Transportation is Energy in Motion
Williamson County, Texas, racked up a 69 percent increase in its number of jobs between 2000 and 2012. That is extremely fast growth, even by Texas standards. With a boost in overall population to match the job growth,8 civic leaders were faced with a major challenge: The county needed a significant amount of new hard infrastructure, including roads, power, water and schools.
“The Texas State Demographer estimates that the state is currently adding about 1,100 new residents per day,” says Rep. Dale. “That is creating tremendous pressure on all types of infrastructure to include transportation as well as water and schools … in addition to other basic services.”
Dale notes that while the transportation infrastructure is certainly vital to the movement of people around the state, it also supports key industries and job creation. As such, he sees transportation and the built environment as inextricably linked to all other aspects of the system of civic life. For example, Texas may lead the nation in innovative and unconventional oil and gas exploration, but growth in the energy sector isn’t possible without a sustainable transportation system.
“As it relates to congestion on highways, it is my opinion that computer-assisted driving could reduce accidents and increase travel speeds leading to multiple benefits for commuters. It may even be possible to achieve higher, safer speeds without increasing road capacity,” says Dale. In his estimation, pipelines are also a key part of the state’s transportation infrastructure. “Pipelines are the safest mode of transportation for any product and specifically for the hydrocarbons produced in Texas,” he says. “Expedited construction of pipelines will mitigate heavy truck traffic, as well as have positive environmental impact by reducing the flaring, or burning of oil and gas, that sometimes occurs when wells come in and pipelines are not in place.”
Texas is even negotiating with a private sector partner to provide a concession for a monorail-style system that would move truck trailers in an automated fashion from the Mexican Border to Dallas.
“If this innovative project comes to fruition it will reduce traffic on the heavily congested I-35 corridor, decrease road maintenance costs and increase safety,” says Dale. “The bottom line is that government must not fear innovation and must establish a framework where the private sector can help solve these problems. There will never be enough tax money and you can’t pave everything.”
Technology Makes Hard Infrastructure Smarter
Of course, information technology is playing a large role in modernizing transportation. Everything seems to be going back to school these days to become “smart” — smart roads, smart grids, smart traffic systems and even entire smart cities. Technology continues to be critical to the long-range planning of future projects through GIS mapping, sophisticated data mining and statistical analysis. But those high-powered tools are increasingly leaving the engineer’s or the planner’s office and heading out to the highways and byways themselves.
For example, everyone knows that the traffic around the U.S. capital region is challenging to say the least. A new project under the Commonwealth of Virginia “GEC Megaprojects Program” will add an additional 14 miles of two new lanes in each direction on I-495. These aren’t ordinary lanes, however. The high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes will be free for vehicles that carry three or more people, and tolled for those that don’t. Using a novel intelligent transportation system (ITS), the tolls on the lanes can be changed based on traffic conditions to regulate demand. Higher tolls can be charged during busy times and lower tolls on off hours. The result is smarter management of traffic on the roads.
The outcome of the I-495 improvements isn’t just convenience for drivers — it’s also positive for the environment as well. Researchers estimate that stop-and-go traffic decreases gas mileage by 40 percent. The ITS will enable lane-specific speeds and active speed management. When commuters maintain a steady rate of speed, their pocketbooks and carbon emissions will benefit. The project is also innovative in its structure as a public-private partnership.
Within and between communities, other forms of transit are also gaining ground. Los Angeles recently topped New York City at providing access to public transportation to households without vehicles. According to a Brookings Institution study, 99.1 percent of L.A. residents in no-car homes had ready access to public transit. The high percentage is especially good news for low-income households, which rely on the mass transit system.
This accomplishment came, in part, as a result of “Measure R,” a 2008 ballot initiative that instituted a half-cent sales tax that would be used to address the county’s transportation needs. Over its 30-year lifespan, the tax will raise $40 billion for innovative solutions that will ease congestion. Funds already raised by the measure are going towards new public transportation infrastructure, including rail and bus lines.
“We really had maxed out what could be done with asphalt,” says Denny Zane, executive director of Move LA. Zane’s organization is focused on improving public transportation in L.A. County. “I think there was a broad appreciation that building more freeways was a source of the problem, not an opportunity for a solution.
The improvements in Los Angeles transportation — and the vision that inspired them — are significant in their scope but integrated in a way that demonstrates the principle of FutureStructure. Los Angeles has combined what were formally separate projects — like a 30-year, 1,680-mile bicycle master plan, a public-private bike share program, HOT lanes, congestion pricing and a network of 4,398 high-tech networked traffic signals — into an integrated, well-planned and networked whole in which component parts work together.
When the Bill Comes Due
Of course, any grand transportation vision has to be paid for somehow. Julia Burrows, president and executive director of the Greenwise Joint Venture in Sacramento, Calif., (a nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming Sacramento into the greenest region in the country) sees financing as an inseparable part of the overall task of building prosperous and sustainable communities. In fact, finance is one of the most critical considerations of all civic planning.
“The cities that have been successful have not only integrated the different departments that are in charge of transportation, planning, building and utilities, but they have also integrated financing,” says Burrows. Her own experience as the deputy city manager for Roseville, Calif., bears this out: “With the city of Roseville … when we looked at a 1,000-acre development and considered where everything should go, we ran the financing model at the same time.”
States have a particularly vexing funding challenge when it comes to the gas tax. The U.S. federal gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, and it is assessed on a per-gallon basis. As gas mileage has climbed, that means vehicles are driving more miles for each gallon of gas they purchase. More miles driven means more wear and tear on the roads, and a growing budget gap between revenues and costs.
To help overcome the transportation funding gap, states have taken matters into their own hands — which is why eight of them recently raised their state gas tax, effective July 1 of this year (see infographic on page 18). Wyoming added the most at 10 cents per gallon, while Connecticut, California, Maryland, Kentucky, Nebraska, Georgia and North Carolina imposed gas tax increases as well, all to help fund their transportation budgets. Maryland added an extra 3.5 cents per gallon to pay for transportation projects, taking its total rate to 27 cents per gallon.
Even though state gas taxes are seen as more palatable than federal gas taxes, in general gas taxes are not looked upon fondly by taxpayers or policymakers. The commonwealth of Virginia actually took a new approach when it dropped its 17.5 cent-per-gallon tax on fuel in favor of a new 3.5 percent wholesale tax. While the change is not revenue neutral — motorists are expected to pay an average of $15 more per month — the new structure will automatically take account of inflation. That’s something that the old gas tax never did, remaining fixed all of the last 26 years.
As mentioned previously, the state of Oregon recently passed a bill that would charge drivers a vehicle mileage tax (VMT) instead of the traditional gas tax. The change would both eliminate the unpopular gas tax that is viewed as increasingly unsustainable for transportation financing needs and it would encourage purchasing cars with better MPG, lowering fuel emissions. This approach is one way that states are looking to close the increasing imbalance caused by higher-mileage vehicles.
As an additional option, transportation financing can come from trust funds that tax certain purchases specific to a particular industry. For example, people flying commercial planes pay a tax on their airline ticket that goes into the Aviation Trust Fund, which provides grants to airports to cover some of their capital and operating costs, including that of the air traffic control system. Some states may be considering tapping the energy sector for a similar infrastructure fund approach to meet growing transportation needs.
Another way policymakers can fund transportation projects and upkeep is through the use of public-private partnerships. In Boston, the Massachusetts Highway Department (MassHighway) and the Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation partnered with a private company to perform improvements and additions to the Route 3 North highway. The involvement of the private sector reduced the project’s delivery time from an expected nine years to less than four. The agreement required the private sector partner to operate and maintain the road for a 30-year period before transferring it over to MassHighway — providing an incentive for higher quality and containment of maintenance costs. Whatever the funding strategy, creating funds for transportation innovations and maintenance is an ongoing struggle and an increasing problem as our nation’s growth rapidly rises — but as evidenced, innovative financing models do exist.
