Right of Way by Angie Schmitt

Author:Angie Schmitt [Schmitt, Angie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC031000 Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, ARC010000 Architecture / Urban & Land Use Planning, TRA000000 Transportation / General
Publisher: Island Press

Austerity Meets Crisis

By 2018, the damage of some of these policies was apparent, even if no one in Washington was explicitly acknowledging the connection. That year was the most deadly year for pedestrians in a generation. But even as the crisis accelerated, states like North Carolina were scaling back their already anemic support.

In 2018, North Carolina officials slashed $13.5 million from the state’s $15 million budget for Safe Routes to School. Part of the problem, they explained, was that MAP-21 required the state to provide a 20 percent match for federal funds for the program. In the years after 2012, the state had been able to use leftover funding to make the match, but now that funding had run out. In addition, North Carolina transportation officials had political obstacles at the state level to continuing support for the program.

In 2011, a supermajority of Republicans had been elected to the North Carolina Statehouse. Two years later, in 2013, they passed a law saying that no stand-alone bike or pedestrian project would be eligible for state funding. “We have not had one single dollar go to bicycle or pedestrian projects in any part of the state” since then, said Terry Lansdell, the executive director of BikeWalk NC.21

Prior to 2013, North Carolina had been making progress on bike and pedestrian safety, trying to tie it to other statewide health and welfare programs. Smart Growth America recently named North Carolina the seventh most dangerous state in the country for pedestrians and cyclists, and the loss of funding, said Lansdell, “hurts dramatically.”22

There was yet another painful effect of the 2012 federal spending bill: in addition to slashing total support, it made investing in biking and walking optional for states—to a big degree. The law (MAP-21) allowed states to transfer up to half of their transportation alternatives funding to other things, like highway projects, and many chose to do so.

In a single quarter in 2017, for example, eight states—Alabama, Connecticut, Iowa, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Oregon, and Wisconsin—transferred a total of $29 million out of their transportation alternatives funding and moved it to other programs: namely, roads and highways.23 Margo Pedroso, deputy director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, said that about 20 percent of the $850 million the federal government provides to states for walking and biking projects gets transferred to roads projects. “The largest offender is Texas,” she said. “They get so much money and they transfer 50 percent pretty regularly.”24

Texas does so even though it had 615 pedestrian deaths in 2017, roughly 10 percent of the national total.25 Each year, Texas “flexes” away about $35 million that could be used to help its embattled pedestrians and cyclists.

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