Smart Growth and Transportation: Issues and Lessons Learned (2005)

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Where How Do Smart Growth Transportation Systems and Institutional Arrangements Vary with Location? 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 89

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9 1 Introduction Tom Downs, National Center for Smart Growth Education and Research, University of Maryland The program this morning continues with the“where” of smart growth. How have transporta-tion agencies in very different regions of the coun- try responded to smart growth initiatives? This session will explore the questions from four perspectives. The first panelist is Neil Pedersen on how Maryland’s transportation program has changed in response to smart growth. Neil is the Deputy Administrator for Planning and Engineering at the Maryland Department of Transportation’s (MDOT’s) State Highway Administration. He oversees planning and preliminary engineering, environmental design, bridge development, highway development, and real estate. He has been in his current position since August 2000. Before that, he was Director of the Office of Planning and Preliminary Engineering. A native of Massachusetts, Neil holds an undergraduate degree from Bucknell University and a master’s in civil engi- neering from Northwestern, and he is a registered Professional Engineer. Second is Jacob Snow. Jacob is talking about gam- bling on the metropolitan transportation process to fos- ter smart growth in Las Vegas. Jacob is a rarity these days: a native of Nevada. He was born and raised in Boulder City. He has a B.S. in geography from Brigham Young. His postgraduate study is in planning, finance, and accounting. He has held his current position, General Manager of the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, since July 1999. Before that, he was with the Clarke County Department of Aviation, where he was the Assistant Director of Aviation, and before that, with the city of Provo, where he was a community planner. Next is Bob Grow, whose presentation is titled “Whose Future Is It, Anyway?” Bob is a native of Utah and holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Utah. He has a law degree from Brigham Young. He is an experienced private-sector person who worked on the restructuring of United States Steel. He served as a Director of the National Association of Manufacturers. He was selected in 1994 as Utah’s Entrepreneur of the Year. More impor- tant for this presentation, he served as Chair of the Coalition for Utah’s Future from 1995 to 1999 and as Chair of Envision Utah, a Utah public–private part- nership for quality growth seeking to develop a long- term growth strategy for the Geater Wasatch Area, from 1997 to 1999. He is the Founding Chair Emeritus of Envision Utah, and a number of people consider that one of the finest state planning efforts in several decades. We have Tom Kloster, who is from Portland, Oregon. Tom’s presentation is on the role of federal programs in Metro’s 2040 plan for the Portland region. Tom manages Metro’s regional transportation planning programs and oversees the update of the 20-year 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 91

regional transportation plan and the 5-year transporta- tion improvement program for Portland’s metro region. Metro is an elected regional government that actually has a significant amount of control over land use and capital investment. Tom has been with Metro since 1993 and has worked previously in land use in the Portland area. He is a Portland native. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geoscience at Oregon State and a master’s degree in urban planning at Portland State. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and the American Planning Association. 9 2 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 92

9 3 Smart Transportation in Maryland Neil Pedersen, Maryland State Highway Administration Iwould like to spend some time this morning follow-ing up on a number of the remarks that GovernorGlendening made yesterday. I will talk about how the broad vision and policies translate into specific programs that we have implemented at MDOT to ensure that the transportation program supports the visions that Governor Glendening talked about. I’m going to give you an overview of the smart growth program in Maryland to set the context, discuss our pol- icy approach to what we call “smart transportation,” explain how Maryland’s transportation investments have changed since the smart growth program was first imple- mented in 1997, talk specifically about some of our smart growth–related transportation programs, and then very briefly touch on changes in transportation projects to make them compatible with smart growth. Four major goals have been established for Maryland’s smart growth program. They are to support and enhance existing communities, support local busi- ness, preserve agricultural and natural resource areas, and save taxpayers costly infrastructure investments. Transportation can serve an important role in support- ing each of those four goals. As we talk particularly about the programs that we have developed, you will see how they support each of those goals. Governor Glendening made reference to the fact that he introduced, and the legislature passed, smart growth legislation in 1997. It is actually contained in the anno- tated code of Maryland. Much of what I will talk about is in the context of those statutory requirements. We probably could have implemented some of it without the statutory support. But having that policy support from both the governor and the legislature was important in being able to accomplish what we have. One of the major programs established in that statute was the rural legacy program. The intent of that program is to preserve farmland, natural resource areas, greenbelts, battlefields, and coastal bays. I think you will see how we can provide both programs and money to support the rural legacy program, particularly through the enhancement program and through what we call our access control program. The second major program area is the voluntary cleanup and brownfields program. The intent of this is to encourage cleanup and redevelopment. The center- piece of our smart growth program, the Neighborhood Conservation Program, is intended to reinforce this ele- ment of the overall smart growth program in our older areas. We have our “live near your work” program. This is an incentive program where employees who move to within 3 miles of their workplace can receive credits up to $3,000. This provides an incentive for people to give up the long commutes that sprawl tends to induce. The centerpiece of the smart growth legislation and probably the element that affects us most at MDOT is the priority funding areas. You heard Governor Glendening talk about this as the technical term for des- ignating what are known as “smart growth areas.” Generally, they are areas that meet certain density requirements; areas that have water and sewer service; areas that are already developed; and planned areas in county plans, designated by the counties, that meet cer- tain density requirements. Unlike some of the other 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 93

northeastern states, much of Maryland is unincorpo- rated. We have a number of small municipalities, which tend to be some of our older, developed areas. By defi- nition, all of our municipalities are priority funding areas as well. Figure 1 is a map of Harford County, which is north- east of Baltimore. The darker areas are the priority funding areas in Harford County. One striking thing is that probably only about 20 percent of the county is a priority funding area. The idea behind priority funding areas in the statutory requirements is that state capital investments, for the most part, will be made only within those priority funding areas. So if a developer wants to build a subdivision on 3-acre lots outside of those pri- ority funding areas in Harford County, that developer is going to have to incur all of the costs associated with providing water and sewer and roadway improvements for that development. In addition, state money for programs like recon- struction of schools or construction of new schools or new capital facilities is directed to the priority funding areas, and we try to locate many of those facilities within priority funding areas. This creates challenges for transportation, particularly in terms of trying to link some of the priority funding areas, and I’ll talk about this later. The policy approach taken by MDOT is called “smart transportation.” This quotation from the gover- nor really sets the overall policy framework: “Smart transportation means a more balanced and responsible policy that provides our citizens and future generations with genuine travel choices. Smart growth is a way to set priorities that will ensure the efficient use of trans- portation dollars, provide support to our established communities, and discourage costly sprawl develop- ment.” Smart transportation means focusing our resources in specific areas where growth can best be accommodated, the infrastructure is already in place or planned to support it, and local governments want growth to be concentrated. From a policy perspective, this sets the policy direction in terms of where we will spend our money, particularly on projects but also on programs. How have our investments changed during the past 6 to 7 years that smart growth has been in effect in Maryland? First, our money has been directed to prior- ity funding areas. Our program has focused on existing and planned development rather than on sprawl-gener- ated traffic problems. To the extent that people choose to live in sprawl development outside of the priority funding areas and end up driving on congested road- ways, they can’t automatically assume that MDOT will widen those roadways or construct new roadways to alleviate the traffic problems that result. There is an emphasis on providing modal choices— modal choices not just between highways and transit but also between bicycles and pedestrians. We have also looked at ways that we, as MDOT, can support the broader smart growth program initiatives. After the smart growth legislation first passed, we reviewed our entire capital program to identify projects that were not consistent with smart growth. There was a provision in the legislation that any project that had National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) approval was grandfathered and could go forward. But we did a policy review of all projects, even those with NEPA approval, and we concluded that five projects, all of which were bypasses around small towns, did not meet the spirit and intent of smart growth, even though two of those projects had NEPA approval. We removed those projects from our program. You can imagine that there was quite a bit of political backlash. We are still feeling some of it. We focus in Maryland on multimodal improvements. We have a number of corridor studies under way in which we are considering both highway and transit improvements, not as alternatives to each other but as packages of both highway and transit improvements that support each other. We use access controls as a tool for where develop- ment can occur in two broad ways. First, we examine where to purchase access controls on existing high- ways as well as on the few new highways we are con- structing. Second, we look at where we currently own access controls to determine whether we will make 9 4 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED FIGURE 1 Priority funding areas, Harford County. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 94

breaks in those controls to encourage development in some locations. We attempt to link transportation funding with land use decisions. We have taken the bold step on some of our projects of saying to local jurisdictions that if you want us to fund this project, we want and expect cer- tain things in terms of land use decisions. That has had some interesting political reactions. We consider key questions in reviewing projects for funding. Is the project within a priority funding area? Is there a significant safety need, and is there an exception for safety improvements? We generally try, in most of those exceptions, not to have major capacity improve- ments, but in several we have had major capacity improvements because of the safety problems. Does the project connect priority funding areas? We have an exception for making improvements connect priority funding areas, but we need to have as much control of access as possible on those projects. Is there a reason- able alternative in a priority funding area? For example, for those bypass projects, we look at improvements along the existing road within a priority funding area. Finally, is the project grandfathered? The governor noted that in our capital program last year we achieved a 50/50 split between highways and transportation. Figure 2 shows an analysis of the capi- tal program for the 1994 to 1999 period, which was the last capital program before he became governor, versus the current capital program (2002 to 2007). The gover- nor talked about our tremendous increase in investment in transit, from $1.4 billion to $2.5 billion. But the highway program has also proportionally increased, so the split is still the same as it was 8 years ago. However, the significant changes are where and how those high- way dollars are being spent and what type of improve- ments they are spent on. The conclusion is that smart growth—and the governor said this—is not about spending no money on highways and diverting it all to transit. It is about where and how you spend money on both highways and transit. I would like to go quickly through some of the smart growth programs. The first is the centerpiece of our smart growth program. Neighborhood conservation and urban reconstruction projects are focused on revi- talization areas. We basically upgrade state highways that serve as main streets through these areas—not just the pavement but also drainage improvements, side- walk improvements, landscaping, and aesthetics. We try to turn the state highway from something that divides the community into a community asset that can help spur revitalization. In a number of communities where we have done these projects, private money has fol- lowed toward revitalization. We are spending on the order of $30 million to $40 million per year on these projects. We have also recognized that much of our urban con- gestion off the freeway system is at intersections. We are focusing more and more of our improvements on inter- sections, as opposed to widening highways. The gover- nor made reference yesterday to this particular project in Towson. There were five legs coming into a signalized intersection, which operated at a very poor Level of Service F, and we put in a roundabout. It has really helped revitalize this area and improve operations sig- nificantly. This particular roundabout has had a prob- lem with minor accidents, but we have significantly decreased our major accident rate. Our intersection program is funded as a separate program—about $5 million per year. We have a number of other projects around the state that are funded for intersection improvements outside of this as well, including some fairly major projects. We have a major emphasis on bicycle and sidewalk improvements. Up until 1995, by statute the State Highway Administration was not supposed to con- struct sidewalks along its highways unless money was taken away from other projects in the local jurisdic- tion. Statutory language passed in 1995 turned that around; now we must construct sidewalks and accom- modate bicycles as part of our facilities unless we demonstrate why it is not reasonable to do so. We have a program for retrofitting a number of our facilities to build sidewalks from the era when we weren’t allowed to, as well as a person for making our roadways more bicycle compatible. We have a program for improving pedestrian con- nections to transit stations. We have separate invest- ments, called Access 2000, to provide sidewalks on a number of state highways and local streets to improve pedestrian friendliness. We have been spending $1 mil- lion to $2 million per year on this, and it is amazing the miles of sidewalk you can construct for fairly modest amounts of money. We include our noise mitigation program as part of our smart growth program. The governor has said that part of our job is to improve the quality of life in com- munities, and the quality of life along our freeways is very much affected by noise. We have had a pretty healthy retrofit program of $10 million to $20 million per year, in addition to the Type I noise walls that we build as part of our projects. 9 5HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? FY 1994–1999 FY 2002–2007 Capital Program Capital Program $ mil. % $ mil. % Highways $2,601 64 $4,719 65 Transit $1,436 36 $2,544 35 Total $4,037 100 $7,263 100 FIGURE 2 Modal share of capital program. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 95

We emphasize landscaping and aesthetic design on all of our projects through our “thinking beyond the pavement” program. We have a separate program of $7 million to $9 million per year dedicated to landscaping and aesthetic design. We consider congestion management, and in particu- lar our intelligent transportation systems (ITS) program, to be an integral part of our smart growth transporta- tion program, because we try to get as much out of the existing system as we can without actually having to build more capacity. We have been spending $10 million to $20 million per year on our ITS program. We use our transportation enhancement program as a major tool to help smart growth. One criterion that we use to select projects proposed by local sponsors is whether the project is located within a priority funding area. We have had major expenditures on scenic ease- ments, particularly in Civil War battlefield areas, under the enhancement program as part of our rural legacy pro- gram. We have also had a number of water quality and wetland projects funded under the enhancement program. We have access management programs as part of individual projects to ensure that we manage access and prevent new strip commercial development from occur- ring as well along several of our National Highway System routes in the state. We have been spending about $1 million per year on this. The amazing thing is that, particularly in areas where we have agricultural land, you can buy a lot of linear feet worth of access controls, leaving entrances that can be used only as farm entrances. The farmers are delighted because they get money that they otherwise would not have received. The governor talked about our major investment in and our goal for transit, doubling transit ridership in 20 years from about 0.5 million to 1 million riders per day. The backbone of our transit system in the state is our bus system. We do have rail systems in both the Baltimore and Washington areas, as well as statewide commuter rail. But our focus is on improving and increasing bus service, investing in selected new rail lines, and improving service on existing rail lines. Transit-oriented development is a major part of our smart growth program, and we have had task forces working on ways to encourage more transit-oriented development. One group within the secretary’s office is focused on joint development of our transit stations in particular. In the State Highway Administration, we have a number of projects trying to improve access into transit stations, particularly terminal stations, along our beltways, as well as investments to improve parking. To wrap up, I want to talk about changes in the projects to make them more compatible with smart growth. I mentioned earlier that when we are review- ing projects for funding, we try to ensure that the alternatives that are developed or that are ultimately selected are located within priority funding areas. If we are studying several alternatives, some of which will go outside the priority funding area, we try to steer away from those alternatives. The focus of our program has shifted to improving existing roads rather than building new roads. We use context-sensitive design in Maryland. We call it “think- ing beyond the pavement.” This is aesthetic design, working with the community and trying to develop projects that become assets to the community. We con- sider controlling access on particular projects along existing arterials that do not currently have access con- trols. We try to build bicycle and pedestrian compati- bility into virtually all of our projects, particularly off of the freeway system. We look at transit components. We look at transit as an element of our highway proj- ects, rather than looking at transit improvements as an alternative to highway projects. And we try to combine our improvements with other state and locally funded improvements, particularly in revitalization areas. We have been very successful in doing that. 9 6 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 96

9 7 Smart Transportation in Las Vegas, Nevada Jacob Snow, Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada My name is Jacob Snow, and I’m the GeneralManager of the Regional TransportationCommission of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas. I’m not exactly sure why I’m here, coming from a community that probably has represented the antithesis of smart growth in many ways, but in some ways it hasn’t. If you were to ask Las Vegans what “smart growth” means, many would say that means we put the slot machines in the grocery stores so we don’t have to travel as far to the casinos. They are everywhere in Las Vegas. One of the reasons we’re unique is that the Regional Transportation Commission is a metropolitan planning organization (MPO), a transit agency, and a street and highway agency. So we don’t have a fragmented trans- portation framework as do so many other areas around the country. We make the transportation plans as the MPO, and then we implement them as a street and highway agency and as a transit agency. That has been particularly beneficial for us in some respects. Our commission has five goals, and the strategies and tactics that they have pursued to attain those goals are basically focused on some of the principles of smart growth. The first one is compact development in Las Vegas. Back in 1950, the core of the population, which was only about 52,000, was right in downtown Las Vegas. Figure 1 shows all of the developed parcels— 52,000 people. A decade later, we had doubled in pop- ulation to 110,000. A decade after that, we had doubled again to 220,000. A decade after that, we had doubled to 440,000. Pretty soon, we are going to get big enough that we can’t double our population every decade. In 1990 we were 775,000. Then by the end of 2000 (Figure 2), we were more than 1.4 million people. The ethos of Las Vegas is that growth is good. As you look at this picture, ask yourselves a question: Does this represent sprawl or a very compact, high-density urbanized area? The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) studied 68 cities in its annual urban mobility study. Las Vegas is third in density of those 68 cities: New York, Los Angeles, and then Las Vegas. A recent study by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) talked about cities where the vehicle miles of travel per capita is low. The top city on the list was New Orleans, followed by New York City, then Philadelphia. These are cities that developed around transit, where transit predates the automobile. It is difficult to get around in an automo- bile in these cities. But fourth on that list is Las Vegas. FIGURE 1 Development growth as of 1950. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 97

We have an extremely dense urbanized area, and in fact, we have had a de facto urban growth boundary. It is not by choice; the federal government owns 95 per- cent of the state of Nevada. Although we would have like to have sprawled, we could not. The federal gov- ernment would not sell off or exchange land where the developers wanted to build. Some people say that Portland, Oregon, is a Canadian-type city because of its urban growth boundary. Well, maybe Las Vegas is a lit- tle bit more Canadian than we think, although not by choice. This urban growth boundary has allowed us to have a compact urban core and a high density, which has paid off in some unanticipated ways. Figure 3 shows the 2000 peak-hour congestion; darker dots indicate Level of Service F and the lighter dots are Level of Service E. In 10 years, with our popu- lation growing by roughly 100 percent, our peak-hour congestion increased by 216 percent. Three years into the future, the peak-hour congestion increases by 264 percent over that of 2000. At a population of 2.3 mil- lion in 2025, we have a mess to deal with (Figure 4). One of the metrics TTI uses to measure urban mobil- ity is the travel rate index. Los Angeles is at 1.53. That means that it takes 53 percent more time to travel from Point A to Point B during the peak period in Los Angeles than it does during the off-peak period. We have a travel rate index of 1.55. So in our public rela- tions and marketing campaigns, we tout this sign, which takes that iconic sign on the south end of the Las Vegas strip that says, “Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada,” and we say, “Welcome to fabulous Los Angeles, Nevada.” We won’t have the beach or the nice Mediterranean climate, but we will have the smog and the traffic congestion. That is an image that resonates well with many Las Vegans who moved away from Los Angeles to avoid those things. How do our roadways look? Congested. How does our air look? Polluted. These have been some of the negative externalities of all that growth. We invited Bob Dunphy of ULI out to Las Vegas to speak to our com- mission a few years ago, and they were so impressed with him that they decided to start following some of the things he says. In one of its publications, ULI talks about the key elements of a balanced, integrated trans- portation system. We have tried to follow that by going according to these principles. You have to have a backbone with a foundation of an urban highway and arterial system that can go north, south, east, and west across your community, and we do not have that. We have been building what 9 8 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED FIGURE 2 Development growth as of 2000. FIGURE 3 Peak-hour volume capacity, 2000. FIGURE 4 Peak-hour volume capacity, 2025. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 98

virtually is an Interstate here, Interstate 215, all with local money—no state department of transportation money and no federal money whatsoever. We have spent about $800 million over the past decade, and we have a tax initiative that will be on the November bal- lot to expand and accelerate the funding, because we just can’t keep up. We also recognize that it is going to be difficult to pave our way out of congestion, so we are focusing on transportation choices. Yesterday there was a question to a panel about whether there are any revolutionary breakthroughs in transit that are really going to make a difference in cost-effectiveness and getting people on transit. This is one in particular—our bus rapid transit program. I’m going to talk more about this later on, but we have another one that we are really highly touting that we think is going to be a major breakthrough—our monorail project. Our urban monorail is being built in and around the Las Vegas strip (Figure 5). When the Regional Transportation Commission started the major invest- ment study in 1995, there was a real division in the community. It was probably the most controversial transportation project in the history of the state of Nevada because on the west side of the strip was Steve Wynn, who had built the Mirage, the Bellagio, and the Treasure Island. He was against any type of light rail system. He would sit in those technical committees and say, “Congestion is good. I’m not going to spend a bil- lion dollars in Las Vegas to build these megaresorts only to pay taxes so that the RTC can build a light rail sys- tem to take my customers away from my property. Congestion is good for my business. I want to keep peo- ple in my property.” That was his attitude. The attitude of some people on the east side of the strip was different, because the Las Vegas Convention Center is there. Las Vegas is a weekend-heavy tourist environment. During the weekdays, their occupancy rate isn’t nearly as high. The casinos on the east side of the strip said, “If we could have some sort of good con- nection over to that convention center, we would do better in business during the week because we could funnel our guests back and forth between the conven- tion center. We could go after the convention market more heavily.” That was led by the MGM Grand Hotel and by the Las Vegas Hilton, which is right next to the convention center, off the strip. The Hilton wanted to connect to all of these tourists who walk up and down the strip and get more foot traffic that way. So they were in favor of the monorail. Steve Wynn and the Mirage Resort Group and the Mandalay Bay Resort Group became aware that if this monorail went through, the hotels across the street would have them at a competitive disadvantage. So they really fought against this monorail. My predecessor in the job was pushing for a publicly owned and operated system paid for by taxes on the gaming community. He didn’t last very long in the job. The people on the west side of the strip made it so difficult for this monorail project to go forward that they had the community con- vinced that we could not spend any public taxpayer dollars or federal flex funds on this form of transit. We said to them, “If we can build this with our own revenues generated from the private sector, and we won’t spend any taxpayer dollars on it, what will you say?” That is what we did. We worked with a consor- tium of hotels. We secured the right-of-way for a 4-mile system that would start at the MGM Grand Hotel, go past Paris and Bally’s, past the Flamingo Hilton, past Harrah’s, past the Imperial Palace, and over to the con- vention center with stops at the Las Vegas Hilton and the Sahara. We did this by bringing in Salomon Smith Barney and a bond investment rating agency. There is enough foot traffic and convention traffic that this sys- tem will pay for itself (Figure 6). We sold $650 million worth of bonds to build this project. The construction cost was about $400 million, with the rest needed to fund debt service reserve and capitalized interest and contingency accounts. But we did this without any tax- payer dollars. It is under construction right now and will open in spring 2004. Steve Wynn’s argument that congestion was good for his business did not hold true, and the stock share started to plummet in his company. He was bought out by MGM Grand, which is now called MGM Mirage. Of course, it is favorable to the monorail and to transit in general. So now we are actually proposing to spend taxpayer dollars on an extension of the monorail, but we had a senator from Nevada who passed some legislation say- ing we wouldn’t have to come up with a local match because we had already spent local dollars on this [first] piece. We are in the process of extending that a couple 9 9HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? Desert Inn Rd Sands Avenue Flamingo Rd Tropicana Rd Spring Mtn Rd Golf Club Las Vegas Blvd. Koval Ln. McCarran International Airport Flamingo Hilton Caesars Palace The Mirage Treasure Island Circus Circus Luxor Las Vegas Convention Center Monte Carlo Bally's Paris Bellagio Venetian Desert Inn Las Vegas Hilton New York, New York Sahara Harrah’s Imperial Palace Convention Center Station Aladdin Excalibur Tropicana MGM Grand Stardust Frontier Mandalay Bay Existing Alignment Projected Alignment Property owned by Participating Resorts FIGURE 5 Las Vegas monorail alignment, Phase 1. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 99

of miles from the Las Vegas Hilton, past the Stratosphere Hotel and into downtown glitter gulch, Las Vegas—another 2-mile extension. The third phase will be to McCarran International Airport. The monorail is really designed primarily to move tourists in the resort corridor. But what about all of the other residents of the city of Las Vegas, Henderson, unin- corporated Clark County, and North Las Vegas? For them we have the Metropolitan Area Express, a train on tires. It will operate much like a light rail system, although it is really a bus. I believe Las Vegas is the only transit agency in the country that has actually purchased these vehicles, which are manufactured by Aris Bus. This technology exists in France, with one system operating in the Normandy District. It looks like an ordinary bus, with a driver using a steering wheel to steer manually. It has an optical guidance system, and as the driver lets go, as he pulls into the station plat- form, the optical guidance system takes over and pro- vides precision guidance to the vehicle, just like rail does. The driver is not driving; the optical guidance sys- tem is performing the operation. There will be stations and platforms, just like a light rail system. There will be off-board fare collection and preferential treatment for these vehicles at intersections through traffic signal prioritization. Another example is near Lyon, France, in a city called Clermont-Ferrand. It is a different-colored vehicle, but it has the same optical guidance system with the same type of flexibility. If you have light rail, you are confined to where the rail goes, but this is on tires. So you can run this as a circulator in neighborhoods and then transfer it to the main line, where it will operate in Las Vegas along the northern part of the strip in its own dedicated lane. With off-board fare collection, it pulls up to the sta- tion, all four double doors open, and you have platform boarding, so it really facilitates wheelchair boardings. We are very excited about expanding that type of high- quality rail-type transit at the cost, in Las Vegas, of $6 million per mile. By comparison, the average cost of light rail is about $35 million per mile. It is cost- effective for us. We will connect this metropolitan area express system in several locations with our resource corridor monorail. We also are working on light rail in the Las Vegas area, but it is not the traditional light rail. We are tak- ing advantage of underutilized railroad rights-of-way. Using the Union Pacific railroad spur that goes right by McCarran International Airport, we will put diesel multiple unit (DMU) service there as opposed to light rail. This is inexpensive because you don’t have to pay for the electrification of light rail. The track is already there. We can do that for the cost of about $6 million per mile. The community is excited about it as well. We have new intermodal transfer facilities, we will have bus, we will have bus rapid transit, we will have the DMU service for light rail, and we will have monorail at these intermodal facilities. I also want to talk about bicycle and pedestrian improvements because we are the agency that sets the specifications and designs and funds the streets and highways, so we can make changes. We have almost concluded some very strenuous negotiations with the development community and our local governments about changing our street development regulations to be more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly. We are doing that by narrowing local streets, in a smart growth approach, with traffic calming. The development com- munity likes that because narrower streets reduce their development costs. In turn, we are getting 12 additional feet from them out on the collector and arterial streets so that we can add a 5-foot bicycle lane and a 5-foot buffer in between the movement areas and the side- walk. That 5-foot buffer would be landscaped and would also serve as a utility corridor where we can put street lights and other street furniture and things that get in the way of pedestrians and the disabled. We are making it safer for bicyclists and pedestrians, and those changes will go into our standard design documents. Anyone who wants to build a street or a road will have to comply with those guidelines. One of the barriers to smart growth in Las Vegas is that we have gated communities all over. We have a very high density, but it is difficult to take advantage of some of the benefits associated with smart growth 1 0 0 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED FIGURE 6 Fremont Street monorail alignment. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 100

because there is only one access point into and out of these large gated communities. One Albertson’s shop- ping center, for example, has a gated community across the street with several hundred homes, and many of them could walk or take a bike to that shopping cen- ter. Instead, they have to get in their car, drive a mile and a half to the entrance and the exit, and come back a mile and a half to the Albertson’s, and then make the return trip. That is an impediment that we need to work on. Truly, with the principles that we have learned from smart growth, we are seeing a greening of Las Vegas. 1 0 1HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 101

1 0 2 Whose Future Is It, Anyway? The Essential Public Process Robert Grow, Envision Utah My talk will be somewhat different from theones you’ve heard. We come from an areawhere they used to shoot people over water rights and fence lines and where public property rights are considered inviolable. It is a unique political and geographical climate. The Envision Utah project started about 7 years ago to address the growth issues in our communities. One of the first things we did was remind people that our ancestors who settled that area had a history of planning. In fact, 500 cities in the West were laid out under the direction of Brigham Young, including San Bernardino, California, and Carston, Alberta, Canada. The effort back then reached parts of northern Mexico. Although we have a history of planning, it was lost, and Envision Utah was an effort to reclaim our history as citizen planners and to engage the public in a long-range visioning effort. About three millennia ago, a wise king of Israel was reputed to have said, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That is in the book of Proverbs; smart growth efforts, or “quality growth efforts,” as ours are called, require a long-range vision. Our challenge in Utah was quite simple. We have about 1.7 million people in what we have renamed the Greater Wasatch Area. We created our own vocabulary as we went. We don’t call it “smart growth” in Utah. That term is viewed as an intellectual fetish of the self- chosen elite of the East Coast. So in Utah we call it “quality growth.” We were facing a million more peo- ple, joining the 1.7 million who were already there, by 2020. We have significant air quality issues caused mainly by the bowl shapes of our mountain valleys, which trap air pollutants. We were projected by 2020 to urbanize 87 percent more land than we had in the past 155 years. We had significant new water demand pro- jected for 2010; without extensive conservation, we would have to go a couple hundred miles away and completely pipe a new river down to the Wasatch Front area. Congestion and crowding were projected to increase business and personal costs for infrastructure and living expenses, housing costs were projected to increase, and extensive new infrastructure was required. We were running a budget surplus in Utah, and I used to remind people that what we really had was an infrastructure deficit. We hadn’t built what we needed to build for the future. Combined with those growth problems was the political layout of Utah. Figure 1 shows the Greater Wasatch Area, which consists of 10 counties, 90 cities and towns, 157 special service districts, the Utah Transit Authority, two MPOs, and of course the Utah Department of Transportation, or the Utah Department of Roads, as I sometimes call it. There are more than 500 city council members, 500 planning commission- ers, 30 county commissioners, 90 mayors, and hun- dreds of developers, realtors, and other major stakeholders in the growth issue. Our effort was not without political opposition. But because it was a private effort, started by a private group that invited the public sector in, it had no political clout except that clout given to it by the public response. I would like to talk about a few things we’ve learned from our process. Some of them will be replicable. Some of them will not apply to you, but I hope we can 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 102

help you miss some pitfalls. I want to talk about the premise on which we started the partnership we cre- ated, the process we have been going through, the vision and its characteristics, and our progress. First of all, our premise. Nobody can disagree with this, and this is how we got everyone on board at the beginning. The premise was that the public has the right to choose its own future. That is whose future it is. Public officials should serve that vision. We invited all persons in the partnership, regardless of background or constituency, to take off their public interest hat, set it aside, put on their “I’m a Utahan” hat, and look to the future for the benefit of all of Utah and all our children and grandchildren. That is a hard invitation to resist. Second, we all had to recognize that growth issues have natural boundaries. Water comes in watersheds; air comes in airsheds; commuters come in com- mutesheds; and our existing political boundaries are not aligned at all with the natural boundaries of the problems, and therefore we needed a regionwide effort to deal with the issues. The third fundamental premise was that the public would make good choices if we gave them real options. If you poll the public and ask, “Do you want clean water?” they say, “Yes.” You ask, “Do you want clean air?” and they say, “Yes.” “Do you want your half-acre lots?” They say, “Yes.” But choices come in packages, and we believed that if we gave the public real choices, they would make good decisions. We set out to create a process, not a project. This coming year we will redo our baseline and scenarios, and we will move forward through the process we went through for the first 5 years, it is hoped now with bet- ter tools, better modeling, and better ways of conveying them to the public. We have been through hundreds of public meetings and workshops. We have distributed more than 800,000 questionnaires and survey forms. We have spent more than 100,000 dedicated hours of technical modeling, and we have had scores and scores of meetings with stakeholders and decision makers along the way. Our effort was to reach out to the public. We used television, radio, and newspaper, and part of our strat- egy was to involve the media in the original effort. The publishers of the major newspapers and the station managers of all of the major radio and TV stations were all in the partnership. They created a public response committee, which then directed the efforts to obtain the press support we needed. All of our work was done on annual cycles, so that when all the Christmas advertis- ing ended in December and all the downtime came for advertising in January, that was when we went public— the beginning of the new year. We could get lots of free press and airtime. So we paid a fraction of the normal cost for the publicity. The theory of the partnership was that we had to involve everybody who could affect or would be affected by the outcomes of growth. In 1974, Utah passed a bill that created regional planning, and a ref- erendum dismantled that bill that fall. The current sit- ting governor believes his father lost the opportunity to be governor because he supported that bill. That bill was attacked by the realtors and developers in Utah, and it was overturned at a referendum that fall. As we created this process with the governor from that period, he said not to leave anybody out. He said, “I don’t care how hard they are to deal with or how difficult you may think it is to put up with their perspective, but don’t leave anybody out this time.” So we reached out to every interest group that we thought would be affected by or could help us change the direction we were going. The group had to have stature and credi- bility and staying power. We looked for people already well known in the community, so if they were invited to come, even though they were busy, they could bring with them a part of the community that would trust them to be honest brokers of good information. The partnership must not be controlled in appearance or reality by any group of stakeholders, whether public or private. To make certain that was true, we sought funding from multiple sources. One-third of our money came from individuals and from businesses. One-third of our money came from foundations. And one-third of our money came from government. Half of the government’s share came from local government—the individual cities and towns—and half from the state. The fund-raising did not just raise money but provided balance to make it clear that no one entity controlled the effort. We involved everybody we could. The partnership involved business leaders, developers, utility compa- nies, local and state governments, senators, citizens and conservation groups, and religious leaders from across the religious spectrum. Many people view Utah as a religious monolith, but the Salt Lake Valley itself is less than 50 percent Latter Day Saints (LDS) these days. So the Catholic bishop, the Episcopal bishop, leaders from 1 0 3HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? , FIGURE 1 Greater Wasatch Area: 10 counties, 90 cities and towns, 157 special service districts. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 103

the LDS church, a Baptist minister—we tried to make sure we had involved as many groups as possible. We also brought in education leaders, who are heavily influenced by the growth patterns—all of the new schools are out on the fringe. There are tremendous investments every year in bonding for new schools. A tremendous amount of effort was done behind the scenes. Mike Levitt, our governor, and the Chair, Jon Huntsman, Jr., who is now the Deputy United States Trade Representative, were both involved. We did a lot of work with our stakeholder groups and with those who were important in our community to keep them involved. What was the process? Business leaders have a low tolerance for slow processes, so we had to have momen- tum, clear goals, and established timetables (Figure 2). We had to tell them there were deliverables coming within a time frame they could accept. The process had to be inclusive and had to appear to be inclusive. Everything was transparent to all the participants and the public. Anybody could be in any part of the process, and the press was welcome to everything. That was important because at the end of the day we were going to present choices to the public, and the public had to accept that we had been an honest broker of real choices, real alternatives for their future. You cannot underestimate the power of scenarios in speaking to the future. Choices come in packages, and we decided in our scenarios to hold one variable constant: population. Efforts or perceived efforts to slow down growth in Utah over the past 30 to 40 years have not been successful. That tends to be true everywhere. The Constitution guarantees the right to travel, and with that comes the fact that people will go where the economies are strong and where the jobs are and where there is a good quality of life. So we held population constant at 2020 as we did our scenario modeling. We changed the housing types, the transportation systems, the open spaces, and so on. But the constant—so we were always comparing apples to apples—was population growth. We run on a yearly cycle, so each January we came out with a new set of things to go public with. In our first year, 1997, we brought the partnership together. We did an extensive values research project, and we cre- ated the baseline scenario. There were no alternative scenarios yet, but the 20-year baseline is designed to bang people’s heads against the wall. That is out there in the future as we use up our limited resources. Unless you cause them to look out far enough, they don’t see those barriers. The importance of the visioning process is that if you want to change the way people perceive a region, you have to take their vision out far enough that they come to understand the constraints. In the first year we did the baseline. The most impressive part was a simple computer program that showed where people would be living if we continued to grow at the same density between now and 2050, even with declining growth rates. As we ate up our open spaces in those forests we love, everything became crowded, and it was clear the people did not like that. The next year we spent in scenario development. A large scenarios committee worked together with all the government entities as well as the private sector, and we held major workshops on where and how to grow. The next spring, we took that all to the public and listened to the public response. We have been implementing the qual- ity growth strategy that was developed in that third year. Our first workshop, on where to grow, involved about 300 people, but we replicated this all over the area. We designed a simple game called the chip game. We gave participants maps of our area, and then we gave them density chips. There were groups of people from all these interest groups around big tables with maps. We said we are going to have a million more peo- ple here by 2020. This is the average density at which we have been growing for the last 20 to 30 years. We want you to show us where you want to grow by using those density chips. Some of them were pretty proud of themselves—they could get all the 2020 density chips on areas that didn’t matter very much. When they got done with that after an hour, we handed them another 2 million people for 2050 and said okay, put these 2 million people where you want to grow. All of a sud- den, they were stacking the chips, representing density increases. Nothing forced people to come up against the constraints we were facing like going through the process themselves to become a citizen planner. That became our most effective tool—to take their vision out 20 years and have them play the chip game. The second workshop was on how to grow, and it went through a lot of questions about what kinds of communities we really want in the future. This was more community design. As we did that, we got a sense of what the public in our area really would like. The major findings of those workshops would be dif- ferent in every area. But most important, we found that people wanted infill a lot more than they wanted to expand over the areas that they considered pristine. In particular, people wanted to preserve the Wasatch Back, their playground in the mountains, which could become highly developed in the future. Rail transit came out as an important part of the long-range strategy. Walkable 1 0 4 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED • Must have momentum—clear goals and established timetables • Must be inclusive (in both appearance and reality) • Must be transparent to all participants and the “public” • Must be viewed as an honest broker of real choices (scenarios) • Must seek and follow the public’s direction FIGURE 2 The process. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 104

communities were high on the list of things people wanted, along with preservation of critical lands. To develop scenarios, we used some outside consul- tants—John Fregonese and Peter Calthorpe were work- ing with us. You have to be careful if you use consultants, because they bring with them all of their wisdom and all of their baggage. We explained to them that they were going to be our orchestra leaders. They would help us lead the symphony, but the music would be Utah’s music. So when Peter wanted to transport his California designs to Utah, we would smile and say, “Help us lead without writing the music.” That turned out to be a great relationship. We developed the four scenarios shown in Figures 3 through 6. Scenario A was continued sprawl, showing how much land we would consume if we developed like we had over the past 3 to 5 years. Scenario B was the baseline, similar to the past 20 to 30 years and slightly more dense. Scenario C had a lot more infill and redevel- opment. Growth on new land was focused into walkable, transit-oriented communities that used considerably less land. Scenario D was a very intensive infill design. When we took these to the public, we showed them what they meant in terms of land consumption (Figure 7). For example, in one of them we would use another 409 square miles, whereas in C, which was a more dense transit-oriented approach, we would use only 126 square miles. Every mile you develop is another mile of farmland, because in Utah the developable land is all farmland. We talked about the vehicle miles traveled (Figure 8) and the total emissions in tons (Figure 9), but we also did spatial modeling using Mobile 5 for each of the plans to show which were best. What shocked our legislature the most was an estimate of total infrastructure cost. We put in not only the public cost but also the private cost. In Figure 10, the first part of the bar is the municipal and developer local cost for infra- structure. The white is the regional roads. The next light shading near the top is regional transit and then regional water. Between Scenarios A and C, there is a difference of about $15 billion in spending on infrastructure. We took all this to the public in 600,000 newspaper surveys. While this was going out, the governor and about 15 of the most prominent people in Utah were on TV ads constantly saying, “Join us in helping choose Utah’s future.” About 20,000 of those surveys came back. From that, we could see what the public was inter- ested in. Then we used the survey work we had done at the beginning to make sure that we had normalized it across the interest groups in Utah and the public. Figure 11 shows the selections of the public, which were 1 0 5HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? FIGURE 3 New and existing development, Scenario A: continuation of recent trends; larger lot sizes; more auto-oriented development. FIGURE 4 New and existing development, Scenario B (baseline): implementation of adopted plans; dispersed development pattern common in past 20 to 30 years. FIGURE 5 New and existing development, Scenario C: more infill and redevelopment; growth on new land focused into walkable, transit-oriented communities. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 105

weighted heavily toward Scenarios C and D. This would surprise most people: Utah residents would choose a much denser lifestyle with rail transit and other forms of public walkability and transit-oriented developments. From that, we created the long-term vision. Part of what we learned along the way was that if you are going to do a visioning process, it must be at a high level. You can’t get into the details of what goes in this city or that city. It is really a regionwide plan—very little changes on the basis of particular developments for purposes of visioning. Second, it must be long term. There is a freeway pro- posal in Utah called the Legacy Highway, which is cur- rently the subject of significant litigation. The environmentalists wanted to model the baseline and all the scenarios without Legacy in it. The MPO and oth- ers wanted the model with Legacy in it. We finally mod- eled it both ways so everybody would be happy. But we 1 0 6 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED FIGURE 6 New and existing development, Scenario D: significant increase in densities; extensive infill and redevelopment; extensive transit system. 840 755 557 516 409 325 126 85 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 A B C D Sq ua re M ile s Total Area Developed by 2020 New Developed Area Since 1998 FIGURE 7 Land consumption. 85.3 79.2 76.6 76 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 A B C D M ile s in M illi on s FIGURE 8 Vehicle miles of travel per day. 2,660 2,511 2,501 2,512 2,400 2,450 2,500 2,550 2,600 2,650 2,700 A B C D Em is si on s FIGURE 9 Total emissions (tons per day). $0 $5 $10 $15 $20 $25 $30 $35 $40 A B C D Bi llio ns o f 1 99 9 Do lla rs Municipal and Developer Regional Roads Regional Transit Regional Water 37.6 29.8 22.1 23.0 FIGURE 10 Total infrastructure costs. 1% 1% 2% 3% 13% 30% 9% 3% 25% 26% 1% 1% 2% 3% 13% 4% 31% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% Be yo nd A A A/B B B/C C C/D D Be yo nd D FIGURE 11 Choosing a scenario (weighted versus unweighted results). Unweighted results (represented by the dark dashed line) are nearly identical to weighted results. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 106

tried to look to the long term. Legacy was already approved, so we stayed out of a lot of fights by looking out 20 years and then took a second cut at 2050. The vision must be clear and easy to understand. I just read our MPO’s recent 2030 plan. You would have to be an engineer and a lawyer combined to understand it. As you take these things to the public, you must make things understandable and clear. The public will engage only if you can give them clear choices that lead to implementable goals. They want to see change and they are not going to engage unless they think they can affect the outcome. Your effort must be value driven. We have developed goals from all of the public input. They look much like the smart growth goals that you would find anywhere. Our focus is on implementing this through local changes because of our political structure. We will never have the statutory backing that Maryland has. We just live in a different world. We have 32 individual strategies for attaining those goals. If we implement the growth strategy, we will save about $5 billion in public funding for infrastructure over the next 20 years. We will conserve about 171 square miles of farmland. We will provide a much wider range of housing choices for people and have lower emissions and better environmental circumstances. We will reduce our water consumption or put off a lot of the cost for water development, and we will create a much better transportation system for our public. One thing we did early on that the consultants just scratched their heads about was hire one of the nation’s best political strategists and pollsters. We said, “We are not interested in manipulating the public. We want you to do a values survey as you would do for a political candidate. Tell us who lives here and what they care about so that as we speak to the future, we speak to the values they care about.” We found the most common value system in Utah was that people were seeking peace of mind by doing the right things for their children. That was the main driver. Lots of things came out of this value study, and we completely changed the vocabulary of smart growth in Utah to match this value system. With that in mind, let me define “smart growth” (although the way I would define it personally is differ- ent from the way others in my community might). Smart growth is growth in a way that reduces the cost of living for young families. Smart growth allows a young family to operate with one car or no cars. Smart growth reduces the cost of taxes to a young family by reducing the cost of infrastructure. Smart growth reduces the cost of living to young families by giving them a wider range of housing choices. Now, why did I phrase all of it that way? Because in Utah the thing people care about the most is their children being able to live there and their children raising their grandchil- dren—not day care. Smart growth, for some of us, is the ability for our children to choose that one spouse stay home for part of his or her life and raise the chil- dren. That is very different from what it would be in New York. Whatever the value system of your commu- nity is, you need to understand it and speak to it. That was our goal with this particular values research. We have a lot of urban planning tools. The planners are really busy, so we have given them a big book full of tools. These are essentially explanations and ordi- nances that they can adopt in their communities. We have also just finished one on transit-oriented develop- ment particularly aimed at the nodes along our trans- portation system in the future. We have done local planning projects like the shoreline project along the Great Salt Lake, which is a highly con- tested, environmentally sensitive area pressured by devel- opment, with nine communities coming together along with the environmental groups. We brought 10 cities together in southern Utah County, which is all farmland, and did the Nebo Community Vision Plan for how those 10 cities will grow. We are sponsoring a project with the nine jewels of the Wasatch Back—little towns that are now under development pressure. We are now doing a plan for transit-oriented development around 15 major transporta- tion nodes. We are taking the process and drilling down to individual needs that are not across the region but make up a big part of the picture for the region. We give awards every year, with the help of the gov- ernor, to smart growth/quality growth projects, projects worthy of public consideration. Envision Utah helps lead the effort to establish quality growth. The com- mission in Utah doesn’t have power like Maryland’s, but it does give leadership. Envision Utah is often cred- ited with passing a quarter-cent sales tax increase for public transportation and affecting local plans. When our light rail system began service, it went to the projected 20-year ridership in the first 3 weeks. That was largely due to the Envision Utah effort that gave the public an interest in alternative forms of trans- portation. Now we have cities fighting over who gets the next lines, so we have the leverage to develop the ridership. Cities have to bid for these lines on the basis of ridership, and the ridership depends on what cities develop around these transportation nodes. The biggest difference between Scenarios A and C is that under Scenario A, only 50,000 to 60,000 people will live within a half mile of a rail line in 2020. Under Scenario C, it is 800,000, or one out of every three. Our process is not replicable everywhere. We do not define public process as due process under the law, in which you give people notice and an opportunity to be heard after you have decided what you are going to have them do. Public process is involving the public from the beginning in a process where you truly trust them to make wise decisions by giving them good choices. 1 0 7HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 107

1 0 8 Smart Transportation in Portland, Oregon Tom Kloster, Portland Metro This is going to be quite a challenge. RobertGrow’s presentation is probably typical forWestern states. Portland is like a little piece of Israel in the West because we are very tolerant of regu- lation in Oregon. Our statewide planning program dates back to 1973. Our approach commonly comes on the regulatory side; even though we have used a lot of other tools in our planning, it is possible for us to have a gov- ernment lead the kind of project that Robert was talking about for Utah. This presentation is going to focus on how we have used public-sector planning to achieve goals similar to Utah’s and on how we are using federal funding to implement those plans for our region. Portland lies at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Portland’s history goes back even before the Oregon Trail—Lewis and Clark came through the same area, following the Columbia River. Part of what makes Portland different is that it is at the head of a fertile valley. There is not a water shortage, there is lots of land, and so Portland really evolved historically more like a European city, unlike the boomtown growth that has affected almost all Western cities. If you go back to the 1840s, Portland’s immigrants were farmers. They were coming to the area to grow crops in the European tradition. The entire valley was laid out in a grid, just like the European designs. By the 1870s, Portland was, by far, the largest settlement in the western half of the country, serving as the provider of crops and raw materials such as timber to the boomtowns where the gold was being sought. Towns like San Francisco and Seattle were boom- ing but needed resources from Portland, which had an agricultural and timber base. In the early part of the 1900s, Portland was a typical streetcar town, and San Francisco and Seattle were passing Portland up in size. By the 1940s, we had our first peek of being a multimodal, mature city and estab- lished as a metropolis. Then a period of decline began. We began putting freeways in, like every other city in the country. By the 1960s, we had knocked down about half of our traditional downtown for urban renewal and freeways. We put in a loop system that still occu- pies the east bank of the Willamette River downtown. And ever since 1970, we have been trying to undo the damage and put back together a city that was quite nice in the 1940s. Our economy, which is very diverse, is still based on a lot of those same traditional legs. Energy, agriculture, timber, and shipping are the major parts of the econ- omy. Emerging now are technology and athletic acces- sories—Nike and Adidas and Reebok are now based in Portland. Technology is our largest sector, which is why Oregon currently has the highest unemployment in the country. The needs of the technology-based economy are constantly being balanced with the area’s preservation of nature and natural resources. Portland is the only sea-level route through the Cascade Range of the inte- rior of the West. Because quality of life centers on the Columbia River and the Columbia River Gorge, there is tension between respecting the environment and bringing commodities out of that environment. Portland’s growth curve is similar to that of other parts of the West, though not quite as steep. We gained about one-half million residents in the past decade, 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 108

which was a lot for us to deal with. We have had an urban growth boundary since 1979, and we had to begin expanding it in the past 10 years to accommodate that growth. Over the next 20 years, we expect to see about 700,000 new residents, not as extreme as Las Vegas and the Utah Front Range area, but still for us a very steep increase to contend with. Also, there will be a lot of job growth, which is a good thing, but we are actually quite short on employment land. I work for Metro, which is a regionally elected gov- ernment. Metro is made up of seven council members and one council president elected regionwide and six representatives elected by their districts. Our function is to do growth management and transportation planning for the region. We have a green space department that operates regional parks and a solid waste plan. We run the landfill and recycling programs for the region. We also handle the revenue-producing parts of the agency, which include several attractions that are operated by Metro. Our planning activities increased from simply being an MPO in the late 1980s. This is one of those lemons- to-lemonade stories. We had a western bypass freeway proposed in the western suburbs, which is the technol- ogy corridor in Portland, and there was a lot of debate about how the region should grow and a lot of concern about the fact that this particular facility would go out- side the urban growth boundary. It started a discussion of alternatives to the status quo. Our land use watch- dog group, 1,000 Friends of Oregon, which was estab- lished by the governor at the time our statewide planning came into place in the 1970s, came out with the Land Use Transportation and Air Quality alterna- tive, which tried to look together at all of those things on a major transportation investment. The good thing for Metro is that linking land use and transportation became a new ethic in the Portland area. Metro upgraded our regional modeling tools to actually do this work. It put us in a good position to begin public agency sponsorship of this kind of planning. We started a project called 2040 back in 1990. It was 50-year vision for the region, because in addition to this freeway project, we also had this larger issue of our urban growth boundary getting tight. We were up to the edges and we had been developing at 1970s densi- ties within that boundary. There wasn’t a plan for how to develop inside the boundary. It was just a belt around the region. We were trying to develop a series of alter- natives for the region. We also had our powers expanded dramatically in 1992 by voters, giving us direct land use planning authority over local jurisdic- tions. We can enact regulations on local development codes. That made it very handy for us to then talk about growth for the region. This was very similar to the Utah case. We look at different ways to grow in, out, and up. They came together as a 50-year growth concept. It is very centers oriented. To give credit where credit is due, this is stolen from Vancouver, British Columbia, one of our neighbor cities in the Northwest. We aspire to emulate them because they are doing good planning in Vancouver— probably the best in North America. So the centers idea really came out of Canada. We adopted that and ended up with seven major centers, about 30 town centers, and a lot of main streets. A three-point summary of the mandate for trans- portation planners like me: (a) We focus growth in cen- ters that are easily served by existing infrastructure—a theme in smart growth. (b) We preserve freight access to industry and ports. (c) We avoid unintended effects on rural reserves. These are areas outside of our urban growth boundary that in our 2040 plan are perma- nently rural—we will never go into those areas. But because transportation does occur through those areas, there is a potential to undermine that vision. We used these in our regional transportation plan as a way to implement that vision. It took us 5 years and $2 million to develop this plan. Beyond the 2040 vision, it took a lot of effort to lay down these details. I like the carrots-and-sticks theme, so I’ll start out with regulations and then I’ll talk about how we use funding programs on the carrot side of the equation. Figure 1 shows the five key regulations that we know will result in changes in mode choice. That is what we are really after—what can we do on the transportation side to allow people to select a different mode of travel if they are given that opportunity? We have answered the land use side of the equation in our vision, as well as some very broad transportation questions about it. Centers-oriented system classifications, level of service, parking, street connectivity, and a long-term mode share vision are all part of our plan and regulate local jurisdictions in the region. Our street design concepts, shown in Figure 2, are essentially zoning for streets. This is a specific design clas- 1 0 9HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? Centers -Oriented System Land Use–Based LOS Policy Parking Ratios Local Street Connectivity Non-SOV Targets 1 2 3 4 5 FIGURE 1 Carrots and sticks: five key regulations. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 109

sification for different parts of the major street system based on land use. Boulevards, streets, and roads are the three most important. We use common terminology. These were specifically intended to empower citizens to ask for better design on their system. Boulevards are tied to centers; streets are tied to neighborhoods; roads are tied to industrial areas. We also adopted a level of service policy tied to land use. Our old policy, which many people still think is a great policy, is the level of service, to ensure that streets maintain Level of Service D or above during the rush hour. You would be hard pressed to find a “D” in Portland on a major street right now or even 10 years ago, even though it was in our plan up until the mid- 1990s. We knew we were operating at Level of Service F during the peak hour in most places, because we don’t have pricing or any other way to keep people off the system when everybody wants to be there. We had a fairly unpleasant 1-year process with our elected officials to grind through this, due to the finan- cial complexities. We wanted to give them options. We laid out the fact that building to Level of Service D costs us $13.5 billion, while tolerating our current congestion level during the rush hour, which still requires us to build a system to keep up with growth, costs about $5 billion. Our current revenue stream for that period was a little over $1 billion. Being poor helped us because the elected officials were faced with a 20-year congestion problem or an immediate funding problem. This was not a happy outcome, but it was a “coming to grips with reality” outcome. The other important part was putting a face on what that Level of Service D looks like. The idea behind a 2- hour peak is to make sure that tolerating congestion during the rush hour doesn’t erode economic viability. We are keeping an eye on that shoulder half hour on the other side of the rush hour to make sure our peaks are manageable. When we talked to businesses, they said they know it is busy during the rush hour and avoid going on time-sensitive deliveries. The long-haulers take those deliveries because they are going to Reno or to Las Vegas anyway. So it turned out the issue was more about confining that congestion than trying to eliminate it during the rush hour. We did a pricing study, a pilot project under federal funding. The elected officials are not going to adopt pricing on an existing facility in Portland. They will consider it in planning for new lanes, but it is a volatile topic. We don’t have priced facilities for the most part. The level of service policy helps you eliminate a lot of bad projects. If you look at our 1995 Regional Transportation Plan, only about 25 percent of projects come from that previous plan. That is a dramatic change in the focus of the plan. We essentially carried over projects that made sense and dropped everything else. Level of service was key to making those decisions. Another important point is that half of the projects in the planning came from a citizen-based workshop process that we did. We asked people what the improvements ought to be to help achieve the land use vision. Parking ratios are another important regulation. They were relatively easy to adopt. Retailers wanted them. They set maximum and minimum ratios for two different zones tied to transit access. These have been adopted in almost all of the local plans now. This solves the problem of competing jurisdictions: because every- one knows they are going to adopt the regulations, you don’t worry that someone else will capture an employer because you have a tough regulation. This is a distinct advantage of regulatory authority. We have established connectivity requirements shown in Figure 3. We have again used a lot of scientific analysis showing that 530-foot spacing is about the right amount for connecting local streets. That is about twice the spacing of Portland’s historic grid, which fea- tures small 200-foot blocks. But at this level, we are able to show that we could drop volumes on adjacent arterials by about 17 percent and reduce delay enough not to have to widen the intersections and install turn 1 1 0 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED Throughways connect centers and major destinations, provide mobility across the region, and include freeway and highwaydesign types. Boulevards are transit-, pedestrian-, and bicycle- oriented designs that serve centers and main streets. Streets balance all modes of travel in corridors and neighborhoods. Roads are motor vehicle –oriented and include urban roads that serve industrial areas and rural roads that serve urban and rural reserves. FIGURE 2 Street design concepts. New streets at no more than 530-foot spacing Accessways at no more than 330-foot spacing when full street not possible Cul-de-sac maximum length of 200 feet, and no more than 25 housing units FIGURE 3 Connectivity requirements. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 110

lanes on intersections. A detailed analysis of this issue is available. We also have an accessway requirement: when you go up to that 530 feet, anything over 330 would trigger an accessway connection. This is about pedestrian and bike access to transit. There is also a limit on cul-de- sacs to 200 feet and no more than 25 housing units. These regulations have been adopted in all but a few jurisdictions now. Finally, we have non–single occupant vehicle targets shown in Figure 4. This is basically the total share of peo- ple who aren’t driving alone. These relate to the various 2040 land use geographies, especially the centers and the central cities where we are focusing. Local plans must aspire to these targets as they make decisions about land use and transportation. They allow us to evaluate their plans in the statewide planning program to make sure that when they make decisions on a Wal-Mart or another new development, they keep these future targets in mind. These targets are our way, at the regional level, of com- plying with a statewide rule that requires a reduction in vehicle miles of travel per capita over time. The state is very interested in how we actually implement this. I’m going to switch over to the funding side. Our gas tax has been stagnant for a long time, and we don’t have a sales tax in Oregon. Since that is not a resource for us, we use property tax occasionally for transporta- tion. Our registration fee for cars is $35 for 2 years. This is a crummy system for financing roads. A lot of people in Portland think that is good. We have had to persuade people that to achieve this 2040 vision, we have to spend money on roads because we have a lot of growth coming into the region. But we are going to change our ways and build different kinds of facilities and put that money into different kinds of programs. We are using five programs to leverage those projects that are alternatives to the stereotypical ugly arterial and freeway projects. We put together a handbook called Creating Livable Streets for the street design classifications. We spent about $200,000 on this back in 1996. This essentially provides guidelines for engineers, planners, citizens, and planning commission members. Although I recommend using them, I actually recommend composing your own guidelines, because the process gave us ownership and connection to our region. The $200,000 was a good price, considering the amount of money we pour into transportation. These guidelines set up, especially for the boulevard category, specific dimensions that we’re going to be looking for on boulevard projects. Like the Maryland Department of Transportation’s plan, this focuses the money on centers. The handbook becomes a threshold for all our regional funding, but the boulevards actually become a category. We have allocated about $16 million so far. We will be allocating more to additional projects this fall in the next round of funding. We have been through two rounds of boulevard projects so far. In our breakout sessions yesterday, I was complain- ing about working with the DOT and National Highway System designations and all manner of prob- lems with state and federal engineers on building those. Our current problem is that we have designed and funded all these projects, and now we can’t get sign-off at the state level. We are hitting boiling point on that right now, but money created the pressure to actually get to the table. So it was still an important step. Next we have regional transportation demand man- agement (TDM) funding. This comes out of our flexible funds at Metro. We also have a special category that pri- marily funds citizen-based alternatives to the public agency TDM programs. It is called 2040 Initiatives. Our bike program has received approximately $26 million since flexible funding was instituted. Flexible funding is almost entirely devoted to regional system improvements that are too costly for localities to fund. They are often missing link improvements or bridge improvements. Our pedestrian system is also receiving money. A large number of pedestrian improvements are funded by $16 million. These are on major streets, commonly county roads that were not built with sidewalks. Successful projects include the addition of street trees and wider sidewalks. One unique program is our transit-oriented develop- ment program, funded out of those flexible funds through our Metropolitan Transportation Improvement Program (MTIP). We have done a whole series of proj- ects since the program began back in the mid-1990s. In these cases, we are not actually building the transit- oriented development. We are leveraging the difference between that site development with that density over developing it someplace else, on the edge or on a piece of vacant land somewhere. Commonly, these sites have baggage, so we are trying to make up that difference with these funds. We became eligible to use federal funds and buy land for this purpose in 1994. Our first grant was officially signed off on in 1996, and we have been handing out money ever since to these projects. By defi- nition, they are all on light rail transit stations: not just on a line, but within a few steps of a station. They are pedestrian oriented. Residential development density is 1 1 1HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? 60% to 70% in Portland central city 45% to 55% in other centers, main streets, LRT station areas 40% to 45% in low- density neighborhoods, industrial areas FIGURE 4 Non-SOV targets. 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 111

about 35 dwelling units per acre, depending on the local market and conditions, and we are pushing toward 80 in downtown areas and a couple of our suburban down- town regional centers. Commercial densities are about 0.5 to 1.5 floor area ratio—higher than 0.2 or 0.25 in a typical development. Since these are increased, it is hard for developers to do them without funding assistance. One of our new projects illustrates how we do this. In Gresham, an eastern suburb, a big vacant 85-acre parcel has a light rail line going through it. There is a project funded to put a light rail station in the middle. Several blocks on the south side of the diagonal rail line were privately developed by the landowner. Metro has bought seven of the blocks because we want to be involved in designing residential right around that sta- tion. The developer has put in some really progressive commercial buildings, but Metro wants to be involved in making sure we get residential at that station. One more thing outside of our MTIP is through the Transportation and Community and System Preservation (TCSP) program. We used about $600,000 from that program and another couple hundred thousand from a terrific state-funded program in Oregon called Trans- portation Growth Management. It has done a number of model codes and development guidelines. Between those two sources, we came up with about $800,000 to plan an area of around 3,000 acres that we had brought inside the urban growth boundaries. This is a new area for us. This is our first expansion since it was established, so this is new town planning. We contracted with Port- land State University’s urban studies program to docu- ment our public involvement. We are using federal funds to develop a concept that, in turn, guides local zoning, which needs to be adopted before they can actually issue permits. Again, there is a lot of benefit from having our planning authority, but nevertheless, the groundbreak- ing thing here is doing master planning with this kind of money. The bad news is that the TCSP program got com- pletely earmarked in the last round, and money that was supposed to go to smart growth went to freeway proj- ects in the worst cases. So we and others are lobbying to make sure this goes back to its roots as a grant-based program based on project merits. We are going to do a concept plan for a very large expansion of our boundary—20,000 acres likely to come in during the next few months—to do essentially a new town. We have taken $1 million out of our federal funds, not TCSP in this case, for that work. We are hoping that TCSP funding will be available in the future. As an aside, I am optimistic that even the retail sec- tor and consumers are actually interested in place, because I’ve noticed that development names are chang- ing. The old joke is that they cut down the trees and named the streets after them. Since you have to come up with a second half of the name, you had Tall Cedar Terrace, Pine Grove Estates, and Big Oak Gardens— very backyard, “my property” oriented, up until the mid-1980s. Now the developers are actually marketing with terms that planners use. Now you see Tall Cedar Place and Pine Grove Village and Big Oak Station. The last thing I’ll mention is our green streets project. This was a case where we had a gun to the head but also a lot of public interest in developing street designs that were more environmentally sound. Like Seattle, we have salmon and steelhead endangered species listings. That is a very serious issue for us. We developed two handbooks that really expand on our livable streets program. One is called Green Streets, and one is Trees for Green Streets. They are essentially best practices guides for designing streets that are entirely infiltrated so that they don’t have storm water runoff or pollutants that come off of the street surface. This is a brand new program for us, so we will be adding this into the whole divided pie of MTIP dollars that we allocate. In the past 10 years, we have allocated approxi- mately one-third of our MTIP funding to transit, about a quarter to roads, and the rest to all these new cate- gories. That money is important; even though it seems that 4 percent for boulevards isn’t very much, that is 16 projects across the region. When you count in local match, you have quadrupled the money in some cases. In this round we are going to add green streets, including retrofitting culverts that block fish passage, as another federal funding category. We will also increase our focus on centers. We are planning to spend more money on centers in the future than we already have and emphasizing more leveraging of local dollars, because we think we can. There is also a concern that we are slicing too many thin pieces of this pie. Of course, the obvious answer is that we need a bigger pie, but that goes without saying. 1 1 2 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 112

1 1 3 Discussion Tom Downs: There seemed to be several common themes. One is that each of these presentations focuses on a rapidly growing population. Each of them is in a com- munity that cares profoundly about, or at least has deep relationships to, the natural environment. And each trusts the democratic process to build consensus from the ground up. It would be interesting to question whether communities such as Pittsburgh, a region that has lost population consistently over the past 20 years and has an ambivalent feeling about its environment, would have the same set of approaches to trying to manage sprawl, which they are all struggling with, even in a declining situation. Audience question: Could the panel talk about the institutions—the MPOs, the state planning processes— that we have, and how they help or hurt? Jacob Snow: In the MPO planning process, there is really no federal requirement to have a planning factor for land use. We pay lip service to it, but we are left to our own devices to decide how we are going to deal with it. But I think the MPO process is good because we have a process that looks at transportation. There is a definite link between transportation and air quality. The federal government has always eschewed this completing the triangle—the Bermuda Triangle of transportation, air quality, and land use—because it has always felt that should be a decision left up to the locals. I think that, in effect, it divorces the development process from the transportation planning process by not having that link at least somewhere in a stronger capacity. Robert Grow: I think our MPOs developed a love–hate relationship with Envision Utah. We gave them an opportunity to be involved in this visioning process in a big way. Honestly, the MPOs could have led it if they had wanted to. They have the political base and the money to do it, but I’m not sure it is a role that MPOs are comfortable with, and many directors are road engineers. We had an interesting experience work- ing with the MPOs. Sometimes they were helpful and sometimes they were not. They were scared to death of scenarios because they were afraid that running scenar- ios would demonstrate that their conformity modeling might have holes. They were scared to death that the leg- islature would know that they have choices and could spend less money. So we were dealing with a tough polit- ical situation because every political entity you deal with has its own objectives. MPOs, at least the Wasatch Regional Council, tend to do this—negotiate with each city about what it wants. It is more of a consensus- building process than it is a leadership or visioning process. That ought to change. Neil Pedersen: I want to add that not just MPOs but local governments ought to change. We were finding that the initial reaction to smart growth (and, in partic- ular, the decisions we had made on pulling the bypasses from the project list) from local governments and there- fore the MPOs was that smart growth was a stick approach. We found that we really needed to concen- trate on marketing the carrot part. We needed to mar- ket all of the programs so the local jurisdictions saw that there were benefits from the smart growth approach. I think once they started to see the carrot side we turned the corner. Tom Kloster: Several questions came up yesterday about whether you need something like a Metro with 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 113

the regulatory authority to implement these initiatives. I think it obviously helps to be able to put everybody on the same playing field on regulations. I would point out that we at Metro care about areas outside of our boundary. “Rural reserves” is just a name we gave to areas that we care about outside our jurisdiction. We are at the mercy of the counties and what they do in those areas on the state planning program. We have relied on intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) in those areas. We have set up something called Green Corridors on state highways that connect us to other cities that have their own urban growth boundaries, to make sure we don’t grow toward each other and don’t develop those corridors and keep those areas rural. Those IGAs are flimsy right now, but we are working on them. I would make a case that Metro is actually our agency in that it is elected. This is really an outgrowth of the fact that there was a decision in the 1970s to bring parties to the table. The tool came about because we agreed there was a problem. I don’t think you start out by saying “we need an agency” to get to these things. You actually need to have consensus at the table to know what the problems are. I think that can happen in any metropolitan area. Audience question: This question is for Jacob Snow. I am interested in the notion that the monorail, at least in its first stage, was financially self-sufficient and could be privately financed. I was then curious, once the east side landowners bought out the west side landowners, about the consensus that for the next stage you would use taxpayer dollars. I was wondering whether the sec- ond stage could have been privately financed and whether the taxpayers questioned the public funding of the second phase. I am wondering if and how you dealt with it. Jacob Snow: Interestingly enough, the financing for the second phase is going to be one-third revenue bonds, one-third from a Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loan, and then the final third will be from New Starts 5309 money. We are still not using a large amount of local taxpayer dollars. But for the first time we will have a small amount of Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality funds in the Phase 2 extension. All the $650 million worth of bonds for Phase 1 will be repaid just from fare box revenue and advertising. About two-thirds of the downtown extension will be paid off by fares and advertising. The dynamics of the downtown area of Las Vegas are such that there just isn’t enough passenger traffic to support it solely from a private revenue bond placement. It is just not as dynamic as the south end of the strip, where most of the foot traffic is. Audience question: A question for all of the speakers. From the presentations that we’ve heard, it seems that among the keys to real success are effective leadership and leadership coalitions that can advance a process, the development of effective technical analysis accounting for impacts so that we can actually see what the effects of different choices are, and then a process of engaging the public in values. Yet in many regions of the country, we seem stuck with fractured local leadership and gover- nance structures that impede the emergence of effective leadership to advance that process. Robert Grow: When we did our original survey in Utah, we asked the public who was in the best position to solve growth-related issues. About 18 percent of the people said government officials; another 18 percent said community and business leaders; about 50 percent said citizens like you and me. The citizenry wants to be engaged on these issues. The problem is that things are so complicated and you have to go through an exten- sive process to get to where you can present the public with choices. Any organization could sponsor some- thing like Envision Utah. We started that as a branch of the Coalition for Utah’s Future. An MPO could sponsor an Envision Utah project. The state governor could. The state legislature could. They need to make certain they get all of the interest groups involved at the outset and create a sense of momentum in the process. We just lucked our way through it. We did a lot of things right. But we started out knowing that we are going to have the public make the choice in the long run. You always start with a sponsoring organization that does not match the group that needs to come together. We were not that organization, but we decided to help create it. In Utah, that was a long-term group called the Coalition for Utah’s Future. I don’t want people to get the impression that we just popped out of the grass one day. A group of which I was chair said, “We’re not it—but we will create the big roundtable for everybody.” Once we did that, it wasn’t a government organization anymore. So the level of cynicism that attaches to government did not attach to the organization. Neil Pedersen: In all candor, I think the process today in many metropolitan areas and states is primarily driv- en by federal regulations and by technical requirements. We have technical tools that we all would agree are inadequate. My experience, in terms of moving for- ward, is that leadership really comes from people who have a vision, who clearly articulate that vision, who get the public involved in helping to define the details of that vision and then trying to move forward. They are not bound by the federal regulations that limit the cur- rent process. They are not spending too much of their time debating the nitty-gritty of technical tools that can’t address the real issues. Tom Kloster: I actually don’t buy into the cynicism thing. I’ve been worrying about that ever since the notion that government is the problem and not the solu- tion—which started in 1980, when it became a theme in 1 1 4 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 114

the presidential campaign. In my experience, individu- als don’t care about the rhetoric if they believe they have a say and are being heard by someone at whatever the sponsoring agency is—whether it is public or not. The regulations are part of our program. What has helped us the most is being nimble and actually embrac- ing the brushfire approach: when something comes up because someone is unhappy and was probably excluded from a process that happened on the public side, we are able respond to that quickly. We make a point of responding to every public comment we get in writing. We had thousands come in on our various proj- ects. People become selective in their cynicism. They still are cynical about the Oregon Department of Transportation, frankly. But they are fine with Metro on many of the things we are doing because we have gone out and taken the time to talk to them. That open- ness and that ability to be nimble are costly and must come on the front end. You have to have people to do that job. But the elected officials have supported us because they have seen that that paves their way as well—people support them in the end. Neil Pedersen: You need a champion, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a politician, although it can be. You need someone who has respect and credibility in the community to bring those people together. More often than not, that is a single political figure. In Maryland it’s the governor. In Utah it was the governor. In Las Vegas it was a county commissioner. Some peo- ple just happen to ooze credibility. You need that kind of person to be part of your process. Audience question: My question is to Neil. You men- tioned in your presentation that the Maryland Department of Transportation shifted its priorities on the basis of the governor’s mission. There were several elements: directing toward priority areas, existing and planned developments, and emphasizing modal choices. The fourth one sounded like you look for opportunities for engaging communities in smart growth. I was wondering how that was done. Neil Pedersen: The fourth one that I recall was sup- porting other programs, specifically by engaging com- munities. That is one of the linchpins of our success, as far as I’m concerned. It comes back to a common theme among all the presentations. We try to work with com- munities on developing projects that the communities end up seeing as assets and that help in their revitaliza- tion efforts. The neighborhood conservation and urban reconstruction program that I said was the centerpiece of our smart growth program—every single one of those projects is developed by a team of community leaders working with our project managers to define what the project elements should be. Often those ele- ments end up including things funded by parties other than the state department of transportation, whether by other state agencies, local jurisdictions, or the private sector. So we are able to leverage the state transporta- tion funds to get something much larger in terms of community revitalization goals. I also want to emphasize that we really need to think about transportation supporting other smart growth programs as well, through things like our access control program and our enhancement program, and combin- ing money with a number of these other programs to achieve the broader goals. Audience question: How do state DOTs help or hurt in the drive for smart growth? Tom Kloster: I will be really frank here. State DOTs are difficult right now for us. I’ve talked to people in various states about this, and it is a common theme. There is a triangle between FHWA, state DOTs, and AASHTO, which is the highway engineers’ association that sets guidelines that then turn into standards. We’re getting blocked on implementing a lot of projects that have support from our governor and our Transporta- tion Commission. Our plan has been adopted by the Transportation Commission into the state highway plan, including our level of service policy. All of our local elected officials have shown political support. We have connected the dots the way you should to build a boulevard project on a state highway. We are now get- ting end runs on the design level. The state engineer is not stamping the plan because FHWA won’t certify it as a National Highway System route, perhaps because it will lower the level of service or create safety issues— for example, you might be requested to add in a 3-foot shy distance, which would really undermine the basic concept of the design. We are now working through that. I almost shouldn’t be talking about it because we are trying to work that out and come up with a fix because Oregon DOT is get- ting embarrassed on these projects. But I still see the reaction to treat these as isolated examples and come up with a backroom fix as opposed to doing a systematic fix. But it is a change of course for the agency to treat arterial streets differently from freeways. That is a huge step we have yet to make. Neil Pedersen: I think there is tremendous variance among state DOTs in terms of the degree to which they have adopted context-sensitive design, which is a spe- cific issue we should talk about for smart growth prin- ciples in general. To be candid, one of the things that has enabled Maryland perhaps to go further than a lot of other states is that we don’t have the same tort lia- bility issues that a lot of other state DOTs have. State engineers are largely driven by tort liability concerns. That needs to be looked at on a broader level. We have been frustrated, quite frankly, within the AASHTO community in terms of the conservativeness on a num- ber of these context-sensitive design issues being driven by liability concerns. 1 1 5HOW DO SMART GROWTH TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS VARY WITH LOCATION? 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 115

Robert Grow: I sometimes refer to our department of transportation as the department of roads. The atti- tude is, somebody else plans it, and we just build what you want. You grow there; we’ll build it. That philo- sophical attitude is taking a long time to change. We have a lot of younger people in the department who are moving in that direction, and I see that changing. But it has been very strange to me that they have no concept like Maryland’s, that what they are going to build has an impact. Jacob Snow: I think that state DOTs, around the country by and large, are a problem for the process of smart growth going forward, because many of them refuse to suballocate flex funds. Those flex funds can be valuable in implementing a local or regional smart growth program. If a state DOT is going to take the uni- lateral approach that come hell or high water it is going to use those flex funds for roadways, then we are not going to see the things that need to happen in the regions and local areas from a smart growth standpoint. 1 1 6 SMART GROWTH AND TRANSPORTATION: ISSUES AND LESSONS LEARNED 63805_079_126 4/7/05 2:55 AM Page 116