 Maine's Sensible Transportation Policy Act (or STPA) is a remarkably progressive law. It states that the state's transportation decisions must "minimize the harmful effects of transportation on public health and on air and water quality, land use and other natural resources," and "give preference to transportation system management options, demand management strategies, improvements to the existing system, and other transportation modes before increasing highway capacity through road building activities." It also requires state transportation policies and investments to be consistent with local comprehensive plans and land-use plans. Numerous issues are converging to convince State agencies, courts, and lawmakers that the STPA needs to be more strongly enforced. Gasoline price volatility has been extremely damaging to household disposable incomes and Maine industries: in the last few years, Maine households have spent almost as much on transportation as they do on housing. At the same time, vehicles on the Maine Turnpike alone generate more greenhouse gas emissions every year than all of the state's power plants, combined. The state's near-exclusive focus on highways is also fiscally reckless. The Maine Department of Transportation's latest Long Range Plan (which was finalized in 2008, in the midst of the gasoline-price superspike) proposes to spend over $12.7 billion over the next twenty years on transportation infrastructure; of that, less than 6% would be dedicated to transportation dollars on sustainable forms of mobility, like rail, sidewalks, and bus transit. The majority ($12 billion) would be spent on asphalt, and wider highways. Even worse, thanks to rising costs of construction materials, the state expects a shortfall of up to $3.8 billion in the next ten years, a gap that the Department of Transportation proposes to fill with increased taxes and borrowing from the state's General Fund. The typical Maine household would have to pay $733 every year in new taxes to make these plans a reality - and it wouldn't even pay for basic sidewalks on our Main Streets, or for a single new bus route. Maine can't afford this. The state's transportation policy clearly needs to move in a more sustainable direction, as the Sensible Transportation Policy Act demands. MAST's strategy is twofold. First, MAST will demand fiscal and environmental accountability by opposing pork-barrel freeway expansions.Current plans from the Maine Turnpike Authority and the Maine Department of Transportation call for Maine to spend a quarter-billion dollars on freeway expansions in the City of Portland alone - an area where traffic levels have actually been in decline in spite of strong economic growth. In 2007, several MAST coalition members - including the League of Young Voters, the Portland Bicycle-Pedestrian Advisory Committee, and others - joined together to protest a proposal to spend $100 million to widen I-295 through downtown Portland. Thanks to dozens of letters and phone calls to political leaders and massive turnout at public hearings, Portland's regional transportation planning agency resolved to divert the funds intended for highway widenings to fund transit improvements instead. Second, MAST will promote more cost-effective regional transit solutions that will save Maine commuters, businesses, and taxpayers billions of dollars.Maine can't afford to maintain existing roads, much less spend hundreds of millions of dollars on wider freeways. Transit improvements, on the other hand, can accomplish far more in terms of reducing congestion in Greater Portland, at a fraction of the cost. In a demonstration of this fact, MAST is promoting its Turnpike for the 21st Century plan, which proposes new commuter bus routes as a more effective and energy-efficient alternative to the Maine Turnpike Authority's proposed $100 million widening project in West Portland. Comprehensive commuter bus services could be obtained for less than one tenth of the cost of a freeway expansion, and save Mainers millions of dollars - both at the gas pump, and at the toll booth. For details, download our full report or our 2-page summaries of the proposed new services to York County and to Lewiston/Auburn. |
Fiscal Accountability and Cost-Effective Transportation |
