Getting the Federal Government to do "the Math"

A new America 2050 paper by Polly Trottenberg of Building America's Future focuses on the challenge of shifting toward a data-driven and performance based system for federal decision-making in transportation investments. The paper, "Federal Decision-Making in Transportation Investments: Getting the Federal Government to do 'the Math'," observes that the U.S. is noteworthy for the lack of goal-based criteria or performance measures in its infrastructure programs and at a more basic level, our extremely poor data collection on transportation at the federal, state and municipal levels. With growing consensus among the transportation community that the next transportation bill should include strong national goals and ways to evaluate performance against those goals, our data collection shortcomings are noteworthy.

Informed by an ideologically diverse focus group of current and past Congressional staffers, transportation experts and statisticians, the paper makes recommendations on how to better inform and motivate members of Congress and administration officials to integrate data and analysis into the next surface transportation bill. 

This paper is the second in a series of three papers commissioned for America 2050's recent workshop, "Envisioning a Trans-American Network."

Two New America 2050 Papers on Megaregions and Equity

America 2050 has released two new papers exploring the issue of equity at the megaregion scale.  Since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a growing regional equity movement has recognized the consequences of urban sprawl and regional causes of poverty and successfully built political power at the scale of metropolitan region. Now, with increasing attention to social and economic factors at the megaregion scale, these papers ask whether equity proponents must shift their attention outward and upward.

The first, Fractures and Faultlines: Growth and Equity in California's Megaregions, by Chris Benner of UC Davis and Manuel Pastor of USC, asks: are problems of inequality are being caused and the scale of the megaregion, and if so, can equity issues be effectively addressed at the megaregion scale? To answer these questions, the authors present a quantitative analysis of megaregion patterns of economic growth and inequality in California, and identify certain issues, such as infrastructure and the environment, that would benefit from megaregion-scale alliances, as a complement to comprehensive equity organizing at the metropolitan scale.

The second paper, The Quest for Megaregional Equity: The Gulf Coast and Beyond by Angela Glover Blackwell and Dominique Duval-Diop of PolicyLink is set in the context of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which dramatically swept away the veil obscuring severe poverty and inequities in the Gulf Coast and echoed in regions across America. The authors observe that the recovery from this disaster of megaregion-scale impacts failed to seize upon the opportunity to craft more effective megaregion-scale strategies for infrastructure planning, affordable housing, health, education, and transportation issues that could address the inequities reflected in the entire Gulf Coast.  In response, the authors offer seven principles for a megaregion-scale equity approach