Reauthorization of the Federal Transportation Bill
Round Table Discussion

Sponsored by US Representative Nick Lampson

By David Crossley, President, Gulf Coast Institute, and Member, Lampson Economic Development Task Force on 21st Century Transportation

Thank you, Congressman Lampson, for asking me to offer some comments about transportation and the TEA-3 reauthorization bill. And thanks to Congress Members Bell and Culberson for being here today.

Much of the work we did on the transportation task force that Dr. Carol Lewis chaired for Congressman Lampson a few years ago focused on three general topics:

• Cooperation
• Intermodalism
• The land use/transportation connection

All these are part of a complex system in which actions often occur without adequate understanding of their effect on other parts of the system and thus produce unintended consequences.

It is easy, for instance, to argue that traffic congestion in the region is actually caused by the policies intended to reduce it.

A very large step toward development of a holistic and comprehensive transportation strategy would be to work toward achieving a little more calm in the deliberative process. As a friend has said to me, here in Houston we tend too often to take the Ready, Fire, Aim approach, which sometimes results in shooting ourselves in the regional foot.

So I’d like to champion the general themes and undercurrents that emerged first in ISTEA and then in its successor TEA-21 and continue to evolve in the new TEA-3.

Among those themes are planning, intermodalism, serious public involvement, and most importantly the development of strategies that link transportation to land use.

I believe it’s a fair statement that we spend most of our research and capital expenditures for transportation to address those trips from home to work and back. But as we try to take the big picture approach encouraged by the transportation bill, we ought to reflect that those trips are less than 20 percent of all our trips. Is it possible the low-hanging fruit is on the other side of that equation?

Let’s recognize that more than 80 percent of all the trips in the region are not about going to work or going home from work. They are basically about running errands. Those trips are relatively short – about 3 miles on average – and thousands of those trips lend themselves to relatively easy and inexpensive solutions that can evolve over time simply by giving some thought to our policies.

Let’s put some energy and creativity to finding ways to make neighborhoods and districts all over the region more convenient for access to the amenities of daily life.

Let’s recognize that there is no one lifestyle that can serve all people and stop trying to “win” lifestyle wars. There are people who really want to live in dense cities where walking, elevators, and transit are the primary mobility modes and there are people who really want to live in purely residential sub-urban places where driving is required for all mobility and there are all sorts of permutations of those metropolitan lifestyles in between.

Let’s recognize that Houston doesn’t have just one city, it has several. Looking at the skyline in all directions from the Warwick Hotel there are at least three distinct cities on the horizon that are nearly the size of St. Louis in terms of jobs – Downtown, the Medical Center, and Uptown/Galleria. And those places are growing and adding nearby residential capacity that is getting more and more urban.

So let’s recognize that those enormous job/activity centers, that also include Greenspoint, Greenway Plaza, Westchase, perhaps the Energy Corridor, and the Bay Area, are increasingly suns in their own satellite system in this metropolitan universe we call Houston.

Let’s recognize that the innovation that is happening in Sugar Land’s new Town Center, in the Woodlands, in Friendswood begins to offer in these places a range of residential opportunities from single-family large lot to the downtown apartment or condo over the doctor’s office, or on a park, a square, or waterway.

Let’s recognize that in those urban places of all sizes and scales, there will be enormous economic activity and that trade will only be enhanced by finding innovative ways to link those places together so people who want to can move around them without being dependent on using a car.

Let’s recognize that it really is time to stop fighting against the urbanism that is growing all over the region, and recognize that this too is part of Houston’s growth pattern and that this type of product does have advantages over the sub-urban pattern, even while the reverse is also true.

As we spend more time talking about transit, let’s encourage criteria in the legislation that requires transit agencies to demonstrate how transit-oriented development will occur around proposed high-capacity transit stops. Criteria for successful applications should weigh heavily against new high-capacity, high-dollar transit stops that are only parking lots that discourage the possibility of pedestrian orientation or the growth of an urban system.

And let’s recognize that the oft-stated goal of reducing congestion has never been successful in any corridor anywhere in America. It’s become pretty clear over the last 50 years that congestion, once it enters a corridor, cannot be reduced for any significant period of time. We all know it’s a core, free-market concept that when something is free humans will either use it up or fill it up. Indeed, the only example of actually reducing congestion that I’ve been able to find happened recently in the City of London, where a new fee for driving in the City really did reduce demand, and that has produced faster travel times for everyone, drivers, pedestrians, and transit users.

After all, let’s also recognize that the Texas Transportation Institute’s study of congestion from 1982 to 2000 shows that while population increased 40 percent, lane miles increased 80 percent, and travel delay increased twice that much, or 160 percent.

As a conservative and responsible approach to public projects, let’s require consultants who claim their plans will reduce congestion to post a bond that assures that if congestion is not reduced say three years after the project is completed, the consultant will repay the public entity for the cost of the project.

So let’s get rid of the pointless public goal of reducing congestion, and instead let’s pursue public policies to mitigate congestion, to provide relief from congestion, and produce the transportation competition that will give travelers the maximum number of mobility choices, including driving, public transit, or simply walking to the store or the cleaners, or to lunch or dinner or the movies.

In fact, let’s recognize that it is now quite clear that there is a mechanism of induced growth and induced demand that comes from the creation or expansion of major high-capacity roads, or any roads. Indeed, we have said for 50 years that new roads promote growth and economic development, so let’s recognize that we have not only agreed with the dynamic of induced demand, but have consciously used it to produce economic development in the region.

So, if we recognize the truth of induced growth, it then follows that we should add that into the computer modeling used to determine future needs and growth as well as to test for conformity within the Clean Air Act. I believe that induced demand is not today an underlying assumption in that modeling and because it is not, it is always reasonable to call into question the efficacy of modeling results.

Let’s also recognize that those computer models sometimes contain self-fulfilling feedback loops. An example is the work that was done around Segment C of the proposed Grand Parkway, in which the justification for the segment was to serve the large number of new residences forecast – if the road were built. It was argued that those residences would be built whether or not the segment were constructed, but it’s also plain that those houses would not be built in that area of rice fields and wetlands if there were not a historical line on a map that says “Proposed Grand Parkway.”

Let’s recognize that more and more people like myself and other citizens are becoming educated about transportation dynamics and policy. Increasingly they are becoming more sophisticated about the use of Geographic Information Systems and more able to read such documents as Major Investment Studies and understand the language, see the patterns.

So we are seeing more plans that need challenging, and that could have been produced in a way that diminished or eliminated those challenges.

In many other regions around the country, the concept of context-oriented design is now in practice, and one given in that process is to bring in not only professional, certified planners at the beginning, but also representatives from some of the interest and neighborhood groups that are probably going to be shocked and opposed to your plan if you introduce it without their input during the process.

For instance, I hear rumors of something called the “100% solution” that is being developed here. I gather that’s a regional transportation plan that grapples with the huge gap of desire for new capacity that is not addressed in the current Metropolitan Transportation Plan. What is this 100% solution, and who is responsible for it, what citizen groups have been in that loop, and what citizen groups are going to be outraged when they see it?

I also see that the new Metropolitan Transportation Plan that will be brought forward soon expresses the need for more than 7,000 new urban lane miles. This is the equivalent of building a six-lane Interstate from here to Chicago. Yet the region’s federally funded public outreach program that contacted 60,000 people heard from the citizens that they don’t want to see significant new road capacity as a solution to the region’s mobility problems. How will they react to this call for a spectacular new burst of high-capacity road building, particularly when you consider their overwhelming expression of support for much more rail and bus transit and much faster development of it?

So let’s just make the process by which we test the value of new transportation projects much more objective, let’s struggle in public and debate our assumptions and tools to try to arrive at plans that are much more bulletproof than many of them are today.

Let’s recognize that any strategies that sustain economic growth but reduce new demand for roads are at least as useful and efficient as strategies that increase new demand for roads.

Let’s produce all the range of development choices, from the densely urban to the small city-like urban (Uptown, Greenway Plaza) to the small urban city (Bellaire)

Let’s establish new ways to take a holistic, inclusive approach to transportation planning. Let’s make it easier, not harder, for ideas to be offered and explored.

Let’s recognize that transit properly designed and deployed is first a utility for pedestrians. And to recognize that light rail is increasingly being challenged as the solution to all public transportation problems. Light rail obviously has its place, and I think that we’ll see that Main Street is one of those places. But there may not be many more such options, so we should look to Asia and other cities to see how they’re handling the addition of rail to an existing transportation system.

And let’s look at big regions like Los Angeles where a transit authority led by DART’s former head Roger Snoble will deploy about 250 miles of new express bus service in the next 4-1/2 years to give their citizens a convenient, fast transit system now, not just 25 or 50 years from now.

It’s not a large group of people who understand that different transit service options have different applications, that there’s a huge difference between commuter rail and inner-city rail, and that there will be many corridors where Bus Rapid Transit is the most responsible choice, and perhaps others where elevated rail is the right choice. And we may even come to realize that the extensive study Metro did of monorail in the early 90s was right after all in some places.

But we’re going to need a more open process and we’re going to have to be much braver and take some public risks to figure these things out. All of this says we need much more attention to process and our ability to collaborate. The purpose of cities, after all, is exchange, and ideas are the basic currency of exchange.

Finally, let’s recognize that most of the other large metropolitan regions are changing their strategies to provide citizens and visitors real mobility choices. They’re all still building and expanding roads where that’s sensible, but they’re also putting huge new energy into understanding how to develop places that allow people easy access to the amenities of daily life without using a car, and to develop innovative public transit.

When the smoke clears 25 years from now, will Houston be seen as not only a leader in mobility solutions, but also a great place to live where citizens have a fantastic array of lifestyle choices and more than one or two means of gaining access to all the amenities of life.

Thank you.