Federal Transportation Reform Starts With Damage Control

This article is part three in a series on top-down power, and how a Strong Towns advocate might use existing top-down programs and federal funding streams as tools (in the short term) for boosting local resilience.

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Interstate 45 in Houston, Texas. Image source.

In March 2021, something all too unusual happened. The US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) sent a letter to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) requesting that it stop work on the planned $7 billion expansion of Interstate 45 in Houston, pending an investigation to determine whether or not the expansion violates federal civil rights law. If it does, according to the Texas Observer, FHWA may withhold certain categories of funding for the project or even refer it to the Department of Justice for legal action.

This kind of intervention from the FHWA, which is part of the US Department of Transportation (USDOT), is rare. Although every major construction or expansion project on the Interstate Highway System involves substantial federal funding, these projects are planned and executed at the state level, and it’s unusual for the feds to balk at even the most ill-conceived expansion plan.

Balking is very welcome in this case, because the I-45 expansion is a Hall of Shame project by any measure. It’s a proposal that would not only widen an urban freeway but would do so in part through low-income communities of color—just like the infamous freeway projects you read about in the history books, except that it's happening now. It would displace hundreds of homes, two public housing complexes, churches, schools, and local businesses, and further divide the already segregated city of Houston. Local opposition has been strong enough that, days after the FHWA issued its letter, Harris County (which contains Houston) sued TxDOT in federal court to halt the project. (You can learn more about the I-45 project in this Houston Chronicle article from 2020.)

The federal effort to apply the brakes here is a refreshing and tantalizing taste of what it could look like to have a USDOT committed to reversing course from the disastrous mistakes of the freeway era—and willing to turn the screws on retrograde state DOTs that would rather double down on those mistakes.

I'm not even remotely ready to conclude that that’s going to happen. USDOT has a long history of funding projects that destroy local prosperity instead of creating it, and even the I-45 plans are nowhere near dead yet. But I am hopeful, amid this TxDOT news and recent statements from Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, that we're moving in the right direction.

First, Do No Harm

I want to step back and tie this into my ongoing series on top-down power and the Strong Towns approach. Part 1 introduced the notion that sometimes it may seem to be necessary to "use Robert Moses means to achieve Jane Jacobs ends" when the only tools to prevent urgent harm are those of existing, flawed power structures.

Part 2 laid out the concept of iatrogenics, or "harm caused by the healer"—a key reason that centralized authority even in well-meaning hands can produce damaging results. And it teased a partial list of ground rules for how to exercise centralized power in ways that are more likely to be restorative rather than destructive:

1. Prioritize damage control.

2. Invert the rules of engagement to let locals lead.

3. Tie emergency relief to systemic fixes.

We now begin exploring that list. The DOT is as good an object lesson as any for Rule #1. What would it look like, in the case of federal transportation policy, to put damage control first? And is there an important role for USDOT to play as a sort of referee with regard to city and state transportation projects—particularly as long as those projects rely on federal purse strings?

This part of the work deserves more attention than it sometimes gets. There are those who want to see leaders at the highest levels of government be the ones with the boldest, most transformative and comprehensive visions for the future. (Fantasies of a national high-speed rail network, for example, are resurgent in Very Online quarters since the arrival of the new administration.) Honestly, before we even talk about such steps, I just want to see the federal government work to grapple with the harm that its leadership has created for decades.

Secretary Pete is tweeting stuff that would get a local DOT Director called into the mayor’s office in almost any lefty costal city.

— Queen Anne Greenways (@QAGreenways) March 26, 2021

Secretary “Mayor” Pete has been on a tear doing just this kind of grappling... at least, rhetorically. In public statements and on Twitter (are those the same thing these days?), Buttigieg has set more than a few urbanist hearts aflutter by calling out, in uncharacteristically blunt terms for someone in his position, the grave and historic mistake of creating cities where owning a car is a necessary ante to participating productively in society.

Actually redirecting the ship of the DOT will be much, much harder than tweeting. (The Secretary, no doubt, understands this.) Much of the change that needs to happen depends on Congress and isn’t up to the bureaucrats. But there’s a lot that is up to the bureaucrats and that we should view as a prerequisite for them to have any credibility in asking for more funding to implement new, affirmative priorities.

“First, do no harm” is a good principle for plenty of professions. At Strong Towns, that principle is why #NoNewRoads has been our rallying cry for years. More recently, high-profile lobbying organizations like Transportation For America have taken up a similar position as well: we must repair our priorities to focus on essential maintenance and high-returning investments, before we pass any sort of multi-trillion dollar infrastructure bill. Otherwise we will simply end up pouring money into the same wealth-destroying projects that have spread out, denuded, and impoverished our cities for decades.

This means a lot more than just Pete’s tweets. The agency has all sorts of bureaucratic inertia downstream from the Secretary, although he gets to set the tone. In a recent Strong Towns Podcast episode, Transportation for America director Beth Osborne laid out her vision of what would constitute a credible effort toward change on the part of USDOT:

It’s going to require this new crew at USDOT to make permanent changes. They need to change not only what they say about design guides and things like the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices permanently: they need to change their own instructions, they need to manage their division staff. Each state has an arm of [the FHWA] and they implement the program totally differently. USDOT needs to get a handle on that and watch how they control things. They need to change basic requirements they put on the states, like requiring a 20-year traffic projection. I guarantee whatever you project is random garbage. Don’t base expenditures on things we can’t possibly know.

There’s all those sorts of things that they don’t have to wait for legislation for that I am not gonna be super excited about until I see them start doing it. Those things need to be put on the books and made permanent, and that’s how they’ll change the culture.

I’m very carefully waiting to see what they put out in terms of what they’re going to support—reauthorization, or if there is going to be a stimulus package. If it’s a gigantic amount of money for existing programs, then you know they’re all bluster. You cannot be for improving the economy, improving racial justice, reducing climate emissions, if all you’re going to do is put money into the programs that created the problems you’re trying to fix. Not possible.

If USDOT was to really engage in this work of systematically cleaning house, it’d keep the agency quite busy for some time. There are two main elements that have to happen:

• Do everything in your power to stop enabling destructive projects. Not a penny of federal funding should be going to projects like the I-45 expansion or Shreveport's Inner-City Connector that will waste billions of taxpayer dollars, worsen segregation and racial disparities, and destroy the wealth and integrity of communities. These are tough political fights, but USDOT should use every tool at its disposal to block the worst highway boondoggles from receiving federal funding and support.

• Do a comprehensive review of policies and procedures that perpetuate bad practices all the way on down to the local level. Osborne identified some of these, as well as the fact that the devil is often in the details. For example, why is it that a transit project in Minnesota recently had to add $70 million worth of parking (which the local planners involved did not think was needed) in order to better meet the criteria to receive a USDOT transit grant? Why are 20-year traffic projections still a requirement for any federal-aid project? There are an endless number of details like this in any bureaucracy—situations where the right hand and the left are working at cross purposes. Rooting them out is important work.

Sometimes You Need a Referee

Why do this work, though? As long as we're going to dream, why not just dream of defunding much of federal transportation policy altogether, and devolving control of both project planning and the purse strings to local and state governments, where it belongs? (Incidentally, we published a piece about just such a proposal from Utah Senator Mike Lee a few years ago.) The Houston kerfuffle offers an excellent answer to that: for now, we need the USDOT to play referee, while advocates and internal reformers do the hard work of changing the culture of local and state transportation agencies from below.

In practice, when you remove a source of centralized, unaccountable power, what fills that vacuum usually isn’t some benevolent form of bottom-up democracy. It's just centralized, unaccountable power from a different source. (This is a general rule about power, and one of the main philosophical justifications for centralized state power, summarized as, "Look at the alternative!" If Big Government is not good in its own right, it can still be good in situations where it's the only available check on Big Corporations, Big Aristocracy, Big Organized Crime, or Big What Have You.)

In the specific case of transportation policy, the equally Big Bad alternatives to federal funding, federal standards, and federal control look like state DOTs. Many of these, like TxDOT, are totally committed to a destructive Growth Ponzi Scheme mindset and an antiquated set of assumptions about how infrastructure serves local prosperity. (Transportation for America has also been on the front lines of pushing pragmatic reforms to the broken culture of state DOTs.)

Even local authorities won’t inherently make wiser decisions for their local constituents in a vacuum of federal leadership. Many don’t know how to: they are often myopic, less imaginative, and less informed about alternative approaches. This is especially true because after a near century of the suburban experiment, a lot of the wisdom of how we used to create productive places has been lost, and local officials are living with received beliefs that are simply wrong. The locals are often the biggest cheerleaders for the very policies—like widening a road and displacing adjacent businesses—that destroy their wealth.

In the long term, local authorities do make more solvent decisions, but this isn't because of inherent virtuosity or democratic representativeness. This is because of skin in the game—because of shorter feedback loops. That's a long-term process. We don't live on forest time. We get hurt now.

State DOTs don't have skin in the game in local highway projects any more than the feds do. It's plausible to say that if Houston were left entirely to its own devices (i.e. having to fund all of its priorities and services through local revenue), then we'd see Houston stop taking drastic actions like widening I-45 that destroy Houston's wealth, because city leaders would feel the hit and change course.

The state of Texas, on the other hand, probably can destroy a bunch of Houston's wealth and a bunch of Houstonians' homes, and get away with it before feeling the feedback, and that might in fact be a popular policy among Texans not living in the affected parts of Houston. This is a basic collective action problem: a highway through your backyard sounds pretty nice to me, if your backyard is on my way to places I want to go. And a highway through my backyard likewise sounds pretty nice to you.

This is where leadership from the very top is transformative. Keeping mindful of the iatrogenics argument, let's distinguish this from the notion that local and regional transportation projects should be planned from the top, funded largely or exclusively from the top, or designed subject to criteria determined at the top.

This isn't about taking a brand new transportation program and imposing it everywhere without local feedback or nuance. We tried that once already. It was a very, very bad thing to do.

This is about the negative. It's about playing referee. The feds should tell TxDOT or any other state DOT, "Here are the things we don't do anymore, because they were a disaster, and we don’t have time to wait for all of you (local and state officials) to reach that conclusion yourselves. So if you want to do X, you won't get any federal funding or federal support." 

It’s not a substitute for the needed bottom-up cultural change that must take root in our thousands of local governments. We can drag the whole transportation planning profession along kicking and screaming, or wait for its old guard to retire. But in the meantime, we can have some measure of harm reduction. We can have a federal DOT that is willing to be the referee. And, just maybe, we already have a Secretary of Transportation who is choosing to exercise the kind of visible intellectual leadership that will give courage and cover to hundreds of reformers within local and state agencies. I like that prospect.

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