Traffic cameras, Circulator & K Street: Where are we on DC’s transportation budget?

On Wednesday, March 22, 2023, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser released her proposed FY2024 budget. The mayor’s proposed budget is not the final word. The DC Council’s own process takes a couple of months, and is well underway now. Hearings on agency budgets and the resulting committee markups have concluded. During those markups, committees approved reports their chairs prepared, which include “recommendations for funding and personnel levels for each agency in [their] purview, policy proposals, and any appropriation language changes.”

The next significant event in the budget timeline will be the Committee of the Whole’s first vote, on May 16, 2023. Councilmembers will meet to review, then approve, a unified budget based on committee recommendations, prepared by Council Chair Phil Mendelson and the council budget office.

Bowser’s budget was highly reactive to the uncertainty of commercial property tax revenues, principally in downtown DC. The Office of the Chief Financial Officer has anticipated that revenues might contract by about $266 million in 2024, because downtown office space—and, you may have heard, most of what’s downtown is office space and road space—is not as valuable as it was pre-pandemic. People don’t really want to be working in offices the way that they used to, and many firms have decided to reduce their rental costs. So, commercial properties can’t be assessed for as much money as they had been in prior years, which means the District has less money to pay for goods, services, and the employees that deliver those goods and services to residents.

The policy issues GGWash focuses on primarily fall under the purview of the Council’s Committee on Transportation and the Environment, the Committee on Housing, and the Committee on Operations and Public Works. Here are three takes (and only three, or else we would’ve never finished this post) on decisions by the mayor that elicited significant counter-action by the Committee on Transportation and the Environment (T&E), which is chaired by Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen: automated traffic enforcement camera revenue, the Circulator, and the K Street Transitway (or K Street freeway, depending on whom you’re asking).

Safety not-first

The mayor’s proposed budget substantially increased the number of automated traffic enforcement (ATE) cameras from 140 to 500 in coming years. Bowser also stood up a task force to figure out how to collect up to $889 million in unpaid tickets.

Years of research and other evidence show that the public often views ATEs as a cash grab rather than a mechanism to improve safety, and that popular resistance to them has reduced their capacity to change behavior. This distrust worsens the racial and economic disparities of traffic violence. People of color as well as people living on low incomes are less likely to drive, but more likely to be hurt or killed by drivers. The consequences of road traffic injuries or death can be not just emotionally but also financially devastating to low-income households.

GGWash isn’t interested in tickets for revenue purposes. GGWash’s interest in ATE is rooted in its potential to make our streets safer. Ideally, all the District’s roads would be designed and built to make speeding effectively impossible. That would require removing many more lanes from drivers, whether parking or travel, and reallocating that space, which is a slow process beset by political hangups. So advocates, like my colleagues and myself, have in the past several years called for an expansion of automated enforcement (as well as reducing traffic and parking lanes), because cameras can improve driver behavior over time without leading to potentially escalating interactions with law enforcement.

In keeping with the prioritization of safety, we also fully support the stipulations of § 50–921.20 of the D.C. Code, which, as part of the 2020 Vision Zero omnibus bill, set up a “Vision Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Fund.” Per the code, “the Fund shall be used solely to enhance the safety and quality of pedestrian and bicycle transportation, including education, engineering, and enforcement efforts designed to calm traffic and provide safe routes.” Funding road safety improvements with ATE revenue seemed to break the wheel of the cash-grab perception, and should have led to fewer infractions over time.

But, for FY24, Bowser swept this special-purpose revenue fund for safe streets and reallocated ATE money to general revenue. This means that an enormous chunk of the District budget is reliant on revenue generated by people’s poor, unsafe, and illegal driving. Here’s how the T&E committee report describes it:

“Most importantly, to ensure that the excess ATE revenue deposited into the [Vision Zero (VZ)] was actually spent on traffic safety improvements, the [2020] law explicitly prohibited transferring money from the VZ Fund “to the unassigned fund balance of the General Fund of the District of Columbia at the end of a fiscal year, or at any other time.

The Mayor’s proposed subtitle would strike the requirement that excess ATE revenue be deposited into the VZ Fund. Instead, the VZ Fund would be funded through appropriations proposed by the Mayor or Council. In effect, this means that ATE revenue exceeding the $98.8 million threshold [see below] will revert to General Fund for any use. In fact, the Mayor FY24 Budget Overview touts the fact that she ‘[w]orked with CFO to certify $578M in anticipated Automated Traffic Enforcement revenue from new cameras approved in FY 2022 and FY 2023.’ Combined with previous forecasts, the CFO has projected that the District will collect $972,798,000 in total ATE revenue between FY24 and FY27.” (page 119)

No, the ATE money is not going to be put back in the special-purpose-fund bottle. By spreading it throughout the whole budget, Bowser made it effectively impossible for the Committee on Transportation and the Environment to restore that funding; they would have had to ask all the other committees to re-fund their own budget priorities with non-ATE money. The committee is “still eager to redirect ATE camera revenue towards traffic safety improvements and interventions that can save lives and improve the quality of life for people traveling in the District.” But the most it has the power and ability to do is to rededicate ATE revenue, above a certain threshold, to the Vision Zero fund. Again, per the committee’s report:

Therefore, the Committee recommends adopting the Mayor’s proposed subtitle with several key changes. First, the Committee’s subtitle restores the requirement that excess ATE revenue be dedicated towards the traffic safety improvements identified in D.C. Code § 50–921.25(b). However, the subtitle raises the threshold for determining excess revenue for to account for the CFO’s latest projections, summarized in Table 1 (above). The subtitle further raises the thresholds to account for costs resulting from the Mayor’s proposed reversal of the revenue dedication.” (page 121)

Gutting the Circulator

The mayor’s budget cut funding to the Circulator by $6.9 million, eliminating the Woodley Park-Adams Morgan-McPherson Square Metro, Eastern Market-L’Enfant Plaza, and Dupont Circle-Georgetown-Rosslyn lines. Transit cuts are bad for mobility, equity, and sustainability, of course, but the administration’s public justification for them—⚡ e l e c t r i f i c a t i o n ⚡was making the buses too expensive to operate—was rather strange.

The costs of electrification are well-known, and funds to electrify the Circulator should normally come from capital, not operating, dollars (except in extraordinary circumstances, which this specifically is not). Electrification is important, but as WMATA’s general manager, Randy Clarke, observed recently, shifting trips from cars to buses is substantially better for the environment than shifting those buses’ energy source. Fiscal constraints would logically lead to deprioritizing the more expensive, less immediate thing (electrification) rather than the cheaper, more immediate thing (service).

Pitting buses against electric buses means no buses at all. The committee has only scrounged up $3.5 million in one-time funds to maintain the Eastern Market-L’Enfant Plaza line for one year (which actually serves fewer riders than the Adams Morgan-Woodley Park route). Riders of the other lines are still hanging, and so are the businesses and other amenities that rely on them, a situation that DC Sustainable Transportation (the coalition of business and advocacy groups that I serve as director) sought to avoid in asking the Council to keep funding Circulator services.

K: A capital L that didn’t have to B?

The most attention-grabbing shift from the mayor’s proposed budget is the committee’s defunding of K Street Transitway construction this year. Leaving aside all that’s happened since the T&E Committee’s markup last Thursday (press, more press, so many tweets, a new design with no bike lanes that hasn’t yet made it to DDOT’s project page, press about the blowback, a rally), Bowser’s budget originally defunded Allen’s signature legislation, Metro for DC, but did fund the K Street Transitway.

Allen swapped one for the other, allocating “$153 million in funding to the Metro for DC Amendment Act of 2022 to begin providing free Metrobus service in the District by reducing the K Street Transitway’s FY24 capital budget by $115 million, accepting a transfer from the Committee of the Whole of $115 million in operating funds from Paygo, and depositing $112.5 million of those funds to the Fare-Free Bus Fund; and accepting $10.3 million in recurring operating funds from the Committee on Public Works and Operations to be deposited into the Fare-Free Bus Fund.”

Institutionally, both GGWash and DCST have long supported the Transitway for its capacity to improve east-west transit service (a huge priority for WMATA), pedestrian and cyclist safety, and the quality of place that Downtown needs to recover. The current designs are hard to read as doing much to improve the wraparound elements that bus riders need to make transit viable, like safe crossings, widened and inviting sidewalks, or bike facilities (contradicting years of planning). Critics might also look to countries where bus priority is thriving, and wonder why they seem to mostly have, well, standard, well-enforced bus lanes. Whatever you think of the current design, what’s built here for bus riders, pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers in the next five years may be in place for thirty.

Opponents of the T&E Committee’s move have raised diverse concerns, one of the fairer ones being that pulling capital investments into shorter-term operating costs borrows from the future in a way that may not necessarily strengthen our long-term ability to deliver quality public services (which the Mayor called a “gimmick”). But some advocates note that spending those dollars on this current design–which DDOT has suggested is final, despite a previous “final” design released in December 2022–is not so much a case of a “don’t make perfect the enemy of good” moment as it is missing the mark entirely, flying in the face of sustainability goals by prioritizing traffic throughput and driver ease over pedestrians, cyclists, safety, and downtown as a place. In short, the choice for GGWash in this budget has not been between bus service and free fares. DCST took the position at the budget hearing that the Transitway is worthy of funding with the right design: a design that definitively incentivizes mode shift.

The Committee explained their approach as follows:

“Some may question why the Committee continues to support free bus service for all, as opposed to limiting free transit benefits to low-income residents. However, there are several reasons why extending the benefit to all residents – regardless of income – will have more positive impacts. During discussions to determine the cost of the bill, the Committee learned that establishing means-testing requirements would have dramatically increased the administrative costs; in fact, it could have as much as doubled the cost of the Fare-Free Bus Program. Furthermore, making Metrobus service free in the District can reduce headways because it avoids the delays associated with the farebox – passengers are not slowed by the need to tap their farecard, operators do not need to verify payment, and passengers can use rear doors without a farebox for boarding.

Most importantly, reliable bus service is critical for the District’s, and specifically downtown’s, economic recovery. In the District, nearly two-thirds of bus riders are Black residents, 68% of bus riders have incomes of less than $50,000, and 18%—nearly one fifth—have incomes below $10,000. Many bus riders are service workers who never had a chance to work from home during the pandemic. The funding to expand overnight Metrobus service to the routes in the District with the highest ridership is especially important to hospitality and service industry workers, on whom the District’s economy depends. These workers stand to benefit the most from 24/7 service because they often go to work before, and leave after, current Metrobus operating hours.” (page 31).

Putting aside who’s “winning” more advocacy, business, or public support, and questions about financial governance, the short-term (Metro for DC) vs. long-term (dedicated, “gold standard” transit priority) framing is more complex than it first appears. Getting more people to ride transit, walk, and bike–a goal to which DC has committed itself–is not just about making those facilities and services better; they have to be a better choice for most people than driving a personal vehicle. At the bare minimum, that means cities must do less than they do right now to incentivize driving. We’ve known this for years; there’s no meaningful debate. Building a project that improves bus service, but makes driving better than ever in the center of the District, would throw into question how serious we are about those goals.

That’s not all, folks

Overall, the Mayor’s proposals to cut Circulator routes, forge ahead with a K Street design that supports bus services but leaves few people feeling safer or more enthused to spend time downtown, and ignore Metro for DC are striking in light of a track record that boasts many wins for sustainable transportation, especially in recent years. Whether the Council and Mayor can work together to keep us on that track remains to be seen, but it’s one of the more important political processes playing out right now in the District. What does a city need more than anything else? People (housing), and those people must be out of their homes and out of their cars to yield wider societal benefits. There’s no economic, or social, recovery if most of us don’t leave our homes and personal vehicles.

This post is specifically about things that the mayor did in her budget that the T&E committee then changed, and how the committee changed it. We didn’t cover all budgetary decisions regarding transportation—for example, bus priority and protected bike lane projects are still, at least on paper, on track with their funding in FY24, and the committee’s report proposes a Budget Support Act subtitle mandating that the District Department of Transportation update and release a report on road pricing that is long overdue (page 123 of its report!). The Council’s proposal to levy a $2 surcharge on ride hail trips is also notable.

There will be plenty more to say about all of the above, especially as the council moves through its votes on the budget in the Committee of the Whole’s hearings.