After a divisive election, it is heartening to see that one issue seems to be creating a potential point of unity among a broad range of political groups: investing in the nation’s infrastructure. The tri-state region, especially, needs to focus on long overdue megaprojects, from the Gateway tunnels to La Guardia Airport. A 2016 report from the TRIP research group found that “roads and bridges on New York’s interstate highway system are among the most deteriorated in the nation.”
President Donald Trump has vowed to invest as much as $1 trillion over 10 years to restore or upgrade our crumbling infrastructure coast to coast. This is a promising development, especially since it comes as many states, including New York, and municipalities have themselves recently committed to major transportation investments.
With the promise of a formidable one-two punch of federal and state/local dollars in the near term, America may have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reposition its transportation infrastructure for the future. And, yet, there is a major challenge: spending the money in the right ways.
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We must make our infrastructure investments very strategically if we are to achieve the gains—in jobs, economic growth, global competitiveness and quality of life—that Americans deserve. We must rethink our transportation priorities and approaches so that new spending lets us leapfrog to a new level of performance, rather than merely catch up to where we should have been for decades.
Here are a few ideas to ensure that America and our tri-state region achieve the greatest benefit from transportation spending in the coming years:
• Prioritize projects transparently. When spending large amounts of public money on transportation, it’s critical to preserve taxpayers’ trust. One way is by removing politics from the equation when determining which projects to prioritize. For example, using a data-driven model can serve to standardize and rationalize the decision-making process by scoring projects based on how well they ease congestion, improve economic development, provide access to jobs, enhance safety and environmental sustainability and efficiently use land.
• Deliver projects more efficiently. Many states now allow the use of a design-build method for delivering large, complex transportation projects. Design-build brings together designers and contractors at a project’s beginning, under a single contract, which can spur innovation, gain economics of scale and accelerate the timeline to deliver the project at a significantly lower cost than offered by the traditional design-bid-build method. By adopting design-build for more projects, and even smaller ones, we can get more transportation improvements for the dollars we invest. The state legislature this year will again consider legislation that allows design-build to be expanded statewide.
• Innovate first, then construct. Before we take steps to widen highways to deal with congestion, we should consider other techniques that can be more cost-efficient. For example, in urban areas where closely-spaced on-ramps cause congestion to build quickly, planners can consider a technique called ramp metering, which uses traffic lights to adjust the flow of vehicles entering the highway. The net effect of this technique is to increase capacity during times of greatest demand, without building costly new lanes that are also expensive to maintain—and which are often unnecessary except during rush hour.
• Advance user-centered mobility. Technology is revolutionizing virtually every aspect of travel, from digital maps for planning trips, to GPS guidance, to digital tickets for trains and subways, to ride sharing. We need to invest in tech that erases the seams between modes, so travelers can assess and activate their Mobilbahis options easily, often from a smartphone.
These are just a few of many strategies that could help us improve our transportation system significantly, while also ensuring that each dollar is spent effectively if indeed we embark on the road to more predictable and sustainable funding for New York City, the tri-state region and the nation.
Thomas J. Spearing III is New York office leader and senior vice president at HNTB Corp.
After a divisive election, it is heartening to see that one issue seems to be creating a potential point of unity among a broad range of political groups: investing in the nation’s infrastructure. The tri-state region, especially, needs to focus on long overdue megaprojects, from the Gateway tunnels to La Guardia Airport. A 2016 report from the TRIP research group found that “roads and bridges on New York’s interstate highway system are among the most deteriorated in the nation.”
President Donald Trump has vowed to invest as much as $1 trillion over 10 years to restore or upgrade our crumbling infrastructure coast to coast. This is a promising development, especially since it comes as many states, including New York, and municipalities have themselves recently committed to major transportation investments.
With the promise of a formidable one-two punch of federal and state/local dollars in the near term, America may have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reposition its transportation infrastructure for the future. And, yet, there is a major challenge: spending the money in the right ways.
We must make our infrastructure investments very strategically if we are to achieve the gains—in jobs, economic growth, global competitiveness and quality of life—that Americans deserve. We must rethink our transportation priorities and approaches so that new spending lets us leapfrog to a new level of performance, rather than merely catch up to where we should have been for decades.
Here are a few ideas to ensure that America and our tri-state region achieve the greatest benefit from transportation spending in the coming years:
• Prioritize projects transparently. When spending large amounts of public money on transportation, it’s critical to preserve taxpayers’ trust. One way is by removing politics from the equation when determining which projects to prioritize. For example, using a data-driven model can serve to standardize and rationalize the decision-making process by scoring projects based on how well they ease congestion, improve economic development, provide access to jobs, enhance safety and environmental sustainability and efficiently use land.
• Deliver projects more efficiently. Many states now allow the use of a design-build method for delivering large, complex transportation projects. Design-build brings together designers and contractors at a project’s beginning, under a single contract, which can spur innovation, gain economics of scale and accelerate the timeline to deliver the project at a significantly lower cost than offered by the traditional design-bid-build method. By adopting design-build for more projects, and even smaller ones, we can get more transportation improvements for the dollars we invest. The state legislature this year will again consider legislation that allows design-build to be expanded statewide.
• Innovate first, then construct. Before we take steps to widen highways to deal with congestion, we should consider other techniques that can be more cost-efficient. For example, in urban areas where closely-spaced on-ramps cause congestion to build quickly, planners can consider a technique called ramp metering, which uses traffic lights to adjust the flow of vehicles entering the highway. The net effect of this technique is to increase capacity during times of greatest demand, without building costly new lanes that are also expensive to maintain—and which are often unnecessary except during rush hour.
• Advance user-centered mobility. Technology is revolutionizing virtually every aspect of travel, from digital maps for planning trips, to GPS guidance, to digital tickets for trains and subways, to ride sharing. We need to invest in tech that erases the seams between modes, so travelers can assess and activate their options easily, often from a smartphone.
These are just a few of many strategies that could help us improve our transportation system significantly, while also ensuring that each dollar is spent effectively if indeed we embark on the road to more predictable and sustainable funding for New York City, the tri-state region and the nation.
Thomas J. Spearing III is New York office leader and senior vice president at HNTB Corp.
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