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Road transfer discussion likely to continue (NCLM Southern City)

The secretary of the state’s Department of Transportation believes there is room for improvement in the process of how to consider any possible transfer of responsibility for state roads to municipalities. The secretary shared his views during an N.C. League of Municipalities annual conference concurrent session on “Transportation in the 21st Century” and in a follow-up email.

NCDOT Secretary Gene Conti told attendees at the annual conference that he is not in favor of transferring the responsibility from the state to the cities, towns and counties, but that it is a topic for discussion.

“The process for such transfers in the past has been somewhat ad hoc and disjointed, and the DOT supports dialog with the League on a process to bring uniformity and consistency to that process,” Conti said in a follow-up.

This idea of transferring state-maintained roads to local governments was discussed during the past legislative session and was introduced in HB 881/SB 1001 – Transportation Corridor Mapping Changes. The idea was that NCDOT would reclassify state roads with an SR designation within municipal borders to cities and towns. Municipalities would then be left to maintain these 5,000 miles of roads with no clear source of additional revenues. However, the transfer language was removed from the bill thanks to the work of the League and the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition.

Sens. Dan Clodfelter and Bob Rucho co-wrote in a June Charlotte Observer piece that transferring responsibility was appropriate “since it is local planning, zoning and land use decisions that drive the need for improvements, upgrades and repairs to the local network.” They argued that today’s state roads system “is not capable of meeting the transportation needs of a state that has become dramatically more diverse and urbanized.”

However, Durham Mayor Bill Bell and High Point Mayor Becky Smothers quickly responded in a coauthored piece that this transfer would not result in an improved system but would instead result in 100 county transportation departments, thus resulting in less efficiency. They noted that revenues for transportation are continuing to shrink while demands on roads are increasing.

“As we’ve stated before, the funds to care for our state’s roads are increasingly inadequate,” said Bell, vice chair of the Metropolitan Mayors Coalition and co-chair of that organization’s transportation committee, along with Smothers. “To shift that responsibility to the cities, towns and counties in this state would essentially be an unfunded mandate, the result of which would be higher city taxes for our citizens. Our cities are already doing the best they can with what they have to build and maintain roads, and our counties should not be forced to get into the ‘road business.’”

That said, NCDOT is “interested in having a dialogue with local governments about the future maintenance and construction of secondary roads within their boundaries,” Conti said. “We recognize that there are serious issues associated with any such transfer. It would not be fair to turn over responsibility for the roads without giving local governments the resources to pay for it. And many local governments don’t have the expertise or equipment to handle local road maintenance.”

NCDOT has formed an Intergovernmental Advisory Group to strengthen the relationship between NCDOT and local governments. Julie White, director of the Metro Mayors Coalition, and Paul Meyer, the League’s chief legislative counsel, both serve on this advisory group.

“The Intergovernmental Advisory Group is working to improve the communications between NCDOT and cities, among other issues,” said White. “Hopefully a more robust dialogue will result in a better understanding of all the concerns with a potential road transfer.”

Why big city pols are frustrated with Obama’s agenda—and why statehouses love it (The Atlantic.com)

During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt frequently entertained his friend and fellow New Yorker Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City, at the White House. La Guardia would tell the president a “sad story” about some project he wanted funded and Roosevelt would buckle: “Tears run down my cheeks and the first thing I know he has wangled another $50 million.” La Guardia was manipulative and self-serving, but he also helped guide a policy that proved critical to beating the Depression. Roosevelt’s economic agenda succeeded in large part as an urban agenda. Over time, mayors became darlings of the White House and their lobbying arm, the Conference of Mayors, dedicated itself to promoting New Deal endeavors in exchange for federal largesse.

Today’s mayors enjoy the same access to President Obama as their predecessors did to FDR, but so far they’re seeing different results: deteriorating urban conditions and a stimulus package adapted to the needs of state governors. Interviews with eleven mayors from across the country reveal that big-city chiefs are waiting anxiously to see whether the first big-city president in decades will treat cities as central to his agenda.

Last summer, when Obama was still on the campaign trail, he seemed eager to listen. At a June 2008 speech to the Conference of Mayors, he pledged to create the first urban policy office in the White House. The mayors of Minneapolis, Denver, and Dallas all consulted with Obama’s team as early as October 2008, reminding the candidate that cities provide the vast majority of American jobs and produce the bulk of its GDP.

These arguments won mayors a candid and bipartisan relationship with the White House. Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, who heads the Republican Mayors and Local Officials coalition, regularly chats with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top administration officials. “I don’t think they would have spent their time talking to me if they didn’t really care what I thought,” he says. Another Republican mayor called certain energy grant applications “crap,” a comment he still marvels at making to the country’s second-in-command.

In the midst of this promising dialogue, however, the economic crisis has taken a firm hold. A September survey of city budget officers warned that “the nation’s cities will most likely still be realizing the effects of the current downturn in 2010, 2011, and beyond.” Unemployment rates are above 10 percent in almost a third of metro areas—as high as 16 percent in cities like Detroit and Flint—and service cuts and layoffs are likely. Reacting to these conditions, voters earlier this month sacked at least one incumbent mayor, Seattle’s Greg Nickels, and gave an unexpected scare to another, New York City’s Michael Bloomberg.

Now mayors are pointing out that the stimulus package was supposed to help cities avoid this nightmare scenario. During the bill’s conception, mayors stressed that a state-focused stimulus would bring slow, inefficient results, and that more jobs could be created if money were funneled directly to urban areas. In a report issued last winter, the U.S. Conference of Mayors listed more than 15,000 “ready-to-go” projects that could provide 1.2 million new jobs in just two years.

So what happened, exactly? “I think we were listened to,” says Stamford, Connecticut, Mayor Dannel Malloy, who will run for governor of his state as a Democrat in 2010. “I just think we were then ignored. And I don’t think we were necessarily ignored by the president. I think we were ignored by the Congress.” Vice President Biden, the stimulus sheriff, has echoed this explanation. In a September speech on the stimulus, he lamented that “Congress, in its wisdom, decided that the governors should have a bigger input.”

But the White House can’t blame this shift entirely on Capitol Hill. Biden, Emanuel, and other administration officials spent late nights and much political capital shaping the finer details of the stimulus package in ways that thrilled states but disappointed cities. As Brookings scholar Thomas Mann has observed, “Obama’s hands were all over this bill from start to finish. … The nitty-gritty legislative work identifying where and how these decisions could be implemented … was done in Congress with the direct participation of key Obama administration staff.”

Representative Chaka Fattah, chair of the urban caucus in the House of Representatives, acknowledges that Congress privileged states over urban areas when drafting the stimulus bill. “If you had nine dollars missing in social service funds to a city, there would be a call for a grand jury investigation,” he told me recently, contrasting this with the billions of dollars misplaced and largely forgotten in Iraq. “There was a great deal of concern about how to

[fund] things that were needed and not end up with headlines that were going to be problematic at the end of the day.”

Though Fattah can list a slew of funding streams in the stimulus package that he says will eventually benefit urban areas, mayors remain skeptical. Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer jokes that some mayors have “seen money go to building roads where there are more deer than people.” Mayor Cornett is blunter. In his us-versus-them view, “It was either going to be a governors’ stimulus package or a mayors’ stimulus package, and this is a governors’ stimulus package.”

The evidence seems to be on the mayors’ side. In July, The New York Times analyzed the distribution of stimulus money, particularly the $26.6 billion that had been allocated for roads and transportation projects. The federal government left the details up to states, which, the Times noted, “have a long history of giving short shrift to major metropolitan areas.” After looking at approved transportation projects in all 50 states, the authors concluded, “It is clear that the stimulus program will continue that pattern of spending disproportionately on rural areas.” North Carolina state stimulus overseer Dempsey Benton agrees that the federal-state allocation formula “has been a source of frustration,” favoring country roads over urban freeways.

Mayors are hopeful that Obama will eventually turn his attention back to federal urban policy. The president has already made good on his promise to create a White House urban affairs office, a historically significant step for cities. Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter treated urban areas as warrens of poverty and racial conflict that would implode without sufficient attention. Richard Nixon took the opposite approach, espousing a theory of “benign neglect” toward urban problems that set the tone for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Even Bill Clinton, widely viewed as a champion of cities, struggled to come up with a workable plan for metropolitan areas. Just a few weeks after the administration issued a national urban policy report, Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros expressed concern in a memo to the president. “We do not have enough to stand on,” Cisneros wrote frankly, adding, “We can be caught flatfooted by the violent outbreaks which will stem from the anger of the cities.”

Today’s mayors are urging the White House to embrace cities not as problems needing to be solved but as catalysts of long-term economic well-being. “America needs a jobs bill,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told me recently. “There are ways to leverage what cities are doing through federal partnerships that won’t even cost a lot of money up front. We need to be thinking of those creative partnerships.”

So far, the most notable activity of the urban affairs office has been a “listening tour.” The director of the White House Office of Urban Affairs, former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, has led the tour into three cities over the last five months, meeting with local innovators in each location. “Our mission in developing a new urban policy,” he told me in a statement, “is to make our cities and metropolitan areas more economically competitive and environmentally sustainable, and the critical investments being made through the Recovery Act are helping us achieve those goals.” But as stimulus funds continue to pass their cities by, mayors are looking for more than good listeners. “Listening is not an action. Listening is passive,” says Malloy, the mayor of Stamford. “Action requires definitive steps.” For that, America’s mayors say they are still waiting.

Harry Moroz is a research associate at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.
DISPATCH NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Rethinking the Way on Infrastructure (The Hill)

With the specter of a jobless recovery looming, Washington has been casting about for ways to put Americans back to work. In the process, the political class has re-discovered infrastructure.

Just this past week leaders in Congress and the president’s own Economic Recovery Advisory Board have called on the federal government to pump billions of dollars into new roads, bridges and rails.

Of course, we’ve seen this before. Since the time the Interstates were finished transportation has been more about job growth than the national economy. President George H. W. Bush was widely quoted in 1991 when he said the federal transportation law he signed “could be summed up in three words: jobs, jobs, jobs.”

But this approach ignores the real power of infrastructure to generate productive, sustainable and inclusive long-term growth, not short-term jobs.

This past summer, National Economic Council Director Larry Summers laid out a vision for the next American economy: one that is lower-carbon, innovation-fueled, export-oriented and opportunity-rich.

Yet current federal infrastructure policy directly undermines this ambitious vision.

A lower carbon future means our infrastructure investments must address global warming, caused, in large part, by burning coal and oil. Yet transportation alone accounts for 28 percent of U.S. emissions and is nearly all petroleum-fueled. Efforts to reduce that dependence are to date ephemeral.

To lead on innovation, infrastructure policy needs to make quantum leaps on everything from clean technology and renewable energy to high-speed rail and smart grid creation. While some progress is being made, infrastructure debates still revolve around the amount of spending, rather than its quality and impact.

A more export-oriented economy will require high-functioning global ports and transportation hubs that support, rather than impede, the movement of people and goods. So unlike competitors in Europe and China, which have national freight policies and invest heavily in their major ports and hubs, the U.S. government largely expects our gateways to modernize their facilities and keep pace with global commerce on their own.

And to ensure our investments are opportunity-rich they can no longer subsidize the excessive decentralization of people and jobs. Sprawl has a sticker shock. Household spending on transportation has risen across the board and is now the second largest expense for most American households, eating up 19 cents out of every dollar. Utilities such as electricity and natural gas consume 7 percent but are a disproportionately larger burden for low-income families.

So at the precise time that the nation desperately needs to prioritize its limited resources, the federal response has been mostly to keep throwing money at the problem, without any meaningful attempt to update our policies to the realities of today.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the stimulus, is illustrative in this regard. Infrastructure makes up a substantial share of the recovery package, about a quarter of the total excluding the tax cuts. Using the existing federal delivery system and focusing on shovel-ready projects thwarted any conversation about real reform. The one performance target, jobs created, has produced uneven and opaque results so far.

Nevertheless, the pressure for jobs in the near term is intense. At minimum we should focus any additional investments on repairing the nation’s existing crumbling infrastructure, helping transit agencies avoid drastic cutbacks in their workforce and their service, and holding the states and metropolitan entities responsible for their performance.

But to truly produce real prosperity, federal leadership, as with the interstates in the 1950s, is more necessary than ever and should advance an updated vision identifying strategic, transformative infrastructure investments of critical importance to national economic competitiveness. That vision should include robust plans for freight movement, the electric grid, and water infrastructure across state borders and between metropolitan areas.

We also need the federal government to empower our metropolitan areas to use infrastructure and mechanisms like congestion pricing and transit to improve mobility and choice and enhance sustainable patterns of development.

And we desperately need a new way of financing infrastructure. A merit-driven national infrastructure bank could be the vehicle for green-lighting those infrastructure projects (from road and rails to ports and pipes) that have the highest return on investment rather than the greatest political reward.

These are the strategies for an infrastructure agenda that truly positions the country for the stormy, competitive decades ahead.

The recovery, we now know, will be long, messy and uneven. Since what preceded the downturn was anything but normal, there will be no “return to normal.” The same should go for America’s infrastructure.
Bruce Katz, Vice President and Director, Metropolitan Policy Program
Robert Puentes, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program
The Hill
NOVEMBER 20, 2009 —

Mayors Sound Alarm Over Drop in City Revenues (Wall Street Journal)

WASHINGTON — Mayors from four U.S. cities said they are facing a once-in-a-generation fiscal crisis and that federal stimulus funds have, so far, been largely unhelpful in helping them balance budgets hit by steep drops in nearly every source of municipal revenue.

The comments, from mayors of Philadelphia, San Jose, Calif; Mesa, Ariz., and Bowling Green, Ky., at a panel discussion sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the National League of Cities, underscore how the recession for local government is far from over.

Mesa’s mayor, Scott Smith, said the steep drops in sales-tax revenue, the city’s primary source of money, are “changing our reality.”

“We treat this financial crisis as something we’re not going to get out of,” said Mr. Smith, whose city has about 500,000 citizens and is in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Even as economists declare the recession over, local revenues continue to fall. That’s because the lion’s share of their receipts — sales, income and property taxes — are connected to the job market and real-estate prices. Jobs and real-estate prices are expected to lag the broader economic recovery, reducing city revenues for months or years after the technical end of the recession.

“This is unknown for our generation,” said Chris Hoene, director of the center for research and innovation at the National League of Cities. Mr. Hoene said it was likely to be 18 to 24 months before local government revenues resume growing.

The mayors said deep budget gaps have forced them to make cuts to basic services including police and fire protection, that the financial crisis has turned cities and states against each other and that fiscal strains emphasize the need for money-saving changes to pension and health benefits in the heavily unionized public sector. “Change has to come and this moment of crisis is going to force it,” said Michael Nutter, mayor of Philadelphia.

While federal stimulus funds have helped states close budget gaps and preserved jobs for many state and school-board employees, the mayors said federal money hasn’t done much to ease their day-to-day budget problems. “The stimulus is going to special things,” said Chuck Reed, mayor of San Jose.

Beyond budget and services cuts, the mayors discussed new ways to raise revenue at a time when incomes are stagnant and the national unemployment rate is at 10.2%. Philadelphia, for instance, has temporarily increased its sales tax while Mesa has levied a property tax for the first time.

Write to Conor Dougherty at [email protected]
By CONOR DOUGHERTY
NOVEMBER 19, 2009, 3:48 P.M. ET

Accident spurs state to study bridges (News and Observer)

RALEIGH After the second person in four years plunged through a narrow gap between I-440 Beltline bridges, state Department of Transportation officials Monday launched a study of 17,000 bridges aimed at preventing similar deaths.

“We’re trying to determine the magnitude of this problem,” said Terry Gibson, the state highway administrator. “I’ve got our folks across the state … studying every bridge in the state that has a gap like this.”

Carroll Lee Eames Jr. of Willow Spring was driving to Crabtree Valley Mall about 6:45 p.m. Friday to buy gifts for his 10-year-old daughter and 3-year-old stepdaughter when he stopped to aid victims of a three-car pileup on the Outer Beltline bridge over Crabtree Creek, between Glenwood Avenue and Six Forks Road.

A Raleigh police report said Eames was in danger of being struck by oncoming cars that swerved to avoid the accident. He jumped over a 32-inch concrete median barrier on the inside breakdown lane and fell about 30 feet to his death on the rocky bank of Crabtree Creek.

The accident took place after dark on a stretch of highway without overhead lights.

“I feel like the state took my son’s life away,” said Carroll Eames Sr. of Smithfield, Lee’s father. “He was just trying to help somebody. The state had to know it was dangerous.”

It was the second fatal plunge from the Beltline bridges over Crabtree Creek in four years. Todd Fletcher of Wilson County fell from the Inner Beltline bridge after stopping on a rainy night in October 2005, also to help after an accident.

“After Todd’s death, you would have expected DOT to entirely safeguard against this risk – especially at the very spot that Todd died,” said Michael Patrick of Chapel Hill, attorney for Fletcher’s father, Don Fletcher of Wilson County. The N.C. Industrial Commission is considering a wrongful death claim filed by the elder Fletcher in 2007.

DOT officials defended the corrective steps they took after Fletcher’s death.

The department spent $31,400 in 2007 to erect a fence on the Inner Beltline bridge, doubling the guard rail height to 64 inches – but without adding a similar fence on the Outer Beltline bridge a few feet away.

Jon Nance, DOT’s chief operations engineer, said the fence was needed because the Inner Beltline bridge is slightly higher than the Outer Beltline bridge. That could have made it difficult for Fletcher to see the gap between the two bridges.

But DOT engineers concluded that a second fence was not needed for the outer bridge. They figured that someone standing on the Outer Beltline bridge – as Eames did Friday night – would notice the concrete rail and fence of the higher Inner Beltline bridge nearby.

“We thought the ability to see the abutment for the other bridge was much more pronounced as you looked up,” Nance said.
DOT will decide what to do on the Outer Beltline bridge after police and department engineers have investigated the details of Eames’ death, Gibson said. Safety engineers and bridge inspectors will look for similar hazards across the state.

“This is a rare issue that occurs,” Gibson said. “This is not something that happens a lot.”

DOT will search bridge files and other reports to find out whether there have been similar accidents elsewhere, he said. Such falls often would not show up on police traffic accident reports, he said.

DOT does not have uniform guidelines that make protective rails the same size on all bridges, he said. In the past, DOT has added fences after incidents on other bridges where pedestrians fell or, in one case, where pedestrians threw bricks and bottles on cars and trucks passing underneath.

Meeker wants changes

Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker said the city drafted a letter Monday asking DOT to fix the Crabtree bridge and find any similar hazards in bridges across Raleigh.

“We have to make sure there are no others,” Meeker said. “For this to happen twice now in the same place proves that at least some kind of structural change needs to be made at that location.”

In the wrongful death claim against DOT for the 2005 death of Todd Fletcher, Patrick cited evidence of similar falls from the Glenwood Avenue bridges over Crabtree Creek.

DOT erected a fence there in 1977 – and again after Glenwood was widened and the gap between the bridges narrowed following a fall in 2003.

Eames wasn’t the only person to fall off the Outer Beltline bridge after the three-car accident Friday night. Luis Jesus Coyt of Smithfield, a passenger in one of the cars, fell but suffered only minor injuries, Raleigh police spokeswoman Laura Hourigan said.

Eames, who grew up in Smithfield, had returned home Thursday from New York, where he was a groomsman in his friend Wei Zhao’s wedding. Zhao owns the Peace China restaurant in downtown Raleigh.

The two met while Eames was doing maintenance work for the Seaboard Station shopping center. About six months ago, Eames was laid off, and Zhao hired him to do odd jobs around the restaurant.

“He was such an honest person,” Zhao said. “I’m grateful to have had a friend like him.”

Eames had been living with friends for the past several months until he found permanent work. His sister, Marie Tanner, said he was engaged to remarry his former wife in April. Together they had a 10-year-old daughter, Ocean.

Family members said Eames loved to help other people, even when it was inconvenient. It was common for him to stop on the side of the road to change a stranger’s tire.

“And even though he never had a lot of money,” said his uncle, Adam Eames, “he wouldn’t accept any from the people he helped.”

[email protected] or 919-829-4527
Published Tue, Dec 01, 2009 04:57 AM
Modified Tue, Dec 01, 2009 11:36 AM

Sec. LaHood: Gas tax likely to see debate in Congress soon (The Hill)

A federal gas tax hike is likely to appear on lawmakers’ radars again this year as they search for new ways to fund the country’s transportation programs, the department’s secretary suggested on Monday.

During a summit in Fort Worth, Texas, Transportation chief Ray LaHood predicted the federal government’s gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon would not be enough to offset the nearly $500-million gap between how much revenue is available and how much money the department hopes to receive next year.

That dilemma, he said, would present Congress with two choices: Cut some programs or consider increasing fees, including the federal gas tax — an idea LaHood discussed, but did not explicitly endorse, during Monday’s conference.

“To index the federal fuel tax, that’s something Congress is going to have to decide. As we get into the reauthorization bill, the debate will be how we fund all the things we want to do,” he said, as reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“The idea of indexing the taxes that are collected at the gas pump is something I believe Congress will debate,” he added. “When the gas tax was raised in 1992 or 1993, in the Clinton administration, there was a big debate whether it should be indexed. At that time, they thought there’d be a sufficient amount of money collected. Now we know that isn’t the case. That is one way to keep up with the decline in driving, and more fuel-efficient cars.”

LaHood took careful note to stress Congress, not the Obama administration, would have to drive debate on a possible gas tax hike.

However, previous attempts to raise the country’s at-the-pump fee have encountered stiff congressional opposition from both parties.

When House Democrats on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee proposed such an increase earlier this year, vulnerable Blue Dog Democrats balked, putting the party’s leadership in a bind.

A number of Republicans reacted similarly, and time has unlikely abated their concerns.

Many in the GOP have signaled a strong disapproval for a number of similar fees Democrats have tried to introduce this year to pay for healthcare reform and a troop increase in Afghanistan, among other legislative efforts, further making a gas tax hike difficult in 2009 or 2010.

By Tony Romm – 11/30/09 04:50 PM ET
Source:
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/69815-lahood-gas-tax-one-way-to-pay-for-transportation-budget

LaHood announces money for transit projects (AP)

NEW ORLEANS — The federal government is making available $280 million for street cars and other public transportation projects aimed at creating jobs and more walkable, environmentally-friendly communities.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made the announcement Tuesday at a streetcar barn in New Orleans. The city, which has been trying to overhaul its public transit system since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was LaHood’s first stop on a listening tour on federal transportation policy.

The last transportation spending bill expired in September. While President Barack Obama’s administration has sought a reprieve into 2011, given the federal stimulus package that passed earlier this year and was aimed largely at public works projects, Congress hasn’t agreed to an extension past mid-December.

LaHood said there’s a “pent up demand” for infrastructure work around the country but that it would cost up to $500 billion to do all of it. He said the administration supports a “robust” transportation bill but wants to see projects that encourage innovation, reduce carbon emissions and help to improve quality of life in communities, urban and rural. The new round of grants, expected to be awarded on a competitive basis next year, is in line with those priorities.

New Orleans hopes to make a case for grants and other federal dollars. Mayor Ray Nagin called public transportation — from biodiesel buses being put into service to hoped-for streetcar line expansions and the addition of bike paths to help spark neighborhood-level revitalization — important to the city’s overall recovery efforts.

While the streetcar service is back, the Regional Transit Authority says ridership, overall, is still only about one-third of the 33 million annual riders before Katrina. The city is still rebuilding its tourism-based economy. The agency’s bus fleet, largely wiped out by flood waters, is a fraction of the size it once was and there are fewer people living in New Orleans.

Transit Authority Chief Executive Justin Augustine acknowledged the need for innovation in seeking to attract more riders.

“Public transportation represents regional economic vitality when done correctly,” he said.

The RTA has eyed more than $100 million for streetcar expansion, and Nagin said he believes the city is well-positioned to secure a “significant” level of funding for transportation projects in early 2010.

By BECKY BOHRER (AP) – 1 day ago

How Deadly Are Rural Roads? It Depends On Your Definition Of Rural (NPR)

The final story in NPR’s week-long series “On the Road to Safety” focused on the nation’s most dangerous roads — rural highways extending beyond cities and suburbs. I reported in that story the clear and convincing statistics from the National Highway Transportation Administration: 56% of the country’s traffic fatalities take place on rural roads, even though only 23% of the nation’s population lives in rural America.

But how deadly depends on how rural the road actually turns out to be, according to further analysis of the NHTSA numbers, and NHTSA’s own new numbers crunching.

These additional analyses show the risk in making firm declarations about any rural trend. Different government agencies define rural differently. In fact, some clearly remote and sparsely populated towns complained bitterly a few years ago when the Office of Management and Budget changed its definition of rural and made these places metropolitan or micropolitan, even though locals couldn’t see, hear or smell any city from there.

It takes someone steeped in the nuances of rural statistics and government definitions to sort this stuff out so I turned to John Cromartie, a rural geographer at the Economic Research Service, an agency in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Last year, Cromartie co-authored a thorough article on the multiple and competing definitions of rural that you can read here.

As Cromartie noted:

The nation’s rural population “ranges from 17 to 49%, depending on the definition used.”

NHTSA uses the Census Bureau’s definition of rural in pinpointing the locations of traffic accidents. Basically, any place outside a city or town of more than 2,500 people is rural in the Census world. So, in those places beyond the boundaries of even the smallest cities, the share of highway fatalities approaches 60%.

But the portion of fatalities on rural roads drops to just 27%, according to Cromartie’s analysis, if only small towns (of less than 2,500) and the low-density countryside are included in the calculation. Throw together the cities, suburbs and exurbs (outer suburbs) and the urban share of fatalities rises to 70%.

NHTSA itself bolstered this fresh statistical perspective in a report released on Monday. It takes traffic fatalities and plots them based on proximity to cities. And it concludes that a whopping 86% of traffic deaths occur in cities and in the first 10 miles of rural highway adjacent to cities. Just five miles outside of town the number is 73%.

This seems to indicate that the farther out you drive the safer you’ll be, at least statistically and generally. Get down to specific states and highways and the risk changes. In largely rural states (Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana) the rural share of highway deaths remains close to 60%, even with this proximity analysis. But even states with vast rural regions, like Pennsylvania, have the highest fatality rates within 10 miles of cities.

The new NHTSA study says that this proximity perspective is instructive. “Highway safety planners seeking to reduce rural fatalities in these states should concentrate their resources in the rural areas adjoining urban areas,” the study concludes.

That would seem to feed into the highway safety funding disparity described by Jerry Donaldson of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.

“The highways that need the money most are the ones that will usually get the least,” Donaldson told NPR, in reference to dangerous rural roads. “And the reason is because you put your money where you already have a … highway with higher traffic volumes serving a more densely populated area.”

Donaldson also notes that the actual rate of fatalities based on miles driven is still higher on rural roads no matter where they are.

“The question is whether you are counting fatalities or measuring travel risk by the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled,” Donaldson added. “By the latter measure, rural highways outside the 10-mile perimeter, especially two-lane, two-way roads with poor alignment, cross-section, and roadside design, are clearly — and by far — the most dangerous highways.”

The fatality rate on rural roads, per 100 million miles traveled, is 2.5 times the fatality rate on urban roads

For evidence of the danger, consider the section of U.S. Highway 6 in Utah that was featured in my story. Its most dangerous sections are not within 10 miles of even the most loosely defined boundaries of any city. Activists demanding safety improvements found it difficult to compete with highway projects in and closer to population centers.

The new NHTSA study does not characterize the types of highways within the 10 mile buffer zones adjacent to cities, so it’s difficult to know whether these are highways with outdated designs in need of safety upgrades. It’s not known whether they have four lanes or two.

So, generally, highways in rural areas are still more deadly.

If all this is a bit too complicated to discern, just do this: Slow down; stay alert; buckle that seat belt; put down the cell phone; and be vigilant. That improves your odds everywhere.

(Howard Berkes is NPR’s rural affairs correspondent.)
December 1, 2009

Shape of jobs creation bill unclear ahead of White House summit (The Hill)

Democrats have a slew of legislative proposals to pick from when they begin crafting a job creation bill in earnest this week.

Lawmakers, prompted into action by the double-digit unemployment rate, are considering business tax credits for new hires, state fiscal aid, extended unemployment and COBRA benefits, a $600 billion transportation reauthorization bill, a “work share” program, aid to homeowners facing foreclosure and increased loans for small businesses.

Congress and the White House have yet to coalesce around one approach. But congressional leaders said that some measure is necessary now that the jobless rate has reached 10.2 percent, a 26-year high. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned of an even worse unemployment situation if lawmakers fail to act.

“If we pull our punch, as they did in the mid-’30s, we shouldn’t be surprised if history repeats itself,” Pelosi said during a conference call with bloggers last week.

The direction of the plan will likely become more clear after Thursday, when President Barack Obama will host business leaders, union officials and economists at the White House for a jobs summit.

One proposal Obama is seriously considering is a tax credit for businesses that bring on new workers. Obama asked his economic team to examine the hiring tax credit several weeks ago, Jared Bernstein, the chief economist for Joe Biden, told reporters during a briefing last week.

Obama as a presidential candidate proposed a similar plan, one that would award a $3,000 credit to businesses for each new, full-time worker that they hired. But lawmakers opposed the plan when they were writing the stimulus in February, arguing that there were more direct ways of spurring economic action.

Both liberals and conservatives have been skeptical of the hiring tax credit.

Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), the chairman of the new bipartisan Congressional Jobs NOW! Caucus, said that passing the tax credit alone would be a “short-sighted” and “foolhardy” approach because it doesn’t do much to help the unemployed and underemployed.

A hiring tax credit is “a way for getting businesses money for jobs they would have created anyway,” said Robert Borosage, co-director of the left-leaning economic policy group, Campaign for America’s Future, echoing an argument made by the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Labor unions have instead been pushing instead for fiscal aid to help states stave off teacher and public employee layoffs, transportation and other infrastructure investments and increased loans for small businesses.

Plans for more infrastructure spending and expanding small businesses’ access to credit have gained currency in Congress.

Pelosi last summer signaled support for the $600 billion, 6-year transportation reauthorization bill, which was reported out of committee by House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar (D-Minn.) but has stalled in the Senate.

One of Oberstar’s top lieutenants, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), has proposed paying for transportation investments, new job creation legislation and deficit reduction with revenue from a new financial transaction tax, but Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has opposed the new levy.

Rush and other leaders of the Jobs NOW! Caucus, which includes 128 House members, said that they would be open to funding infrastructure and transportation projects using funds that remain in the $787 billion stimulus or the $700 billion bank bailout, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), for transportation projects.

Rush said that there’s “enormous dissatisfaction” over the stimulus and the TARP because they haven’t done enough to create jobs for Americans seeking work.

“The jobless American Recovery Act, that’s what we’re looking for,” said Rush, playing a pun off of the official name of the stimulus.

In the upper chamber, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and a group of Democrats have proposed using TARP money to start a new $50 billion fund to provide small businesses with more loans. More than $300 billion in TARP remained as of October, according to the special inspector general examining the bailout fund.

Other proposals include a $2 billion plan by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to provide credit to help homeowners avoid foreclosure and a $600 million program, championed by Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), to provide unemployment benefits to employees who reduce their work hours to help their companies avoid cutting jobs.

The push for a new jobs bill comes as Democrats and the White House head into a mid-term election year with their poll numbers sliding. As unemployment has increased, Democrats have fallen behind Republicans in Gallup’s generic congressional ballot. Gallup’s November survey had Republicans ahead 48 percent to 44 percent, marking the first time Republicans have held a lead in the generic congressional survey this year. Obama’s average approval rating has fallen to 48.6 percent, after staying above 50 percent in most surveys through most of this year, according to Pollster.com, which averages each presidential approval survey.

Obama has been playing defense on his past efforts to jumpstart the economy, and especially on the $787 billion stimulus. Republicans have repeatedly criticized the package for not doing what White House economists said it would do back in January. The Obama economic aides said a substantial stimulus package would keep the jobless rate around 8 percent or lower and that the absence of a package would allow the jobless rate to rise to around 9 percent.

Obama last week said that the package is responsible for most of the 2.8 percent growth rate in the third quarter, which is the first quarter that the U.S. economy expanded since late 2007. But he signaled that he plans to do more to create jobs, even as he shepherds a controversial healthcare reform bill and a troop surge in Afghanistan through a divided Congress.

“Our economy is growing for the first time in more than a year, and we know that economic growth is a prerequisite for job growth,” Obama said. “But, having said that, what I emphasize today is we cannot sit back and be satisfied, given the extraordinarily high unemployment levels that we’ve seen. We have only taken the first step.”

Republicans in Congress haven’t opposed new measures to create jobs, but they suggested that Democrats could do more to help the economy by ending their push for healthcare reform, which GOP members argue would increase taxes and add to the $12 trillion federal debt.

“Pulling down the job-killing healthcare spending bill would be a good place to start,” a Senate GOP aide said.

By Walter Alarkon – 11/30/09 06:00 AM ET

Project Safe Neighborhoods targets ‘gun-toting criminals’ (WRAL.com)

Project Safe Neighborhoods is cracking down on gun crime, gangs and repeat offenders in communities across eastern North Carolina, federal prosecutors and local law police officers touted at a press conference Monday.

The operation is a joint effort by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that started in the 1990s.

“We’re here as a team to assist the communities and community organizations to take back these communities from gang members and drug dealers and gun-toting criminals,” said George Holding, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina.

In the 1990s, the Eastern District prosecuted less than 100 gun crimes a year. Since the creation of the Safe Neighborhoods and Anti-Gang task force, that average has jumped to 300. Last year, the district ranked fourth in the U.S. for firearms prosecutions.

(See cases prosecuted by Project Safe Neighborhoods.)

Convictions for gun crimes in federal court results in significantly stiffer sentences than state courts could impose.

For example, in August, a federal judge sentenced Kendricus Marquell Williams, 21, of Raleigh to 226 years in prison after a jury convicted him of a robbery spree in which a store clerk was shot.

“To be slinging rocks (of crack cocaine) and having guns in your pocket 24-7 will get you 24 years,” Raleigh Police Chief Harry Dolan said. “We’ve got to send that message to change your life and to help so many young people.”

Those stiff sentences are only part of the strategy of Project Safe Neighborhoods, though, officials said.

Team leaders utilize neighborhood outreach programs to reach offenders before they commit serious crimes.

Of a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to Wake County, $1 million is dedicated to gang prevention and $500,000 to anti-recidivism directed at gang members who have served time. Raleigh is focusing its efforts on the southeastern section of the city that has the highest rate of gang-related crime.

“This strategy gives identified offenders a second chance to turn their lives around and become productive citizens,” Holding said in a release.

Reporter: Cullen Browder
Posted: Today at 12:32 p.m.