Recently, the U.S. DOT released its Strategic Plan for 2010 through 2015 to the public. The Executive Summary describes the plan as the following:
President Barack Obama supports a transformative U.S. transportation policy that improves public health and safety, fosters livable communities, ensures that transportation assets are maintained in a state of good repair, supports the Nation’s long-term economic competiveness, and works to achieve environmental sustainability.
Which is an excellent sentiment, and certainly a good goal. But there’s one blaring question: What exactly does “livable communities” mean?[SButtonZ button="digg"]
Always ready to shed light on vague transportation language, Secretary Ray LaHood came forward to clarify the term as follows: “Livability,” he said, “means being able to take your kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, drop by the grocery or post office, go out to dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in a park, all without having to get in your car.”
So what we’re talking about here is car-less (or “extreme car-light”) living in dense urban neighborhoods. Which, given the gradual movement towards urban environments, isn’t a pipe dream. But it does present a pretty drastic change to millions of Americans who have come to associate “freedom” and a high quality of life with suburban communities, cul-de-sacs, and above all, cars. As for how the administration plans to achieve this urban-based vision of “livability,” the Plan states the DOT will:
• Establish an office within the Office of the Secretary to promote coordination of livability and sustainability in Federal infrastructure policy;
• Give communities the tools and technical assistance they need so that they can develop the capacity to assess their transportation systems, plan for needed improvements, and integrate transportation and other community needs;
• Work through the Partnership for Sustainable Communities to develop broad, universal performance measures that can be used to track livability across the Nation as well as performance measures that capture local circumstances; and
• Advocate for more robust State and local planning efforts, create incentives for investments that demonstrate the greatest enhancement of community livability based on performance measures, and focus transportation spending in a way that supports and capitalizes on other infrastructure investment, both public and private.
All of which seems like a fancy way of saying, “We need more public transportation, but we’re not entirely sure how to build it.”
The sentiment is certainly valuable, but the government’s major failing is that it presumes a power it doesn’t have. As Ken Orski put it in his Innovation Newsbrief:
The power to shape local communities (and thus enhance their livability) resides not in the hands of federal agencies but those of local citizens and their elected officials. As the noted urban commentator Joel Kotkin observed, there are more than 65,000 general-purpose governments, many of them small enough to allow citizens to have a direct say in their governance. To assume that the federal government, despite the growing concentration of power in Washington, could persuade people across this vast land to abandon their preference for suburban amenities and the convenience of personal transportation and accept the “livability” norms as defined by federal officials, is a notion that even the most dedicated progressives of our acquaintance find unrealistic.
Does this mean that the feds should abandon all hope of influencing national transportation policy and leave it entirely up to local and state governments? Not at all. But it might help the government’s cause if it focused equal time and energy on finding workable alternatives for those not living or planning to live in a dense urban community. For instance, how about starting by pushing through some higher mile-per-gallon minimums in the auto industry? Or advancing policies that are pro-electric car?
C’mon Melissa, don’t buy cranky old Ken Orski’s one-sided “innovation” brief as the last word on the subject. You’re far better than that. In his world, the transportation community begins and ends with people who lay asphalt and concrete for a living, so perhaps a more detailed examination is in order.
(Let’s just bypass the entire issue of whether or not people are living in and ‘preferring’ deconcentrated suburban places because a massive set of incentives and heavy handed government interference for 50 years made it the most obvious option.)
Taking Lahood’s one-sentence description of a very complicated issue and therefore equating driving less or not driving with only dense urban environments isn’t accurate at all and lazy from Orski at best. Plenty of small towns and rural areas are designed explicitly to make walking safe and attractive, as well as REDUCING the amount people have to drive by virtue of the ample connections that a town street grid provides — as well as the fact that most small cities and towns are concentrated around a town center or square. They may be rural, but they are ‘urbanized.’
Rail transit or even buses aren’t feasible in large scales in every community, nor are they appropriate. That’s not what livability means and those kinds of projects wouldn’t be the only things eligible under the DOT strategic plan.
The livability that Lahood is so vocal about pushing for is something that community leaders from the state all the way down to the county level are interested in getting funding to work on, but they find their options limited by the fact that the state highway department gets all of that federal transport money. If you’re a small town mayor, maybe you just have to suck it up while the state comes in with their no-strings federal highway dollars and widens the state highway that goes through your little downtown to 8 lanes, no matter that you want to reinvest in your core, increase connections in the grid and coordinate where things get built with where people live.
Livability isn’t about being carless or taking the train — it’s about having crumbling roads and bridges that aren’t neglected while an unnecessary bypass gets built around the county, or by having money to better coordinate land use planning with transportation plans so that a community can sustain the kind of enjoyable place to live that drew people there in the first place.
It’s also worth noting that this livability initiative isn’t some secret agenda cooked up in a backroom in DC — this is the product of bottom-up support from people across the country who want an approach to transportation that is more flexible than the automatic answer of building more, wider new highways as the old ones crumble.
The feds aren’t mandating, they’re responding.
Good post from Gary at PPS about this very topic this week in Blueprint America: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintamerica/blogs/the-dig-op-ed-how-can-transportation-support-rural-livability/1021/
Regarding this (paraphrased) quote: “Livability presents a change to millions who associate a high quality of life with suburban communities.”
I wonder if we confuse standard of living (big house, luxury car) with high quality of life (free time, short commute). Which one is more valuable?
While I agree with LaHood’s goals, I really dislike the phrase “livability.” What the hell does it even mean, really? The act of being alive? Most people in the suburbs are alive, too, last time I checked.
Why don’t we just call a spade a spade and say that we want to, if not encourage people to drive less, then build communities in which driving is not always a necessity? That’s quite a worthy goal and a much more accurate description of what the report goes for than the wishy-washy buzzword of “livability.”
Higher MPG minimums are all well and good, but they can only do so much to reduce the amount of energy we consume. The inescapable fact is that it takes a certain amount of energy to move two tons twenty miles, and raising fuel efficiency by 10 percent really isn’t going to do jack — not compared with moving one-tenth of that mass only three-fourths of a mile. Redensification is the only sensible way out of our energy bind.
Math fail. For “one-tenth,” read “one-twentieth.”
The most efficient way for the feds to support livability is not issue federal money without congestion pricing strings attached to the any new project moving forward. When people pay the true price of their transportation they will naturally gravitate to the most efficient and economical forms available.
It seems that LaHood is talking up new urbanism. New urbanist subdivisions are built to be fairly walkable and mixed-use, so that people can do light retail and social activities on foot, but drive to destinations further away.
There is a difference between controlling what happens and encouraging it. Yes the federal government can’t control how city governments and regions decided to develop but they certainly can decided not to fund projects that encourage the wrong things.
Strangely enough, Ray LaHood may have been Obama’s best cabinet appointment.
We are entering dangerous terrain in the transportation world, now that we all firmly acknowledge that both our infrastructure is crumbling as well as the financing to support it. Even AASHTO and Congress acknowledge that we need a new vision for the 21st. See http://www.transportation.org/news/91.aspx
For once, an Administration is trying to exert some leadership to move the transportation juggernaut out of the 1960s and into the 21st Century. Admittedly, as spectacular as the Administration has been at standing at podiums and broadcasting bold words, they have been equally unspectacular as truly articulating that their intent. They do not to seek to impose urbanism on all of America, and do not want to force them all out of their cars. In not doing so, they have jutted out their chins, painted a bulls eye on it, and said: “pummel me please”. And pummel them we are doing.
As I watch this growing anti Livability food fight, it is particularly interesting to note that none of the columnists have an alternative to offer. The public has lost faith in and won’t fund transportation. Congestion indicators today are four times worse than they were in the 1970s; our approach which worked so well in the 50s and 60s has led to unintended development pattern consequences that is destroying rural areas and driving housing/mobility costs through the roof; inducing development infrastructure costs and therefore private homeownership costs to go through the roof; become recognized as a major contributor to troubling declines in public health; and oh yeah, is also contributing to the gradual deterioration of the climate (apologies to those who still want to cling to the myth that this is a natural swing in climate). In short, the transportation policies and investment patterns that I worked so hard to foster while at a state DOT for 34 years, are in a shambles. America’s future truly depends on us getting this right, and all these revered columnists can do is further destroy any faith we have in the ability of government to solve this problem. Kudos to those columnists and those at AASHTO who have resorted to rhetoric and obscenely twisting the Administration’s words to inflame opposition. This is slander politics at its worst and is a major reason why we are in this mess in the first place.
What is needed today is the politics of inclusion. I challenge AASHTO and those with a typewriter and a blog to start telling us what their answers are. Help us start building coalitions to get this done. Show us the light, we are desparate for clarity.
Like it or not, the Obama Administation is the only administration we have for the next 2 1/2 years, and we can’t afford to waste that time dancing around a fire and putting war paint on. We will only fix this if we all line up and push the wagon in the same direction. And if you are not sure whether they are pushing the wagon in the right direction, well, here is an idea: why don’t you go talk to them and find out what they mean when they say Livability. Last year, after listening for weeks to folks from AASHTO decry what a bunch of whackos the Reform movement were, I compared the T4America Platform with AASHTO’s position on reauthorization and found that 90 per cent of it aligned! Imagine that. Why has distracting the public from the real issues by inflaming them with inaccurate diatribes about socialism, removal of personal freedom and the destruction of the American way become so popular? If we take the time to stop the rhetoric and the negative politics, we might actually be able to start addressing the problem.
I truly believe our future depends on it.