Remarks by Jacky Grimshaw at the Regional Transportation Task Force
Thank you, Chairman Lipinski and members of the task force for the opportunity to comment as you begin your deliberations about how to ensure an efficient and responsive transportation planning system in this region.
I am Jacky Grimshaw, Vice President of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and convener of the Chicagoland Transportation and Air Quality Commission, or CTAQC, a coalition of almost 200 communities, environmental, municipal and business organizations working for the past decade to promote effective transportation for this region; I am also a resident of Hyde Park in Chicago.
CTAQC has submitted a detailed report, titled Planning Matters, which we will reference in these remarks. We have footnoted our report in great detail; footnoted documents are provided to the task force chair in this notebook, for your reference or further review.
Your questions at the January 30th meeting about whether the planning process addresses regional goals prompt us to also submit a shorter report documenting why procedural problems at CATS lead to major substantive problems for the region.
Planning Matters provides a historical summary of why and for what purposes our regional planning agencies were created. It looks at the agencies in light of federal transportation legislation and points out the deficiencies and inefficiencies of our planning processes, including the inordinate amount of money we spend on planning instead of on producing results. I hope that the Task Force members have had a chance to review it.
I want to spend my allotted time elaborating on a few of the points and giving you the underlying frame of reference that guided our approach. We entitled our report Planning Matters because Performance Matters. There was a concern raised last week regarding the relationship between planning and investments. The stated bias was that planning was the inferior activity.
Performance however is NOT just about money and NOT about how quickly money moves through the pipeline to put projects in the ground.
Rather Performance is how investment serves the public good:
- How accessible and convenient is where they work and spend their leisure to where they live?
- How affordable and coordinated is the set of transportation choices for the traveling public?
- How committed to improvements are the responsible agencies?
- How well integrated are transportation systems with community and marketplace investments?
- How much value is both created AND captured from public investments?
- And lastly, do the resulting investments add to or detract from the quality of life, especially for children, seniors and the disabled?
Good planning is necessary to produce good results. There are 8 million people out there who pay the bills and depend on the results of this process. Your obligation is to them, you cannot fail.
Times are tough. They are tough on private budgets and they are tough on public budgets. I'd like to zero in on the economic issues, because economic security is the number one issue facing Illinois voters, taxpayers, businesses and communities today.
Both Moody's and the Rockefeller University Institute of Government project that it will be at least five more years until state and local revenues return to year 2000 levels. Mr. Greenspan has just reported to the Congress that the economy is looking up. But the happy talk about job creation has not meant that that economy is working for everyone, and it doesn't even touch the people who have stopped looking for a job.
Transportation is the number two household expenditure in northeastern Illinois. If you're fortunate enough to live either in the City or in the inner ring suburbs, you have transportation choice, and you more often than not exercise it. Regardless of income, your neighborhood's car ownership will be between 0.5 and 1.3 cars per household. As a result, your cost of transportation will be between 10 and 17 percent of disposable income, unless the transportation network does not easily access your place of work.
The Location Efficient Mortgage (LEM) was designed to capture this hidden benefit of transit. The LEM is a Fannie Mae mortgage product that takes into account transportation cost savings in underwriting homeowner mortgages. Twenty five percent of Location Efficient Mortgage holders sold at least one car within a year of home purchase, in the target market cities of Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland.
Good planning expands residents' choices. It provides the option of having access to a car without being burdened with car ownership. In Chicago's car sharing experiment, 45 percent of participants either sold a car or delayed purchasing one in the first year of the experiment, the Bay Area had similar numbers.
One less car per household, for median income households, produces savings equivalent to 10 percent of disposable income: that's the kind of choice we'd like to see: trading in a hidden tax for a boost in income.
By contrast, if you live in the collar counties, your neighborhood is likely to see 2 to 3 cars per household, with the exception of urbanized areas such as Aurora, Joliet, Waukegan and Elgin. These folks are paying around 25 percent of their income for transportation.
The difference between these two situations, 15 percent in the more urbanized areas where 60 to 70 percent of the population resides, and 25 percent elsewhere, is a hidden tax on household income and on regional productivity.
Can we do anything about this or is it 'just natural?'
Chicago and its suburbs historically grew up around its mass transportation network. In many ways, it's the best in the country: more commuter rail lines, more service per square mile, and more bus access. In Chicago, 100% of residents live within _ mile of CTA bus or rail. In the six county area, 86% of the region's residents live within _ mile of METRA, CTA, or PACE routes. No one lives more than 4 miles from a rail stop or a bus line. Our challenge is to provide the frequency to make transit a real alternative everywhere in the region.
But historically, transit lines and communities were planned together. Street railway engineers and railroad real estate departments were business partners with city planners and their real estate developers. This integrated planning created real valuetaxable real estate, sales taxes from on site or adjacent retail facilities, reduced travel times, and importantly, affordable places to live. These affordable places were the result of a modest housing stock that, combined with low transportation costs, was what historian Kenneth Jackson dubbed "affordable housing for the working man."
CNT was were honored to be part of a national team that produced a set of case studies of what it takes to make transportation investments add value today (hold up the book), The New Transit Town, which we have copies of for each task force member. The case studies and analysis in this just-released guide show how smart developers today are looking for communities that will host them to develop mixed use, mixed income, and increasingly transit-oriented developments.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that Chicago isn't in this book. We looked for best practitioners, found them, and found that they were having more luck in the Sunbelt or in certain east coast regions than they were here. In Arlington Virginia, thirty years of regional, county, and community efforts have resulted in an extraordinary amount of both traffic control, mixed use development, and overall affordability.
In Dallas Texas, where they are on their fifth consecutive passage by referendum of a sales tax increase, the developments downtown at Mockingbird Center and in the suburbs such as Addison Circle are winning awards and raising interest in the institutional real estate community (that one was done by industry leader Trammell Crow).
Not all the cases were totally good news. In Atlanta, Bell South decided to consolidate 75 of their regional offices into three transit oriented downtown locations serving 13,000 employees. But the associated community planning was ignored, with poor traffic management results. The message of the book is this: where planning and investment, housing and transportation are done hand-in-hand, riders, taxpayers, elected officials, and the business community, are much happier campers.
Ok, does this mean anything for the question of how to organize the planning agencies?
There are people within state government today who understand that today's taxpayers are looking for something different than what they are getting. The policy advisor to the IDOT secretary offered the following cautionary note at the annual IDOT conference this fall (to paraphrase): roadway connectivity, a national objective of the 1950s, is virtually complete; what the public focuses on now is the quality of life aspects of transportation and congestion mitigation is only one aspect of quality of life. We agree, but our region, unlike others is not prepared to respond.
In St. Louis, the East West Gateway Coordinating Council, that region's MPO, took the lead in developing the MetroLink light rail service, and after turning it over to the transit operator, became the regional convener of that metropolitan area's job development efforts.
In spite of what was previously reported, San Francisco's MPO, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the MTC, operates the bridge and toll authority, runs the area's tow truck operations, does investment banking for BART and other transit operators, and provides incentive payments to developers that locate housing within walking distance of mass transit. In the nation's most highly regulated state for planning, the MTC and their local governments and transit operators have no complaints about "streamlining."
Even Atlanta's MPO, the Atlanta Regional Commission has figured out that transportation is about quality of life. The Region was out of compliance with the Clean Air Act, and ARC was out of touch with community needs. It voluntarily committed 1 percent of its Regional Transportation Planning funds, $36 million up front, to a Livable Centers Initiative, which now involves dozens of city and suburban communities in joint learning. The overall outcome is that investments are being re-planned and recalibrated around quality growth and affordable housing. This popular program, which provides both planning and implementation support for transportation enhancements and land use planning, is likely to be expanded.
These MPO's and others that are included in Planning Matters, along with their host states, are garnering the lion's share of funding for innovative approaches that was provided in ISTEA and TEA21. Extraordinarily important strategies for transportation finance are being pioneered in states and regions from Virginia to Oregon...but not here. CATS isn't mentioned in any of best practices in the documentation for Planning Matters. We set the standard for the nation in the 50s, but now CATS has fallen far behind the pack.
When CNT was started twenty-five years ago, the state and civic groups were continually flagging the low return on dollars we sent to DC. Today we're still at or near the bottom of the heap.
Nobody came to Chicago because of the weather. In Atlanta, where they are just starting to come to grips with their gridlock reputation, they are starting to lose investment over it.
Is that where we want to be?
We need a system where our $40 Million per year spent on planning isn't an expenditure, its an investment with an expected return, measured in improvements to cost of living, cost of doing business and quality of life; not how fast we spend the money or how many commuters pass a laser counter per hour.
We need a system where our public agencies are committed to the same goals, not competing with each other for the same dollars -- honestly, the RTA ran a perfectly good process on how to meet traffic needs in the Northwest Corridor, and then picked an alternative that wasn't even on the list evaluated.
If the state and its agencies are not going to honor planning for what its worth, why don't we save the $40 Million and put in an ATM machine?
We need to come to grips with the 21st century reality: it's a big region, the transit system doesn't go everywhere. In the short term this means we need effective reverse commuting, and in the medium to long term we need both incentives for employer relocation AND a realigned and expanded set of scheduled services.
We must not abandon the transportation industry that has been a significant contributor to our region's and State's economic prosperity. The current system doesn't allow for integrated planning for the major investments of aviation, inter-city surface transportation to aviation, freight or inter-city travel in general, whether rail, bus, car or aviation.
We call on the Task Force to recommend the following in its report to the Governor and General Assembly:
- Adopt and use performance measures to screen investments, and include economic impact on households, communities and the region overall.
- At least functionally coordinate, if not consolidate, the functions now performed by too many agencies competitively. We have a big job in front of us, and it makes no sense to pay for agencies in the same region to compete for the same funds. We should analyze what the competencies are of each agency's staff, versus what is needed to get the job done, and then design an organization and a strategy that can succeed.
- Redesignate the MPO for the region to be independently incorporated and representative of the people and jurisdictions in the metropolitan area. The employees of the Chicago Area Transportation Study are employees of the State of Illinois. The Policy Committee is advisory to the Illinois Secretary of Transportation. The Illinois Toll Highway Authority and private transportation providers have the same representation as the mayor of Chicago and all 272 mayors and presidents of the balance of the region. This is clearly a system biased toward the providers of transportation, not its users, and not a system that has the needs of its users at the forefront.
- Bring in the best practitioners from around the country and be not afraid to innovate in meeting your mission
- Use the process to identify desirable outcomes and then invest in systems that get us there, rather than ignore the landscape and foster a food fight over dwindling resources.
- Commit to a process of continuous improvement. If our goals are valid and clear and our performance measures progress toward those goals, we should be able to correct our course as necessary along the way.
Too many leaders today believe that there is no willingness to pay for what they want. Rather than a lack of money, there is a lack of courage imagination, and political will. Are we really not as smart as leaders in Dallas, Miami or Los Angeles? The right kind of agency will help us assemble the resources needed to get the job done. Or we can be as one FHWA official described engineers incapable of designing a project that fit within the contextual environment: "Some minds are like concrete, thoroughly mixed up and permanently set."
The last time we had an economy this bad, Herbert Hoover encouraged people to take cheap car loans and buy cars (isn't that what Governor Schwarzeneger said upon election). Will Rogers, a noted transportation expert, responded by saying that we'd be the first generation in the history of the planet that drove to the poorhouse in an automobile.
I hope we can do better. We can't afford to do otherwise. Thank you.