Madison is paving itself into oblivion

Thursday, October 27, 2011

From a commentary by Michael Barrett on the Daily Page of Isthmus:

Over the last 11 years, the city of Madison has increased pavement spending at 11 times the rate of population growth plus inflation. So why have both reconstructions and highway expansions increased at far above the inflation and population growth rate? That depends on whom you ask.

Ask a progressive alder from an isthmus neighborhood why he or she votes for all the paving (and they all do), and the answer ranges from roads-as-public-works-savior to roads-as-bargaining-chip-for-park-benches. Never mind the illegality of such log rolling, or the good old fashioned sexism favoring "breadwinner"/manly road building over "women's work"/social services.

Ask a fiscally conservative alder, and you'll find out that they are actually closet socialists -- albeit a socialism for cars, not people.

The mushy-middle alders are easily cowed by the city engineers into believing that unless every street is in freshly steamrolled condition, they will be thrown out of office.

And so we pave. A lot.

Gas tax doesn't cover cost of roads

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

From an article by Larry Sandler in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The state gas tax would have to rise 50 cents - a 152% increase, to nearly 83 cents a gallon - to cover road costs that are now being paid through property taxes or other general tax revenue, a new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers say.

The study, commissioned by the environmental group 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin, challenges some common claims about how transportation is funded in this state.

Highway advocates typically contend roads pay for themselves, through gas taxes and user fees. But that's only true of state-owned highways, which account for just 10% of all Wisconsin roads, the study says.

When local roads are included, property taxes and other general taxes cover 41% to 55% of road costs, says the study, "Who Pays for Roads in Wisconsin?" For local roads alone, property taxes paid 83% of costs, or $9.9 billion, over the five-year period that ended June 30, 2008, found the study, which is being released this week.

That comes out to 20% of the average property tax bill, said Steve Hiniker, executive director of 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin. If roads were fully funded by gas taxes and vehicle fees, local governments could afford to cut property taxes and increase services, instead of raising taxes and cutting services, the environmental group said.

"Taxpayers cover costs that should be borne by road users," says the study by UW-Madison's State Smart Transportation Initiative. By forcing local officials to choose between roads and other services, the study says, "Road subsidies push up tax rates, squeeze government services and skew the market for transportation."

Walker says ‘yes’ to roads we don’t need

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

From a column by Dave Zweifel in The Capital Times:

Whether it’s a result of recent bad winters or just the impact of more and more traffic, local roads and streets have taken a serious beating throughout Wisconsin.

Potholes, sunken manhole covers and deteriorating concrete and asphalt are taking their toll on cars and the nerves of the people who ride in them. Many communities and counties have fallen behind on road maintenance in recent years because of budget shortfalls.

But we’ll just have to learn to live with the disintegrating roads and streets thanks to yet another curious set of priorities on the part of the Scott Walker administration.

The new Wisconsin budget, which is headed full speed to implementation, includes massive cuts to Wisconsin schools, fewer dollars for the working poor, more tax breaks for big business and, yes, less money to help the state’s already-beleaguered municipalities fix streets and roads. (Madison is on the verge of losing $1 million.)

Instead, the budget that’s being fashioned by the Walkerite-dominated Joint Committee on Finance will effectively shift transportation dollars away from the locals and into the hands of the big road builders who gave so generously to get Walker elected.

While local road aid is headed for what looks like a $35 million cut, some $328 million more is being earmarked for new highway construction by shifting automobile sales tax revenue, which has historically gone to the general fund, into the transportation budget. Further, more dollars for big highways are being freed up by shifting public transit out of the transportation budget and into the general fund, where public transportation will be more vulnerable to indiscriminate budget cutting.

Road builders to see quick return on donations to Walker

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

From a commentary in The Capital Times by Rod Clark, who recently retired after almost 37 years with the state, 33 of them with DOT:

Anyone who followed Gov. Scott Walker’s election campaign last fall was aware that Wisconsin’s road builders were at the top of the list of his contributors. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that about 150 individual employees of road-building firms contributed $128,859 to Walker’s campaign, along with the $25,000 given by their state association to the Republican Governors’ Association, presumably to help cover the $5 million in anti-Barrett ads run by the RGA.

But what no one knew, or could even guess, until the governor unveiled his biennial budget on March 1 was how quickly and dramatically the road construction interests would see a return on their investments. Or how clearly this would highlight the governor’s true priorities.

In a budget that has drawn national attention for a proposed $834 million cut to K-12 education funding in Wisconsin, and that is being used to justify the need for significant teacher layoffs, salary reductions and an end to public sector collective bargaining, Walker has made his priorities clear for everyone to see. Walker has proposed making cuts to education at least $144 million greater than otherwise needed in order to increase funds for road construction. . . .

While claiming “Wisconsin is broke” -- a charge disputed by many -- Walker proposes in his budget to move the cost for public transit from the Transportation Fund into the General Fund, making the General Fund hole $107 million deeper and freeing up the same amount in the Transportation Fund.

At the same time, Walker’s proposal phases in a diversion of vehicle sales tax revenue out of the General Fund and into the Transportation Fund, eventually resulting in 50 percent of all vehicle sales tax going into the Transportation Fund. This amount starts at around $37 million in 2013 and grows to an estimated $200 million when completely phased in.

Further, Walker’s budget proposes bonding authority for another couple hundred million of road-building money, with the debt repayment coming from the General Fund instead of the Transportation Fund. The impact of this is as yet unknown.

Doyle announces Interstate 39-90 expansion

Thursday, August 19, 2010

From an article by Barry Adams in the Wisconsin State Journal:

A plan to spend an estimated $1 billion to expand Interstate 39-90 between the Illinois border and Madison is moving forward.

Gov. Jim Doyle has announced that he will convene the Transportation Projects Commission this fall to review the proposed project that would replace existing pavement along the 45-mile corridor, add a third lane in each direction, replace two bridges over the Rock River and reconstruct 11 interchanges.

Economic development leaders in Rock County have pushed for the project because they say it would make the highway safer, the area more attractive for business development, and aid the state's tourism industry, which draws many of its visitors from south of the border.

"The single most important thing government can do is set the table for economic growth, and that includes infrastructure improvements," said John Beckord, president of Forward Janesville. "We look forward to the project being enumerated and scheduled for construction."

The Department of Transportation is required to submit its proposal to the TPC by Sept. 15 with the TPC meeting in December to make a recommendation to the governor or governor-elect, the Legislature and Joint Committee on Finance.

Let’s have real debate about transportation fund

Monday, July 19, 2010

From a column by Bill Berry in The Capital Times:

STEVENS POINT — A chorus of voices, orchestrated by the transportation lobby in Wisconsin, is calling for amending the state constitution to prevent raids on the sacred state transportation fund.

Several counties are dancing like good, little puppets, passing resolutions for advisory referendums this fall to pressure legislative candidates. Newspapers have fallen in step with pseudo-patriotic editorials tut-tutting about raids on the transportation fund to support a wobbly state economy.

OK, so let’s have a discussion about the transportation fund. Maybe a constitutional amendment is in order, especially if it addresses the real costs of our transportation system and how to pay for them.

Fortunately, we have new information. The American Public Health Association released a report in May, "The Hidden Health Costs of Transportation.” It addresses how our transportation system contributes to soaring health costs and prevents progress toward improving public health.

Among other things, it notes that U.S. traffic fatalities and injuries remain unacceptably high, about 40,000 a year. Meanwhile, the American Automobile Association says traffic crashes in 85 urban areas cost $164.2 billion a year, roughly $1,051 per person, in 2008.

Jonathan Patz, director of global environmental health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has conducted research that found cutting down on the number of short car trips and reducing the number of miles driven by about 20 percent would save hundreds of lives, avoid hundreds of thousands of hospital admissions, and save billions of dollars in health care costs in the Midwest alone.

Many other costs are often referred to as “hidden,” but they’re really quite visible. They include the toll of physical inactivity, rising asthma and obesity rates in both adults and children, and degraded air quality. In the end, we’re all helping to pay some of those bills.

Monday, June 21, 2010

From an article by Clay Barbour and Mary Spicuzza in the Wisconsin State Journal:

Dangerous cracks discovered on a Milwaukee County bridge earlier this year have become battle lines in the governor's race as the candidates push competing visions of Wisconsin's transportation future. . . .

On one side is Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate. Barrett favors a two-pronged approach that includes improving roads and incorporating passenger rail into the mix.

On the other side are the two leading Republicans: Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker and former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann. Both favor a concrete-and-asphalt approach focused on roads. And both promise to halt the construction of the federally funded passenger rail program from Madison to Milwaukee — despite the fact that the state may have spent as much as $100 million on the project by that time.

Madison's sustainability mirage

Friday, January 22, 2010

From an article by Michael Barrett on the Isthmus Daily Page:

Gleaming atop Madison's new Fire Station #12 sits its green crown jewel — a solar panel. Station #12 on the city's far west side is so green it was just awarded the U.S. Green Building Council's "Platinum" status. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is shouting the news from the mountaintops. Here it is, a full flowering of his Natural Step program for a sustainable city.

But there it sits, in car-mandatory suburbia, surrounded by pavement and plentiful parking, walkable to nowhere. Walkscore.com rated the fire station's address a 2 (out of 100), dubbing it "auto-dependent."

Contrast this with Fire Station #3 on Williamson Street. It's walkable to everything, deemed a "walker's paradise" with a Walkscore of 97. It is nestled between neighborhood retail and residences. It sits on one of the liveliest blocks in town. Streams of pedestrians, bikes and buses flow by. And it has a solar panel.

But this 1950s-era building will never win a green architecture award. The U.S. Green Building Council and others are too focused on new buildings, paying little heed to issues of context.

And therein lies the problem with the approach taken by Mayor Dave. The Natural Step, his citywide strategy to save energy and reduce waste, is a thoroughgoing, top-to-bottom, cross-disciplinary, holistic, green paradigm. But Madison would achieve far more if it focused on preserving natural and food-providing areas, instead of paving them over.

In the case of Fire Station #12, the car-mandatory nature of the neighborhood completely negates the green gains achieved through architecture, and then some.

Northeast Neighborhoods plan "deeply disappointing"

Monday, July 20, 2009

From a commentary by Michael Vickerman, member, City of Madison Sustainable Design and Energy Committee:

The Northeast Neighborhoods Plan is a deeply disappointing exercise in sustainable and forward-looking urban design. All of the rhetorical flourishes and modest gestures toward sustainability cannot disguise the essence of the plan, which is to continue the fundamentally unsustainable practice of reserving relatively undeveloped and distant parcels of land for future highly urbanized development that may or may not ever materialize. There is no immediate reason to absorb this parcel of land into greater Madison. Between the deteriorating conditions in the local commercial and residential real estate marketplace and the current excess of vacant land already zoned for development, it is doubtful that development pressure will return to boom levels any time soon, if ever at all. And, from a sustainability perspective, that is not a bad thing, considering how much land was consumed and pavement was created during the housing boom that ended in 2007. It’s worth adding that no amount of “green” add-ons--bike paths, electric vehicle charging stations, district heating systems or rooftop solar systems--can offset the environmental degradation that will arise from transforming a relatively undeveloped area with few roads into a full-blown city neighborhood.

Like cyclist's death, our way of life is a tragedy

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

From a letter to the editor of The Capital Times by Hans Noeldner, an activie participant in the Madison Peak Oil Group:

Dear Editor: Our failure as a community to support and reward those who attempt to go about their lives at a walking or bicycling pace is bad enough. But the recent cyclist fatality near Brooklyn reminds us that we-the-drivers often pose a life-and-death threat to non-motorists.

The swift, the powerful and the heavily armored so thoroughly dominate most of our public thoroughfares today that merely walking or bicycling across them can be hazardous. (Walk or bicycle along them? Forget it!)

Our pervasive (if unintentional) disregard for the "least among us" -- those annoyingly slow, small, vulnerable creatures called pedestrians and bicyclists -- represents one of the most flagrant injustices in our society. We've made things even worse by withdrawing ever more frequently into our supersized vehicular exoskeletons. Many of us now consider a three-ton armored personnel carrier a practical necessity for conveying our youngster to extracurricular activities. "My child needs to participate just like other normal children, and I need a big SUV to keep her safe!"

. . . .Not only is the Brooklyn cyclist's death a tragedy; our sprawling, hyper-mobile, resource-gobbling way of life is a tragedy as well. And so long as we cling to our steering wheels; so long as our leaders deploy American troops all over Earth to ensure an uninterrupted flow of cheap energy into our tanks, nothing will change.
. . . .

DOT plan needs to consider hard choices

Friday, February 27, 2009

From the comments submitted by Madison Peak Oil Group on Connections 2030, the long-range planning document of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation:

Transportation infrastructure and services in Wisconsin affect both the economy and quality of life in the state. Prospective policies for different transportation modes deserve thoughtful consideration of current realities as well as probable futures.

WisDOT deserves credit for its efforts to make the report comprehensive, integrated, and mindful of the many goals for transport programs. However, Madison Peak Oil Group believes that a number of issues and evaluations do not receive the attention that they warrant, given long-term trends in oil supply and our current economic reality.

Madison Peak Oil is concerned that the report does not really confront:

1. The economic realities since mid-2008 which threaten current state transportation programs, much less new efforts;
2. The combined long-term implications of higher state program costs and declining transportation revenues for the prospective scope and number of DOT programs; i.e., it will be harder than ever to be all things to all people over this planning horizon;
3. The combined implications of lower incomes, aging populations, environmental goals, and higher costs for oil-based personal vehicle operation on the prospective demand for transit and beyond-auto transport over this planning horizon;
4. The fact that some freight transport systems (e.g., rail and water) are more energy efficient and cost-effective than others (e.g., air and long-distance trucking) and are more likely to grow in importance and cost-effectiveness over the planning horizon. . . .

Facing tight budgets, rising costs, increasing environmental and resource problems, this report needs to go beyond a feel-good vision of 2030. While the Wisconsin Department of Transportation alone does not make the decisions that lie ahead, it would be useful if WisDOT would provide more information about the tradeoffs ahead and the tools and approaches which have been developed or used by other governments and nonprofits for making choices. This would enhance greatly the usefulness of the document in the coming decision process. In this fast-changing and challenged future, the document prepared in draft is being over-taken by harsh realities and many difficult choices are ahead. WisDOT needs to do a better job of preparing its audience for that process.

Benefits of transit construction outweigh highway construction

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Comments from Susan De Voss, Madison Area Bus Advocates, on the Wisconsin Department of Transportation's assertion that road building stimulates economic development, while DOT makes no mention of the economic development value of transit construction:

. . . transit can provide more good long-term jobs than highway construction. . . . There are two other more recent studies that make a similar point. One is a US DOT study made in 2004. There is a lot of good material at http://t4america.org.

The other is a 2006 Wis DOT study for those who are most interested in the Wisconsin situation -- http://on.dot.wi.gov/wisdotresearch/database/briefs/05-14tranbenefits-b.pdf and http://on.dot.wi.gov/wisdotresearch/database/reports/05-14tranbenefits-f.pdf.

The first is a summary of the research project and says, among other things, "A 2002 Wisconsin DOT study of the socioeconomic benefits of transit learned that public transit use saves the stateʼs riders and taxpayers an estimated $730.2 million annually, contributes to the overall quality of life in communities, and mitigates traffic congestion and pollution levels.

And then from the more recent study: "Investigators summarized the results of their cost-benefit analysis under three state funding scenarios: no annual increase in state funding over the next 20 years, a 2.5% annual increase, and a 2.5% annual decrease. . . . Under all three scenarios, transit benefits outweigh transit costs in Wisconsin: the net present value (benefits minus costs) of transit is always positive. A 2.5% annual increase in state funding would produce a net present value of $8.2 billion by 2024, for a return of $3.61 on each dollar spent on transit. A 0% change in funding would produce a net present value of $6.9 billion and a return of $3.44 per dollar invested. A 2.5% annual decrease in funding would produce a $6 billion net present value and a $3.32 return."

The latter gives a more detailed report of everything. Wis DOT keeps moving the location of this report around, so if the current address does not work, search the data base. The title of the study is called "The Socio-Economic Benefits of Transit in Wisconsin" and the author is Robert Russell.

This suggests that WisDOT could be actively promoting economic development by funding transit better. The idea of simply relying on the existence of Regional Transportation Authorities to collect extra tax for that purpose, if my reading of the 2030 Plan is correct, is wrong.