RIP Joe Lieberman

Back at the dawn of the modern election-conspiracy era, Al Gore and his running mate Joe Lieberman, despite winning a half-million more votes than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, suffered defeat at the hands of a clearly biased Supreme Court.

He told The New York Times in 2023, “It was a miscarriage of justice on two levels. One was that the Florida Supreme Court had already ruled in our favor to continue the recounts, and the other was that it was an extrajudicial political decision made in the crisis of a transition of power, and out of line with precedents of the Supreme Court.”

Lieberman passed away this week at age 82 after injuries from a fall at his Bronx home.

Instead of becoming vice president, Lieberman began a retreat from a long and impressive career of public service. He was about as centrist as a politician got and his style has not exactly translated to our era of maximum fringe and infighting. 

But Lieberman had a truly impressive record of work on social causes to better the world, starting with his earliest efforts in civil rights. He went on to be a major player in the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security after the September 11 terrorist attacks, led the fight against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and provided the tie-breaking vote to pass Obama’s Affordable Care Act. 

His descent was spurred by losing in the Democratic primaries for president in 2004 and losing his Senate seat for Connecticut in 2006. Even since leaving politics - when I hadn’t really thought about him for years beca,use I assumed he had retired from public life - Lieberman worked at a lawyer, as chair of No Labels and was even surprisingly considered for a short time by Trump to lead the F.B.I. 

The Times added:

At his political peak, on the threshold of the vice presidency, Mr. Lieberman — a national voice of morality as the first major Democrat to rebuke President Bill Clinton for his sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky — was named Mr. Gore’s running mate at the Democratic National Convention that August in Los Angeles. He became the nation’s first Jewish candidate on a major-party presidential ticket.

“It was a very hard thing for me to do because I liked him,” he told Bill Kristol, the neoconservative commentator. “But I really felt what he did was awful.”

RIP Myles Goodwyn of April Wine and Sandra Day O'Connor

1980s Canadian pseudo metallers April Wine may seem like an odd subject to cover at Pop Culture Lunch Box. Even odder to bill it above the passing of the legendary Sandra Day O'Connor. But man, I have always loved a handful of tunes from the band's 1981 album The Nature of the Beast.

I don't know if I need to begin discovering April Wine's extensive catalog prior to that album - who knew it formed way back in 1969? - but most notably "Just Between You and Me" and "Sign of the Gypsy Queen" are remarkable numbers written, sung, and performed on guitar by the band's leader Myles Goodwyn, who has passed away at 75 apparently from multiple health issues.

A couple of good anecdotes from the New York Times obituary:

The band attracted attention in 1977 when it was performing at the El Mocambo Club in Toronto. Before the show, April Wine was asked to pose as the headliner for a charity event with a group called the Cockroaches as the opening act, but the Cockroaches turned out to be the Rolling Stones.

In 2016, Mr. Goodwyn released a memoir, “Just Between You and Me,” which became a best seller in Canada. “Elvis and Tiger,” his novel, was published in 2018.

In a rough week for pop-culture deaths, the passing of Sandra Day O'Connor - at age 93 from dementia - must be mentioned. She was the first woman on the Supreme Court, appointed in 1991 by Ronald Reagan as a moderate conservative from Arizona. She retired in 2006 and looked pretty liberal by that time compared to the increasingly conservative bent of the Court.

She played a major role in shaping the directions of the country with her more nuanced views of how abortions and affirmative action, among many other important issues, should be handled. She was also passionate about the importance of civics education.

RIP Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger advised 12 - yes, 12! - presidents on foreign policy and has passed away at the age of 100. I’m not sure whether he helped Calvin Coolidge as a baby, but he got to just about every other U.S. leader since then.

Hard working literally until the end (he recently co-authored a book on AI), Kissinger is regarded as the most powerful Secretary of State since World War I, having been a top negotiator in deals with China, the former Soviet Union, and Vietnam. Even the current Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, admits to being advised by Kissinger within the past month.

Kissinger was one of the very top - if not top - advisor to Richard Nixon, and he said he would have “excruciatingly long conversations” that would go over and over the same material again and again. Much of the time they would land back on the strategy that the U.S. had to stand up to aggression from all corners of the world or it would lose credibility. This of course extended the awful results in Vietnam, contributing to a long losing and mostly pointless war effort for the U.S.

If you were to ask me, a peace-seeking liberal, I would tell you my opinion is that Kissinger really screwed up this country, making it more war-loving and helping us get to today’s more dangerously isolationist place. But, at the same time, he's always been a bit of a mystery to me (maybe I'm too young) and his legacy remains enigmatic - leaning towards brilliant with a touch of evil.

Learning some simple facts about the very misunderstood country of Israel

Noa Tishby grew up in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and became a child actor. After she got out of the mandatory Israeli military, she moved to Los Angeles and found herself having more success as a producer. 

She started realizing that very few people in the U.S. had any idea about the history of Israel. They would ask her severely misinformed questions like “how do your parents feel about you being modern and not wearing any head gear (also known as the Muslim hijab).” She eventually realized she was spending lots of time telling stories about her homeland and what Israel was and is all about.

Some basic facts:

• Israel is a very “freaking modern” country. It is not, say, Afghanistan.
• There is huge difference between a kibbutz and a settlement.
• It’s the only country in the Middle East that “has been an uninterrupted democracy since its founding in 1948, after the United Nations granted the Jews a state after the horrors of the Holocaust. The Arabs were also granted a state at the time, but they chose to refuse it and start a war.”
• Israel is not a colonialist state. It’s a refugee state that was decolonized from British rule. Sounds a lot like another country we’ve all heard about.
• It’s not really an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s more like Israeli-Arab, which makes Israel a serious underdog, with its population of 9 million compared to the 21 Arab nations surrounding it with 423 million people.

Tishby's new book, Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, is a fascinating read at a time when we all need to be reminded that we should all be pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, and anti-Hamas, a terrorist organization that has the sole aim of wiping out Israel and uses international aid funding to build attack tunnels instead of schools and hospitals. Further, it uses that funding to build these tunnels under schools and hospitals, as a way to use innocent and usually vulnerable Palestinians in Gaza, where Hamas is based, as human shields for themselves.

There have been a lot of slogans thrown around social media and at protests recently that contain a lot of half truths at best. I like Tishby’s slogan best. “Free Gaza from Hamas” says it most humanely.

She also reminds us of the many beautiful things about the very existence of a Jewish state, which is maybe a little like if Washington D.C., a tiny liberal enclave, were dropped into the deepest rural reddest parts of the U.S. South. Here are just a few examples:

• There is a “built-in liberalism in Judaism and Zionism”
• Debate and dissent are a key component of a “highly Jew-y culture”
• “The Jewish holidays are connected to the moon.” That's pretty cool
• It’s a place you can be super secular and still carry a Bible in your bag because being a little weird is cool
• But to leave God and religion out of it for a second, Jewish people - despite what a lot of people not relying on archeological or written records often claim - are indigenous to the land of Israel not just since 1948 but rather for about 2,500 years, even back before the time that one dude was wandering around there in his hippy hair and sandals and spreading messages about peace and humbleness. That’s all very different than the state of Palestine, which, oh yeah, has never been a state. Not that it shouldn’t be a state, but just that is has yet to ever be - in case you hear folks in their antisemitism using a lot of talking points about indigenousness and how Israel needs to “give that land back.”

And, by the way, my above D.C./Deep South analogy isn’t entirely accurate. Israel is in fact about the size of New Jersey. But hopefully my sloppy comparison makes a point. It takes about six hours to drive the whole way north to south and about an hour to get west to east. So it’s small and you could say it’s a “rough neighborhood” with the likes of Syria, Lebanon, and Iran surrounding it. 

One of the truly odd things about Israel is why such a place - with almost no natural resources and a very limited supply of fresh water - is the origin of Judaism and Christianity as well as the home of the third-most holy place for Islam.

These are some of the details from the very start of Tishby's book, so as you can see, it's very interesting and she is a great and funny storyteller. I'm excited to keep reading it.

RIP Rosalynn Carter

Rosalynn Smith was young Jimmy Carter's sister Ruth's best friend back in 1945 when he asked his sister to set them up. It was practically settled from the start that Jimmy and Rosalynn would work hard to make the world - beyond just Plains, Georgia - a better place.

Rosalynn Carter would go on to become one of the most politically active first wives in history, right up there with Eleanor Roosevelt. She has died at age 96 in Plains from dementia. 

While they served in the Oval Office from 1976 to 1980, they arguably went on to have much more influence in their post-presidential years. They focused largely on human rights and democracy and did a lot of Habitat for Humanity house building. She focused on mental health and, under her watch, the office of first lady became a federal position for the first time.

Jimmy is still alive at age 99 and their marriage is now the longest ever for a presidential couple at more than 77 years.

Nancy Pelosi’s daughter shows that discussing our political differences is key for a more empathetic future

My main hard-news media sources are The Week Magazine (which is great because it tells all perspectives - right and left), The New York Times, and The Washington Post. To me, these seem like the most balanced and most well-funded in order to do the most in-depth and investigative journalism. 

I can’t go so far as to listen to the entertainment/ratings-driven news at the likes of FOX, Breitbart, Newsmax, or any number of other “outlets” that will tell subgroups of radical conservatives the kinds of conspiratorial misinformation they somehow want to hear. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear what's being propagated in those worlds. It’s interesting, even if it is fanciful and devisive.

That’s why a minute or two of The Righting is my answer each day. It’s a website (I get it as an email newsletter) that sums up what the far-right Trumper press is talking about. That press, in short, is obsessed with thinking Biden is the anti-Christ, DeSantis will stomp out the woke that is destroying this country, and how anything that's not white and male is a clear and present danger.

The Righting also alerted me to an interesting-sounding documentary that was just released on HBO MAX, created by famed lefty politician Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra Pelosi. 

The Insurrectionist Next Door ran the risk of being a preachy takedown of the idiocy of the people who attacked the U.S Capitol on January 6, 2021. But it is instead a thoughtful and entertaining glimpse into the worlds of several Insurrectionists who each had at least loose reasoning for being there that day, and somehow it doesn’t ever feel like Pelosi is in danger around these characters, even sitting down to “break bread” - or, rather, eat cake - with a Tesla-driving Trumper who says he wants to do his part to keep the world from being destroyed. 

The documentary is definitely no glimpse into the minds of geniuses, but it does serve as a painful reminder how dreadful the mental-health crisis has become in the United States.

I found it hard to take my eyes off any of the character studies, which each lasting about 10 minutes, as Pelosi tries to understand what led them to D.C. that fateful day and also hears their backstories and what makes them tick. 

The documentary is only about 80 minutes and kicks off with a Florida muscleman (pictured) who dreamed of becoming a pro wrestler but filled the hole in his life from that failed attempt by becoming a diehard Donald Trump fanboy.

That profile is mesmerizing as is the one about a very misguided young woman (pictured at the top) from outside St. Louis who follows her uncle to D.C. only to get caught up and then later kills someone as she drives drunk down the wrong way on a highway. 

There’s the gay diehard Trump fan who plans to run for office once his sentence ends, the parkour enthusiast who just apparently went along blindly with his sister to D.C., the emotional redneck who says he’s not racist but just had to align himself with the Aryan Brotherhood to survive in prison, the family-man rapper with "Proud Boys" tattooed across his forehead, and a few other notable deplorables.

This was one of the best documentaries I’ve watched in a while. And it’s interesting to go back and see the January 6th-ers and how they are faring nearly three years later. Some have some regrets about that day, but overall, their futures do not look bright.

5 out of 5 stars

Pop Culture Presidents: #1 George Washington

My master's thesis at Georgetown was called The Pop Culturalization of the U.S. Presidency: How Monica Lewinsky Saved Democracy. Ok, now I know that sounds cheeky. But my findings were that, generally speaking, presidential candidates that had some kind of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll" past tend to do well at the polls.

I digress. This is a new series I'm starting here because I love presidential history. Each individual president’s personal story tends to tell such an incredible microcosm of what was happening in the U.S. culture at large at the time.

So with that prelude out of the way, here, for your reading pleasure, are what I think are the most interesting personal - often sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll - anecdotes of each president, mixed in with some of their key policy work as well. This first edition starts at the logical spot - big GW.

————

Sex

One of my favorite myths about old George is about his "wooden teeth." They weren't wooden, however, because of poor dental hygiene, he did have a metal frame mixed with ivory, gold, and other materials to hold his teeth together.

It's tough to tell whether those bad teeth did much to deter the ladies. His sex life is a topic that has been the subject of much speculation and debate. There is no definitive answer, as there are few records that explicitly detail his sexual experiences. However, there are some clues within his personal writings, letters, and other historical sources.

It is known that Washington was married twice, first to Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759 and then to Nelly Custis Lewis after Martha's death in 1799. He had no children with either wife, but this may have been due to a number of factors, including Martha's age at the time of their marriage and Washington's own health.

There is some evidence that Washington was sexually attracted to other women. For example, he wrote a series of passionate love letters to Sally Fairfax, a married woman with whom he was briefly involved in the 1750s. However, it is unclear whether these letters were simply expressions of platonic love or if they had a more physical dimension.

Along with these women, Washington, it should be noted, was a dude who seemed to also like himself quite a lot. He allowed his portrait to be painted, had major celebrations of his birthday, and could really cut the rug at those celebrations. He was also known for his tours across the country, because he recognized the importance of bringing the nation together with feelings of shared symbols and symbolism.

Drugs

George Washington was a pretty heavy drinker who tended to choose Madeira wine and Port. He also drank rum punch, porter, and whiskey. That said, this behavior was not unusual for the 18th century, as everyday alcohol consumption was much more common than it is today. For example, it was used for medicinal purposes, as a way to stay warm in the winter and as a social lubricant.

There is some debate about whether Washington's alcohol consumption was excessive, but he lived to the ripe old age of 67, pretty impressive for back then. It doesn't appear that Washington used any other drugs, either recreationally or medicinally. He grew hemp at his home at Mount Vernon, but that's about it.

Rock 'n' Roll

At 6'2", GW was often the tallest man in any room he entered, so most people could probably see him frequently dancing, with typically graceful moves. He was even known to dance late into the night at balls and parties. When not partying on the dance floor, Washington could be found riding horses both for military purposes and personal pleasure and also breeding mules, perhaps his greatest passion.

Despite those outgoing sides, Washington was a very private person, known for his stoic demeanor and his reluctance to share personal details about his life. He rarely spoke about his family or his feelings, and he kept his private life pretty much to himself.

He was also a very religious man, a devout Christian who believed that God had a special plan for America. He often prayed for guidance and strength, and he believed that the U.S. was a divinely inspired nation.

Policy

Looking beyond the topics of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, the first U.S. president was elected in 1789. A member of the Federalist Party, he fervently established a strong central government and was the lead author of the Constitution and then the 10 amendments granting fundamental citizen rights in the Bill of Rights. His refused calls for a monarchy-type government or life-long terms shaped the way we elect presidents to four-year terms. He also wanted the U.S. to remain neutral and stay out of wars in Europe.

Despite protests from Thomas Jefferson and others, he envisioned Washington D.C. with Pierre L’Enfant as a magnificent capital to rival the great capitals of Europe. He also chartered a national bank.

He brokered peace between the major partisan hostilities of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans and Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists, and in the process helped put down the anti-tax Pennsylvania farmers’ Whiskey Rebellion.

Perhaps his most lasting (although frequently disregarded these days) legacy was his call in the Farewell Address at the end of his second term to value our united nation and to beware of extreme partisanship.

How about some “fair and balanced” with these masked singers?

Many people in the heated worlds of social media and in conversation are questioning why a TV show would make Rudy Giuliani one of its stars? The show also starred Sarah Palin a while back.

I would add, why wouldn’t it?

It’s some mindless program called The Masked Singer. I watched 10 minutes of it once and it was painful to me, not my cup of tea. But to fans of it, it makes perfect sense that such a spectacle would seek guests who would enhance that spectacle.

Giuliani, the ex-mayor who used to say “9-11” every time someone questioned his morals or judgement, has fallen about as low as it gets. Even the large handful of people who believe his work as Trump’s lawyer and his direction of the January 6 Capitol takeover is righteous stuff have to admit that someone else in those roles could stand a pretty good chance of seeming less seedy. I mean, he’s like a very poor man’s version of the Wizard of Oz. Add glowing white, perfect fake teeth. Dripping hair dye. All around falling-apart-edness.

Not that anyone should be a judge based on his looks alone. But, I mean, did you see Giuliani in Borat? C’mon, the guy’s disgraceful and without morals. Can we all just agree on that, even though we mostly shouldn’t give it too much thought?

All that said, what I’ve written here should be totally unnecessary. 

I’m not one to harken to the olden days, but remember when we all watched the same TV shows and read the same news sources? Then, people knew that the Vietnam War or JFK’s assassination or Watergate were the big deals they were because they had huge headlines on the front pages. Something like Giuliani on The Masked Singer would have appeared in a very tiny blurb deep in the entertainment section of the newspaper (maybe only in the TV Guide listings, remember those?). Same with Whoopi Goldberg’s misinformation about the Holocaust or the Wild West commentaries of Tucker Carlson and other TV non-newscasting entertainers of all political stripes.

Authors fail to understand the public's love of presidential scandals

I'm trying to clear out some of my grad-school books. As part of this project, I figured it would be good to revisit and review, for one last time, some of the books I used extensively in my thesis on whether personal scandals helped or hurt voter turnout in presidential elections.

Peep Show: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal by Larry Sabato, Mark Stencel, and Robert Lichter, reports of a time during the Clinton Administration when the line between public and private was blurring more than ever in media coverage of politics. They found that responsible media was fooling itself into not printing some scandals while seemingly arbitrarily covering other ones. They wonder if some mainstream reporters are simply lazy and bad investigators.

One striking passage early in the book makes a claim that my thesis found not to be true at all:

"The fidelity of elected officials and other personal matters are of little concern to most Americans, despite the attention such stories get in the news."

The authors do back this up by noting that 80 percent of those polled disapproved of coverage of Clinton's extramarital affairs. But Sabato and company failed to wonder if these people could have actually been lying. And what about all those everyday, water-cooler conversations about Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's "I didn't inhale," and the poor academic grades of Bush and Gore?

I largely disagree with the authors' findings in this book and contended in my thesis that Americans did indeed care about sex, drugs, and rock n' roll-type scandals and that they drive higher turnout in presidential elections.

People say Clinton's mistake was the lie, but they certainly discuss the sex a lot more than the lie. What I thought was good from this salacious turn by the media is that it shouldn't have ever been the media's job to offer a "zone of privacy" to public figures (as they had for many years) who have done scandalous things in the past; it's more the politician's job not to run for office in the first place if they've done those things.

The authors also claim the public will tune out personal scandals. But all these years since this 2000 book was published, it doesn't seem like that's holding true at all. People are chomping at the bit for the next scandal to sink their teeth into. Even with the seemingly daily scandals of the Trump Administration, the public still has great interest in reading all about it, and those scandals may drive massive turnout from both sides of the political aisle, potentially resulting in Trump winning reelection in 2020.

Biking with Ivanka Trump and Barrack Obama on a cold D.C. morning

I'm working at a Transportation Techies event tonight, so I took the opportunity for a rare casual, roundabout bike ride to work in frigid 20-degree weather this morning.

My usual route never takes me to Washington D.C.'s Kalorama neighborhood. And, in fact, not many routes to work of mere commoners goes through Kalorama by design. It's a neighborhood of mansions and embassies nestled between Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, and Georgetown. But none of the streets are all that easy to pass through. So despite being practically smack-dab in the center of D.C.'s action, it has very little traffic.

That might change a little bit soon, as two new neighbors are sure to bring gawkers like me. Barrack Obama and family will soon move in to this lovely red-brick home overlooking Rock Creek Park at 2446 Belmont Road NW. Lots of workers were there getting it ready, as were a few people taking photos like me.

And just a block-and-a-half away, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are moving into this more fortress-like abode at 2449 Tracy Place NW. I imagine the gold-plated interior walls will soon be installed. For now, there was an on-camera interview of some kind happening on the street in front of the house (and just above my thumb's-down sign).

Federal agencies highlight the intersection of housing and transportation

This article was originally published by Mobility Lab.

People often consider the costs of owning or renting a home and getting to and from it as completely separate items in their budgets. They also likely consider these items as highly personal and local matters beyond the influence of the federal government.

But U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Housing Secretary Julian Castro made the case last week at a Brookings Institution event that President Obama’s Cabinet is working across their respective fields to build creative tools that help local leaders improve their economies and communities based on this relationship.

An American household’s two biggest expenses are housing and transportation, yet transportation costs tend to be discounted when people are making decisions about where to live. As a result, transportation is often referred to as the “hidden cost” of housing.

To that end, the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, in 2013, launched the Location Affordability Portal, which not only aggregates your total housing and transportation costs, but also creates an anonymous costs database for researchers and planners, who can now work to help improve transportation access for potentially millions of Americans.

With the new paradigm of considering housing and transportation costs together, the general rule is that the combined total should be no more than 45 percent of a household’s income. Mobility Lab’s Research Director Stephen Crim has noted that many areas of Arlington County, Va., for example, that are considered unaffordable following the old 30 percent housing rule in fact become affordable when applying the “housing and transportation” 45 percent rule. An otherwise expensive location, for example, may benefit from highly accessible rail and bus transit options, making car ownership (and its associated costs) unnecessary.

When many people think of the housing and transportation equation, they think it only directly affects lower-income households. But it is a factor of concern to middle class, and even fairly wealthy, people as well.

“Poverty is actually pretty expensive, both for the poor and for the country,” Secretary Foxx told the Brookings audience. “People end up becoming more isolated when they move to the suburbs and don’t have transit options.”

Secretary Castro added that the poorest people are affected disproportionately by the lack of investment in mobility options for some neighborhoods.

“We need to stop stacking and segregating poverty. Improving transportation and fair housing are keys to equality and opportunity,” he said.

Castro explained that these circumstances have far-reaching effects. “There are 14 neighborhoods in Baltimore, including the one where Freddie Gray lived, that have lower life expectancies than North Korea.”

Foxx agreed that transportation options can often be part of the answer, but that the lack of transportation has often exacerbated housing problems.

“We have a very ugly history of our transportation infrastructure being built,” Foxx said, but added, “Who would have thought we would have light rail in [Los Angeles’ poor] Crenshaw [neighborhood] 30 years ago. We’re starting to see businesses where there were deserts in the past.”

He cited how Rochester, N.Y., recently asked USDOT for a TIGER grant to tear down a highway as representative of how communities – after years and years of narrow-minded thinking that transportation only meant building highways – are rethinking their own designs.

Photo: Bus riders board a Metrobus in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia (Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab, www.kittner.com).

Answers to Transportation Ills Need to Come from Unexpected Funding

This is the second of a two-part Mobility Lab series. Part 1 looked at the big-picture history of transportation funding in the United States. Part 2 examines ways we can fund transportation in a future of flat federal funding.

OPTION OPPORTUNITIES

Ideas abound for ways we can fund transportation, but our leaders need to hear more from a gridlocked – yet quiet – public.

The world of transportation is innovating and shifting at a clip no mere mortals can expect to follow easily, but one would never know it by simply glancing at the flat and seemingly unexcited way Congress has taken to keeping roads and transit barely patched.

Luckily, life does not end and begin on Capitol Hill.

States, localities, and companies are offering some truly inventive methods of finding funding sources to supplement what will be available from the federal government for maintaining and replacing crumbling roads, bridges and transit systems.

The public-private path

Let’s start with an example from Sao Paulo, Brazil, which offers perhaps a gold standard for public and private entities working together for public good. An incredible 50 percent of trips taken in Sao Paulo are by transit, but planners identified a gap, where city-operated buses and state-owned trains didn’t connect very well for travelers.

According to TheCityFix, the city constructed a seven-mile, six-stop underground metro line called Linha 4 with “$1.6 billion in public investment and $246 million in private investment from seven different financial institutions.”

As TheCityFix notes, the new line is “a resounding success, demonstrating that public collaboration with the private sector is possible” and:

• it integrates several fragmented public transport systems
• the line increases access to jobs for the marginalized living on the periphery of the city
• by its second year of operation, Linha 4 met its demand target to serve 700,000 passengers per day and reduced commute times by about half an hour, and
• the line had an estimated net present value of $364 million to the local economy and boasted average annual returns of 14.4 percent to the operator and 18.7 percent to shareholders.

A city that won’t wait for the feds

Back in this country, Miami’s city commissioners have decided enough is enough. Lacking certainty from federal funding, it’s taken matters into its own hands by creating a special fund to help think into the future – rather than constantly playing catch-up – about transportation projects.

• Although the fund started with a mere $1.6 million when it was established last month, commissioners think the legislation will permit it to grow fast. The Miami Herald reports that other deposits into the fund will come from:
• 20 percent of any unrestricted, one-time payments to the city of at least $500,000
• 20 percent of any cash payment by developers for “air rights,” sold by the city’s public benefits program, excluding amounts reserved for affordable and workforce housing
• 25 percent of Miami’s general fund ($615 million in 2016) from each budget year, and
• new legislation that allows transit-oriented-developments to pay the city to receive reductions in parking requirements, which developers and activists worked together to push through.

As if all that isn’t impressive enough, Miami worked with several semi-autonomous entities to pitch in $30 million to get Tri-Rail trains connecting downtown to Palm Beach County by 2017.

The citizen-activist route

As we’ve seen with Mobility Lab’s own Transportation Techies and TransportationCamp, passionate movers and shakers can make change happen outside the policy and business avenues.

“Anyone can take action to make their bus or train ride more enjoyable. Even more important, by organizing, fundraising, and carrying out quick fixes, ordinary citizens [can get] transit decision-makers to take notice,” says Erin Barnes of ioby, which, along with TransitCenter, documented 10 projects throughout the U.S. where “community-led change is shifting the culture of transit agencies.”

Take a look at just these four incredible projects highlighted in Trick Out My Trip and you’ll no doubt want to devour the rest of the short report:

• In a heavily industrial corridor of Brooklyn, N.Y., a dark and decidedly unappealing transit hub at 9th Street is being revitalized with funding provided to the community in order to demonstrate its vision to the Metropolitan Transit Authority of how the area could be improved.
• The Atlanta Bicycle Coalition and MARTA teamed up to raise money for self-service bicycle maintenance kiosks at high-density MARTA transit stops. This is a brilliant and subtle way to get people thinking about how they can take more than one mode on their journeys.
• PLAY Denver raised funds to create safe, stationary opportunities for children to play while waiting for the bus with their parents – a nice way of making that type of travel just a little bit more attractive and less stressful. Similarly, in Seattle, local leaders installed free libraries at bus stops across the city, offering a little fun and productivity for people on their journeys.

PLAY Denver installing art.

Corporate leadership

On-demand technology companies like car2go, Zipcar, Uber, and Lyft are certainly performing a service by opening people’s minds to the fact that there are now many transportation options – something that hasn’t always been obvious in the past.

But what truly makes it apparent that these companies are onto something is that automotive titans like Daimler, Honda, and General Motors are getting into the mobility game.

Ford Motor Company has been perhaps the most outspoken about the need to adapt to new realities brought on by population, traffic congestion, air pollution, chronic sickness, millennial habits, and countless other social issues.

Ford mobility manager Erica Klampf recently predicted that the company’s semi-driverless cars will be on the roads in five years and that its e-bikes will be a real part of the solution to help people take more multi-modal trips.

Earlier this year, Ford announced the first round of winners for its Innovative Mobility Challenge Series, which awards more than $200,000 to winners who designed improvements in categories such as deliveries, software, and parking and traffic congestion. Some of the winners include:

• An electric individual podcar in Argentina that launches out of a shuttle bus offers a better way to connect people to public transportation.
• A Los Angeles-based crowdsourcing app called Crowd Park allows lot owners to set their prices based on demand and helps users to find information about flexible pricing and real-time alerts for near-expired spots.
• A MultiModal Transportation Platform app from Chongqing, China – where extreme congestion and the sharp mountains and valleys often require multiple modes of transportation – now combines city-based mass transit information about buses and trains with options for localized transportation such as bicycle rentals and rickshaws.

Transit advocates need to get louder to influence a quiet public

Of course, all of this is a roundabout way of saying that roads and transit in this country need funding from somewhere. All of the above examples are wonderful, but they are all makeshift. A larger dedicated fund, much like what Miami has initiated locally, is imperative at the national level.

The most logical and simple options for such a fund remain through a “pay at the pump” gas tax indexed for inflation and a tax in which drivers pay per mile driven.

But these are much harder done than said. In focus groups conducted a few years back by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and the Brookings Institution, it became abundantly clear that “people don’t understand transportation” and especially the way it’s funded.

As Streetsblog noted, people surveyed in the D.C. region:

Don’t see themselves and their own driving as contributors to the problem of congestion. They blame construction and other drivers (especially those from “other jurisdictions” – D.C. and Virginia residents love to beat up on “Maryland drivers”) – anything but their own driving. They assume that congestion pricing can’t work because everyone on the road is there because they have to be. They don’t think they, or their fellow drivers, have choices in travel behavior.  

The Washington region is relatively well-served by transit and ridesharing, so many of them were probably wrong in assuming they don’t have options. Be that as it may, participants were supportive of adding new transportation options. Even the most car-centric people — those who live far outside the urban core and drive alone to work — thought it was important to build more transit and facilities for biking and walking. In fact, these improvements were, to many, a prerequisite to any pricing change.

That all seems to take us back to square one: continue to educate the public about transportation options (through pilots, by discussing the benefits, and by being louder than transit advocates have been in the past) and hopefully the public will one day become vocal enough about improving traffic to influence policymakers and other leaders.

Photos: Top, Linha 4 in Sao Paulo (Metro de Sao Paulo, Flickr, Creative Commons). Middle, a PLAY Denver project (PLAY Denver, Facebook).

This article was originally published by Mobility Lab.

How Transportation Funding Fails to Work the Way Anyone Intended

This article was originally published by Mobility Lab, with my co-author Howard Jennings.

This is the first of a two-part Mobility Lab series. Part 1 looks at the big-picture history of transportation funding in the United States. Part 2 will examine ways we can fund transportation in a future of flat federal funding.

OPTIONS OPPORTUNITIES

Even with a bleak outlook for federal funding, state and local leaders can use historical arguments to change the mindset towards transportation projects.

As the Senate and House are finalizing touches on the first new transportation authorization bill in more than 10 years, everyone agrees there are major problems with our transportation systems in the U.S. But nobody agrees on how to fund the necessary improvements.

The new six-year bill will provide some welcome certainty, but it is not expected to provide adequate funding to meet the needs for new capacity in any modes, and there will likely be few incentives for innovation.

The bottom line is that we must improve transportation as a path to better health, better places to live, a more robust economy, and ease of personal mobility. In reaching these goals, however, it seems clear that states and localities will have to be inventive in finding funding sources to supplement what will be available from the federal government.

A majority of the interstate highway system is well beyond its 50-year design life-span. And even the new authorization bill, with no real increase in funding, will not come close to covering the need for maintenance and replacement of crumbling roads, bridges and transit systems.

In fact, it is fair to say that the U.S. transportation system has been in a state of crisis since at least 2008, when Congress had to begin transferring funds from the General Fund to the Transportation Trust Fund just to meet operating obligations. Plus, funding has been authorized on a year-to-year – or sometimes month-to-month – basis since the last long-term authorization law, SAFETEA-LU, expired in 2009. Disagreement over how to fund transportation and at what level have stymied Congress ever since.

The 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax was first devoted entirely to transportation by creating the Highway Trust Fund in 1956 to fund the interstate highway system. In 1982, the Mass Transit Fund was created within the Highway Trust Fund. There were gas-tax increases by presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, but the tax has not kept pace with inflation since 2005, and the revenue it brings in isn’t enough to cover current highway and transit needs, let along provide expansion.

Since 2000, the balance in the Highway Trust Fund has declined dramatically and since 2008, both the Highway and Mass Transit funds have been within a month of running out of funds numerous times, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Congress has responded in an ad-hoc manner year after year, authorizing transfers from the General Fund as stop gap measures. In all, Congress has authorized a total of $65 billion in transfers from the General Fund since 2008, and the CBO estimates the average annual shortfall to be on the order of $15 billion per year at least through 2020.

Voters in various surveys support a gas tax hike, but California voters recently opposed one, reflecting the fact that the tax is tough for politicians and a conflicted public to deal with. Moreover, the gas tax is not a viable long-term solution because it will produce less and less net revenue in the coming years.

States also tend to use a tax on gasoline to support highway and transit projects, supplemented by revenues from tolls sales taxes, other local taxes, and general local and state revenues. Their sources are typically not keeping pace with inflation or overall needs either.

So where should more reliable funds come from? Growing congestion, lessening mobility, slower goods movement, and higher citizen frustration are going to be in our future unless we figure out better approaches.

There is nearly unanimous agreement that the gas tax has basic structural problems as a long-term revenue source. Vehicles today are getting better and better gas mileage, and the total mileage that Americans drive is no longer rapidly increasing as it once did. So the tax produces less and less revenue each year relative to the need. But no other funding mechanism has emerged to take its place.

A variety of other sources of funding have been debated for years, including tolling, Joan Lowy of the Associated Press put it well recently:

To help fund new construction, the Obama administration has proposed letting states toll federal interstates. That’s been prohibited since the interstate system was launched in 1956, except for a few exceptions, including highways that already had tolls. Congress would have to approve the change.

One way to make existing highways more efficient is “high occupancy toll” (or HOT) lanes. The idea often involves converting carpool lanes that may be relatively car free into lanes that solo drivers can pay to use. Carpoolers typically travel for free. Hundreds of miles of toll lanes already are operating in or around Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Miami, Washington, D.C., and other cities.

We’ve gotten to this point because most of our transportation system and land-development patterns make us dependent on the car. Even in places where we do have other options, most of us simply don’t consider how else we could travel and haven’t researched our transportation options, which leaves us chained to our cars.

The irony of all this is that roads were federally funded in the first place because a bunch of lawyers wanted to be able to ride their bikes on them. In 1880, the League of American Wheelmen, led by a Civil War veteran and leading bicycle manufacturer, requested that roads fall under a federal mandate, which was pushed through as the National Highway Act in 1896 and later provided a means for getting cars on the roads by the burgeoning auto industry.

Meanwhile, transportation should truly be one of those issues that is non-partisan. Reagan, the Republican standard bearer, raised taxes during a recession to fund increased infrastructure investment. As former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, himself a Republican, said at a Mobility Lab forum, “There are no Republican roads or Democratic bridges.” And Arizona’s former Democratic Representative Stewart Udall once noted that “a rational transportation policy should seek a balance between individual convenience, the efficient use of limited resources, and urban-living values that protect spaciousness, natural beauty, and human-scale mobility.”

Despite all those warm words, the new authorization law will be keeping the gas tax as the only politically feasible funding mechanism for now. And what do we do in the face of all these shortfalls and limitations?

The exciting thing about the times we live in today is that there are lower-cost solutions like:

• improving bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure
• an on-demand economy that has opportunities to improve traffic flow
• automated vehicles that also might do the same
• an uptick in private-funding possibilities, and
• a growing focus on user-based road fees to help hobbling public investment.

And fortunately, we – Republicans, Democrats, and everyone else – can still all agree that sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic is something worth fixing.

Part 2 of this series will examine some of the alternative and innovative transportation solutions that are being employed and that local leaders can use to supplement traditional projects and funding sources. 

Photo: Tops, rush hour traffic on LA’s 101 freeway (Eric Demarqc, Flickr, Creative Commons). Bottom, HOT lanes on a state road in Washington (Washington State DOT, Flickr, Creative Commons). 

Mad Men for Democrats, Modern Family for Republicans

This is an amazing graphic from Buzzfeed.

Glad to see I'm post-partisan. My favorite drama is Mad Men (which Democrats like much more than Republicans ... why?) and my favorite comedy is Modern Family (which Republicans like much more than Democrats ... I can maybe understand that a little more, except the gay couple would seem to conflict a little more with Republican values, right?).

And by the way, has anyone else noticed that Modern Family has taken a serious dive in quality this season? It's like night and day from previous seasons. Anyone have any theories as to why?

An Insider's Account of the Final Night of Global Climate Negotiations

This was originally published at Planet Change.

I’ve now experienced four of these annual UN climate talks and it’s a great feeling to finally wake up at the end of one of them with a “win” instead of a disappointment.

The Washington Post had a wonderful “color” piece the other day on how the whole fascinating process works. It’s well worth reading. But outside of the 20,000 climate geeks (I mean that lovingly, being a bit of one myself) who wait at the “document stand” with bated breath for every new version of the prized “text” of the deal, all you really need to know is:

There are delegations from each country that are assigned by their governments to attend and refine a deal over two weeks. There are ministers of environment and forests and finance who also join at some point. And then presidents and other heads of state sometimes join at the very end.

Then there are also lots of public groups who want to influence the process. The Nature Conservancy has its own delegation (of which I was a part) and is one of the important non-profit organizations (NGOs) in the climate talks because we work on so many of the issues chiefly discussed by the negotiators: forests, adapting to climate change, finance, and others.

Because the talks were headed into the wee hours last night, much of our delegation headed back to the hotel quite a ways from the main conference venue. Those who stayed were camped out on the most comfortable chairs they could find. They couldn’t get up because they would lose those chairs. Some were watching on big screens outside of the massive main negotiating room.

We also had a meeting room in our hotel. So those of us who came back to our home-away-from-home for the past two weeks watched the webcast on our big screen there. I had mentioned to a colleague Friday morning that I had a strangely positive feeling, even though at that point many of the journalists were reporting that Cancun would fail. My optimism received a boost when the lead negotiator from the historically bristly U.S. more or less said he was ready to commit to a Cancun Agreement. It was the longest applause I’ve ever heard for the U.S. in this setting.

I finally went to bed. Then I was pinged with a text message from one of our media-relations experts and alerted that we had a deal. At 3:30 a.m.! So I got up and helped make sure everything was in place as far as telling the world what The Nature Conservancy thought about the done deal.

After working much of the morning, I’m exhausted. But I’m also excited. Not only does the global community have a way forward towards solving climate change, but I’m going to swim in the turquoise ocean for the first time since I got here two weeks ago.

Chinese Fundamentals Could Provide Global Warming’s Savior

I originally wrote this on Thursday, October 21 for The Nature Conservancy's Planet Change blog.

Reading the China Daily newspaper in the cab on the way to the airport after 10 days working in the country, I was struck with the idea that China has a real opportunity to lead the world on climate change.

One article noted that “China’s clean energy market is open to all foreign players, and many foreign companies have built a presence in the market.” That seems like a fairly straight-forward news item. But think about it, could such a sentence be written about the U.S., where we increasingly seem to be weaving an isolationist cocoon from the glories that could accompany this moment in time of endless globalization opportunities?

General Electric’s turbines in China, for example, are generating major amounts of wind power there. Meanwhile, the article noted, “China has only exported three wind turbines to the U.S.”

While China certainly has the problems that accompany major industrialization and a massive reliance on dirty coal burning, I gained a sense of real hope while visiting China that there is still time for the world’s powers to get a grip on global warming.

In the many conversations I had with Chinese citizens and environment experts while working in Beijing and Inner Mongolia (where one of our tree-focused climate projects is kick-starting), there was confidence that China is learning from the lesson of previous industrializing countries. Also, China seems to still comprehend the importance of fundamentals.

A few other headlines from that edition of China Daily: “Rationality urged for students.” “Reform leading to good governance.” There was also an editorial urging Beijing leaders to improve public transportation in a city that welcomes more than 500,000 vehicles from outside the city limits every day.

These articles, I fear, would not make it to the top of U.S. newspapers, where news needs to be about something original, post-post-modern, or Lindsey Lohan.

This Chinese fundamentalism offers to be the saving grace for us all. Or at least for the Chinese, if the U.S. and our politicians don’t begin to think a little more globally.