The Citistates Group

CURT JOHNSON: Congress has just increased the level of federal transportation spending by 42 percent, raising the annual allotment to $286.5 billion. While most state and local departments of transportation are populated with earnest engineers, there’s apparently enough misfeasance to ignite a growing cry to burn down these budgets.

Examples are all too ready. In Washington state, which has seen a whole agency melt down around a voter-mandated monorail service connecting neighborhoods and downtown Seattle, there’s now an initiative gaining momentum to undo the 9.5-cent fuels tax approved in the last legislative session. See this Seattle Times article: Gasoline tax fuels backlash. If voters agree, hundreds of transportation projects just vanish. Reports say it’s all about credibility.

Then dash across the country to the Atlantic states and witness the nasty imbroglio over the Connecticut Department of Transportation’s apparent massacre of one of those historic stone bridges on the Merritt Parkway, one of the few if not the only major freeway that has always made its journey through the countryside without overdone concrete flyovers and tacky commercial signs, frontage roads, and disposable development on the shoulders.

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“We’ve tried to be known, ” said Georgia Tech professor Mike Dobbins, “as the city too busy to hate. Maybe we still shun hate, but with the level of congestion we now face, we sure do have a lot of time on our hands.”

At the curb, a Hummer limo waited for someone. It’s L.A. of course, where many people are defined by their style of transportation. Inside the Pasadena Conference Center, the 2005 version of the Congress of the New Urbanism was under way. Dobbins, a former planning director for Atlanta, was paired with William Fulton of Solimar Research, Ventura, California, in an effort to compare Atlanta and L.A.

Both places are prisoners of gridlocked freeways. The contrast lies in L.A.’s history. It grew up as a collection of small cities with real centers. “Today,” Fulton said, “the region revolves around the freeway system, but underneath it remains the world’s largest arterial grid.” Today both regions rely on their freeways, but in Atlanta there’s no real driving alternative.

Those old cities in the L.A. region offer another advantage, Fulton said. Citing Torrance as an example, Fulton claimed there are huge areas, aging and awaiting infill development. With endangered species laws creating the equivalent of urban growth boundaries, L.A. is out of land. Urban infill is where much of the action is today. Atlanta, by contrast, appears destined to stretch out toward Charlotte, Chattanooga, and Birmingham, according to Dobbins.

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ALEX MARSHALL: Traveling —- driving down an open road, rolling on steel rails, soaring in the sky —- is romantic. Constructing the means to travel —-building a highway, a train line or an airport —- generally isn’t.

Which is why the new Seattle monorail project, set to begin construction this fall, is so interesting. It is a rare thing: a populist piece of infrastructure. Over the heads of the planners, the politicians and the business leaders, Seattle residents have come up with a plan, designed a system and then funded it — in three separate referendums. It’s an amazing act of civic chutzpah. The project’s eventual success or failure bears watching, because it raises the question of whether citizens can play the game of infrastructure development more directly, and not just give thumbs up or down to what the experts come up with.
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