WITHOUT A DOUBT

YES TO HIGH SPEED RAIL

Good luck with Governor Waaaambulance, Congressman Cao.

His administration was working toward high speed rail before he had a child-like reaction to being made fun of for previously opposing it publicly to score a one-off political point.

From Worst To Worster

Wahmbulance.

Just to deprive President Obama of credit for a forward-thinking stimulus package that funds rail expansion, we get deprived of a no-brainer high speed rail project.

Maybe the feds should offer to name the railway the Jindal High Speed Line to smooth things over.

But that sounds like something that would be built to connect Jefferson Parish to Washington D.C. only to veer off about a fifth of the way there and crash into the ocean.

Thanks for effing over the whole state because Keith Olbermann said something true about you.

Only tourists deserve transit?

And only the least adventurous ones at that.

--

An official WCBF tip of the hat to Transport for Nola for keeping an eye on the RTA.

To briefly synthesize what's going on, and please correct any inaccuracies:

The city actually has a little bit of money for a new streetcar line. Perhaps more to the point, there is a lot of federal money available for public transportation via the stimulus bill. To tap those funds, we need to present a compelling project. More consequentially, we need a project that will serve real neighborhoods and real New Orleanians while also opening up some economic opportunities to under-performing areas.

The RTA, or rather, the private firm Veolia to whom the RTA has contracted away all of its responsibilities, recently pitched three separate proposals.

One would be a new streetcar line starting at Canal and Rampart that would run on Rampart and then all the way down St. Claude Avenue to Poland Ave. One variation would be to instead run the line down Elysian Fields to the riverfront instead of taking it all the way down St. Claude.

One would be a new line connecting the Union Passenger Terminal to Canal St. via Loyola Avenue.

The last would be a new line connecting the Convention Center to Canal St.

There's an opportunity for outrage here and it's obvious. Guess which plan has been dubbed 'preferred?'

Of course it's the one that only tourists will use - the one on Convention Center Boulevard.

There are a few really dumb reasons this plan has traction over the other more utilitarian options.

First, Veolia believes that the Convention Center route would have the greatest short-term ridership, thereby increasing revenue. However, this is an insulting rationale since the other options would surely contribute to more robust use of public transportation by the residential public over the long term as well as boost public support for future capital investments in transit.

The second rationale for the Convention Center Boulevard route is that the Convention Center folks have a little bit of extra money that they would throw into the project. This is insulting since that money is just sitting there from the Convention Center's failed phase four expansion. They should probably just return it to the taxpayers.

OR...

THEY COULD USE IT TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO THE STREETCAR THEY ALREADY HAVE!

That's right! The Convention Center already has a streetcar! The riverfront line sits behind the Convention Center and has low ridership because nobody knows it's there.

The guys at Transport for NOLA have a great compromise idea that would draw on the two other streetcar line proposals. I think it's the best proposal, the one most likely to get funded, and one that gives the city really strong options the next time money frees up for another expansion.

Their idea suggests running a streetcar line up Howard Avenue and down either Loyola or S. Rampart to Canal and then down Rampart to St. Claude and as far down St. Claude as money would allow, probably to Press St.

I think this line would develop really good ridership. After all, the St. Claude Avenue bus line has the highest ridership in the RTA.

I like this idea because it connects our streetcar lines into a discernible system. It connects uptown to downtown and offers incentive to build along the most depressed blocks of the CBD. Plus, it gives us a bunch of choices next time around whether we want to bring Elysian Fields Avenue into the mix or extend the St. Claude line all the way down to Poland.

View the Transport for NOLA resolution in pdf form here.

Sign on to it here.

The Transport guys have done a great job and really lay out a compelling case. It's not just that their proposal is the best for the city, but it is most likely to win federal funding. Read the resolution.

There is a really critical Thursday morning meeting about this as well:

WHEN: Thursday, June 25th, 10AM
WHERE:
RTA Headquarters
2817 Canal Street (one block lakeside of Broad Street)
New Orleans, LA 70119

Ladies and Gents, it's sexy to be a public transit wonk in the 21st Century.

Stimulus: Crossing Our Fingers

I've tried to stay on top of the New Orleans implications of the big federal stimulus bill being negotiated in Congress. When I last broached the topic, I discussed the competing asks coming from the state and municipal levels.

Under a directive from Governor Bobby Jindal, the Department of Transportation and Development released an approximately $1.4 billion plan that is almost entirely comprised of major highway expansion projects outside of Orleans Parish. DOTD Secretary Ankner is on the record saying that the state is really only expecting to receive something in the ballpark of $400 million from the feds.

That's not very much money at all, and almost none of it would go to New Orleans, you know, the place with the most crippling infrastructure needs in the United States of America.

But as it turns out, New Orleans has come up with it's own ask. I alluded to the competing plan by the Regional Planning Commission, Regional Transit Authority, and the City of New Orleans.

Here are some more details:

Total ask: $6.3 billion
Estimated "shovel ready" spending for 2009: just under $1 billion.

First up is public transportation, where we request a total of half a billion dollars,

This portion of the draft document proposes seven streetcar projects, including:

-extending the Carrolton ave. line to connect to the Canal st. line
-extending the riverfront line to Jackson Avenue, building a new line north along Jackson Ave to St. Charles
-extending the riverfront line to Poland Avenue, building a new line along Poland from the river to St. Claude
-building new line to link union passenger terminal to Canal
-new line from Canal to Elysian Fields along N. Rampart and then from N. Rampart to the river along Elysian Fields
-a new line along convention center boulevard
-a new line connecting Canal all the way to Poland Ave, perhaps extending the proposed line along N. Rampart all the way down St. Claude

Also there is several tens of millions of dollars in spending proposed to build Bus Rapid Transit lines from the CBD to N.O. East and Algiers as well as for shelters, new buses, kiosk technology, etc. etc.

Then there's what is known as 'infrastructure resilience' spending, which actually comprises close to half of the city's total request. This includes an ask of $2.5 billion to supplement efforts to replace our sewer lines and pipes and half a billion to bury electrical and telephone wires.

Another section details our requests for regional rail spending, about $1.2 billion. There's a 450,000,000 request for a light rail line from downtown New Orleans to the airport. The city also proposes high speed rail connections to Baton Rouge, Mobile, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Hattiesburg, and Meridian.

Then there's just over a billion dollars proposed for "pedestrian enhancements" like new sidewalks, curbs, gutters improved drainage systems, street lights, trees, crosswalks, etc.

What else?

$120,000,000 for airport improvements
$240,000,000 for road repaving in Orleans Parish
$65,000,000 for bicycle infrastructure

Of course, all amounts are approximated and project details are heavily annotated.

But after a quick browse, it's a pretty solid package. I'm not sure what's "shovel ready" for 2009 but it's not hard to imagine how helpful these projects would be for our short, medium, and long term regional health.

Just think if all we got funded out of this was half of the proposed streetcar lines and half of the proposed sewer replacements. Even that would be an extremely significant, if not a game-changing investment.

I'd been wondering why it was that the city of New Orleans and the RPC were putting out a plan that would compete with the state plan, why the DOTD plan didn't just include our region's requests.

It turns out that this was by design - as a result of lobbying by the Mayor - to counteract what might happen if states were not given strict guidelines on how to allocate federal money. This was something discussed within the US Conference of Mayors, so I don't mean to insinuate that Nagin just invented the strategy out of thin air.

In fact, it would appear that the USCM thinks that a lot of the infrastructure money in the stimulus bill can and will be funnelled directly to cities and regional planning organizations through existing programs like CDBG.

--

I have also heard from a couple of different sources that, to a significant extent, the amount of stimulus money allocated for New Orleans depends on the lobbying efforts of folks like Karen Carter Peterson and Desiree Glapion Rogers instead of the Louisiana Congressional Delegation.

My question now is why our Congressional Delegation isn't up to bat for us. Is it just because New Orleans doesn't have political clout within our state delegation? Or is it because Congress in general isn't actually doing much "earmarking" of the package?

I have some theories but I'd like to know what you guys think...

Infratructure and You: City v. State

Following up from earlier...

Bobby Jindal was early proponent of a possible infrastructure stimulus package. Here's what he had in mind in December:

At a news conference before leaving for the Philadelphia meeting, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said he would like to see more federal investment in coastal restoration projects, barrier island recovery efforts and the project to close the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. He also listed hurricane protection and levee projects in Jean Lafitte and the restoration of a Charity Hospital medical complex in New Orleans as priorities.

"There are literally billions of dollars that can be pushed through the pipeline that have already been allocated by Congress that have yet to come to our communities, that have yet to come to our state, " Jindal said, before leaving for the summit with Obama.

"I think it's unprecedented for a newly elected president to sit down with Democratic and Republican governors, " Jindal said. "We're going to have the opportunity to share with him what's going on in our states and make some recommendations to his administration so they can hit the ground running."

The Times-Picayune made it seem as if Jindal would be making hurricane protection and coastal restoration the centerpiece of Louisiana's ask. We also know that the funding shortfall for the LSU/VA hospital development is a big priority.

Jindal has remained in control of the state's stimulus strategy. He held a press conference announcing the state's priorities last weekend. The article only briefly summarizes what might be in Louisiana's request but there are some interesting things to infer. For one, many of the things that Jindal has put on the table are not actual infrastructure projects. In no order, some examples of that from the article include:

- aid to farmers who experiences losses from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike

- "removal of red tape for local governments negotiating with [FEMA]"

- "changes to the Medicaid financing formula for states affected by disasters"

For flood protection, the article alludes to the Governor's desire to address the issue but the only concrete measure that gets fleshed out is the long-requested rule change that would mandate the Army Corps to use materials collected from dredging for existing coastal restoration projects.

-

So what is actually concrete?

Highways. We can build highways.

"I'll make the case that projects like I-49 north should be a priority for his administration.

I will personally be advocating to President-elect Obama that this project be included in the stimulus package that the federal government is hoping to get done by Jan. 20 at the latest next year."

In fact, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development has been hard at work in anticipation of a federal infrastructure bill since summer.

DOTD started compiling a list in August - three months before the presidential election - because "I assumed that whoever was elected president was going to have to do something like this," Ankner said. "But I didn't think it was going to be this big."

Because of DOTD's planning, it was one of the first states to submit a proposal and one of only three states that included a separate plan for improving ports and airports, too.

The list of projects comes out to a price tag of $1.314 billion. But Secretary Ankner is setting lower expectations:

“I think $400 million is a good number for us to think about,” Ankner said.

We know that finishing the I-49 project around Shreveport and renovating I-12 and I-10 around Baton Rouge are major state priorities. In the metro area, we know that there are projects already underway on I-10 in Jefferson Parish that have made it on the list. What's going to be left over for New Orleans?

If you browse the actual DODT list, next to nothing. Though measures improving highways in Jefferson Parish will have a direct impact on Orleans Parish, the absence of money for New Orleans is striking. There's $7 million proposed for improving an access road at Louis Armstrong International and $10 million proposed for improving the Crescent City Connection ferry terminals. The DOTD also proposes spending $30 million to help the RTA do "preventative maintenance."

Part of the issue, I suppose, is that only a small percentage of the projects in the city are "shovel-ready." The Obama administration apparently favors projects where construction can begin immediately and be completed within the next 2-3 years. This, they say, will maximize the extent to which federal spending stimulates economic growth over the short term.

I've argued that those strings shouldn't be attached when it comes to allocating resources to New Orleans because of the last administration's broken promises and our city's sobering list of imminent needs. Given the political opportunity, it makes sense to approach the infrastructure stimulus as an opportunity to secure money that might not be available at any other time. Whatever limits the Congress or the President want to attach to how that money is allocated by local officials are more than fine with me. The important thing is getting the money through Congress, especially since it isn't at all clear when or if New Orleans might get its own turn at the top of the docket or if there will be any political will to allocate resources when or if that time comes.

In fact, I have recently learned that New Orleans, the Regional Planning Commission, and the RTA are indeed drafting their own list of smart-growth transportation infrastructure projects totalling a very large number. It will be very interesting to see how the Louisiana Congressional delegation reconciles competing lists.

Other state agencies will be submitting their own recommendations for stimulus dollars. We should be careful to monitor those also.

I don't like this process at all. There is very little information in the public domain and it doesn't seem like the local professional media is particularly curious.

Am I overstating the local implications of the stimulus? Why isn't all of this a much bigger deal in the papers?

RTA Management Decision Upcoming

This will be a very interesting decision.

There are three contenders for the RTA management contract.

Two of the firms, Veolia Transportation and First Transit Inc., are private for-profit companies.

The other, TMSEL, represents the current employer of RTA personnel.

Veolia is an international giant in transportation management while First Transit has more modest contracts nationally. TMSEL, at least the way it is described, would represent status-quo for retaining the current in-house administration.

The way the article is set up, one would expect Veolia to get the contract. Not only do they have the most impressive international pedigree, servicing nearly 3 billion riders annually, but have already alluded to planned installation computerized bus stops that estimate the next arrival. They have promised to headquarter in New Orleans and have assured the RTA that the management team will be comprised of locals.

If RTA management is privatized, it is likely that there will be noticeable bus route reorientation that emphasizes more convenient services for post-Katrina population centers between the canals. It is possible that regular service to Lakeview, Gentilly, New Orleans East, and the Lower Ninth Ward will be cut.

UPDATE:

The consultant hired by the RTA to vet the proposals has recommended Veolia Transportation. The RTA will make their choice in July.

Required Reading

This article in the Times Picayune about geographic rivalry in City Council.

I have a lot to say about this, hopefully I'll get to it this weekend.

Not totally unrelated is the bidding for management of RTA.

Think about how these things are connected and we'll reconvene later.