There are two ways to respond to the shrinking federal budget for transportation projects: You can whine and mewl and curse the injustice of things, or you can look for other ways to cope with the country’s transportation challenges. Smart Growth America (SGA) has chosen the latter course, publishing “The Innovative DOT: a handbook of policy and practice,” which systematically explores alternatives to the old tax-and-build paradigm. This handbook covers ways to allocate existing revenues more efficiently, enact pricing strategies, adopt system efficiencies and integrate transportation and land use — the very things that states and localities should have been doing all along.
As SGA asks, “Could state DOTs provide better service for less money?” To pose the question is to answer it. “States and their departments of transportation (DOTs),” states the handbook, “are reevaluating and retooling traditional practices to ensure that those practices continue to provide users with a robust, economically beneficial transportation network.”
Insofar as necessity is the mother of invention, the impending contraction of federal transportation funds actually may prove to be a good thing. The Handbook doesn’t recommend which strategies to pursue. But it does lay out the array options available to state and local policy makers, and provides case studies of how different states, regions and communities made them happen. As SGA makes clear, every state is different. Not every option is suitable for all 50 states. But state officials can learn from what others are doing.
There is too much densely packed material to summarize in a single blog post. For details, I refer you to the handbook itself. However, there is such a treasure trove of information that, as time permits, I will explore several handbook themes in future posts with an eye toward defining policy options appropriate for Virginia.
(Full disclosure: Smart Growth America sponsors the Bacon’s Rebellion blog.)
— JAB