Transportation funding: doing more with less

Last week, the General Assembly Commission on State Tax and Financing Policy took up the issue of transportation funding during its second meeting. During this summer and fall, the interim Commission is examining a roster of financial issues including transportation, county income tax, fire protection territories, tax credits for school foundation contributions and others. Chairperson Scott Pelath stated in a press release about the Commission that “We will come to grips with dissipating sources of road dollars, establish realistic levels for state and local road funding, and scrutinize our infrastructure priorities.”

The meeting’s transportation session began with a presentation by the Purdue Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) that mapped the complex state transportation financing structure. We also heard from INDOT on the status of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-funded transportation projects. Stimulus monies have funded 1,087 transportation projects around the state, ranging from road resurfacing to bridge repair to transit vehicle upgrades. Indiana’s ARRA projects have a completion deadline of February 17, 2012.

For the rest of the session, local public officials, citizens and interest group representatives made comments before the Commission. Just about all of the comments concerned the scarcity of transportation funding. City and town managers spoke of the hardships they face in funding local road maintenance. Several comments referenced the LTAP 2008 Statewide Bridge Sufficiency Rating Report, which reports that 21.6 percent of the state’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Some relayed concerns about the expense of constructing Interstate 69 in the southwest region of the state. Another issue that came up was vehicle fuel efficiency. Improvements in fuel efficiency (along with other factors such as the economic downturn) are decreasing the amount of gasoline sold, leading to a reduction in the gasoline tax revenues that fund much of the nation’s transportation programs.

Though the session’s main theme was the shortage of funds for meeting our transportation needs, the dialogue focused on lack of money – there was no discussion how we can reduce those needs to begin with. We are rightfully concerned about meeting the demand for transportation infrastructure. But what if we could reduce that demand? Transportation demand management is the process by which we change travel behavior (how, when and where people travel) in order to increase transportation system efficiency. Using transportation demand management strategies, we can do more with less. For example, we can reduce the number of vehicles on the road by increasing carpooling to work through incentives such as HOV lanes or preferential parking and resources like online carpooler matching databases. If we improve bus service and rail options, maybe we can divert enough traffic from the roads to reduce the expense of continually repairing and expanding highways like I-465. Another strategy is to employ transit-oriented development principles in constructing or redeveloping our neighborhoods and urban corridors.

There are dozens of other transportation demand management strategies to consider as governments plan for a future of increasing mobility needs and fewer funds to meet those needs. Which of these measures would work in your community? What are the best alternatives to making more and more room on the roads for single-occupancy vehicles?

Central Indiana Commuter Services

The following is a message from our friends at Central Indiana Commuter Services! Check out their options for reducing the cost of your commute. BTW - that cost doesn't just involve money, but stress and pollution, too. You can read some firsthand stories about the benefits of using an alternative to driving alone to work at the Commuter Profiles section of the CIRTA website.

Transit and wellness

Lately, a lot of items in mass transit news have had a common theme: “transportation and wellness.” For example:

• While doing research on commuting, we discovered the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a project that surveys more than 1,000 U.S. adults per day and assigns them a well-being score based on six sub-indexes: life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, work environment, healthy behaviors and access to basic necessities. (On a 1-100 point index, with 100 being a state of maximum well-being, the overall score for the survey population was 49.6 in July 2010.) In August, the index published data regarding commute times. The results? People with the longest commutes scored the lowest on the Well-Being Index, and those with the shortest commute times (0-10 minutes) had less back pain and lower cholesterol, and they weighed less. Long commutes also take an emotional toll, according to the findings: “Among employees who take more than 90 minutes getting from home to work, 40% experienced worry for much of the previous day – significantly higher than the 28% among those with negligible commutes of 10 minutes or less,” the report said. “Conversely, workers with extremely long commutes were less likely to have experienced enjoyment for much of the previous day or to say they felt well-rested that day.” 
  
• As we prepared a report the other day, we took a look at the state-by-state totals of vehicle-miles driven per-capita. The list seemed remarkably similar to something else we had recently seen, so we checked and, sure enough, the states with the most vehicle miles also rank high on the state rankings for obesity. In fact, many of the states rankest highest for resident with a body mass index over 25 are the states with the highest per-person miles driven. Four states occupy the Top 10 list for each. Of course, it works the other way, too: New York, Hawaii and the District of Columbia rank at the bottom of the list for both weight and VMT. 
  
• A report released last month by the American Public Transportation Association confirms what we could suspect from the report mentioned above: People living near public transportation drive less, exercise more, live longer and generally are healthier than those living in places with inadequate transit. Considering factors ranging from air pollution, vehicle accidents, walking to and from transit stops and consumer cost savings, the report examines and attempts to quantify the different health impacts of transit use. 
  
• Another recent study demonstrates health benefits – including weight loss – of using transit with an analysis of the public health effects of a new rail line. When the nine-mile Lynx South Corridor Light Rail line opened in Charlotte, N.C., a group of physicians started tracking the weight and exercise habits of people living nearby. Collecting data before and after construction of the line, the physicians found that users of the rail line had lost an average of 6-7 pounds just eight months after construction.
  

So what does all of this mean for Indiana, a state with an underdeveloped transit system? Well, we rank 20th in overweight/obesity and 15th for vehicle miles per-capita. Which raises the question: As we discuss the economic and environmental benefits of transit, should we be working harder to make the case based on the health benefits of transit? Or would that be, um, biting off more than we can chew?