by RON STARNER
What’s the quickest way to improve the economic fortunes of any community in America? Get the people in that community moving more quickly and efficiently from Point A to Point B, says former US Department of Transportation official Beth Osborne.
Now a vice president with the Washington-based advocacy group Transportation for America, Osborne told Janus Forum attendees at Lake Rabun recently that without continued investment into America’s roads and highways – and other forms of transportation – the US will continue to fall further behind in the race for global competitiveness.
“Our concept of mobility has completely changed,” says Osborne, whose organization is an alliance of elected, business and civic leaders seeking to ensure that states and the federal government invest more into smarter, locally driven transportation solutions. “Studies show that homes in walkable areas have 12 percent higher value. Areas with more transportation choices have higher economic mobility. And livable communities generate 10 times more tax revenue than traditional suburbs.”
The problem, she says, is that America is not moving – literally. “In Atlanta, the average trip now takes 42 minutes without traffic,” she notes. “With traffic, it takes 56 minutes. Fifty percent of all new housing demand today is for transit-access communities, but transit-access development represents only 5 percent of all new housing supply.”
Osborne adds that “traffic speed reductions in neighborhoods of 5 to 10 miles per hour result in economic growth of 10 to 20 percent.” For good examples of communities that have implemented livable neighborhoods seamlessly, Osborne says, look to Salt Lake City and Denver.
“Envision Utah looked at everything before adopting a plan to create more livable communities,” she says. “It is now working very well there, and it can work virtually anywhere.”
With the Federal Highway Trust Fund down to about $1 billion, Osborne says that America has reached the crisis point in its transportation infrastructure. “The shoe drops this fall, and we have got to act now,” she notes.
“The burden is on the states to do something. If the states don’t fix this problem, the Feds are not coming to the rescue,” she adds. “We know from our studies that new highways do not have a very good return on investment. Road repair work, meanwhile, has a 16 percent ROI.”
The 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax provides about $38 billion a year in revenue for the Highway Trust Fund, says Osborne, “but the problem today is that people are not driving as much. People are driving less because studies show that they have a commute threshold of 35 to 45 minutes. Anything past that, and they simply won’t drive. As a result, the money the federal government has taken in from gas taxes has remained flat since 2005.”
No one wants to see the program go broke, she notes, “but what we need are more creative solutions from the state and local level. That’s one of the things we advocate.”
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