By Jason Segedy

May 26, 2015

Follow me on Twitter @thestile1972

Akron’s Innerbelt Freeway at 12:30 p.m. on May 14, 2015. The Innerbelt was built between 1970 and 1986 at a cost of over $300 million in 2015 dollars. Its purpose was to spur economic development in downtown Akron. It didn’t work. Built to accommodate over 100,000 vehicles per day, it currently carries 18,000. Next year, the entire stretch of highway shown in this photo will be decommissioned and redeveloped - hopefully as an actual neighborhood where Akronites can live, work, and play.

Prologue

This post is based on some thoughts that I recently shared with my fellow directors of Ohio’s Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). But what I’m discussing involves everyone - not just those of us operating within the arcane world inhabited by regional transportation planning agencies.

As such, I’m interested in sharing these thoughts with all of our state’s public officials and with the citizens that they represent.

I am trying to to tell the truth here about our public policy, to the best of my ability, and at least as far as I understand it. I do not claim to know everything, nor do I claim to have all of the answers. But I believe that my assertions here are more correct than they are incorrect.

There is undoubtedly a lot of nuance that I will be unable to capture here, which would serve to temper the broad-brush that I will admittedly be painting with.

Recognizing the dictates of brevity, I press onward:

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and sim­plification help us to understand – but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our compre­hension may be only of the abbreviator’s neatly formu­lated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted. But life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything. In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator’s business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignor­ing too many of reality’s qualifying side issues. In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important sub­ject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought. -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Two other preemptive clarifications:

I am not arguing that, in a state with 11.6 million residents, we should never again build a new road, build a new interchange, or add lanes to a highway. But what I am arguing is that we do it far too often, at far too great of a cost to the taxpayer.

I am also not arguing that we should never do or dream anything big in terms of economic development. But I am saying that we should be prudent and wise, and that we should tend to prefer our economic development and public investment to be nimble, scalable, small-business-oriented, neighborhood-focused, and diverse.

What I am doing here is pushing back against our general transportation and economic development public policy - against its implications, against the things that often go unsaid, and against the unspoken philosophical assumptions that underlie much of what we do in this state - assumptions and transportation dogma that I simply do not believe anymore – namely that more highway capacity is a recipe for economic prosperity, that traffic congestion is a serious problem for Ohio, and that more infrastructure is the cure for what ails our cities.

Our Economic Development Policy Doesn’t Work



I no longer believe the dogma that is proffered by much of the mainstream economic development, planning, and engineering professions. The practitioners in these professions increasingly function as priests, rather than scientists. And I reject their statement of faith.

That statement of faith being: “More highway capacity is the path to economic prosperity”.



If that were the case, Ohio (the 7th largest state with the 4th largest interstate system) should be tearing it up economically. Instead, we are one of the slowest growing states in the union (44th); our economic growth lags far behind the nation as a whole (which is why our population growth is virtually non-existent); and our state contains (with the exception of Columbus) the weakest performing central cities of any one state in the union.

Our cities are bucking just about every major national trend when it comes to urban revitalization and job creation, and I simply don’t believe that more transportation infrastructure or less “congestion” (such as it is) is the cure for what ails them.

Our biggest economic problem in Ohio today is not the inability to get goods and services to market. Our biggest economic problem is economic inequality – a lack of economic opportunities for the poor and the working class – most of whom are clustered in our central cities, our inner ring suburbs, and our towns.

Increasingly, our jobs are being created far from the people that need them the most. Our prevailing transportation and economic development policy means that these people face either: a) a long, inconvenient bus ride; b) owning and operating a car that they will have a lot of trouble paying for; or c) no job at all.

Our problem is this: in most urban core neighborhoods, inner ring suburbs, and towns, there is poor transportation access to work and shopping (because most employers and stores have left these communities), and there is a corresponding lack of place-based economic development in the form of local entrepreneurship and small business growth.

New small businesses could provide jobs and shopping opportunities in these places – if they existed. But they don’t. So most people don’t want to live in or invest in these communities – and the vicious cycle continues.



Why is this happening to our urban places? Well there are dozens of reasons, but one of them is that our economic development policy in this state focuses on one company that employs 500 people, rather than 50 companies that employ 10 people.

Nine times out of ten, that one big company ends up in a greenfield at a new freeway interchange or along a newly-widened road (that was cheerfully built on the behalf of less-than-cheerful taxpayers).

Meanwhile, our urban places (where a significant proportion of our population actually lives, and where untold billions of dollars have already been spent on infrastructure by taxpayers at all levels of government) continue to languish.



Transportation policy is far from the only (or perhaps even one of the primary) reasons that our urban places are in lousy shape in this state, but it is also far from an insignificant reason.

It was far “easier” (if you will) to be poor in 1945 than it is today. Seventy years ago the poor were able to easily walk to work, to walk to the grocery store, and could use the comprehensive public transit networks that were in place at that time for longer trips when necessary.

Today, due to the disinvestment in and abandonment of large swaths of our core cities, rudimentary access to employment, shopping, and basic services often entails a long and inconvenient bus ride – if it exists at all.

In a state like ours, that is so very segregated by income (the overwhelming majority of the poor live in our inner cities, and most of our jobs and shopping opportunities are being created in the outermost suburbs) there is a growing disconnect between where jobs and shopping are located, and where the people that need them most live.



Make no mistake - this pattern of disinvestment, abandonment, and outward growth isn’t just the result of the free market at work. It is aided-and-abetted by public policy decisions made in the name of transportation access and economic development.

We can choose a different path, if we want to.

By focusing resources (both time and money) on place-based economic development, and transportation policy that supports, rather than undermines neighborhoods in urban areas, we could help bridge these social and economic gaps, and create opportunity for all.

Communities and neighborhoods that are designed to support public transit, biking, and walking can offer many place-based economic development and entrepreneurial opportunities for small business.

Similarly, targeted investment in these modes of travel, if coupled with good urban design, and an economic development focus that makes them effective (see: Columbus, Short North), can reduce the pressure to expand our highway system.

Speaking of which…

Traffic Congestion Is Not the Problem Everyone Says It Is



Our levels of traffic congestion are negligible when compared with nearly every other highly urbanized state. Yet we are continuing to spend far too much money on expanding our highways. Nearly every penny of the $1.5 billion obtained last year by borrowing money from the Ohio Turnpike is going to a roadway expansion project. Why?

I encourage you to read this short post by Charles Marohn on the pseudo-scientific alchemy that goes on within our thinktanks, our engineering firms, our DOTs, and sometimes within our MPOs, to quantify the “cost of congestion”:

Is congestion a transportation problem? Yes. Is it a big transportation problem? No. Should it be one of our largest overall public spending priorities in Ohio? Not even close.



Our obsession with congestion is incredibly short-sighted. We no longer have the money to worry about someone having to drive at 45 mph, rather than 70 mph, for two miles, at 5:00 p.m., or having their commute take 5 minutes longer than the same drive normally takes on a Sunday morning (which entails 90% of what we normally call “congestion” in Ohio).

Even if we had the money, we would be misallocating it to spend it on this particularly underwhelming transportation problem – rather than on maintenance, or safety, or on promoting other transportation choices – along with the place-based economic development which makes those choices work.

It is important to recognize that chasing after congestion is not being done in bad faith. It is instead due to institutional inertia, and a lack of engagement by elected officials and citizens.

Consequently, ODOT, MPOs, and local governments are continuing to do things as they have always been done, rather than pivoting to align with demographic and fiscal realities (not enough transportation dollars to maintain the status quo, decreasing per-capita vehicle miles traveled, a lack of economic opportunity for the transit-dependent poor, and the desire of younger generations to not be as automobile dependent).

Most public officials and citizens simply do not think about the trade-offs between supply, demand, and cost that govern the level of traffic congestion:

Q: “Would you like us to build this project that will make your commute take less time?“

A: “Yes.”

Q: “Would you like us spend $300 million to build this project that will make your commute take less time?”

A: “Well, maybe.”

Q: “Would you like us to spend $300 million to build this project that will make your commute take less time, but doing so means that your taxes will go up, and that 20 years from now, the state will have to spend that same amount of money again on another highway expansion to keep your commute just as short, and that it probably won’t be able to fix a lot of potholes as a result?”

A: “What was that last part that you said? Run that by me again…”

Most other states are beginning to recognize this new reality, but we are far behind the curve. We are going to end up with too much pavement and not enough money to maintain it in the future. We need to shift our transportation priorities now rather than later.

I recently read in a report put out by the Ohio Contractor’s Association that Ohio has an $11.6 billion backlog of unfunded, but needed highway projects. I suspect that a healthy portion of this backlog are congestion-mitigation projects that we don’t really need and that I don’t believe will make our economy better – instead they will add to the maintenance liability burden in one of the slowest growing states in the union.

If there is one large state that could get away with not spending a lot of money to relieve congestion, it is Ohio.

Our Cities Are In Terrible Shape

The above heading is not an insult to cities. I live in the City of Akron. I love Akron. It is a great place to live. I’ll always live here – in the city. But when you compare our largest cities in Ohio on nearly any measure of socioeconomic or fiscal health to those in just about any other state (with the possible exception of Michigan), we look awful.

At the statewide level, and often at the metropolitan level, our transportation priorities are misaligned with our needs. Ohio ranks 44th in population growth among the 50 states. We have more large shrinking cities than any other state in the union. In every urban area other than Columbus, we are experiencing continued outward development with little, no, or even negative regional population growth.

These trends are partly market based, but the state itself is influencing the market and underwriting continued outward expansion and continued urban decline by its transportation and economic development policy choices.

It is the exact opposite of the approach that we need. Ohio is the poster-child in the United States for urban decay and I think that fact should be an embarrassment to (and a concern for) all of us and for all of our statewide elected leaders. For our state to truly thrive as the wonderful place to live that we all know it to be, we need to lift all of our residents up.

Population Decline in Ohio’s 8 Urban Core Cities

No state with cities that post numbers like this can honestly be described as economically healthy.

Now, granted, there are myriad demographic and economic trends, both great and small, that have contributed to the well-documented poor social and economic outcomes in our cities.

Public officials can’t control the global economy, or social trends, or consumer preferences, or the housing market - but they can control transportation and economic development public policy.

Is our current public policy regimen in Ohio reinforcing the social and economic trends that have harmed our largest cities, or is it pushing back against them?

I’d argue it is the former, rather than the latter.

What Should Public Officials Be Doing?



I would argue that it is this:



Our job is to help people; specifically to help local governments and the citizens that they represent to create a transportation system that makes our communities better places to live – for everyone - rich and poor; black and white; young and old.



We do this by recognizing that transportation is a means-to-an-end, rather than an end in itself, and by recognizing that transportation planning is not a “value-neutral” proposition. It involves subjective value judgments about what is important, and it can help (or harm) local communities, depending on how plans and projects are implemented.



It is our job to support the projects and initiatives which provide help to communities by enabling them to build better places, rather than those that do harm by undermining and weakening our places. Distinguishing which type of project is which is not always clear, and takes learning by doing. It is hard and messy (but very important and rewarding) work.



We recognize that institutions like planning agencies and governments are a means to an end. It is the ideas that they embody which change the world.



But we also realize that institutions are where ideas are developed, nurtured, and disseminated; and that ideas, estranged from their institutional homes, lose much, if not all, of their transformative power. As such, our goal is the reform, renewal, and transformation of our institutions.



We recognize that our job is ultimately about people and places, rather than physical infrastructure. Roads, bridges, buses, and bike trails may be our artistic media, but better-connected people and stronger, healthier communities are our completed masterpieces.

We realize that the process of working together to build something is just as important as what is physically built, because what is really being built are relationships and a sense of community.



Once those relationships develop, collaborative networks of people working, learning, and doing together can begin to form. And once that happens, we will have built the capacity to transform our culture and our state.

We don’t care about receiving accolades for being the person that threw the stone into the pond - all we want to do is see the ripples expand across the water.

