Streetsblog has done an excellent job of researching the presidential candidates’ records on transportation. What they brought up, combined with the additional comments on each post, reveals much about how each of the candidates stand not only on transportation reform, but also on energy and the environment.

Part one discusses the Republicans.

Part two discusses the Democrats.

In case you’re on the fence one way or another, this is a little-discussed issue of real substance that may help sway you one way or another.

Why is the Bush administration secretive? If you think it’s for reasons of national security, you guessed wrong.

Here’s one piece of the puzzle, courtesy of the New York Times:

If you want to know something as simple as who heads the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, don’t bother to ask the safety agency’s communications office. Without special permission, officials there are no longer allowed to provide information to reporters except on a background basis, which means it cannot be attributed to a spokesman.

NHTSA is the best resource out there on automobile safety. To close that resource — except on a megalomaniacal quest to control the information — can only place Americans in danger. The only group this protects is auto manufacturers, who are more concerned about selling cars than selling safe cars. Remember: this is the same group that insisted that seatbelt and airbag requirements would make cars too unaffordable to too many consumers.

There is clearly no intention here to protect American lives. Should the Bush administration have any concern for actual human life, they would let the sunshine in.

This from a recent editorial in the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:

Transportation, in Georgia and across the country — probably around the world — is a matter of always trying to catch up with needs and demands and never coming close. What transportation funding in our part of the country has traditionally consisted of, and consists of to this day, is gasoline taxes that build more roads that accommodate more cars, which in turn create the need for more roads, and so on.

That cycle can’t continue, according to Georgia state Sen. Jeff Mullis, R-Chickamauga. Mullis chairs a panel called the Joint Study Committee on Transportation Funding, created by the General Assembly this year to look for new ideas and new ways to pay for how Georgians get around Georgia.

Even now, Mullis said Tuesday, the costs of building roads and acquiring the land to build them on are rising too much too fast for gasoline taxes to keep up. As more people switch to alternative fuels and hybrid cars, the problem will only get more pronounced.

Rep. Vance Smith of Pine Mountain, chairman of the House Transportation Committee and a member of the joint panel, offered an anecdote that illustrates the problem: After the ribbon-cutting for the new Georgia 400, Smith, recalled, “I got in my truck and came home and said, ‘We just solved Atlanta’s transportation problems.’”

Of course, Georgia 400 is now synonymous with the gridlock that has come to define Atlanta and, to a lesser extent, other Georgia cities including Columbus.

As long as the bulk of the transportation money Georgia uses is tied up as dedicated money for roads and bridges, take that lemon money and make lemonade out of it.

Where possible, shift the money toward city roads and create a set of guidelines. Getting around “within” Georgia’s population centers is at least as important as getting around “between” them. For years, however, the focus has been on going “through” population centers — which makes the “within” and “between” forms of transportation very difficult. As our representatives in the Legislature are now beginning to find out, the “through” policy is also very expensive.

In one example, Midtown narrowed a portion of West Peachtree Street (south of 10th St.). GDOT was very reluctant to agree, arguing that the result would be more traffic congestion. But instead, traffic counts went down.

A similar, strategic, narrowing of “through” roads within Georgia’s cities would save a great deal of money. Building new “within” streets wherever possible — that is, strengthening the grid — would offer a higher amount of capacity per dollar spent.

If you are a narcissistic megalomaniac, I know of just the right career for you: highway builder. That’s one of the lessons I learned from The Power Broker.

Building highways may not sound like a glamorous task, but there is hardly a legacy that is more lasting. In New York, Broadway (”Breedaway,” as it was called back then) follows the same Indian path that the Dutch widened when they settled Manhattan. In Atlanta, Peachtree Street follows the Peachtree Trail, first established by the Creek nation. In Europe, many modern highways follow routes first established by ancient Roman highways.

The warning brought about by “The Power Broker” has to do with a man whose power went unchecked for half a century, and whose vision was blindly stubborn. That he was a highway builder (among other things) meant that his vision would affect many future generations. The warning should give pause to anyone who seeks to use Band-Aid solutions to mitigate congestion.

Robert Moses — RM — gathered power for himself in a way that trapped him into his own vision. Author Robert Caro pointed out that when RM began his career, he would seek power for the sake of building things; and as he aged, RM built things in order to accumulate more power for himself. But from the very beginning, Moses was guided by his own vision, which he began to formulate at the beginning of his career. “The Power Broker” documented the path Moses took to, for example, build the West Side Improvement in the 1930s, a vision he first formulated in 1914. As much as circumstances may have changed in fifteen years, Robert Moses would not change his vision except to accommodate ways he could obtain the money necessary to pay for that vision.

The power Moses accumulated over the years served as part of the warning Caro offers. The power Moses held was not simply administrative — that he held 16 city- and state-wide posts at once was not enough. Moses wrote the laws that established many of the positions he held — laws that gave him an extraordinary amount of power, and made it very difficult to take that power away from him.

Through toll bridges, Moses had access to vast sums of money that could be used to justify an even greater wealth of bonding capacity, which would then be used to finance more roads and highways that served the toll bridges. All that money supplied thousands of jobs, which could be doled out to anyone who would subscribe to the Moses vision. And it was that vision that supplied seemingly endless profits to engineering firms, road-building contractors, insurance companies, banks, unions, political campaigns, and others. This road-building coalition served as a model for departments of transportation to copy throughout the country. (Here in Georgia the profits come, in part, from a dedicated tax on fuel.) In this sense, one difference between Moses graft and Tammany Hall graft was that Moses was able to dress his graft up to look honest.

Beyond tolls, the additional money supplied to him from the City and State came even as schools, police, fire, and other essential services were getting starved.

There is also another warning supplied by this book. While highways can be so strong as to leave a lasting legacy, Moses exposed the delicacy of the urban fabric by ripping it apart. Once-stable neighborhoods were transformed into exactly the sorts of traffic-filled, poverty-stricken, crime-ridden places that so-called American Dreamers paint cities to be. Crime and poverty immediately struck the places where the highways were laid down. Once-thriving neighborhoods were torn apart as residents were displaced by the tens-of-thousands. Businesses on either side of the highways lost half (or more) of their customer base — some to displacement, some to the inconvenience of a new highway dividing the neighborhood.

It is an odd sort of thing about cities. Part of what makes a great city is really in the details that “masterbuilders” like Robert Moses never thought of or cared about — and these are the details that make the city a delicate place. A strong city is a place full of delicate pieces that no highway-building bureaucrat could possibly appreciate.

Part of New York’s fall came after Robert Moses lost his power. The City descended into a staggering load of debt, and eventually had to be bailed out. Much of the South Bronx area, torn apart by multiple Moses highways, burned down as apartment buildings became worth more for insurance collections than they were worth in rent (or rehabilitation, or redevelopment). The highways — built in such a way to retain more permanence than Broadway or Peachtree — contributed to the weakness of the city. New York became, for a few decades, a weak city, full of strong highways.

Some have learned the lesson that the rise of an American dictator such as Robert Moses should never happen again. Cities are for people, not for cars. But many great American cities, torn apart by highways, remain torn apart to this day, choked in traffic, crime and poverty — problems that seem intractable to this day.

Robert Moses is dead. Long live Robert Moses.

Should you find yourself near a Creative Loafing distribution point, pick yourself up a copy and turn to page 16. There’s my article!

It turns out the Atlanta Regional Commission, in its infinite wisdom, decided to take out federal funding for the entire western half of the Beltline from the region’s 25-year plan.

You can also read a more detailed account on Fresh Loaf.

Once you’re done being angry about government incompetence, turn to page 31, and read about Freddie Ashley, the new Artistic Director at Actor’s Express. I also interviewed him earlier this week for the Atlanta Performs Podcast. Once you’ve finished reading about Freddie, feel good to know that something good and right is going on in Atlanta.

Why mention these two things in the same post? Take a look at the map for the Northwest section of the Beltline. You’ll notice there’s a trail that is slated to go directly between a Beltline transit station and King Plow Arts Center, the home of Actor’s Express. That’s just one example of many showing how the Beltline will improve connectivity in the city, not to mention our quality of life. But that’s assuming the ARC puts the funds back in for the western half.

The Star-Tribune reports that this morning’s commute was much easier than expected:

Twin Cities commuters, braced for a wretched rush hour this morning because of the Interstate Hwy. 35W bridge collapse, found the going mostly easy.

An AP Video makes a similar report, which includes this from an interview with a local commuter, Ryan Mooney:

As I commute up and down University, I see no difference from the day of the collapse. It is a lot more congested, but it still seems free-flowing, and I really don’t notice the difference at all.

And this from another local commuter, Omar Taylor:

It was just a smooth ride, a smooth transition. There wasn’t that much much traffic on 35W. Actually, I came in on 35W and got off on 5th Street and was fine.

Let’s see how traffic holds up once the bridge is back.

This is what of the scene I was able to capture this afternoon from the wreck on I-85 South, closing all but one lane in each direction:

According to the story on the AJC website

the bus driver struck a median wall, disabling the steering. “The steering parts underneath the bus broke,” police spokesman Eric Schwartz said. The bus then hit utility poles, according to Schwartz. Two people were thrown from the bus into the northbound HOV lane. It was unclear if they were the same two people who died in the accident.

The story erroneously states (sourcing the GDOT website) that four NB lanes and two SB lanes were closed as a result of the wreck. When we passed by it, all but one lane was closed off in each direction.

We spotted one of the bodies in the NB HOV lane, though it was covered by a blanket.

Someone I used to work with once told me she thought transit was “gross.” But, really, that word is a more fitting description of traffic fatalities. This sort of thing happens every day in America.

The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office identified the dead as Sharon E. Murray, 34, of Dunwoody, and Gary G. Pleasant, 64, of Atlanta.

Tonight at 6:00, a new exhibit opens at the Museum of Design Atlanta — The Design Prescription: How the Built Environment Affects our Health.

I was very lucky to have an opportunity to contribute to this exhibit and encourage you to check it out. My contribution is a short documentary created by myself and Cathy — 4 Commuters. The documentary chronicles the daily commutes of four people, each of whom use one of four different modes of transportation — a car, transit, feet, and a bicycle.

Over time, we’ll be building the 4 Commuters website to document how 4 average, real or hypothetical commuters come into conflict with one another, and what urban design elements can be used to alleviate those conflicts. We may even get really trendier-than-thou and ask whether, in some cases, it’s a good idea to alleviate modal conflicts.

But in the meantime, go and stop by the MoDA gallery space at Peachtree Center’s Marquis 2 building and check out this new exhibit.

h/t Rusty, as reported in the Marietta Daily Journal:

Despite metro-Atlanta’s population now more than 5 million and growing, Cagle dismissed ideas for a light rail system in the metro area.

“The jury is still out on light rail,” he said. “We don’t have the density that can substantiate light rail.”

Meanwhile, in Boston, the costs of the Big Dig continue to skyrocket:

Two top state officials on Monday expressed concerns about the Big Dig’s rising price tag, with Lt. Gov. Tim Murray worrying that the megaproject could take more funds away from other projects and Treasurer Tim Cahill saying state taxpayers shouldn’t be asked for another project bailout.

The Patrick administration plans to tackle the Big Dig’s costs - potentially $333 million higher than the latest estimate - as part of a broader effort to rehaul state transportation financing policies, Murray said.

The Georgia Public Policy Foundation, the Reason Foundation, and Georgians for Better Transportation have done a remarkable job of feeding at the trough. With only a few hundreds-of-thousands of dollars worth of investment, the roadbuilding interests they represent earn back billions of dollars in unneeded highway infrastructure investment.

And now they want to bring the Big Dig to Georgia, calling it the fiscally responsible thing to do? Who are they kidding? And who is Casey kidding, to think that tunnels under Atlanta, or a 23-lane-wide highway through Cobb County will solve anything? They will solve nothing. The tax base will never be able to sustain this obscene level of funding to maintain the highways, mostly because the consumers making up that tax base would be paying so much to maintain their own cars.

New roads are fine, as far as I’m concerned — small, connecting roads that strengthen the grid. Even as America’s governments continue to do nothing about the ongoing infrastructure crisis, a cabal of highway lobbyists continue to steer our elected officials astray in asking them to overinvest in precisely the wrong types of transportation infrastructure. It’s a shame because it’s my generation that’s going to pay for a bulk of that infrastructure in an age of declining oil supplies.

Meanwhile, in the next couple of weeks, I’m likely going to sell my car. Thankfully, I can find ways to contribute a little less to all this madness.

flickr/diddlbiker

Imagine a commute that looked like this.

h/t: Streetsblog

(Note: You’ve probably noticed the technical difficulties of the site recently. If not fixed soon, I may look at switching hosts.)