Wall Street Journal: Austin Wants Mass Transit, but the New Infrastructure Law Will Give It a Bigger Highway | Part 1 -- transit/sustainable mobility planning is not a priority

 -- "Austin Wants Mass Transit, but the New Infrastructure Law Will Give It a Bigger Highway," Wall Street Journal

-- "Wall Street Journal: Austin Wants Mass Transit, but the New Infrastructure Law Will Give It a Bigger Highway | Part 2 -- learning from transit examples across the country"

I wrote about this on an e-list, in response to someone saying, "what can we do, how can we get the federal government to change things?"  It's not that simple.  It's more about local planning.

This is a really complicated question which I will answer in two separate responses. 

Outside of legacy center cities which are transit centric, most metropolitan areas are indifferent to sustainable mobility. 

(1) I use the Pasteur line "chance favors the prepared mind," but about having plans in place, in a line something like "opportunity when money comes available favors the prepared city."

(2) I can't claim this is a definitive statement, but most Metropolitan Planning Organizations, the planning agencies tasked by the US Department of Transportation to plan and coordinate transportation on a metropolitan scale, aren't particularly innovative, and few operate with an overt sustainable mobility preference. Mostly they tot up what the state(s) and jurisdictions give to them, and don't prioritize sustainable mobility investments the way that say the Netherlands and Denmark do. That's your CLRTP -- constrained long range transportation plan. 

MPOs that stick out to me as innovative include LA, SF Bay, Puget Sound, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis. And Portland. 

(3) the planning and funding processes for transit are much more difficult and take a much longer time than for roads. They require special sign offs by the Federal Transit Administration in a manner that is much more difficult compared to road projects.

For example, I first read about the concept for a Purple Line circular "subway" for the DC area in a cover story in the Washington City Paper in December 1987. 

A section of it, as light rail, will finally open in 2026. There is zero planning going on at this point for continuing to build it out. At this point, it probably will take 100 years or more to realize the concept from when it was first expressed. 

(4) Most areas don't have a particularly good advocacy agenda for sustainable mobility. Transit is seen as a social service for poor people. Outside of the legacy cities, most places are automobile centric. 

Few people have experience themselves taking transit. So it is almost impossible for them to believe it can be a desirable, preferred service. 

I consider myself fortunate to have lived in DC for 30+ years as that is one of the places in the US where you can live very well without owning a car, although yes it imposes constraints and you have to make decisions to optimize your ability to get around, and sometimes there are things you can't do. 

--  "DC is a market leader in Mobility as a Service (MaaS)," 2018

(5) the same is true for walking and biking. And with biking even with a focus on building infrastructure, there is insufficient support for building a critical mass of cyclists. Without a critical mass of transportational bicyclists the average automobilist sees investments in biking infrastructure as a waste. 

-- "Revisiting assistance programs to get people biking: 18 programs," 2020

Eg if we had a city in the US comparable to Copenhagen, where 60% of trips are by bike, it would be very visible. 

Copenhagen cyclists at a red light.  Wikipedia image by heb.

The same is true for pedestrian infrastructure. What I now call the difference between planning for Walkable Communities versus pedestrian planning.  

-- "Planning for place/urban design/neighborhoods versus planning for transportation modes: new 17th Street NW bike lanes | Walkable community planning versus "pedestrian" planning," 2021

Montreal

(6) The CLRP process isn't set up for "big hairy audacious goals" like building a robust sustainable mobility system and a metropolitan area replete with great places.  It's constrained by the requirement to have funding lined up.

The BHAG or vision planning is exemplified by the way I've written about transit for the DC area:

-- "Codifying the complementary transit network improvements and planning initiatives recommended in the Purple Line writings," 2022

-- "Backwardness of transportation and land use planning: National Harbor, Prince George's County, Maryland | Why isn't high capacity transit access required from the outset?," 2022

-- "DC, Transformational Projects Action Planning, and the Baltimore-Washington Maglev project," 2021

-- "A "Transformational Projects Action Plan" for a statewide passenger railroad program in Maryland," 2019

-- "The answer is: Create a single multi-state/regional multi-modal transit planning, management, and operations authority association," 2017

-- "A new backbone for the regional transit system: merging the MARC Penn and VRE Fredericksburg Lines," 2017

-- "One big idea: Getting MARC and Metrorail to integrate fares, stations, and marketing systems, using London Overground as an example," 2015

So when "helicopter money" appears, like the Build Back Better initiative by the Biden Administration there isn't a way to really direct it to BHAG projects for sustainable mobility, in particular transit.   

That was the same problem btw with the Obama era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act monies.  It was for "shovel ready" projects.  Transit projects take years to come to fruition, they are never shovel ready.  Roads are.  So instead of investing in ways that support the future, and have extranormal return on investment, they didn't.

We need to add a rung in the MPO planning framework for a metropolitan (and state scaled) "Pie in the Sky Long Range Transportation Plan."  It could include elements like: 

-- connecting the Blue and Red Lines in Boston ("Check out the MBTA’s renderings of the proposed Red-Blue connector," Boston Globe)

-- extending the subway in Queens to LaGuardia Airport

-- filling in gaps in the rail and transit network in Southern California

-- building out the Purple Line

-- creating a streetcar network in Washington, DC

-- extending the NYC subway system to close-in New Jersey

-- building a new Amtrak station in Ann Arbor, Michigan adjacent to the medical campus ("Feds deal blow to Ann Arbor train station plan, citing high costs, too much parking," Ann Arbor News)

-- adding in-city stations to the Metra Lines in Chicago, and to the LIRR and Metro-North in NYC ("New Metro-North line headed toward East, South Bronx in 2027," Bronx Times)

-- etc.

Let alone super BHAG projects like the rebuilding of statewide railroad passenger transportation networks.

(7) But sustainable mobility doesn't work without a focus on compact development and land use intensification.  Integration of land use and transportation planning, needs to prioritize density, proximity, centrality, etc. -- the kind of "recentralization" arguments made by Steve Belmont in Cities in Full.

 If your land use is still sprawled, adding transit doesn't do much because it's still inefficient to get to and from places relatively quickly.  Deconcentration promotes automobile dependence.