Transportation
Transportation infrastructure serves as the circulatory system for cities, metropolitan areas and regions and, just like the human body's circulatory system, is essential to their long-term health. Transportation creates access to opportunity - it is how people get to jobs, higher education and job training, health care, recreational opportunities and other needed goods and services. The Dukakis Center's transportation policy work focuses on the critical inter-relationships between transportation and other urban and regional policy issues: transportation and land use, housing, economic development, health, environment, climate change and economic and social equity. Transit is an important focus of these efforts because well-run, financially stable transit systems are essential to achieving a myriad of important urban and regional policy goals including improving mobility and access to opportunity, combating sprawl, reducing dependence on imported oil, and achieving greenhouse gas reduction goals.
The Dukakis Center is committed to addressing issues of urban and regional transportation policy from a fresh perspective and to working with a broad range of partners and stakeholders to conduct research and create policy tools that address some of the most pressing transportation challenges facing Massachusetts and the nation.
As with all of the Dukakis Center's work, the transportation policy work is grounded in the power of partnership and shaped by the belief that making a difference requires harnessing the expertise and energy of a wide range of stakeholders to shape data-driven, policy-relevant research and then use that research to advance policy change. In recent years our partners have included A Better City, the Conservation Law Foundation, the Urban Land Institute's Boston District Council and the Center for Transit-Oriented Development. The Dukakis Center is a member of, and served on the initial steering committee for, the Metro Boston Consortium for Sustainable Communities, coordinated by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, which is working with a $4 million Sustainable Communities Grant from the federal government to support implementation of MAPC's regional plan, MetroFuture, through local planning efforts, state and regional policy work, development of tools and data, and capacity building for local residents and leaders. The Dukakis Center also served as a member of the design committee for, and will continue to be an active member of, the recently-launched Transportation for Massachusetts coalition, whose focus will include working to secure additional revenues sources for the MBTA and Regional Transit Authorities.
The Dukakis Center's transportation work is directed by Stephanie Pollack, associate director for research, who came to the Dukakis Center with more than two decades of experience on transportation policy issues, primarily at theConservation Law Foundation, New England's leading environmental advocacy group. A nationally-recognized expert on transportation policy and transit-oriented development, she serves as a member of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation's Transportation Advisory Committee, chairs the Transportation Advisory Committee in her hometown of Newton and co-chaired Governor Deval Patrick's 2006 transition working group on transportation.
Recent Transportation News
The Dukakis Center and the Conservation Law Foundation have released two reports addressing the financial woes of public transportation in Massachusetts. The reports were based on conclusions gleaned from a blue-ribbon summit that the two groups co-hosted last November, which brought leading transit finance experts from around the country together to explore and develop solutions that can help build sustainable funding mechanisms for transit currently available in Massachusetts and allow expansion of those services over time. In addition, the reports are supplemented by a background paper describing the financial status of public transportation in Massachusetts and a series of options papers discussing the pros and cons of potential solutions to the problem. More
Transportation Finance in Massachusetts
Like many urban transit agencies across the US, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or the T) and the fifteen Regional Transit Authorities (RTAs) which serve 231 Massachusetts cities and towns outside the MBTA district are facing a stark financial crisis. While the existence and extent of this financial crisis is well documented, few solutions are currently on the table because so many stakeholders and policymakers believe that transit finance in Massachusetts is an intractable and overwhelming problem for which no viable solution exists. Recent steps designed to avoid fare increases and major service cuts in the near term have postponed the day of reckoning, but real solutions remain unlikely unless this brief "breathing period" is used to forge a consensus on financially and politically viable long-term solutions to the structural financial crisis facing all of the public transportation agencies in Massachusetts. The The Barr Foundation, are collaborating to develop a set of viable solutions to Massachusetts' public transportation finance crisis. This effort included a Blue-Ribbon Summit on Financing the MBTA and RTAs, held in November 2010, and the development of a "framework" for solving Massachusetts' public transportation finance crisis. More on the Blue Ribbon Summit
Transportation, Equity and Neighborhood Change
One of the driving forces behind the Dukakis Center's work - in transportation as well as other focus areas such as housing - is the need to marshal data in support of policy change that directly addresses racial and other forms of inequity. Many "transportation disadvantaged" groups find that their access to opportunity is limited by an auto-centric transportation system; these groups, which cannot always rely on or easily afford the use of automobiles, may include low income households, households without vehicles, youth, seniors, disabled people, people with language barriers and households in isolated/transit-inaccessible locations.
With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Dukakis Center recently completed a research project examining the diversity of transit-rich neighborhoods, the symbiotic relationship between diverse neighborhoods and successful transit, and patterns of neighborhood change in transit-rich neighborhoods. This research found that transit investment can sometimes lead to undesirable forms of neighborhood change. Understanding the mechanisms behind such neighborhood change can, however, allow policymakers, planners and advocates to implement policies and programs designed to produce more equitable patterns of neighborhood change. Along with a research report, the Dukakis Center therefore released a Policy Toolkit for Equitable Transit-Rich Neighborhoods, which presents information on a variety of polity tools that are increasingly available and in use across the country to shape equitable neighborhood change in transit-rich neighborhoods and ensure that the many benefits of transit investment are shared by all. More on Diversity in Transit-Rich Neighborhoods
Transportation, Economic Development and Transit-Oriented Development
The Dukakis Center's transportation policy research also focuses on the relationship between transportation policy and economic development.
In order to better understand the relationship between transit investment and land use development in greater Boston, the Dukakis Center convened the Transportation Priorities Task Force for the Urban Land Institute's Boston District Council. This effort brought together a wide range of stakeholders who had not necessarily participated in transportation policy or planning. The resulting 2005 report, On the Right Track, examined the ways in which transit investment supports transit-oriented land use and in which such transit-oriented development supports transit ridership. This was also the first research report to identify a growing debt service burden as the critical budgetary issue facing the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA).
Another example of the Dukakis Center's work linking transportation investment and regional economic development is its 2007 report "Connecting With Our Economic Future: A Transportation Investment Strategy" for the Life Sciences Cluster. Prepared for A Better City, a business and institutional leadership organization, the report articulated the central role of proximity and physical connections in the development of Greater Boston's life sciences "super cluster". The Center also prepared a series of case studies from nine competitor regions that either have or are strategically trying to develop tight-knit life sciences clusters in urban locations, examining how these metropolitan areas have incorporated transportation planning and investment into their economic development strategies.
Another focus of the Dukakis Center's transportation work is transit-oriented development or TOD. Numerous studies have demonstrated that residents of transit-oriented communities exhibit substantially different travel patterns from residents of lower density, single use neighborhoods without transit service. However, fostering the growth of these communities often faces feasibility challenges due to higher up front costs for land, denser construction, and achieving community benefits such as affordable housing and open space. Realizing the potential of TOD in greater Boston and nationwide will require supportive public policies and proactive investments in TOD implementation. State and local government cannot, however, be supportive unless there is agreement on what constitutes effective, equitable TOD that is worthy of public sector support. To address this critical policy gap, in 2011, with the support ofThe Barr Foundation, the Dukakis Center and the Center for Transit-Oriented Development launched an important new research project designed to create and pilot test a "performance rating system" for transit-oriented development. The project's objective is to create a "rating system" for transit-oriented development that would provide the requisite definition of TOD and therefore catalyze rapid policy change in support of both specific transit-oriented development projects and broader initiatives to plan and improve transit-rich neighborhoods, just as the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or LEED rating system has done for green buildings.
Sustainable Transportation
The transportation sector is responsible for a substantial and rapidly growing proportion of greenhouse gas emissions; in Massachusetts, the transportation sector represents both the largest and the fastest growing segment of Massachusetts' greenhouse gas inventory. A complicated set of demographic, economic, transportation and other factors drive the state's travel and transportation patterns. Because transportation is such a complicated issue, policymakers and advocates struggle to understand where the "leverage points" are in the system and what types of policy and programs can actually produce changes in travel behavior and ultimately reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Dukakis Center is working to address this challenge at both the local and state level.
The Dukakis Center's transportation team leader, Stephanie Pollack, was asked by Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino to serve on the city's Climate Action Leadership Committee. With transportation-related emissions constituting the fastest-growing category of greenhouse gases in Massachusetts, the committee's attention quickly turned to the transportation sector. Pollack served on a small transportation working group and helped develop a menu of specific recommendations for reducing the carbon footprint of metropolitan Boston's transportation sector. These were incorporated into the Climate Action Leadership Committee's 2010 report, Sparking Boston's Climate Revolution, a blueprint for reducing Boston's greenhouse gas emissions by 20% or more by 2020. StreetsBlog praised the transportation recommendations, noting that "In the race to have the "greenest, greatest" city, Menino is making Boston a contender."
At the state and regional level, the Dukakis Center believes that collecting, analyzing and presenting a broad range of data about greater Boston's transportation system can shed light on how the system works (or doesn't), a necessary first step toward changing the transportation system to make it more sustainable. Development of a comprehensive set of sustainable transportation indicators can be a critical tool in the effort to "bend the curve" and reduce transportation sector greenhouse gas emissions by identifying system changes that can reduce the amount of driving and increase travel on foot, by bicycle and on transit in greater Boston. Our belief in the power of a metrics-driven approach to policy change is based on a decade of experience applying this strategy to the Center's work on affordable housing. NOTE: This should be internal link to housing focus area page. With the support ofThe Barr Foundation, the Dukakis Center is preparing a benchmark report documenting of a comprehensive set of sustainable transportation indicators for Massachusetts, with a particular focus on the greater Boston region, scheduled for release in June 2011.