Abstract
Active transportation has become an increasingly important policy area over the past 40 years as communities around the country have sought to provide transportation options that improve community quality of life and minimize negative environmental impacts. Federal infrastructure investments supporting walking and bicycling have, however, been contentious. This article explores the underlying tensions created as active transportation has been included in the federal transportation planning process over the past 40 years. Specifically, the article tracks the succession of transportation bill funding levels and changes in policy actors during this period. Structural changes that provided dedicated funding and expanded public participation have been vital to helping to foster the burgeoning active transportation coalition and to increasing usage rates for active transportation around the country.
Introduction
The significance of active transportation policy has increased over the past 40 years with communities around the country seeking to increase the safety and use of walking and bicycling. Spurred by a diverse coalition of environmental, public health, smart growth, and community advocates, active transportation investments are increasingly seen as an important policy tool to achieve multiple community objectives simultaneously (Mapes, 2009). This move toward a more holistic, sustainability focus mirrors larger trends in the field of public administration away from purely “siloed” policy responses to complex problems (Fiorino, 2010).
Federal transportation policy changes in the 1990s and 2000s helped to set the stage for this movement. The creation of a dedicated active transportation funding stream accounting for about 1.5% of all federal transportation spending (Cradock et al., 2009) has been a catalyst for small nationwide increases in active transportation use rates with 11.5% of all trips currently taken by walking or bicycling (Pucher, Buehler, Merom, & Bauman, 2011).
The shift toward providing a dedicated funding stream for active transportation infrastructure, however, represents a significant departure from federal funding patterns established before the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991. Prior to ISTEA, few communities used federal funds to invest in active transportation infrastructure instead focusing the preponderance of funds on the highway and interstate system, the core of the user pay funded system. The broadening of the goals of federal transportation policy has created controversy with repeated efforts made to exclude pedestrian and bicycle projects from federal funding (Fields, Renne, & Kevin Mills, 2013). While the user fee framework has been eroded over the past 10 years with large general fund infusions, the inclusion of federal funding for active transportation remains a contentious issue.
This article explores the underlying tensions created as active transportation has been included in the federal transportation planning process over the past 40 years. Specifically, the article tracks the succession of transportation bill funding levels and changes in policy actors during this period. Structural changes that provided dedicated funding and expanded public participation have been vital to helping foster the burgeoning active transportation coalition. Important opportunities exist for public works agencies at multiple levels of government to begin to engage with this coalition to transition toward agency practices that enhance community livability goals.
Redefining the Transportation Mission: Situating Active Transportation in Transportation Departments
To better understand the underlying tensions in active transportation policy, it is useful to situate the active transportation policy sub-sphere within the broader currents of the larger transportation policy universe. Over the past 60 years, Downey (2007) identifies a set of actors and structures associated with transportation policy decisions in the succession of transportation bills. Federal transportation policy is broken down into three contemporary eras: the interstate era, the Safe-T era, and the emerging wave. This framework, when applied to active transportation, shows how the environmental constituency helped to alter federal transportation policy through the inclusion of expanded public participation opportunities and the creation of a dedicated funding mechanism. The openings provided through this public participation and dedicated active transportation funding have, however, been a source of continued conflict in transportation reauthorizations.
The Interstate Era and Active Transportation
The interstate era (1956-1991) was characterized by extensive highway building and codification of basic standards of road building focused on the movement of cars. This system was predominantly funded through user fees paid by motorists in the form of gas taxes. During this era, there was very little federal funding for active transportation with no identified investments taking place before 1974.
With the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, more discretion was provided to state and local communities for providing a broader array of potential transportation infrastructure. Urban historians Mohl and Rose (2012) point to this bill as marking the official beginning of the “post-Interstate era” with increased local discretion and more engagement from diverse groups that had been “excluded in earlier decades” (p. 4).
This discretion, however, resulted in few active transportation projects. Analysis of the federal funding database, the Fiscal Management Information System (FMIS), shows that only 385 active transportation projects were obligated nationally between 1974 and 1991 totaling US$85.6 million in adjusted 2013 dollars. While the official door to federal funding for active transportation had opened, funding levels remained insignificant compared with broader transportation funding levels.
The Safe-T Era: Building Active Transportation Infrastructure and Coalitions
The second broad phase is the Safe-T era (ISTEA, Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century [TEA-21], and Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users [SAFETEA-LU]). While the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973 had opened the door to more discretion in projects, ISTEA in 1991 officially marked “the turning point between the Interstate and post-Interstate eras” (Transportation Research Board, 2006, p. 32) with the focus of transportation policy shifting from interstate expansion to a much more substantial multi-modal focus. During the debate over the bill, a coalition of environmental and historic preservation interests, the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP), mobilized to support a more quality of life centered transportation system. This coalition was able to effectively convince Senator Moynihan, a key figure in the crafting of ISTEA with a long-standing concern about the impact of urban interstates, to include a dedicated funding set aside for transportation enhancement projects (Weingroff, 2001). Highway interests argued that these non-revenue-generating transportation modes broke the user pay system.
ISTEA and the two subsequent bills, the 1998 TEA-21 and the 2005 SAFETEA-LU, also further expanded the constituencies expected to participate in the transportation planning process through expanded use of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and the inclusion of the broader citizen involvement in decision making (Transportation Research Board, 2006).
In the 2005 SAFETEA-LU bill, two important new active transportation programs were added.Then House Transportation Chair Oberstar (D-MN) extended the “cycling agenda” (Mapes, 2009, p. 57) to include a broader health and safety focus through the US$600 million Safe Routes to School program and the US$100 million Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program.
With the move from the purely discretionary funding model to a dedicated system, funding grew considerably. During just the first full year of ISTEA in 1992, federal obligations for active transportation projects totaled US$56.8 million in adjusted 2013 dollars. This amount represents 66% of all federal government obligations on active transportation in all of the previous years of federal funding (1974 to 1991). These numbers increased for the full funding cycle of ISTEA. Federal obligations from 1992 to 1998 totaled and adjusted US$1.6 billion for 4,041 projects spread across all states.
During TEA-21 (1999-2005), funding increased further to an adjusted US$3.6 billion for 8,343 projects. During the study period for SAFETEA-LU (2006-2010), 11,669 projects were obligated totaling an adjusted US$3.7 billion. Overall, federal funding for active transportation from 1992 to 2010 totaled US$8.9 billion adjusted to 2013 dollars for 24,053 projects. These projects were not, however, spread evenly across the country (Cradock et al., 2009). The impact of federal funding was strongly dependent “on state policy and the response of the MPOs to the opportunities that federal and state policies create” (Handy et al., 2009, p. 49).
Active Transportation Policy at a Crossroads: The Complete Streets Era?
The expansion of policy actors marks the beginning of what some have called an emerging era of transportation policy focused on more multi-modal and sustainable practices (Downey, 2007). While issues of efficiency and financial solvency dominate at the broader level, sustainability issues at the more micro level seem to be coalescing around the provision of multi-modal connections and more “complete streets” or roadways designed to ensure the needs of all users (Mapes, 2009; Snyder, 2013).
The success of the complete streets efforts at the local level stands in contrast to the pushback against active transportation by strong constituencies in Congress. During the debate over the 2012 transportation bill, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), a central sticking point in debates about the entire bill was the presence of active transportation funding. In the end, key active transportation funding programs such as Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to School were scaled back significantly and rolled together with other interests in the new Transportation Alternatives program (National Transportation Alternatives Clearinghouse, 2012; Fields et al., 2013). As MAP-21 is officially only a 2-year bill, the debate over the extent and mechanisms of funding active transportation will undoubtedly be contentious issues in the coming reauthorization.
Conclusion
Active transportation funding and use have grown dramatically over the past 40 years. Before 1973, the federal government provided no funding for active transportation. During the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government extended the option to funding active transportation with an adjusted US$85.6 million obligated between 1974 and 1991. Federal funding of active transportation exploded in the T-era when dedicated funding was included with active transportation obligations reaching a high of US$985 million (adjusted to 2013 dollars) in 2009.
The changes begun in ISTEA have increased citizen participation and opened up the transportation planning process to include an emerging coalition of public health, environmental, and community advocates pushing for an improved quality of life-centered transportation system. With recent reorganization of active transportation funding in MAP-21, funding levels have decreased, and there remains uncertainty about future programming decisions. While there is federal uncertainty, increased public participation by the complete streets coalition appears to be ushering in significant policy change at the local level pushing agencies to consider a broader set of transportation policy goals.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part through a grant from Active Living Research (#58025), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.