This excellent animation from TrueMajority shows in
graphic detail (using Oreo cookies) how ridiculously, large
the military budget is, and how we could solve many domestic
problems with a modest 12% cut. A must-see. (watch
it now)
How
CAMPO stacks the deck on road
planning By Roger
Baker * September 7,
2001
Last Wednesday, I went to the
CAMPO office and picked up my Sept. 10 CAMPO meeting agenda
packet, which has the backup details of this Monday's 6 pm CAMPO
meeting -- to be held at the northeast corner of UT campus in the
JC Thompson Center, where the public may sign up to speak on any
item.
"Thus
BILLIONS of dollars worth of new toll roads in Williamson
County, like SH 130, are being planned on the basis of
old mid-1990's growth trends as reaffirmed by a TTI study
that the public cannot see"
[The staff normally provides
me with the same backup information given to the CAMPO politicians
who vote. This allows me to post my interpretation of the agenda
items -- on lists like this -- several days in advance of the
meetings].
Let me focus specifically on
agenda Item #7, with its key long-term planning implications for
planning roads in the Austin area.
The backup material reveals
that the CAMPO staff, in doing the new roadway plan for this area,
is recommending readopting the old population and employment
estimates from the previous June 2000 plan projections for Travis,
Williamson, and Hayes counties -- as a basis for their new plan to
be approved next year. These key numbers, however inaccurate or
controversial, become the basis for all the subsequent
transportation planning done by CAMPO.
The CAMPO planners take these
population and employment numbers as the starting point and will
plan roughly $10 billion of Austin area highways and transit
around these totals. Through legitimizing the need for proposed
roads in the plan using computer travel demand models based on
these numbers, roads can get implanted in the process for official
approval and eventual construction, and their need
perpetuated.
The population and employment
projections from the old CAMPO plan, now proposed by staff to be
used as a basis for the new plan too, are oriented toward a high
rate of sprawl-oriented growth for 25 years into the future.
For example, the population of
Williamson County is proposed to quadruple between now and 2025,
while Travis county is projected to grow proportionally much less.
This fact by itself implies
sprawl growth that is contrary to air quality goals, but being
carried forward as an unchallengable assumption from the old 2000
plan. The problem for transportation reform advocates is that
these key population and employment estimates were borrowed from
1990-1996 in the boom decade, and then are used to establish a
high growth rate and sprawl trend in the future. But long range
demographic forecasts are some of the least accurate forecasts
that there are, similar in accuracy to long range economic
forecasts.
It so happens that the Peer
Review team was hired for $200,000 to give CAMPO good planning
advice was critical of the existing population and employment
projections, calling them too high for too long (CAMPO chooses the
highest growth projection alternatives provided by the state data
center, based on recent trends).
It said the following about
CAMPO's growth assumptions:
"...The regional population
forecasts are, in our judgment, too high. Further, we believe
that the employment projections for the city of Austin central
business district (CBD) are too low, which may cause
underestimation of the level of travel demand to and within the
CBD..." (see link below)
Nothing could better
demonstrate the political nature of the CAMPO planning process
than the fact that this advice from the Peer Review team is being
ignored by staff in favor of numbers based on trends that follow
the bad old growth habits of the 1990's.
Meanwhile, here is how item #7
of the agenda packet describes the update of the CAMPO plan which
will be voted on Monday as CAMPO planning policy:
"...The Texas Transportation
Institute (TTI) has also examined the CAMPO forecasts and their
spacial distribution used in the last plan update. The TTI's
study indicates that the population forecasts at the county
level used in the last plan update are reasonable and
sustainable. Staff recommends that the county population
control totals used for the 2025 plan adopted in June 2000 be
used again for the 2025 plan update currently being
undertaken..."
But the TTI is a branch of
Texas A & M that does research and planning on roads -- they
are not demographic forecasters! (assuming that such forecasts
could somehow be done accurately through some how predicting the
future state of the local economy and land use patterns decades
from now).
On Thursday, Sept 6, at around
noon I called CAMPO's long range planner Daniel Yang and asked to
see the TTI study cited above. He says it is Texas-wide study and
is about a dozen pages and that I could come to CAMPO and pick up
a copy.
A little later Mr. Yang called
a second time and says that as a courtesy to TxDOT, who contracted
the TTI study being used by CAMPO as a basis for planning, that he
would need to get the approval of TxDOT on Friday morning.
On Friday about 2 pm, I call
again and he says that the TxDOT planners are having a 1:30
meeting where they will discuss the issue of release of the TTI
study, and that he will call me back at 3 pm. Then he calls about
3 pm and leaves a message that indicates I will need to get
special permission to see the TTI study via an open records
request filed with TxDOT's public information officer.
This will naturally delay my
access -- and all public access -- to the assumptions used as a
basis for the the TTI study until long after the new policy based
on the study has been approved by the CAMPO politicians on Monday.
Thus BILLIONS of dollars worth
of new toll roads in Williamson County, like SH 130, are being
planned on the basis of old mid-1990's growth trends as reaffirmed
by a TTI study that the public cannot see, before the resulting
policies are adopted in the new federally sanctioned CAMPO
plan.
Everyone familar with the
politics of Texas roads knows in a vague way that roadway planning
is corrupt in Texas, and that the road building process is really
based on the politics of land speculation using roads as a
publicly funded welfare subsidy for private land development
interests.
No single fact could better
illustrate this situation than the fact that politically powerful
attorney Pete Winstead is director of the Texas Turnpike
Authority, seeking to accelerate the building of Texas toll roads
-- while being simultaneously head of the privately funded Real
Estate Council of Austin, a real estate development lobby group.
But also, as I have shown
above, the whole CAMPO planning process is arranged to come to
certain conclusions meant to perpetuate the justification for
proposed roads serving the same development from plan to plan, no
matter what changes in growth patterns or the current state of the
economy. These land investments require TxDOT's publicly funded
roads as a subsidy. Whether enough public funds actually exist or
not, and no matter the effect of sprawl on air quality goals in
our non-attainment area, the politically influential roads survive
to be planned and built.
Once the deck is stacked by the
good 'ol boys of Texas, it stays stacked.
Another site by Michael Bluejay...
Saving Electricity. Find out how much juice your stuff uses, and how to save money and energy. As seen in Newsweek.
