Under the radar: The Livability Moment

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-avenue/75209/the-livability-moment


The Livability Moment

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Robert Puentes


The U.S. Department of Transportation’s five-year strategic plan was released recently and is open for comment. It has straightforward goals around safety, environmental stewardship, and organizational excellence that don’t appear to be too much of a departure from the current plan. Yet a new set of strategies around the plan’s Livable Communities chapter has generated a fair share of commentary—and some controversy.

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It means reforming federal transportation policy. We need to start by getting the prices right especially congestion pricing on the roads and environmental pricing across the board. We also need a more modally-neutral approach that stresses policy outcomes (e.g. economy, environment, equity) rather than individual delivery systems (e.g., highway, transit, bike/pedestrian, and air).

The backlog of badly needed reform is one reason that reauthorization of the federal transportation law has been stalled in congressional debate. Meanwhile, important innovations like last year’s Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) projects are important steps in the right direction.

The DOT’s Strategic Plan recognizes that achieving livability objectives goes beyond transportation. In this regard, the ongoing initiative to support integrated planning and decision making by joining-up housing and transportation is off to a good start. Let’s see this go farther and make sure HUD-required housing plans report on the relationship of housing investments to transportation and DOT-required transportation plans report on how proposed transportation investments support affordable communities and alternative growth patterns.

The United States is not China. We are not, thankfully, a planned economy, deciding which sectors should grow in which places, and then aligning infrastructure, innovation, human capital, and other investments to make it happen. But communities across America will continue to be profoundly shaped—positively or negatively, intentionally or inadvertently—by federal transportation policy. Ignoring this consigns us to continue the unacceptable social engineering of the status quo. So the question for the DOT’s Strategic Plan should not be whether or not Livable Communities is an appropriate area of focus but, rather, why it’s taken so long.

planning for a better country..afreakin'mazing.

Course according to some on the internet ..all they have to do is write.."the White House is not doing anything" and they think that makes it so.