Citiwire.net: Neal Peirce on Livability, Mark Muro and Rob Puentes on a New Metro Formula

“Livability” — Wimpy Term But Big Stakes For Us All

By Neal Peirce

For Release Sunday, June 06, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

WASHINGTON — Is the Obama administration’s “livability” initiative just a way for intrusive federal bureaucrats to choke off Americans’ prized “automobility” — four wheels to commute from ever-distant suburbs, or just to pick up a quart of milk?

That’s the way some commentators would have it. Disregarding the administration’s clear language about respecting local character and values, they pounced on words of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood — that livability is “being able to take your kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, drop by the grocery or post office, go out to dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in a park, all without having to get in your car.”

LaHood, a former Republican member of Congress known for his moderate views, got labeled “the Secretary of Behavior Modification” by columnist George Will. Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) worried publicly about “federal decision-makers in Washington (telling) communities how they should grow.”

And transportation analyst Ken Orski recently concluded that “the administration’s desire to impose its own vision of how Americans should live and travel represents a misguided and in the end futile gesture.”

Whoa!

New Metro Formula: Helping Those Who Help Themselves

By Mark Muro and Rob Puentes

For Release Sunday, June 06, 2010
Citiwire.net

The federal transportation finance system is broken and will be short on cash for the for a long time.

Some regions—like the growing Phoenix, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, and Denver metropolitan areas—have meanwhile achieved transformation viability through unusual self-help (although they still face massive challenges).

Is there a deal to be done? Perhaps there is.

Check out, for example, the intriguing concept for a new federal-metro partnership in transportation finance being shopped around by the Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) in Arizona.

Challenged by needs yet pessimistic about the likelihood of new federal funding, MAG would have the federal government and large metropolitan areas work a trade in which Washington would provide new incentives in the form of increased and direct funding to metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and new flexibilities in exchange for those regions’ continued contribution of substantial regional funding to the creation of the national transportation system. Along those lines, what MAG calls a “new partnership” between Washington and its most creative regions might enable new progress in addressing the nation’s gargantuan transportation challenges.