The Minnesota Department of Transportation released its first Statewide Pedestrian System Plan on May 26 – a plan that provides policy and investment guidance to improve places where people walk across and along Minnesota highways.
[Photo by Minnesota DOT]
The plan identifies current priority areas for investments while laying out specific strategies to improve walking availability and accessibility statewide for the next 20 years.
“This plan provides an important framework and will help ensure we are meeting the needs and interests of people, today and into the future,” explained Minnesota DOT Commissioner Margaret Anderson Kelliher, who serves as chairperson of the AASHTO Committee on the Environment, in a statement.
“Creating safe places for people to walk is essential to improving equity and mobility, addressing climate change, and ultimately providing a better quality of life for everyone,” she said. Kelliher added that the agency’s Statewide Pedestrian System Plan offers policy direction, identifies investment need, and provides technical guidance to improve the state transportation system for people who walk. It also sets performance measures to track progress towards creating a better pedestrian system and identifies strategies to protect people walking from the effects of climate change.
The Minnesota DOT noted that work on its pedestrian plan begin in February 2019 and included two public engagement efforts that reached 2,700 people statewide. The agency also installed seven pedestrian safety demonstrations projects across Minnesota to highlight certain safety measures in action to the public.
“This plan helps [us] identify opportunities and implement the right strategies on projects to make walking safer and more convenient for all Minnesotans,” noted Tori Nill, director of Office of Transit and Active Transportation within the Minnesota DOT. “While the plan doesn’t tell us exactly what to do in every situation, it does provide the tools we need to make those decisions and make sure pedestrian safety is included on every highway project,” Nill said.
Formula funding mechanisms are critical to building more resilience into the nation’s transportation system, argued Edwin Sniffen (seen above), deputy director of highways for the Hawaii Department of Transportation, during a May 13 Senate Committee on Appropriations.
Appearing before the subcommittee on transportation, housing and urban development, and related agencies, Sniffen said transportation resilience is about “balancing today’s needs with the future and setting the plans and processes so that addressing adaptation is the default.”
That is why, he said, all of Hawaii DOT’s operational divisions have initiated climate adaption studies in response to ongoing and forecasted climate change.
“When your transportation systems are surrounded by water, like ours, climate adaptation is a must. However, I would like to make the argument that climate adaptation is necessary for all, regardless of their geography,” Sniffen explained in his written testimony. Yet simply moving transportation infrastructure out of “harm’s way” is neither the most practical nor economical solution.
“The 2017 ‘Hawaii Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report’ forecasts one meter of sea level rise affecting the Hawaiian Islands by 2100. If we took a traditional approach of relocating transportation facilities, we would be looking at an estimated $30 billion to relocate or elevate state roads and bridges, address impacts to airports, and protect the state’s commercial harbor facilities,” he explained.
That is where resiliency comes into play, Sniffen stressed.
“I believe that the definition of resilience is critical and should not be related simply to the ability of an asset to not fail during certain events such as a bridge strike or a category-five hurricane,” he emphasized. “Rather, it needs to involve the ability of a state department of transportation to anticipate, plan, and adapt to potential risks; withstand, respond to, or recover when an event occurs; and construct and maintain assets that decrease project vulnerability risks.”
Sniffen – who also serves as chair of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Committee on Transportation System Security and Resilience – said that traditional formula funding processes play a key role helping states implement resiliency plans.
“When considering funding for resilience, the current core formula program eligibility could be expanded to consider resilience improvements,” he said. “Or formula funding could be set aside to focus on resilience-related planning, coordination, and evacuation; or, a discretionary grant program for adaptation strategies could be established. [However] AASHTO generally recommends avoiding new plans, programs, and analysis processes as this increases cost and burden to state DOTs.”
Sniffen added that additional funding and an expedited project delivery process would “greatly aid” getting more resilience initiatives out of the theoretical stages and into practice on the nation’s streets, bridges, runways, and harbors.
“The Hawaii DOT is currently approaching building resilience into our systems using a variety of approaches, including pursuing green infrastructure such as carbon mineralized concrete and adding recycled plastics to asphalt mixes,” he noted. “Investing in resilient infrastructure on a federal level will enable us and other transportation agencies to implement better and greener infrastructure.”
The Center for Environmental Excellence – a partnership through the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and the Federal Highway Administration – launched a new website to provide faster and easier access to information for users, available at: https://environment.transportation.org.
Established in 2001, the Center promotes environmental stewardship, encourages innovation and serves as a resource for transportation professionals seeking technical assistance, training, information exchange, and partnership-building opportunities.
The new website presents the Center’s resources in a more visually appealing and organized way – saving time and reducing frustration among users when searching the site for desired information.
The website includes practitioner handbooks; case studies highlighting what state departments of transportation are doing on various environmental topics; news stories; and a listing of upcoming events.
Visitors may also find information in one of several topical areas such as air quality, active transportation, sustainability, environmental justice, traffic noise, climate change, water quality, and many others. The new site also features several resources for researchers, including the Transportation and Environmental Research Ideas or TERI database – a central location for tracking and sharing new transportation and environmental research ideas.
“The Center has always featured an enormous amount of resources relating to transportation environmental topics,” explained Melissa Savage, director of the Center, in a statement. “But we found it could all be a little overwhelming. Now users are able to more clearly see what’s available,” she said. “Those who know what they’re looking for can find it quickly, while those who want to browse resources can do that in a more organized way that makes a lot more sense.
A panel of state department of transportation executives and managers, as well as a team leader from the Federal Highway Administration, recently shared their insights on infrastructure resilience via a peer exchange during the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials 2021 virtual spring meeting.
[Above photo by the Hawaii DOT]
“We are seeing events such as wildfires, flooding, and hurricanes becoming more extreme and occurring more often,” explained Edwin Sniffen, deputy director of highways for the Hawaii Department of Transportation. “We are also seeing more ‘man-made’ issues, too, such as cybersecurity, terrorist attacks, and the like. So it is super important to make our [infrastructure] systems more resilient.”
Sniffen – who also serves as chair of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Committee on Transportation System Security and Resilience – added that “emergency response” is becoming a more crucial component of resiliency efforts at the state DOT level. “That’s one reason why we want to try and make FHWA ER [emergency relief] funding more consistent across the nation,” he explained. “Everyone is looking towards how to make things better.”
Michael Culp – FHWA’s team leader for sustainable transportation and resilience – noted during the exchange that his agency is “really focused on integrating resilience across the board. I would expect in the future to see more [resilience] policies coming out on all of these fronts; not just for state DOTs but for FHWA and the U.S. Department of Transportation, too.”
That includes more “technical guidance type work” and pilot projects where resiliency is concerned, he added.
“We’re seeing a ramped up focus on climate/extreme weather and how it impacts the highway system,” Culp noted, emphasizing that there is “a lot of interest” on Capitol Hill in seeing that the federal surface program integrate resilience within the nation’s transportation system.
“Resilience will also definitely have a lot of presence in federal [infrastructure] legislation, whatever it ends up looking like,” he added.
Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Kemp, head of the Colorado Department of Transportation’s resiliency program, noted that her agency “started down the path of resiliency planning” eight years ago in response to major flooding that occurred in 2013.
Since then, the Colorado DOT has developed a tool to calculate infrastructure risk while assessing the potential benefits of resiliency investments. “We’ve started looking at this from the planning perspective – deploying resilient designs in high risk areas where benefit costs support it,” she explained. “It is not an easy process to develop such tools, as the data are not always there. We have spent the last three or so years developing a robust tool kit to improve our resiliency decision-making in a day-to-day way. That is the key: getting better data for our tool kit and then integrating its findings into our day-to-day decision-making process.”
Yet Jennifer Carver – statewide community planning coordinator for the Florida Department of Transportation – cautioned that incorporating resilience into infrastructure planning “is not a quick thing.” It also involves all of the infrastructure-related processes within a state DOT: long-range planning, construction and design, plus maintenance.
“Over the last few years we set up a framework on how to ‘name’ resilience and point to where we are incorporating it in our infrastructure efforts,” she said. “That’s helped energize our agency around resilience and make it part of what we do. It makes every project into a resilience project.”
Gregg Brunner, director of bureau of field services for the Michigan Department of Transportation, said efforts like Florida DOT’s are vital to “bring more folks to the table” within a state DOT “from an educational standpoint in order to create awareness of the resiliency terminology.”
Developing agency-wide risk assessment and management process is the next step, he said. “It’s about breaking down risk management into two parts – agency risk, or how it impacts Michigan DOT as a whole, and then project-level risk.”
Brunner added that “agency level threats” include things that affect the department’s labor force, technology, and financial health. Project level risks, by contrast, include things like extreme weather events. “From there we develop a risk matrix: Examining likelihood of things like flooding or cyberattacks occurring in different areas around Michigan.”
Geography makes a big difference, too, he noted. For example, while six inches of snow in the Upper Peninsula region of the state would be a non-event – “business would carry on as usual,” Brunner said – six inches in Detroit would shut down the city. “Developing a risk assessment matrix is what helps us pinpoint locales with highest risk factors,” he said.
Chris Engelbrecht, assistant to the chief safety and operations officer at the Missouri Department of Transportation, stressed that planning ahead for disaster is crucial – especially when trying to build in more infrastructure resiliency.
“The hardest time to incorporate resilience is in the disaster recovery phase – that is when we’re stressed with reopening closed roads as fast as possible,” he said. “Thus it is a struggle to bring resilience into the repair process.”
That’s why predictive tools are so important when it comes to planning resiliency improvements. “Looking at historical data does not always give us the full risk picture either,” Engelbrecht noted. “We need to look to the horizon, to examine changing weather patterns so we obtain ‘leading indicators’ before extreme events happen.”
The Minnesota Department of Transportation is already doing that to a degree, noted Tim Sexton, the agency’s assistant commissioner for sustainability and health.
“Right now Minnesota is forecasted to be the number one or two state in the nation affected by climate change; it’ll be getting warmer and wetter for us,” he said. “So the first risk we face is more flooding – and that directly impacts things like slope failures along our highway and railroad networks.
By contrast, warmer winters create more freeze and thaw cycles, which affect pavement durability. “Climate change shines a spotlight on inequities in all states,” Sexton noted. “That’s why we are adjusting resilience to be part of our long-range policy and infrastructure investment plans.”
The North Carolina Department of Transportation said that as May 19 its crews, contractors, and volunteers have collected 6.3 million pounds of litter from along the state’s roads – putting them on pace to exceed the record for litter collection set in 2019.
[Above photo by the NCDOT]
That 6.3 million pounds of trash is roughly the same amount collected in 2020 and puts the agency on track to surpass its 2019 record, when NCDOT crews, contractors, and volunteers collected 10.5 million pounds of litter.
“We are on track to pick up more litter in 2021 than in any year previous,” noted Eric Boyette, NCDOT secretary, in a statement. “But to truly solve this problem, North Carolina must begin dealing with litter proactively. Secure your load, don’t throw trash out the window and do your part to make sure others know this too.”
He added that NCDOT’s litter management programs are “multifaceted” as the department makes use of both state-owned resources and contract services. NCDOT’s Sponsor-A-Highway Program allows businesses, organizations and individuals to sponsor litter removal along roadsides. The agency also partners with more than 120,000 participants in the Adopt-A-Highway Program, where volunteers pledge to clean a section of our highways at least four times a year.
State departments of transportation across the country are ramping up similar anti-litter outreach and cleanup efforts.
In April, the Ohio Department of Transportation joined forces with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and Ohio Department of Natural Resources to conduct a statewide anti-litter campaign – called “A Little Litter is a Big Problem” – to highlight the negative impact litter has on the state’s transportation system, parks, beachfronts, and waterways.
The Ohio DOT noted in a statement that it alone has spent at least $48.6 million to deal with litter since 2011 and that its staff spent 151,410 hours picking up trash in 2020.
Meanwhile, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation launched a new “Clean Rhodes” anti-litter initiative on April 22.
“Litter is one of the biggest sources of complaints for RIDOT and has us spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in a seemingly never-ending battle of picking up trash along our roads,” Peter Alviti, Jr., the agency’s director, in a statement. “We’re upping our game and enlisting the help of the business and volunteer community to help us address this blight on our roads.”
RIDOT, which said it spends $800,000 annually to pick up trash on state roads, noted that the goal of this campaign is to remove 1 million pieces of litter. The agency is also seeking to buy specialized litter removal equipment that attaches to its maintenance vehicles for some $750,000 so it can rake and clean litter from strips of land and other larger green spaces along roads more easily.
Meanwhile, the Delaware Department of Transportation, for example, recently renewed focus on its “Keep DE Litter Free” campaign. To date in 2021, the agency said its crewed collected and cleared nearly 16,000 bags of trash from state roadways – adding to the more than 51,000 bags of trash collected and cleared in 2020.
That includes more than 6,800 tires, 3,500 signs, and 250 appliances removed from Delaware roads, the Delaware DOT pointed out.
“Trying and laborious” perhaps best describes the months-long research and digging conducted in search of the home of a young Harriett Tubman by the Maryland Department of Transportation’s State Highway Administration in the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
[Above photo by the Maryland DOT]
In 2019, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) purchased the 2,600-acre Peter’s Neck site within that refuge for $6 million – an area where historians thought Tubman’s childhood home might be located. That is why a year later, Marcia Pradines – the Chesapeake Marshlands National Wildlife Refuge complex project leader for the USFWS – asked the Maryland DOT for archeological help in potentially uncovering the young Tubman’s home.
“I asked the state for assistance when I learned they had the interest and capacity to do so,” Pradines said. “It’s been a wonderful partnership.”
Tubman – born in 1822 and originally named Araminta Ross – was an escaped slaved who became one of the most famous American abolitionists and political activists. She used a network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad to transport freed slaves to Northern states and served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army during the American Civil War.
Julie Schablitsky, chief of the Cultural Resources Division for Maryland DOT. Photo by Maryland DOT.
While Tubman’s years as an abolitionist, spy, and later as a women’s suffrage activist are well known, relatively little is about her childhood.
That all changed in November 2020 due to the persistent efforts of a Maryland DOT SHA research team.
The extensive digging in the muck by the Maryland DOT SHA crew at the Peter’s Neck site turned up a coin from 1808; specifically a 50-cent “Liberty” coin. Then the archelogy crew discovered a chip from a broken ceramic piece, soon followed by other small artifacts.
After a lull in the project, Maryland DOT SHA researchers returned to the site – a one-time timber farm that had now become marshlands – in March 2021 to continue digging, finally striking pay dirt: the remains of the Ben Ross home, so named for Tubman’s father, still relatively intact. Tubman lived on the site with her family; a place where she began learning how to navigate what became known as the Underground Railroad.
Julie Schablitsky, chief of the Cultural Resources Division for Maryland DOT, explained during a recent press event that she and her crew heard about the potential location of the Ross cabin at the Peter Neck’s site just before COVID-19 hit. After the USFWS asked for their assistance, her team got busy: donning mosquito netting and rubber boots to dig away in the swampland to see if remains of Tubman’s home could be found.
“It was very wet, very foggy and very muddy” digging the five-foot-by-five-foot holes, Schablitsky explained – all in an effort to find what turned out to be archeological gold.
This chapter of Tubman’s story began with plantation owner Anthony Thompson leaving the enslaved Ross 10 acres (known as “Ben’s 10”) in his will. That act gave the Maryland DOT SHA team some idea where the house was.
Julie Schablitsky, chief of the Cultural Resources Division for Maryland DOT. Photo by Maryland DOT.
The team dug “hole and hole after hole,” said Schablitsky, and eventually found that coin from 1808 – the approximate year “when Tubman’s parents were married,” she noted. “Then we found the bits of ceramics.”
When the Maryland DOT SHA crew returned in early spring this year, they resumed digging and found more artifacts, including furniture and other housewares. While small, those bits and pieces equate to the bigger story, Schablitsky pointed out that the real question is, “How do we learn more? Sometimes the answer is archaeology.”
Her team continues learning more of the cabin site, which “about 20 to 25 percent” excavated, she said. It lies in a scenic area near Harrisville Road, an area today surrounded by woods and extensive waterfalls. Historically, it would have been in a wooded area not accessible by water.
With the refocus on Tubman heightening the public’s interest, the current state of the site makes for what Schablitsky termed “a treacherous journey,” including about a one-mile walk through knee-deep water to reach the site. However, there are “creative ways” to make it accessible for pedestrians. “We have a trail laid out and are looking for funding,” she said.
The descendants of the Tubman family are equally excited about the findings and what the future may hold for them.
Gregory Slater, Maryland DOT secretary, pointing to map where the Ben Ross house is located. Photo by Maryland DOT.
Tina Wyatt, Tubman’s great-great-great-grandniece and Ross’ great-great-great-great-granddaughter, spoke for the family at the press event.
“[The news] brings enlightenment, revealing how [Ross] lived his daily life, making it a real-life connection to and for me,” Wyatt said. “The world benefits also from the study of these artifacts concerning objects used by the enslaved; are they common to this plantation, to his position or to this region? It gives us so much more to explore, explain and exhibit.”
As for the site and the artifacts, she added that what has been found looks “Pretty much untouched from when the family was there,” Wyatt noted, emphasizing that Tubman “embraced not the circumstances, but the environment.
“For something so horrific [as slavery to happen] to her people,” Wyatt said. “It’s great to be there now.”
Plans for tourists and historians who want to visit the site are being discussed, said USFWS’s Pradines, as Maryland DOT archeologists plan to return to the dig for further excavation in late fall or spring 2022.
Establishing a timeline for the preservation of the property is critical as well, for the Ross cabin resides in an area predicted to naturally convert to marsh with parts remaining forested into the year 2100.
With the cost to open the approach and the site to the public hovering around an estimated at $200,000 – getting tour buses in could make it a multi-million dollar job – Pradines spoke of establishing a trail system with Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources and the National Park Service.
“We want to honor those stories and create new ones for birders, hunters and tourists,” she noted.
“This land has rich stories to tell,” Pradines pointed out, from the days of the Native Americans to the Ross family to the first state forester. “We want people to visit [and] we also want to preserve to the integrity of the site,” she said.
Toks Omishakin, director of the California Department of Transportation, and William Panos, director of the North Dakota Department of Transportation, highlighted the ways state departments of transportation are incorporating equity into their infrastructure programs during a hearing on Capitol Hill on May 11.
Both virtually joined the hearing – held by the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee of the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works – to share their perspectives on how to improve transportation equity for disadvantaged communities, “no matter their race, socioeconomic status, identity, where they live, or how they travel,” noted Omishakin.
Toks Omishakin, Caltrans Director
“Overall, minority and under-served communities experience fewer benefits and take on a greater share of negative impacts associated with our transportation systems,” he explained in his written testimony. “Because of this, transportation equity is not just a transportation issue. To improve equity across the board, we must address transportation equity. To do that, we need to listen to communities affected by inequity and implement change accordingly by altering the ways we evaluate and make investments in transportation.”
As a result, Omishakin said Caltrans is taking several strategic steps to improve equity, including:
Expanding public transportation to meet the needs of a diverse and aging population, including quality transit service in rural communities.
Developing and investing in passenger rail and transit projects that support inclusive job development opportunities in the trades.
Growing the “clean transportation sector” to address the disproportionate effects of pollution on minority and under-served communities.
Investing in safer multimodal and active transportation facilities on community highways, trails, and streets.
Enhancing maintenance and operational investments on all highways and prioritize under-served and rural communities, including tribal governments.
“We will achieve equity when everyone has access to what they need to thrive,” he stressed.
North Dakota DOT’s Panos added rural communities to that “underserved” list in his written testimony – and stressed that traditional formula funding would provide the means to address their needs.
William Panos, North Dakota DOT Director. Photo from North Dakota DOT.
“In rural America, usually the interest of a disadvantaged community, sometimes a community that has been under stress for a long time, is to be better connected beyond the community,” he said. “Strong formula funding will enhance the ability of states to address these connectivity needs. Regional issues should also be considered in order to optimize investment. Certain investments relative to reconnecting a community should be preceded by giving consideration to the potential impact on other communities or on the transportation system as a whole.”
More generally, Panos noted, federal highway formula dollars are “critical” to the success of state transportation programs serving the public, which includes disadvantaged communities.
“They [formula funds] are deployed widely in all of the states. They are used to improve roads, bridges, bike paths, and sidewalks. They pay for vital safety investments, including guardrails and rumble strips. They can also be transferred to transit projects,” he explained. “Strong formula funding and flexible program eligibilities enable a state to address those circumstances and help people.”
The American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials Center for Environmental Excellence is hosting a webinar on May 26 to illustrate the current sustainability practices state departments of transportation are deploying across the country.
[Photo by Minnesota DOT]
That one-hour webinar – held from 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm ET – highlights how state DOTs can benefit from prioritizing sustainability across a wide variety of practices and activities. Yet a new national survey by AASHTO’s Sustainability Working Group found that only 16 states have directives from their governors, state legislatures, or other bodies to address sustainability issues.
To kick off the webinar, Madeline Schmitt – program planner at Iowa DOT – will provide a brief overview of the sustainability working group’s activities to date, while Phillip Burgoyne-Allen – AASHTO’s associate program manager for environment and active transportation – offers a brief overview of the survey results.
Several state DOT managers from Arizona, Minnesota, and Washington will then share additional insights and lessons learned from their sustainability experiences to date:
Arizona DOT: Steve Olmsted, NEPA Assignment Manager
Minnesota DOT: Jeff Meek, Sustainability Coordinator
Washington State Ferries: Kevin Bartoy, environmental stewardship & sustainability program manager
