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Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors (2011)

Chapter: Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors

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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Chapter 2 - The History of Multimodal Corridors." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2011. Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/14579.
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17 As the interstate highway system nears completion, de- mand for transportation services is increasingly outstripping supply. The costs of new construction in already-built corri- dors have been prohibitive. Ripping out established neigh- borhoods to build a new transportation facility has become increasingly objectionable over the years for numerous rea- sons, including environmental, aesthetic, social equity, and economic disruptions.1 Meanwhile, congestion continues to grow and the environmental consequences of automobile travel have steadily eroded public support for new freeway construction. The motivation for developing multimodal corridors originally arose from a simple need: to assemble land for a transit (or freeway) right-of-way at a reasonable cost.1 More recently, multimodal corridors have been seen as offering qualities beyond low-cost construction, with performance benefits over and above those possible from stand-alone freeway or transit facilities. The history of how multimodal corridors have evolved provides insights into the changing perspectives on transit, freeways, and multimodal corridors. Multimodal corridors can serve another function: providing an integrated, multimodal system where each mode complements the other, yielding a total corridor level of service greater than the sum of its parts. Although the history of multimodal corridors offers many techniques and tools that can help achieve cost savings and avoid land acquisition headaches, building an integrated, complementary multimodal system within a travel corridor has remained an elusive goal. The new paradigm we discuss offers tools and techniques for achieving these elusive ends, but it does not throw away the lessons and insights of the old paradigm—the new paradigm builds on the methods and ideas of previous multimodal corridor efforts. To take full advantage of both these methods, it is important to understand the history of multimodal corridors. The Historical Evolution of Multimodal Corridors The complexity of multimodal corridors makes it diffi- cult to realize the goals that originally inspired their plan- ning, design, and implementation. Several early examples of multimodal corridors combined transit and highways. Per- haps the first is New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge—a structure built across the East River in the late nineteenth century— and the Manhattan, Williamsburg and Queensbourough Bridges built in the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, rail transit was incorporated into the Delaware River Bridge between Philadelphia and Camden, and into the San Francisco- Oakland Bay Bridges. The Shaker Heights “rapid” (in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburbs) was built in the wide median of Shaker Boulevard in the early 1920s. On or around 1941 a section of the San Fernando Valley interurban line of the Pacific Electric Railway was relocated into the Hollywood Freeway median near Mulholland Drive in Cahuenga Pass in Los Angeles.1 One common theme motivating all of these early examples was the desire for construction cost savings. This original purpose—to reduce land acquisition and construction costs— may have seemed like a sensible, straightforward idea, but challenges arose almost immediately that made it difficult to realize these cost-reduction benefits. Successfully retrofitting transit facilities into an existing freeway corridor was one of the first and most intractable challenges encountered because of the potential for dislocating businesses and disrupting economic activities. This challenge was evident in the first era of multimodal corridor planning, the Street Railway Era (see Figure 2-1). C H A P T E R 2 The History of Multimodal Corridors 1Krambles, G. “Expressway Rapid Transit,” A paper prepared for the 1971 ASCE-ASME National Transportation Engineering Meeting, Seattle, July 26, 1971.

1890–1950: The Street Railway Era From the earliest days of modern cities, as the industrial revolution was transforming and increasing the size of cities at a rapid pace, transportation planners and engineers gravi- tated toward combining transit and road facilities into street railways—the earliest version of a modern, multimodal cor- ridor facility. By combining fixed-rail transit and urban surface streets into a single facility, social, economic, and political disruptions were minimized and a more efficient use of the existing street right-of-way and its neighboring land uses resulted.1 But street railway systems had their drawbacks, the most serious of which were the conflicts between streetcars and other modes sharing a mixed-flow right-of-way. Before the intro- duction of the automobile, transit vehicles could dominate this environment, setting the pace of flow and demanding priority through a combination of the bulk and speed of their vehicles along with a liberal use of bell-clanging. As the auto- mobile gained in popularity, streetcars began to take second priority in mixed-flow traffic and increasingly had to wait for automobile traffic congestion to clear or caused congestion themselves (see Figure 2-2). As the automobile became the preferred mode of urban travel in U.S. cities, streetcar lines were increasingly abandoned, their tracks torn up, and their rights-of-way turned over completely to the automobile. Some cities, such as Boston and New Orleans, avoided this problem by giving streetcars their own, exclusive rights-of-way in the center median of large streets—which we might call semi-grade separated. This solution gave streetcars an advantage in terms of speed and reliability, removing their operations from the congestion delays and conflicts of automobile traffic. Although this solution might have seemed ideal to transit advocates, the growth of automobile use and the demands placed on the urban street networks proved insatiable, and streetcar rights-of-way were increasingly turned over to automobile traffic. After World War II, metropolitan areas in the United States expanded rapidly, sprawling outward with freeway- and automobile-led development, and access to and from these new suburbs to the traditional urban core areas—the neighbor- hoods that had been developed in a transit-oriented fashion— remained difficult and expensive. Wherever possible, under- utilized transit and freight rail rights-of-way were converted into multimodal facilities, carrying both modes, or converted completely to freeways. Los Angeles’s famed Pacific Electric Railway interurban rapid rail system was torn up and largely replaced with freeways. Many other cities followed suit. In Chicago, however, a hint of things to come could be seen: efforts to make transit and freeways co-exist and thrive in the same rights-of-way, were beginning. 1955–1965: The Chicago Era Ironically, the first truly multimodal corridor—Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway/Blue Line facility—was built not as a 18 Source: Historic photo courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. Figure 2-2. Streetcar-caused congestion on San Francisco’s Market Street circa 1947. Source: Public domain, United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division. Figure 2-1. Traffic and commerce disruptions from street railway lines in Washington, DC.

means to add more transit capacity but to add more freeway capacity. The planned freeway needed roughly 550 feet of right-of-way width, extending the full length of the city from east (at the central business district) to the developing suburbs in the west. Running along this alignment was the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railway, occupying its own 75-foot-wide right-of-way. Instead of wholesale removal of the transit line as had been done in Los Angeles, Chicago acquired additional land around the existing right-of-way and rebuilt the transit line in the median of the new freeway facility. Once completed in 1960, cost studies found that it was substantially less expensive to build rail in a multimodal corridor than the freeway facility—the division of costs was estimated at roughly 80 percent of total costs to freeway and 20 percent to rail. Passenger-loading surveys showed that the number of patrons served during peak hours exceeded those of the freeway.1 It quickly became clear that the Eisenhower/Blue Line offered a new model for providing grade-separated transit service into the heart of an established urban area using existing or proposed freeway rights-of-way. Although this corridor was built as a multimodal facility essentially by adding a freeway to an existing transit line, its success in operational terms was sufficient proof of concept to encourage other areas to consider their own combined freeway and transit line facilities. Chicago quickly followed this success with the Eisenhower corridor in the Kennedy (opening in 1961) and Dan Ryan Expressway (opening in 1962) corridors. Although federal monies for constructing freeways were readily available from the Federal Aid Freeway Act of 1956, the federal government had no such financing program for transit capital projects. As a result, the rail components of these corridors were not built when the expressways opened, and the Chicago Transit Agency temporarily ran buses in the mixed-flow lanes of the Dan Ryan and Kennedy facilities until rail construction funds could be found. In 1964, Congress passed legislation offering funding assistance for transit capital and construction costs. In 1966, Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley, put a bond initiative before the voters to fund the construction costs for the Kennedy and Dan Ryan rail lines. It passed by a 2-to-1 margin, and con- struction began on both projects after approval of the grant assistance from the federal government. The rail component of the Dan Ryan Expressway/Red Line was opened and oper- ational in 1969 and in the Kennedy corridor 4 months later.1 The design of Chicago’s first three multimodal corridors was similar in many respects. However, while the case can be made that the transit facilities in the Eisenhower/Blue Line and Kennedy Expressway/Blue Line corridors were built to compete directly with their adjacent freeways for the same travel market, the Dan Ryan/Red Line corridor was built to give the rail line a competitive advantage in terms of travel speed for one segment of the corridor travel market—the long-haul commute passenger (see Figure 2-3). Station spacing is a primary determinant of rail transit speeds—the fewer the number of stations, the faster the train can travel to its CBD destination. Similarly (though with less certainty) freeway interchanges play a role in determining automobile speeds because vehicles entering and exiting the freeway cause dis- ruptions in traffic flows that can cause congestion and reduced speeds. Thus, the fewer the number of interchanges, the higher the average freeway travel speeds. A simple comparison of the median spacings between inter- changes and stations along each of Chicago’s three multi- modal corridors suggests planners took a different approach with the Dan Ryan Expressway/Red Line. Although the median station spacings are roughly equal to the median interchange spacings for the Kennedy and Eisenhower corridors, the median station spacings are almost double the median inter- change spacings in the Dan Ryan corridor. This suggests that the Dan Ryan’s planners wanted to give the rail line a com- petitive travel time advantage over its adjacent freeway. In this respect, the Dan Ryan line represented a shift in multimodal corridor design towards a model more similar to a commuter rail line—offering less access to neighborhoods along the spine of its corridor and emphasizing speed for long-distance commuters. This approach was enthusiastically adopted by the next wave of multimodal corridors designed for the BART system in the San Francisco Bay Area. 1965–1980: The Park-and-Ride Access Era Taking cues from the successes in Chicago, the San Francisco region designed its heavy/rapid rail system to take advantage of available freeway rights-of-way wherever possible. Unlike Chicago’s expressways, which were often planned and built in tandem with their rapid rail components, San Francisco’s Bay 19 Source: Photo courtesy of Van den Bossche Peter. Figure 2-3. Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway/Red Line.

Area Rapid Transit (BART) system was planned, designed, and built as an afterthought to the freeway network. BART’s planners knew their system would often be at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the freeway system in terms of travel times, speed, the surrounding land configurations, and public perception. BART’s planners decided to try to give the system’s trains a fighting chance against the freeways wherever possible. By planning multimodal corridors—where the new trains would run in the medians or directly adjacent to a freeway—BART planners designed the system to function more like a high- capacity commuter rail train than a heavy rail system. Station spacings that are much wider than in Chicago’s Dan Ryan corridor are the most obvious result of this decision, giving BART trains on the Concord Line (now known as the Pittsburg/ Bay Point Line) corridor very high average speeds. Similarly, large, commuter-rail-style park-and-ride lots surround most suburban stations on the BART system (see Figure 2-4). BART’s suburban stations often were placed directly adjacent to freeway interchange ramps, minimizing the difficulties of intermodal transfers from freeway to BART by drivers. Park-and-ride access station designs also encouraged and perpetuated the automobile-orientation of their surrounding corridor land uses. Long station spacings mean fewer stations within the corridor, which reduced the opportunities for BART to influence surrounding land uses and the travel pat- terns of corridor residents. Park-and-ride lots surrounding stations took up valuable land for car access that could have been used for transit-oriented developments. Placing BART stations close to freeway interchange ramps cemented the automobile-orientation of the areas surrounding stations, with high automobile traffic volumes from the freeway making the street environment decidedly unfriendly for pedestrians and bicycles. Public perception of transit as an old and slow technology was addressed as well. BART intentionally designed its trains with a sleek, futuristic appearance,2 even at the expense of operational convenience and performance. A noticeable example of this public perception-driven design emphasis is the sloped front of the train design. BART’s engineers inten- tionally designed the front and end cars to project a futuristic image; this over protests from within BART itself that the design was impractical from an operations standpoint since it would not allow front and end cars to be placed between cars in a connected train, as other heavy rail systems can. The BART system focused on luring freeway drivers out of their cars and on to trains, by making transit attractive in terms of comparative travel times to downtown San Francisco and Oakland, by offering ease of transfer between freeways and BART, and through a futuristic design aesthetic. Although this automobile-access priority for suburban stations is sensible from the perspective of planners trying to address the competitive advantage of nearby freeways, it also limited the long-term influence of the system on corridor land use development patterns. BART was one of the first post-World War II heavy rail sys- tem built in the United States and became a model for systems to come. BART’s design priorities were adopted by planners in other cities for their multimodal corridors. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and Metro- politan Atlanta Regional Transit Authority (MARTA) systems designed similar lines in freeway corridors with large station spacings and park-and-ride-oriented station access designs. 1980–Today: The Low(er)-Cost Era Although there were cost savings to be had by sharing rail and freeway rights-of-way, most multimodal corridors planned and built since Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway/Blue Line were expensive heavy rail systems. In Chicago, the pre-existing heavy rail system made this mode the obvious choice. In San Fran- cisco, BART planners hoped to halt and even reverse the ever- growing dominance of the automobile and its freeway system as the preferred mode of regional travel and the driving force behind suburban sprawl. Heavy rail’s high passenger capacities, fast operating speeds, and image made it the transit mode of choice for large and prosperous cities. But costs of $100 million per mile or more for heavy rail construction caused many cities 20 Source: GoogleEarth. Figure 2-4. BART’s Lafayette Station in the median of State Route 24. 2Webber, M., The BART Experience—What Have We Learned?, October 1976, No. 26, Institute of Urban and Regional Development and the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

considering new transit lines to balk, despite any cost savings that might be had from colocating them with freeways. Seeking lower cost solutions, many cities developed multi- modal corridors in the 1980s, 1990s, and into the new millen- nium using less expensive transit modes. The model for this trend was the El Monte Busway in Los Angeles. Hailed as a success virtually from its opening, the busway originally con- sisted of a single, exclusive, reversible bus lane along the I-10 (San Bernardino) Freeway corridor—somewhat ironically, a freeway that occupies the former Pacific Electric Interurban Rail right-of-way between El Monte and downtown Los Angeles. The busway has one-way bus lanes built in the median strip or alongside the freeway, which are separated from the general- purpose traffic lanes by concrete barriers or a buffer lane with traffic posts. Downtown distribution is provided by city streets. These attributes dramatically cut costs of construction and operations compared to its heavy rail predecessors. Buses are substantially cheaper to purchase, maintain, and operate than rail cars. A single, reversible lane needs much less right-of-way to operate than double- or triple-tracked heavy rail rights-of- way. Using city streets to distribute buses instead of acquiring dedicated rights-of-way means substantially lower land acqui- sition costs and fewer disruptions of established land uses. Unfortunately, these cost-cutting measures also reduce the capacity and performance of the corridor’s transit component. A single-direction, reversible lane means the line is only serving peak-period commuters in the corridor. Buses may be cheaper than rail, but they carry fewer passengers and can cost more per rider compared to a high-ridership rail line. Although using city streets to distribute buses at the destination end of a corridor substantially reduces right-of-way costs and enables more flexible and direct routing opportunities, buses must fight downtown traffic and are subject to delays and unreliability. Despite these challenges (and the subsequent opening of the exclusive bus lane to carpools), the El Monte Busway garnered upwards of 25,000 daily bus riders in the 1980s, elevating it to a preeminent status as the “granddaddy”3 of U.S. bus rapid transit systems. It has been held up as a model for the potential of low-cost multimodal corridor transit systems. Other cities took their cues from the El Monte, seeking to drive down the costs of transit in freeway corridors while maintaining service and performance as much as possible— for both the freeway and the transit components. Houston was next, with a BRT demonstration project that opened in 1979 on the I-94 freeway north of downtown. Houston picked up where Los Angeles left off, finding even more inventive ways to effectively cuts costs and woo skeptical voters to support a transit project. Although this proposal planned to take away a freeway lane of travel, the contraflow lane was created by taking the inside lane from the off-peak direction of travel. By taking away a lane during the peak period from the excess capacity in the nonpeak direction, the demonstration project avoided public outcry and resistance. So while this project only attracted about 6,400 bus riders, the low cost of implementa- tion plus the introduction of a carpool lane to this congested freeway corridor were enough of a success that Houston went on to plan, build, and operate a total of six high-occupancy vehicle (HOV)/BRT lines on its region’s freeways. San Jose was next, and as in Chicago’s Eisenhower corridor, this Silicon Valley hub decided to build its light rail line at the same time that they built the adjacent freeway. San Jose was quickly followed by Denver’s Central/I-25 Corridor in 1994; Los Angeles’ light rail Green Line/Century Freeway Corridor in 1995 and Harbor Transitway BRT line in 1996; BART’s Dublin Heavy Rail line in San Francisco’s east bay suburbs in 1997; Portland’s MAX Airport/I-84 Red Line extension in 2001; Los Angeles’ Gold LRT Line in the I-210 corridor in 2003; and Denver’s LRT T-REX extension in 2006. Of these 10 multimodal corridors built since 1980, all but one (BART’s Dublin Line extension) used either some variant of bus rapid transit or light rail for the transit component. A Brief History of Multimodal Project Funding Funding multimodal projects in the United States has always been a challenge. Since World War II, transit systems have suffered both from declining ridership and insecure financing, while highways and the automobile have become the primary means of surface transportation and have benefited from steady and relatively generous funding. This modal imbalance has made it difficult to plan, design, and build balanced, multi- modal systems. Meanwhile, changing social attitudes toward these two modes have brought political and institutional changes to multimodal project funding as well. In response to these economic, political, and institutional changes, approaches to planning, designing, and building multimodal corridors have changed over time as well. The Federal Aid Highway Act and Transit’s Increasing Government Dependence While the automobile had become the favored mode of surface transportation in the United States prior to World War II, this dominant position was cemented by the pas- sage of the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956. This legisla- tion set the blueprint for building and operating the nation’s interstate highway system. Its success was due in no small part 21 3Trombley, W., “El Monte Busway Is Rousing but Solitary Success in L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1985, http://articles.latimes.com/1985-09-26/ news/mn-1357_1_el-monte

to a dependable revenue stream based largely on user fees col- lected through gasoline taxes and tolls. With this act, the fed- eral government created a strong institutional link between themselves, the states, and the voters. Despite the fact that the interstate system was and still is subsidized by taxpayer re- ceipts (currently roughly 30 percent),4 the general perception has been that it is self-supported by user fees. This funding stream and the projects it built became increasingly impor- tant, bringing economic development and political benefits to all levels of government. Meanwhile, transit systems around the country, many of which had been privately owned and operated, suffered from declining ridership, revenues, and physical infrastructure. To maintain viable multimodal alternatives in their communities, many local governments acquired their local transit systems and subsidized their operations. Unfortunately, the strong and effective use of user fees to fund large portions of the interstate system has not been a successful model for transit funding due to declining ridership and farebox revenues. As a result, multimodal projects in the United States were decidedly highway-focused throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The multimodal corridor projects built during this period, largely in Chicago (see description above), were typically free- way construction or widening projects, with transit included either because it was already there (as in the case of the Eisen- hower Blue Line) or as a freeway congestion reliever service. Reaching for Parity: Freeway Revolts and the Urban Mass Transit Administration Almost at the same time as the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, freeway construction projects began to encounter local resistance. Starting in the mid-1950s in San Francisco, local residents turned activists began to oppose freeways planned to cut through existing urban neighborhoods. Often, public transit was seen as a viable and necessary alter- native to urban freeway projects and antifreeway activists often found themselves in political alliances with protransit advo- cates and their allies in government. This local resistance to specific freeway projects also found friendly support from the nascent environmental movement, which increasingly saw freeways and the automobile as prime culprits in threatening the environment. So-called “freeway revolts” spread across the country and put pressure on the federal government to narrow the funding gap between highways and transit. At the same time, concerns in urban municipal governments about the deterioration of their transit systems and their inability to find reliable funding sources for transit projects found a sympathetic ear in the Democratic administration of John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1964, the Johnson administration championed the forma- tion of a federal transit aid program, at that time under the administrator of the Housing and Home Financing Agency. In 1968, Congress transferred the transit program to the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) and created the Urban Mass Transit Administration (UMTA).5 These programs and new institutions were intended to help bring funding and political parity for transit with freeways. But in the case of Chicago’s Kennedy/Blue Line and Dan Ryan/ Red Line corridor projects, these developments were almost too late. For the first time, federal assistance for transit capital expenditures was available, but the freeways for these corridors had already been funded, built, and opened before the transit components had begun construction. Local voters had been asked to pay for these transit improvements, but it was not until 1966 that they approved a bond measure based on the promise of UMTA funds to follow.1 The delay in transit funding for these projects effectively solidified their freeway components as the top priority for their respective corridors. Before the transit lines could be com- pleted, the freeways had a head start in attracting patronage and influencing corridor land uses. Nevertheless, the multimodal corridor projects that followed were more balanced in their designs and funding between freeway and transit components. Attracting Scarce Federal Funds through Marquee Transit Projects Even after the establishment of UMTA and a dedicated transit capital funding source, multimodal corridor projects faced a severe disadvantage vis-à-vis freeways. Until 1983, the federal government funded UMTA using general revenues— as opposed to Highway Trust Fund (HTF) monies. Transit had no dedicated federal funding source. To help rectify this imbalance, Congress passed the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 (STAA) that created the Mass Transit Account (MTA) and funded it using a portion of revenues from the federal motor fuel tax for public transportation uses. STAA also increased the federal gas tax from 4 cents per gallon to 9 cents per gallon and specified that 1 cent of the 5 cents per gallon increase (20 percent) would fund the newly created MTA. Since then, for each increase in the federal gas tax, 20 percent has been deposited in the MTA.6 22 4“Highway Statistics 2007, Funding For Highways and Disposition of Highway- User Revenues, All Units of Government, 2007.” http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy information/statistics/2007/hf10.cfm. Retrieved 2009-06-19. 5APTA, “APTA Primer on Transit Funding,” August 2009, http://www.apta.com/ gap/policyresearch/Documents/Primer_SAFETEA_LU_August_2009_Update.pdf 6APTA, “APTA Recommendations on Federal Public Transportation Autho- rizing Law,” Adopted October 5, 2008, Revised November 1, 2009, http:// www.apta.com/gap/legissues/authorization/Documents/apta_authorization_ recommendations.pdf

Despite these improvements in funding parity, transit remained a second-tier priority in most multimodal planning efforts, particularly prior to the passage of STAA. To overcome these hurdles, transit projects needed to take the center stage. San Francisco’s BART system was the first heavy rail transit system built in the United States in the post-World War II era, much of it within already built or planned freeway corridors. With backing from a Department of Defense-led study that recommended a rapid rail system for the Bay Area and strong local political support, its initial system was planned, designed, and built using no federal funds. However, its high-profile status as the forerunner of a new generation of heavy rail transit systems helped win federal funding for future exten- sions. Therefore, and somewhat ironically, the sheer scale and expense of this heavy rail investment may have helped elevate its profile and have given it an edge in winning federal funding support. Soon after, WMATA and MARTA won federal funding support for constructing BART-like heavy rail systems, again, often within existing freeway corridors. Multimodal corridor alignments took on new importance during this period, where the efficiencies of lower costs of right-of-way acquisition and construction could be a useful selling point to UMTA and Congress. Multimodal corridor alignments also represented the realization of political compromises between highway and transit interests. WMATA was funded and built explicitly as a compromise between these factions, who often fought vigorously, corridor by corridor, for whether a freeway or a heavy rail transit line would be built. Approaching Parity: Flexible Funding and the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act One of the most important changes in the transportation legislative landscape was the Intermodal Surface Transporta- tion Efficiency Act (ISTEA), signed into law in 1991. Prior to ISTEA’s passage, multimodal corridor projects were difficult to undertake successfully. ISTEA provided the incentives and the impetus for agencies to undertake multimodal cor- ridor projects. The ISTEA legislation brought a number of key innovations into practice, including policies specifically directed at breaking down the barriers that have impeded multimodal projects. Among these were • Flexible funding of transportation projects, providing new funds that Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) can use to fund various projects: highways, streets, transit, pedestrian, bicycle, and others • A direct link between transportation and environmen- tal planning, specifically giving transportation planners the responsibility to meet air quality mandates (reinforc- ing earlier highway and air quality legislation making such calls) • The elevation of MPOs to a prominent role in urban trans- portation planning, decision-making, and financing • A mandate that state DOTs adopt an intermodal approach to transportation planning7 • A mandated link between transportation and land use planning Whereas the federal government had traditionally provided highway funds directly to state departments of transportation (DOTs), ISTEA elevated the status of metropolitan trans- portation organizations (MPOs), essentially bypassing the states and putting substantial highway funds directly into local hands. At the same time, federal mode-specific funding requirements were loosened, allowing MPOs to use these funds more flexibly. As a result, highway funds need not be used for building or maintaining highways, but can be used for transit and nonmotorized projects. This shift in the transportation finance landscape has elevated the profile and viability of multimodal corridor projects. The name ISTEA begins with the word “intermodal,” indicating its authors’ interest in encouraging multimodal projects. During this period, multimodal corridor projects have been growing in number and changing in design and approach. Increasingly, project sponsors sought lower costs through light rail (Portland’s Blue and Red Line MAX, San Jose’s Guadalupe line, and Los Angeles’s Green Line) and bus rapid transit (such as Los Angeles’ El Monte and Harbor BRT projects and Houston’s BRT network) while the marquee and expensive heavy rail projects became more of a rarity. This low-cost priority can appear somewhat ironic, since it came during the same period that local interests gained more control over federal funding, which would suggest that cost would be less of a concern. However, the requirements for federal funding—as specified in the “Full Funding Grant Agreement” which places the risk of cost overruns squarely on the local sponsor—have also given them a new perspective on the risks of expensive megaprojects, fulfilling the promise of ISTEA’s other implicit priority, efficiency. Current Financial and Process Barriers to Multimodal Projects Financial barriers to multimodal corridor development arise because there are separate regulations for funding highway and transit projects. First, any multimodal project that includes 23 7Goetz, A. R., et al., “Assessing Intermodal Transportation Planning at State Departments of Transportation,” World Review of Intermodal Transportation Research 2007; Vol. 1, No.2 pp. 119–145.

significant capital investment in both highway and transit infrastructure must navigate two distinct regulatory processes, increasing the administrative burden on multimodal corridor planners. Second, although there is some flexibility in using highway funds to fund transit planning and vice versa, and some highway trust fund programs have an explicit transit focus, taking advantage of this flexibility requires considerable time and expertise and risks a loss of transparency. Third, aspects of the review process affect transit and highway projects differently; these may tend to stall transit project funding, risk- ing that the highway project may proceed on a more advanced track, which is in itself potentially detrimental. Added to this are considerations that take effect at the state and local level. States tend to delegate transit planning to the local and regional level and, because capital investments in transit are fewer and farther between, the base of experience in working through the federal process is potentially thinner. Nevertheless, thus far, requests for New Starts funds have outstripped supply, and while FTA is authorized to fund up to 80 percent of the capital costs of a transit project, most projects receive less than half. This is compared to the HTF, which has traditionally provided 90 percent of construction costs for the interstate system.8 Coordinating a transit funding process and a highway funding process places a premium on flexible funding, but because the flexible sources of funding are more limited, this poses a constraint on the magnitude of any request that depends on flexible funding. The precise limitations on flexible use of funds are another constraint. Figure 2-5 illustrates the sources and patterns of available funding. Historically, differences in the review process for New Starts transit projects compared to highway projects have led to un- favorable comparisons between the two, which undermine a multimodal approach. The lower ridership base for transit has rendered aggregate time savings a less substantial factor in the benefit calculations as compared to highways, but the externalities related to highway travel, such as congestion and air quality effects, are not counted as costs for highway projects. In addition to these considerations, a long-term downward trend in the highway trust fund has been noted over most of the last decade. This is exacerbated by a decline in the real value of the gas tax over time because of inflation and threats to the absolute revenue generated as the vehicle fleet achieves higher fuel economy. At the state and local level, trends in finance pose some constraints as well. The hypothecation (or fixed-purpose designation) of funds raised through bond measures and sales taxes undermines flexibility. Many of these taxation powers are invested with municipal and county governments, often bypassing MPOs altogether, even though MPOs are charged under federal legislation with the primary planning responsibility.9 Somewhat ironically, the Clean Air Act is a financial bar- rier to building transit in new paradigm corridors. Areas in nonattainment (those regions that exceed federal air quality standards) are denied federal transportation funds, including transit capital projects funding unless it is possible to demon- strate no increase in emissions. Although withholding highway funds from nonattainment areas makes sense because highway expansions would be counterproductive to efforts to reach attainment, withholding funds dedicated to building air qual- ity enhancing projects like transit, and specifically Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program funds, prevents transit and new paradigm multimodal projects in general from offering potential solutions. Conclusions: History as Context— History in Context The history of multimodal corridor planning and financing is instructive in two respects: as a lens to understand the accom- plishments and shortcomings of the old paradigm multimodal corridors and as a guide to understanding the potential for the new paradigm. The history of multimodal corridor planning has been driven by the desire to add multimodal capacity (typ- ically high-capacity transit) to urban travel corridors that can effectively compete with freeways in terms of speed and cost. 24 Title 23 Highways Title 49 Transit Multimodal Capital Grants Multimodal Metropolitan Planning Other Flexible Programs Public Transportation Management Non Motorized Access Projects National Highway System Corridors Air Quality Benefiting Project Up to 50% of Grant Indire ct Aid Figure 2-5. Flexible federal transportation funding. 8Gifford, J., “The Exceptional Interstate Highway System: Will a Compelling New Vision Emerge?,” TR News, May-June 2006, 244, p. 10. 9Goldman, T., and M. Wachs, “A Quiet Revolution in Transportation Finance: The Rise of Local Option Transportation Tax” Transportation Quarterly, 2003

This old paradigm approach has been problematic in terms of its implementation and its outcomes. Funding for transit and multimodal projects in general has been difficult to acquire. The plethora of stakeholders and partners involved in multi- modal projects must be coordinated to act in concert. Difficul- ties in coordination were magnified by the mode-specific plan- ning and financing institutional structures in the United States that became more balanced and collaborative only with the passage and implementation of ISTEA and its successors. These improvements in multimodal financing and insti- tutional collaboration have set the stage for a reassessment of multimodal corridor planning ideas, priorities, and techniques—a new paradigm. The new paradigm is intended to take full advantage of these multimodal shifts in planning and financing and seeks to redefine the priorities of these fa- cilities from a focus on direct competition between modes, to a focus on providing segregated travel markets tailored to the natural advantages of each mode of travel in a corridor. The new paradigm also incorporates and offers a new set of tools and perspectives that can help achieve USDOT’s strategic em- phasis on livability initiatives. These initiatives include • Better integration of transportation and land use planning • Fostering of multimodal transportation systems and effec- tive multimodal connections • Provision of more transportation options to improve access to housing, jobs, businesses, services, and social activities • Increased public participation and enhanced coordination of transportation and housing and healthy communities • Reduced emissions 25

Next: Chapter 3 - Existing Multimodal Corridors What Can We Learn From Them? »
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TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 145: Reinventing the Urban Interstate: A New Paradigm for Multimodal Corridors presents strategies for planning, designing, building, and operating multimodal corridors—freeways and high-capacity transit lines running parallel in the same travel corridors.

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