Beth Osborne is Director of Transportation for America. In this episode, Beth explains how the federal transportation program has failed to safely connect Americans with access to jobs and opportunities, despite the billions of dollars being poured into it. Since accomplishing its original mission of building the interstate highway system, the program has floundered, with misplaced goals and metrics for success. “Crumbling roads and bridges” has become common refrains for politicians, yet allocated funds often prioritize new projects rather than maintaining new ones. Many cities have outlined “Vision Zero” goals, yet pedestrian deaths have continued to increase in the past decade. In this episode of High Frequency, Beth walks us through the recommendations Transportation for America has developed for the federal transportation program: 1) prioritize maintenance, 2) design for safety over speed, and 3) connect people to jobs and services.
Beth Osborne is Director of Transportation for America. In this episode, Beth explains how the federal transportation program has failed to safely connect Americans with access to jobs and opportunities, despite the billions of dollars being poured into it. Since accomplishing its original mission of building the interstate highway system, the program has floundered, with misplaced goals and metrics for success. “Crumbling roads and bridges” has become common refrains for politicians, yet allocated funds often prioritize new projects rather than maintaining new ones. Many cities have outlined “Vision Zero” goals, yet pedestrian deaths have continued to increase in the past decade. In this episode of High Frequency, Beth walks us through the recommendations Transportation for America has developed for the federal transportation program: 1) prioritize maintenance, 2) design for safety over speed, and 3) connect people to jobs and services.
"We need to address safety, particularly for more vulnerable populations. While fatalities for people inside vehicles has gone down a little bit. Fatalities for people outside vehicles is going up at an alarming rate and we need to get to the bottom of that." - Beth Osborne
Disclaimer: Political views raised by guests on the podcast do not reflect the views of TransitCenter.
For more information on Transformation for America, click here.
To learn about the TransitCenter event that Beth spoke on, click here.
Music: “Comma” - Blue Dot Sessions
Hosted by Kapish Singla
Produced by TransitCenter
Please note that transcripts are generated by a combination of automated speech recognition software and human transcribers. There may be errors in the text.
From TransitCenter, this is High Frequency. I'm Kapish Singla. [00:00:03]
Kapish: Federal transportation policy for the past 60 or so years has primarily had one objective: fund highways. And through that focus, the interstate highway system has been built up. But it's clear that these funding priorities are no longer working. Much of the nation's infrastructure is in a backlog of state of good repair. The gas tax that funds these projects has not been raised in decades. And building new roads only encourages more driving, which is at odds with the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I spoke with Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America, a D.C. based advocacy organization that has recently called for the federal government to stop pumping taxpayer dollars into the highway program that has failed on multiple fronts and instead establish goals for improving access, reducing roadway fatalities, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. [00:00:52]
Kapish: Beth, can you give us a brief history of the federal transportation program, its goals, and its outcomes? [00:00:59]
Beth: Sure. The program that we think about today was created in the mid 50s after President Eisenhower took office. He, as a general, had been impressed by the highway system--the autobahn in Germany--and wanted to see something similar here in the United States. It was initially envisioned as a way to move tanks around the country for defense purposes, but quickly became clear it was going to be a very important means of moving people and goods over long distances. In the early days of the program, a lot of cities thought if the interstates didn't come through the middle of the city, it would be the end of the city. Of course, a lot of the decisions we made ended up destroying those center cities by dividing neighborhoods and taking away really valuable real estate for the highway instead of for retail and and homes and businesses. When the interstate system was declared to be completed in the early 90s, the program really lost its way. [00:02:00][60.1]
Kapish: Can you explain why these priorities that were set a couple of generations ago are just incompatible with today's needs? [00:02:08]
Beth: What was relevant to the country in 1956 is not always relevant to the country 60 or 70 years later. I mean, that's not just too true in transportation. Circumstances change. Technologies change. Needs change. Following a path created in mid 50s as if that should never change is insanity. Another answer is we should learn something. Maybe we learn that we didn't get the results we quite wanted. [00:02:39]
Kapish: And would you sum up some of those lessons learned, at least for you? [00:02:43]
Beth: Yes. Building a highway through a heavily developed neighborhood is bad for that neighborhood and bad for the economics of the community. You take up valuable real estate with highway. And now that property costs money--it is a liability on the books. I think we also have learned that making these mistakes and putting major highways through heavily developed areas creates a generational type of damage where it becomes a barrier for people in neighborhoods to reach their basic daily needs, their jobs, their access to opportunity. If you look back on a lot of the planning documents for building some of these highways, the purpose of segregating certain portions of the society were spoken outright. And the damage to those communities and then inequities caused we see even today. [00:03:38]
Kapish: And in recent months, T4America has put out a statement that effectively says we need to stop with this status quo that you've been describing. Can you tell us a bit more about the positions that your organization T4America has taken? [00:03:53]
Beth: [00:03:54] I've watched money get dumped into this program and these problems are not getting solved. In many cases, they're getting worse. So we took a different position this time. And our argument, at Transportation for America, is let's talk about what the program should do. Let's commit to the taxpayer and the American people, what they will get for their dollar, and then talk about what that costs, and how much more money you need. You don't do what Congress has done repeatedly, which is: if you give me more of your money, I will spend more of your money, deal? It's a terrible pitch. And I think there's a reason we haven't been able to raise the gas tax because on some level, everyone knows it's not a very impressive offer. [00:04:35]
Kapish: And will you tell me what Transportation for America's recommendations are to help reform the transportation program? [00:04:42]
Beth: Fix it first. We should be fixing what we've already built. This program should be organized around maintaining and better operating--squeezing more efficiency out of the, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of investment we put into the existing roadway and highway system. Two, we need to address safety, particularly for more vulnerable populations. While fatalities for people inside vehicles has gone down a little bit. Fatalities for people outside vehicles is going up at an alarming rate and we need to get to the bottom of that. A lot of it, frankly, is as we have moved what people need further and further away from their homes--we have tried to make the the distance less inconvenient by speeding up travel. And when people drive fast, crashes are deadly. So: fix it first and safety over speed. And the 3rd is access to jobs and services. This is something that technology has opened up to us over history. There have been academic studies about looking at how well the transportation system connects people to jobs and services like groceries and banks and healthcare and childcare and schools and all that sort of thing. And it's been very hard to do throughout the majority of the highway program. But now we have a ton of information just in our smartphones. And we because of GIS, we know where the houses are. We know where the jobs are. We know where the groceries are. We know where the banks are. We know all this. So using that, we can see how long it takes people to access whatever number of jobs across the region. And with that, you can get a score that shows how well the transportation system connects you to those things. We would like to see that be the lens through which we view whether or not the transportation system is working: access to jobs and services. Right now, we look at whether or not cars move fluidly.
Kapish: [00:06:45] So right now, there is some momentum to rethink America's transportation system. I'm thinking about the Green New Deal, which is this call to address climate change and income inequality. [00:06:54]
Beth: Yes, I think the Green New Deal sparks a whole lot of conversations. I think with the Green New Deal falls apart is it really doesn't address the transportation program at all. And the the House Select Committee on Climate isn't really talking to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. They have members that they share, but there's no coordination going on there. And I think in a lot of cases, in fact, I'd say the overwhelming majority of cases, members of Congress don't recognize the connection at all. They think we're just going to electrify the fleet and it's going to fix transportation. And look, even if it really does make a big difference on CO2 and allows us to to meet the goals we have set for the next 20, 30 years. At best, what we would have done is created a system with clean congestion, with very high household transportation expenses, with massive inequality, where, particularly the poor who can't afford these, you know, new electric flying autonomous vehicles are still more likely to be killed on the roadways designed for them. And that's a best case scenario. I think that's appalling. [00:08:10]
Kapish: [00:08:12] And how can the Green New Deal resolution or thinking with it start to help members of Congress make these connections? [00:08:19]
Beth: [00:08:21] Those of us that care about these issues need to go make that connection. We need to point out that addressing greenhouse gases by shortening trips and helping people share trips and get out of their cars comes with a whole lot of co-benefits that are super exciting. It reduces the cost to the government because they won't need to build as many roads trying to keep up with this ever increasing demand for driving. They won't have to put such an onus on the average household. Transportation is the second biggest cost in most American households. It's greater than healthcare in most American households. We just view that as something they are stuck with it. They don't have to be stuck with it. We can lower those costs. You know, all these co-benefits which are so exciting that you can bring along with it. This can energize a lot of members of Congress to get involved and to get excited to make this connection.
Kapish: Thank you Beth
Beth: Sure, thanks for having me.
This conversation is part of the event's program at Transit Center, a foundation that works to improve transit in cities across the US. For more information, visit transitcenter.org