, which seeks to reshape the Federal areas around the National Mall, is available for review and public comment. We’ll post our thoughts in a day or two.

2) Jim Graham’s streetcar oversight meeting was today. BeyondDC couldn’t attend because we’ve got a day job, but we’ll weigh in as soon as we know what happened.

3) The “photostream” pictures at the bottom of the right-side column are random pictures from BeyondDC photo sets. We’ll be fiddling with the photostream, and possibly with the home page layout itself, in coming weeks.

Has Graham read this?

Why now is the question we’d like to ask DC Councilman Jim Graham, who is stalling construction of the Anacostia streetcar because he wants to know “where it’s located and what it’s going to achieve”, “how much it’s going to cost”, “what other routes were considered” and “why were they rejected.” To answer those questions Graham has scheduled a public hearing for July 14.

What’s got us confused is that that information has all been available for years. Why is Graham asking those questions now, two-and-a-half months after DDOT solicited construction bids for the project, rather than say in 2005 when DDOT was going through its corridor selection process?

It’s hard to tell whether Graham is stalling because he doesn’t understand the benefits of streetcars in general or only has questions about the Anacostia line specifically. It’s possible he has no objections and just wants to look democratic by holding a public meeting. We don’t know, but in any event, getting streetcars up and running is the single most important issue in District transportation planning, so we’re taking Ryan Avent’s suggestion and writing to the Councilman for answers.

Update: (July 8) Mr. Graham’s response to our email: I may have been misconstrued. I am not against the project. I wanted an oversight hearing on this, some $60 million expense…something that has not occurred.