TIGER grant announcements this week

The stimulus bill passed last year included a $1.5 billion line-item for a merit-based grants program known as TIGER (Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery). This money has been held separate from traditional federal spending programs in order to fund projects that would have a particularly strong impact on economic development and community vitality, by criteria to be determined by transportation secretary Ray Lahood. This week, reports Streetsblog, those grants - the last major infrastructure funding announcement from the stimulus bill - will be announced.

First, rein in your expectations. $1.5 billion divided among 50 states evenly would net $30 for Maine. That's not exactly chump change, but there's not much our spendthrift transportation bureaucracy can do with that kind of sum - $30 million wouldn't even pay for the Maine Turnpike Authority's proposed new tollbooth in York. More likely, the $1.5 billion would be divvied up in a way that more closely matches states' populations, which means that Maine will get even less.

It might be different if Maine had proposed a radical, game-changing transportation plan for funding. It didn't. The state's TIGER grant applications read like a series of hail-Mary passes for projects with little to no real economic justification. They include:

• The "Caribou Connector," a 4.3 mile road through potato fields designed to bypass "congestion" in a farming community of 8,000 souls;
• The Eastport Gateway Rail project, a crutch for the moribund Port of Eastport near the Canadian border;
• The Northern Tier Rail Preservation Project, an effort to save an east-to-west rail line through the North Woods that was recently abandoned by its for-profit owners due to lack of traffic;
• The Mountain Division Rail Project, requesting $28.5 million to rebuild a rail line to sleepy foothill towns like Baldwin, Brownfield, and Fryeburg.
  

Pictured above: the Mountain Division Line, a $30 million railroad between Portland and Nowhere.

There are good reasons why no one wants to pay for these projects: all of them demand tens of millions of dollars for parts of the state where there are very few people and even less economic activity. I grew up in Steep Falls, right next to the Mountain Division line; if there were a train there, I'd ride it on a monthly basis. But I am one of perhaps 30 people in the entire state who would do so. Why is the Maine DOT even talking about building a train line to Steep Falls before we invest in rails to actual cities like Lewiston or Bangor? Why is this a higher priority than improving travel speeds and reliability on the Downeaster line between Portland and Boston?

Rounding out the list of Maine's TIGER applications are two projects that do a slightly better job of passing the sniff-test: a plan to revitalize three of Maine's ports with various capital projects, and a plan to rebuild the bridge between downtown Portsmouth, NH and Kittery, ME. Unfortunately, the former is tainted by its inclusion of a cruise ship "mega-berth" of questionable provenance, and the latter ought to have been paid for under the Maine DOT's regular maintenance schedule - it seems like a long-shot that Secretary Lahood will want to foot the bill for Augusta's negligence.

In total, Lahood has received $57 billion in requests. That means that 93% of funding hopefuls will go home empty-handed this week. To be sure, other states are also proposing potato-field bypasses and backwoods railways.

But other states are also proposing meaningful projects that will serve millions of people - and Maine missed that opportunity.

Veterans' Bridge Replacement Details

Here are some detailed plans of the new Veteran's Bridge, following up on my post from last week. I'll post more detailed thoughts later, but here's my quick take.

Things to like:

• Valley Street near Barber Foods will get smaller, with only five turn lanes, as opposed to six. The extra space will go towards a wider, safer sidewalk on the west side of the street;
• The Commercial St. crosswalk at Valley Street will get a new median to provide a refuge for crossing pedestrians;
• Sidewalks on both sides of the new bridge over the railroad tracks, between Valley Street and the waterfront.

Things we should work on:

• No sidewalk or crosswalk connection between the Fore River waterfront trail (which runs north from the bridge, towards Mercy Hospital) and the new bridge sidewalk (which is on the southern, opposite side of the bridge).
• Likewise, no crosswalk between Barber Foods and the opposite side of Commercial Street. With so many pedestrians headed to work at Barber and other workplaces on St. John Street, this will be a probable jaywalking problem area unless a safe crossing gets built.
  
• Still no word on where the sidewalk will go on the other (South Portland) side of the bridge. Another sidewalk to nowhere?

For the curious, a binder with engineering documents from the proposal is available at PACTS offices on the 4th floor of the AAA building on Marginal Way and Preble Street.

Budget crisis? Let's stop wasting space.

Our city, like most governments in America these days, is in the middle of a big budget shortfall. They're cutting school programs, raising bus fares, and laying off social workers. The city's main source of revenue is a 1.8% property tax, which is already high by Maine standards - the city can't raise it much further without sending more development and investment into the suburbs, and sending more homeowners into foreclosure.

On the face of it, it looks pretty hopeless. But in fact, City Hall has millions of dollars in costs that, out of pure neglect, it's been hiding off of its balance sheets. They're not in the schools, or in homeless shelters.

They're the opportunity costs of the city's acres of parking lots.

Here's an example - the East End School has a half-acre off-street lot on North Street. It's got gorgeous views of Back Cove and Casco Bay, it's across the street from the community gardens, it's a desirable neighborhood - and we're using this space only 15% of the time, for private vehicle storage during school days. This is self-evidently stupid, isn't it? And yet, there it is.

What if, instead, we made those few drivers park in the abundant on-street spaces on North Street and the Eastern Promenade (or walk, or take the bus), then sold this half-acre on the open market, no strings attached? Even in this economy, such a desirable location would fetch a lot of money - probably at least $400,000, which happens to be roughly 5% of the school system's budget shortfall this year.

And that's not all. If this half-acre of hilltop land goes to the private sector, it's all but certain that some developer will want to build something there. Most likely it would be homes, which is something our city needs more of. Let's assume they build 8 townhomes for $210,000 each. Then the city will collect 1.8% every year in property taxes - or about $30,000 in new revenue total. That's enough to cover the entire East End School's annual supplies budget.

And another thing: if we sell a pointless parking lot on the open market, the East End School will save a few thousand dollars every year in avoided pavement maintenance and plowing costs. It would become somebody else's problem, instead of the taxpayers'.

What do you think would make the teachers at the East End School happier? Having very convenient off-street parking, or having THEIR JOBS and A REASONABLE NUMBER OF STUDENTS IN THEIR CLASSES?

This is just one single parking lot. There's also Reiche School's 1/4 acre parking lot on Brackett Street in the West End, the 1/2 acre of parking at the corner of Stevens and Pleasant Ave (the very center of Deering Center), and the huge 6 acre front lawn of the PATHS school on Allen Avenue. All told, selling this land could recoup 1/3rd of the school budget cuts this year, and start generating new property taxes immediately for future years, and trim the school system's property maintenance costs.

And that's just the school system. Think about the Portland Housing Authority, which is hoarding acres of parking lots in the West End and East Bayside. Selling some of those lots into private ownership wouldn't just help the budget - it would also introduce a measure of stability and new housing opportunities into some of Portland's most depressed, rental-dominated neighborhoods.

But the biggest opportunity is the city's parking management itself. By charging below-market rates for parking on the city's streets and in its garages, the tiny little Parking office might rank as one of the most expensive in City Hall: it's hiding tens of millions of dollars from the city's balance sheets, from unaccounted parking subsidies to lost tax revenues. Our city's parking manager could have worked for Bernie Madoff.

So, I ask you again: what's more important? Solvent schools, a social safety net, and decent public services, funded by the development of new housing opportunities?

Or free parking?

METRO Fare Hikes Hearing Scheduled Next Thursday, After Buses Stop Running

The regional bus transit agency METRO is considering a $0.25 fare increase to cover serious budget shortfalls - even though ridership is increasing, operating funds from the city and state are diminishing. The new fares would be $1.50.

Personally, I think this is a reasonable price for transit, especially compared with other cities. However, METRO ought to use this opportunity to look hard at other cost-saving options. The biggest opportunity would come from streamlining the convoluted, impractical Route 8, which takes an entire hour to run a byzantine loop across the peninsula.

Streamlining Route 8, while supplementing it with better services for elderly and disabled riders, would let METRO increase its ridership and fare revenues, while also dramatically reducing its costs.

Anyhow, METRO will hold three hearings next week in Falmouth, Westbrook, and Portland.

The Portland public hearing on the fare increase begins at 7 pm next Thursday. Hilltop resident Bobbi Keppel pointed out on the Portland Bike/Ped Committee e-mail list that this is 20 minutes before the last Route 1 bus departs from downtown to the top of Munjoy Hill.

So METRO apparently doesn't want any transit-reliant East Enders to be there. But maybe you could pool your money and split a cab.

Downeaster extension to Freeport, Brunswick funded; work to begin immediately

The White House press office has announced the projects that will receive funding for high-speed and intercity passenger rail projects through the stimulus program. Here's the rundown for the Northeast - Maine will receive $35 million to extend the Downeaster north to Brunswick, with an intermediate stop in Freeport, on rehabilitated tracks.

According to this schedule, the work should be finished by the spring of 2012.

Maine had also put in a separate request to speed travel times on the existing Portland-to-Boston route, as well as several other rail upgrades in other parts of the state, but it now seems unlikely that those projects would be funded from the stimulus.

Elsewhere, the feds will give Florida $1.25 billion to initiate a fast train between Orlando and Tampa, and $2.3 billion to get California's ambitious bullet train network off the ground.

Tom Bell has a story about the grant, with local reactions in Brunswick, in today's Press Herald.

The New Veterans Bridge

A design/build team of Reed and Reed construction, a local Maine company, and T.Y. Lin International, a global civil engineering firm, has been tentatively selected to replace the Veterans Memorial Bridge between the West End of Portland and the Maine Mall area of South Portland.

The details are still scanty, but the new bridge is almost certain to be a huge improvement for bike riders and pedestrians who would like to make the three-mile trip between the Mall area and downtown Portland. It will create a pleasant and safe new crossing point between the two cities. But the new bridge, in a new alignment, also has the potential to dramatically simplify and calm traffic at the southwestern gateway to the Portland peninsula.

Here's what the area looks like now:


Those green dotted lines are the existing sidewalks in the area, and white dotted lines indicate crosswalks. There's a sidewalk on the bridge, but it dead-ends on a freeway offramp on the South Portland side. There's also the Fore River waterfront trail, which is little-used right now - its northern end leads to a freeway off-ramp and its southern end leads into the nightmarish intersection of the bridge with Valley and Commercial Streets.

This junction is a half-acre field of pavement, so vast that it's hard to see the other side. There are a full twenty lanes coming into and out of it, and it's a huge source of confusion for everyone who gets sucked into it. The truck in this Google Street View provides a good, unintentional commentary on how safe this place is:


View Larger Map

Fortunately, the word from reliable sources indicates that the new bridge design from T.Y. Lin would dramatically simplify and shrink this intersection by bypassing it entirely. Again, details are scanty, but here's a rough sketch of their proposal:


Instead of replacing the bridge in its current location, which leads into the Tombstone junction clusterfuck, T. Y. Lin is proposing to lead the new bridge into a new T-junction with Fore River Parkway, near the new Mercy Hospital campus. A new, 12' wide bicycle and pedestrian trail on the bridge would link to existing sidewalks and a little-used dead-end spur of the Fore River Trail south of Mercy Hospital. The word is that the bridge itself will also include bumped-out viewing platforms along its length, which would commemorate veterans, and that its length would be illuminated with human-scaled streetlamps (as opposed to freeway floodlights).

The realignment will save a lot of money, since the new bridge would be slightly shorter and allow the builders to work while the old bridge remains in service. But once the new bridge is open, there will also be an opportunity to reduce lanes and calm traffic at the junction of Commercial and Valley Streets, which will go from an awkward four-way intersection to a three-way T-junction. The five lanes leading to and from the old bridge will disappear, and turn into a park. But three additional turn lanes leading from Valley, Commercial, and Fore River Parkway would also become obsolete, making room for median pedestrian refuges, or larger sidewalks.

One of those lanes - the long, right-turn slip lane from Fore River Parkway to the old bridge - could be retrofitted as a new sidewalk on the south side of the railroad overpass. This conversion would significantly reduce the city's long-term maintenance costs on this smaller bridge, and create continuous sidewalks on both sides of the Fore River Parkway between Valley Street and the new Mercy Hospital campus.

More detailed bridge designs should be available soon, and some elements are still open to tweaking. A public hearing on the proposed design will probably happen in February or early March, so that final designs can be completed for construction in the spring. Stay tuned.

Help Set Portland's Bicycling Agenda

Earlier this year, Portland submitted an application to the League of American Bicyclists to become a certified "bicycle-friendly community." We didn't win any awards, but the League did send back a list of detailed criteria - sort of a checklist of steps that Portland can take in order to improve.

Now, the City wants the public's input on which of those steps we should be taking first. Should the city invest its limited resources into more bike lanes? Education and enforcement? Making critical connections easier to bike across?

Help us decide, this Saturday morning:

Saturday, Jan. 9, 2009
from 9am to Noon
Merrill Rehearsal Hall, entrance on Myrtle Street behind City Hall.

Please register ahead of time by following this link, so that we'll know how many people to expect.

I'll bring donuts from Tony's!