Media Coverage

Report finds job boost from increased transit spending

Rachel Lippmann, St. Louis Public Radio (2010-09-02)
 
 

ST. LOUIS (St. Louis Public Radio) - A new report funded by a mass transit advocacy coalition says increased spending on public transit could generate more than 180,000 new jobs in five years.

The Transportation Equity Network studied 20 metropolitan areas, all of which had organizations in the network. St. Louis was among those studied.

TEN's researchers at the Public Policy Research Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis found that $1 billion spent on public transit projects generates more jobs than the same $1 billion spent on roads and bridges. The researchers found that St. Louis spent just 15 percent of its federal and state transit funding on mass transit projects, and hence generated just 31,257 jobs for each $1 billion spent. Increasing that total to 50 percent would lead to a net gain of 7,000 jobs, the researchers concluded.

The report also evaluated a proposal endorsed by a national mass transit advocacy group to increase the amount of funds available for mass transit in the next federal transportation bill by 240 percent. In St. Louis, researchers believe that could create 30,000 more jobs than current transit funding levels, though the exact numbers are uncertain since much of the revenue is available on a grant-only basis.

This story originally appeared on the KWMU St. Louis Public Radio website on September 2, 2010 and is available here:   http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kwmu/news.newsmain/article/1/0/1695906/St..Louis.Public.Radio.News/Report.finds.job.boost.from.increased.transit.spending

 

FCCG and TEN director push for a local workforce in Springfield IL rail project

Group wants local rail jobs

Green spaces, safety, economic development on list of goals

Originally appeared in the Illinois Times on August 26th, 2010. By Patrick Yeagle

A Springfield-based community group is hoping to make the contentious arrival of high-speed rail into a blessing by making sure 30 percent of the jobs from the project go to local disadvantaged workers.

The Faith Coalition for the Common Good hosted a public meeting Aug. 19 at Union Baptist Church to discuss the coming project’s effects on Springfield. The high-speed rail project will be accompanied by an increase in freight traffic through the city, and a plan by the Illinois Department of Transportation to expand the Third Street rail corridor to handle the increased traffic generated considerable controversy.  FCCG formed several task forces comprised of concerned citizens to address issues such as noise, safety and economic development related to the project. Formed in February 2009, FCCG is a multi-congregational faith-based organization focusing on issues affecting communities in central Illinois. 

FCCG members have developed a platform of goals to ensure that the high-speed rail project benefits the whole community. The goals include green spaces, local jobs and training, noise and safety mitigation and support for small business growth. FCCG would like to see 30 percent of the jobs created by the rail project go to local low-income, minority and women workers, as well as one percent of the project budget being used for job training.

Laura Barrett, executive director of Transportation Equity Network, emphasized the need for the community to decide early what it wants to gain. TEN is a national coalition of community groups focused on the transportation needs of minorities, women and the poor.

“You guys (FCCG) are really pioneering the idea of ‘You’re going to spend a whole bunch of taxpayer money on high-speed rail; we want to see some results,’” Barret said while addressing the group. “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, that you’re not going to have barriers with IDOT itself or the mayor. … but it can happen and you guys are the ones to make it happen.”

The model for FCCG’s plan is an effort spearheaded by Barrett and Rev. Tommie Pierson of St. Mark Family Church in St. Louis. During a major construction project on Interstate 64/Highway 40 in St. Louis during 2008 and 2009, Barrett and Pierson met with officials from the Missouri Department of Transportation, local unions and community members to ensure that a portion of the jobs on that project went to local workers. As a result, $2.5 million went toward training local low-income, minority and women workers to participate in the construction project.

Dr. Gordon Smith of Springfield, a former employee of the Illinois Department of Transportation and current member of an FCCG task force on jobs, said the group has already met with the Union Pacific Railroad concerning jobs. UP is one of the main railroad companies involved in the high-speed rail project, and Smith says the company will provide all of its own labor for the project. Several overpasses and underpasses will likely be built by IDOT to separate train traffic from auto and foot traffic, however, and Smith says that may yield some new jobs for local workers. 

FCCG rail issue task force chair Leroy Jordan said he had talked with IDOT concerning the use of eminent domain during the project. It is likely that the three railroad corridors running through Springfield will be consolidated to one expanded corridor during construction, displacing several residents near the tracks. Jordan said FCCG would work to ensure fair compensation for displaced residents.

“Regardless of where the rail (project) goes – Third Street, 10th Street, 19th Street – we want to be involved, because somebody in our community is going to be affected,” Jordan said. “We want our community to be involved in all levels of decision-making.” 

Contact Patrick Yeagle at  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Original article can be found at:

http://www.illinoistimes.com/Springfield/article-7691-group-wants-local-rail-jobs.html 

   

Service Cuts Restored, Thanks to MCU

Buses return in force Monday

Originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on August 23rd, 2010.

By Ken Leiser

After years of scaling back bus routes and MetroLink schedules, the Metro transit agency is adding a new word to its vocabulary: restoration.

Metro on Monday will make good on its promise to restore much of the bus service that at one point appeared long gone because of chronic budget shortfalls.

St. Louis County voters' passage of Proposition A in April boosted the sales taxes dedicated to transit in the county, and also triggered collections in the city of St. Louis because of a voter-approved tax passed in the 1990s but never enacted.

"It is one of the more hopeful things going on in the region right now, especially when you look at the budget cuts that are happening at the state level," said Katie Jansen Larson, executive director of Metropolitan Congregations United for St. Louis, an interdenominational coalition.

Larson's group was one of several that pushed Proposition A this spring, saying that building up service was key to helping people get to jobs and schools.

With the new influx of money, Metro intends to restore 97 percent of the service miles that were in place before cuts were made in March 2009, said Ray Friem, Metro's chief operating officer of transit services.

Riders should expect added trips throughout the area and better connections between bus routes, Metro officials said. Metro started rolling out its first phase of added bus service in late June, and Monday's additions will complete the restoration.

"There are a lot of changes," Friem said. "It's just about every corner of the system."

Metro's plan will feature some new wrinkles.

Some of the longer bus routes — including those serving Earth City, Lindbergh Boulevard and Manchester Road — will be split into multiple routes. Friem said splitting routes will allow Metro to keep more buses running on time, make it easier to schedule drivers and offer more direct service.

But the job will be complicated by a lack of buses. That's because the agency's financial problems in previous years threw a wrench into its bus-purchasing cycle.

Two 24-bus orders were canceled, and another was deferred. Metro is now scrambling to find replacement buses. Friem hopes the first batch of new buses will reach the region before the end of the year.

"I'm hitting the street (on Monday) about 50 buses short of what I was in March 2009," he said.

Metro will have to leverage its bus fleet to step up service. In order to put the additional buses on the street this year, Friem said, the agency will increase the average number of miles a bus is driven in a year to 60,000, from 48,000.

Metro expects to have 118 more bus drivers than it did before the passage of Proposition A.

"The clear beneficiaries are the people who are going to be using the public transportation system to get where they need to be," said Washington University Chancellor Mark Wrighton, who helped oversee the Proposition A campaign and whose students and employees are frequent users of the transit system.

Donald Walker of Wellston, who began studying computer programming at ITT Technical Institute in Earth City on Monday, said he hopes the new service will reduce his wait time. Now, he said, it takes him about 45 minutes to take two buses and MetroLink to school.

"This works out pretty good," he said.

The changes will not affect MetroLink train schedules. A major rehab project on the Eads Bridge prevents more trains from being added to the schedule for now, Friem said.

Metro is trying to get word of the bus changes to riders. Agency workers have been handing out new schedules and fliers for the last two weeks. This week, Metro employees will be at MetroLink stations and transit centers throughout the region.

Originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on August 23rd, 2010 and can be found at:

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/article_26cb84f4-7083-5be3-8e17-ce9a4524b638.html

   

Feds still worried about civil rights in Bay Area transportation

Feds still worried about civil rights in Bay Area transportation

By Casey Miner

It was nearly a year ago that local transportation advocates filed a complaint against BART, alleging that the agency had not complied with federal civil rights legislation when making plans for the Oakland Airport Connector. The Federal Transit Administration agreed, and BART lost $70 million in stimulus funding as a result.

Now, it's not just BART that's under scrutiny. BART gets its federal funding via the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the regional body that doles out state and federal funds for transportation projects, and they're on the feds' radar as well. Last February, the FTA asked MTC to prove that it had procedures in place to make sure everyone who got money was complying with federal law.

You can read the back and forth on the Public Advocates website (the local group that filed the original complaint), but the gist of it is this: in its response letter to the FTA earlier this year, MTC claimed that it actually wasn't responsible for ensuring that the organizations it funds comply with Title VI. They argued that those organizations already agree to follow civil rights law, and that additional oversight would be redundant.

In a letter sent back to MTC late last week, the FTA made clear that they see things differently. Office of Civil Rights director Cheryl Hershey pointed out that every year MTC signs on to the FTA Master Agreement, it agrees to do the following:

Nondiscrimination -Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Recipient agrees to comply, and assures the compliance of each subrecipients, lessee, third party contractor, or other participant at any tier of the Project, with all provisions prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended...

In the letter, Hershey goes on to cite several other documents to which MTC is a signatory, all of which seem to suggest that the agency is indeed responsible for making sure that their funding recipients follow the law.

This has big implications: the FTA says it's concerned that without proper oversight, other local transport agencies -not just BART-might be violating Title VI as well.

The FTA has requested a number of documents from MTC, including their process for investigating complaints, a breakdown of how they investigated the BART complaint, and evidence that the agencies under MTC's umbrella are holding up their end of things. MTC has 30 days to provide the information. Other than acknowledging that they received and are reviewing the letter, MTC declined to comment.

This story originally appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle's website on August 18th, 2010:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/kalw/detail?entry_id=70386

Note: TEN member Genesis in Oakland, CA was a party to the lawsuit that led to the FTA's original investigation.

 

   

The Real Red Scare

Post by: Laura Barrett

Executive Director, Transportation Equity Network

Originally posted August 11th, 2010 on the Huffington Post

If you want a glimpse at what awaits America if we don't change our auto-dependent ways, just look at Russia.

In "Stuck," a stunning piece in a recent issue of the New Yorker, Keith Gessen paints a nightmarish vision of Moscow's streets that we're already far too close to.

As Gessen writes, car culture has spread like wildfire in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Car ownership rates in Moscow have increased fivefold in the last two decades, while the subways and trams have been left largely untouched. The result, according to Russian traffic expert Mikhail Blinkin, is a city "on the verge of transportational collapse."

Moscow will simply cease to function as a city. You and I will be living in different cities. Some people will live in one neighborhood, and others will live in a different neighborhood, and that will be fine, except they won't be able to get from one neighborhood to another.
As the U.S. has for decades, Moscow builds and builds and builds, endlessly expanding highways and roads at massive financial and ecological cost. The problem? As University of Pennsylvania transportation expert Vukan Vuchic says in the article:
No city has ever constructed itself out of congestion. It's impossible.
Other U.S. academics and city planners have offered similar warnings for decades, but America's dependency on the automobile has only increased. Americans drive twice as many miles per year as they did 20 years ago, and spend more of that time than ever in traffic. The average American driver spends 47 hours per year stuck in traffic, wasting 2.3 billion gallons of fuel per year in the process. The wasted fuel contributes to smog, creating chronic environmental and health problems.

Prior to World War II, the majority of American cities enjoyed reliable public transportation systems and thriving urban centers. Few now remember the electric streetcars that once dominated the downtown streets of Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Louis, and a dozen other cities before the quiet buyouts and closures orchestrated by GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone.

Fueled by a federal highway program that was the largest public works project in human history, our federal and state Departments of Transportation began building the sprawling webs of interstates, highways, and roads we know today. Paradoxically, but predictably, American cities are now more congested and less connected than ever before.

Moscow stands as a warning to us. Without adequate investment in public transportation and a concerted effort to combat sprawl, our metropolitan areas face a grim future. Cities like Los Angeles and Houston are already mired in some of the worst congestion in the U.S., and often seem to be competing for the dubious distinction of having the worst air quality in America.

The result for the poor, working class, and people of color -- in city and suburb alike -- has been devastating. A lack of fair access to economic opportunity has left America with the largest income gap of any developed nation. The strict income segregation enforced by suburban planning has left suburbanites profoundly divided even within their own towns. Meanwhile, asthma rates in cities are as much as 50% higher than in suburban and rural areas because of the air pollution left by millions of cars commuting in daily.

There is a better way. TEN and our allies are building a national movement to reverse the decades of bad policies and practices that have brought us to this state. Find an affiliate in your area and join us in changing a nightmare of endless gridlock into a dream of a more just, prosperous, and connected America.

Originally appeared in The Huffington Post on August 11th, 2010:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-barrett/the-real-red-scare_b_676481.html

   

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