ENO CENTER FOR TRANSPORTATION
Introduction
In November 2016 voters in Los Angeles County approved a ½ cent sales tax increase to finance transportation called Measure M. Formally titled the “Los Angeles County Traffic Improvement Plan,” Measure M was proposed by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) and on Election Day won resoundingly, with 71.15 percent of the vote. Measure M’s passage marked the fourth time since 1980, and the second time since 2008, that LA County voters approved a sales tax increase to finance transportation. The measure is expected to generate $120 billion over forty years to fund 50 transportation projects.
Measure M’s ambition is not small: its goal is to transform the way people move around the region. Los Angeles County has long been oriented around the automobile, and the region’s traffic congestion is notorious. Only a small minority of its residents use transit regularly; the county’s transit commute share is about 6 percent, and about 78 percent of the population uses transit less than once a month. Most of the county’s regular riders are low-income people who lack access to cars. In 2016, 78 percent of LA Metro riders reported not having an automobile available for their trip, and their median household income was just over $16,000, much less than the county median of over $57,000. In other words, public transportation in Los Angeles has long been a vital social service for people with few options. Those with more options overwhelmingly choose to drive.
Measure M aims to upend this status quo. It includes funding for road and freeway improvements, but its primary focus is expanding public transportation. Over 65 percent of the measure’s revenue goes to transit and construction of new rail and bus rapid connections. When the Measure M project list is fully built, the county’s rail network will have doubled in size. LA Metro’s CEO has said, at different times, that Measure M will help make upwards of 25 percent of residents into regular transit users and help Los Angeles’ transit system rival New York’s.
Measure M’s resounding victory was impressive given its focus on transit in an auto-focused region. It is even more so considering the county’s physical vastness and demographic heterogeneity. Los Angeles is the United States’ largest county, with over 10 million people in 88 cities across 4,000 square miles that include urban centers, seaside suburbs and resorts, and rural communities in both mountains and deserts. To pass Measure M, supporters had to market a massive investment in public transit to a diverse electorate united by little—at least in transportation terms—beyond a commitment to daily driving.
For these reasons Measure M is an unquestionable political achievement and its victory holds important lessons for other auto-oriented places. Los Angeles is unique in being a large transit market that demographically resembles a small market. The sheer number of transit trips rivals the country’s “legacy” systems that today account for over two-thirds of U.S. transit use. However, in its low share of people who regularly use transit as well as the socioeconomics of its riders, Los Angeles looks much more like the systems in Topeka, Waco or many other American places. Some of these other regions—like Atlanta—are also using the ballot to finance and encourage more use of public transportation. Because Los Angeles shares both goals and attributes with these places, Measure M holds potential lessons for them, as they embark on their own processes of trying to change transportation at the ballot box.
This paper offers lessons from Measure M in a specific way: by drawing primarily on a novel dataset created by LA Metro. In early 2017, the authority’s communications office commissioned Joel Epstein (a transportation writer and policy analyst) to conduct detailed interviews with scores of people involved in Measure M, asking for their recollections and interpretations of the campaign. The interviews offer a unique window into the thinking behind Measure M, and together form an oral history of how it came to be. Unless otherwise noted, all the information about the Measure M campaign in this paper comes from the Epstein interviews. For more details, see the Appendix.
The purpose of this paper is to situate Measure M in a larger academic literature on transportation finance and politics, and also to more critically explore the tensions and tradeoffs that ballot box transportation planning creates for transit advocates. The intent is that these lessons provide a perspective on Measure M’s victory and a window into what successful transportation ballot campaigns require.
The findings, in brief, are as follows:
Measure M is a classic example of coalition politics. Much of the work surrounding the measure involved building an alliance to support it. This took place long before voters even saw the proposal.
Los Angeles County placed Measure M on the ballot in June 2016 and voters approved it in November 2016. The campaign—if we define a campaign as an effort to persuade voters—lasted only five months. But the groundwork began years before, and was a campaign in itself, albeit one that played out beyond the public eye. Uniting a large and diverse county behind Measure M meant building a coalition of what political scientists often refer to as elites: political insiders that are actively involved in the policy process and wield disproportionate influence as a result (either by being able to sway voters or elected officials). Measure M’s success began with a coalition representing almost every geographic area and large stakeholder.
The fulcrum on which that coalition was built and balanced was the specific set of projects and the order of delivery that Measure M’s tax revenue would fund.
The project list obviously had to appeal to voters, but it also served as the glue that held the coalition together. The plan carefully balanced geographic, schedule, and modal interests, to ensure that stakeholders from every part of the county and every area of transportation policy felt invested in the near and long terms. Thus, building the project list, schedule, and coalition were not separate steps, but were instead the joint outcomes of a single process. In creating the project list and schedule transit advocates also created the coalition needed to support it.
Coalition politics at every level demand tradeoffs between political feasibility and transportation efficiency.
When a project list is designed to deliver both transportation projects and political support, a tension between transportation planning and political strategy is likely to arise. The project list that creates the strongest coalition may not be one that creates the best transportation system. Unless the geography of transportation aligns with the geography of political power, ballot advocates will be forced to balance these dueling imperatives. As a result, some decisions about what to fund, and especially the order in which projects get built, may be based on maintaining political support, rather than maximizing transportation efficiency. Transportation planners may dislike such concessions, but when finance moves to the ballot box it becomes an all-or-nothing exercise. A plan designed with concessions to politics might be less beneficial than one built only with transportation performance criteria in mind. But if a plan designed by transportation experts does not win, it delivers no benefits at all. This balance is one of the central challenges of building a coalition.
Coalitions require strong leaders who can coordinate efforts publicly and privately.
An effective coalition must unite a diverse array of interests, harness powerful stakeholders, and minimize opposition. The same breadth and diversity that define a strong coalition, however, can also make it hard to manage. For this reason, coalitions must have at least de facto leaders. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and LA Metro CEO Phillip Washington functioned as both the public face of the coalition as well as important brokers between its members. Garcetti was not just the leader of the county’s largest city but also a member of LA Metro’s Board of Directors. MoveLA, an independent group that formed in 2008 to help pass an earlier tax measure, played a similar though less-visible role in building the coalition and helping its members maintain a consistent message. MoveLA, the Mayor’s office, and the LA Metro CEO had no formal relationship with each other, but they coordinated to move Measure M forward.
Ballot campaigns often require advocates to strategically manage its messaging.
One of Measure M’s policy goals was to make Los Angeles a place where more people can regularly use transit, and thereby make the region more socially equitable and environmentally sustainable. This policy goal, however, confronted a political obstacle: many voters seemed to have little appetite for changing their travel behavior. The Measure M campaign, as a result, downplayed this objective. As one of the measure’s political consultants put it, “This was not a campaign about ideas … it was not about transforming LA County or changing your behavior.” The campaign instead pushed the idea that Measure M would benefit people who maintained the status quo of driving. In so doing it also pushed the limits of accuracy, relying heavily on two questionable studies that generated appealing but often incorrect talking points. Tactics of this sort are hardly unique to Measure M, of course, but they are a reminder that campaigns often reward simple talking points and punish nuance.
Download full version (PDF): Measure M: Lessons from a Successful Transportation Ballot Campaign
About the Eno Center for Transportation
www.enotrans.org
The Eno Center for Transportation (Eno) was founded in 1921 by William Phelps Eno (1859-1945), who pioneered the field of traffic management in the United States and Europe. Mr. Eno sought to promote safe mobility by ensuring that traffic control became an accepted role of government and traffic engineering a recognized professional discipline.
Tags: California, Eno, Eno Center for Transportation, Los Angeles, Measure M, Transportation Ballot Campaign, Transportation Funding
RSS Feed
