Visitors and residents of Maine count on the New England 511 website for real-time road and weather conditions, and a recent makeover could help even more people navigate their travels.

The website is now more mobile-friendly, helping drivers through Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont view the fall colors. It provides links to live cameras, construction alerts and traffic warnings.

Paul Merrill, director of communications for the Maine Department of Transportation, said the website gives users a heads-up, whether they are on vacation or making their daily commute.

"You might roll out of bed and say, 'Oh, there's a tree down on the road that I take to the office. It's going to take me a little extra time to get to work,' " Merrill noted.

The website address remains the same, but because of extensive changes, current users of NewEngland511.org will have to create a new account to continue receiving email or text notifications. Merrill said the "MyTrips" alerts generated by the old website will stop on Oct. 23.

Individual alerts will now come from a system called "My 511," with the goals of alleviating not only congestion, but the air pollution that comes with it.

Merrill pointed out the site is both old and new, with links to state permits for parks as well as information on bicycling through New England and where to find electric vehicle charging stations.

"Poke around, see what features are there, there's a lot," Merrill urged. "Kick the tires, see what's there, as you go in and set up a new alert."

He added it takes only a few minutes to set up a new account, which could save a lot of time down the road.

And the website is not only for road travelers. It lists all state and regional airports and flight information, as well as important details regarding train travel throughout New England and its extensive walking trails.

Merrill emphasized riders of Maine's ferry service, for example, can get important updates.

"That's really the quickest way to get information from the department if there's a ferry run that's canceled or delayed," Merrill stressed. "They are a big user base here."

The new website arrives as construction is expected to increase throughout New England due to new federal funding from President Joe Biden's infrastructure law, which designates some $400 billion over five years to help repair the nation's roads and bridges.

The "Idaho Stop" measure for bicyclists is spreading to other states. Minnesota is the latest to adopt the so-called Idaho Stop, in which cyclists can treat stop signs as yield signs. Idaho was the first to adopt this law in 1982, decades before other states even considered it.

David Groff, executive director of the Idaho Walk Bike Alliance, said the law reduced bicycle accidents by more than 14% after its first year of implementation in Idaho.

"The main benefit is that you have a lot of accidents that occur in intersections, be that with stoplights or stop signs," Groff pointed out. "Allowing cyclists to clear out of those areas sooner actually ends up reducing the amount of collisions."

Nine other states and Washington, D.C., have adopted a law allowing cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs, including Oregon and Washington. Of those, only three other states have adopted the full Idaho Stop law, which also allows cyclists to treat red lights as stop signs, so if there is no cross traffic, they can move out of the intersection before the light turns green.

Groff added the Idaho Stop law reduces friction points for cycling commuters.

"Friction points are the least favorite part of it," Groff acknowledged. "How many steps are there in front of getting to the conclusion here? And continuing to hit stop signs as a cyclist can actually create a barrier to more people cycling."

All the states passing Idaho Stop laws have done so in the past six years. Groff emphasized it is a sign cycling is becoming more popular, and really picked up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"What happens when you have more people out on the road is you have more people really seeing what the impact of these different laws can be," Groff contended. "Then you have more voices saying, oh, we think we should do it this way, or we think we should do it this way."


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Legislation has been signed to revamp the roads in fast-growing Tennessee and spend more money on them.

The Transportation Modernization Act invests $3.3 billion to address traffic congestion in urban areas, and make upgrades in rural and suburban communities.

Mandy Spears Pellegrin, deputy director of the Sycamore Institute, said the measure will allow the state to either make changes itself or work with private companies to build so-called "paid choice" lanes.

She noted close to a dozen states already have separate lanes people pay to use.

"In Tennessee, what they're hoping is that this could address urban congestion problems, because 'paid choice' lines don't make sense to go everywhere; they only make sense where there's a whole lot of traffic," Spears Pellegrin explained. "That frees up our existing gas-tax dollars to address congestion issues and other needed road repairs."

Spears Pellegrin pointed out "paid choice" lane rates would vary based on time of day, how many cars are in the lane already, and distance traveled in the lane. The bill received bipartisan legislative support and was backed by dozens of organizations across the state, according to the governor's website.

The Tennessee Department of Transportation said paid-choice lanes are not toll roads, so drivers do not have to use them if they do not want to pay the fee. Spears Pellegrin added the state will need another $42 billion for transportation projects in the next few years. The legislation is a one-time investment of $3 billion for the state, and $300 million to local governments for transportation projects.

She noted the bill includes other components as well, although drivers of electric vehicles might not be too pleased.

"One more mechanism is they increase the state's existing fee on electric vehicles, and they add a new fee on hybrid vehicles," Spears Pellegrin pointed out. "The hope there is that begins to backfill some of those gas-tax losses."

She added the bill was necessary because Tennessee is falling behind on projects related to roads and bridges, and it does not include expanding public transit into rural or suburban areas.


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By Claire Elise Thompson for Grist.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Keystone State News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Governments the world over have made a lot of great-sounding climate commitments. In Pittsburgh, for example, an ambitious plan adopted in 2018 outlines objectives like 100 percent renewable energy in municipal facilities by 2030, a fossil-free fleet, and zero-waste operations. But setting goals is one thing. Implementing the programs and infrastructure needed to reach them is another - and that work costs money.

"We had a large, ambitious agenda, but very little resources that went alongside it," says Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh's former chief resilience officer who oversaw creation of the 2018 plan. "Following the completion of our resilience strategy and our climate action plans, we were asking the question: Where is the money to help implement these different initiatives that we had identified?"

Answering that was tricky for this midsize post-industrial city, which was designated as "financially distressed" from 2003 until early 2018. For Ervin, the challenge went beyond raising funds for new initiatives. He wanted to ensure the city's spending - all of its spending - aligned with its climate and equity promises. "If we're going to address the climate challenge," he remembers thinking, "we're going to have to start to leverage our existing resources to do the things that we know we need to do."

For Steel City, that meant scrutinizing its entire spending plan through a climate lens with the help of a method called priority-based budgeting.

The challenge: budgeting for a cause

There are several ways an organization can slice its budget. One common approach is incremental budgeting, wherein the previous year's budget provides the baseline for the next, with incremental adjustments. It's easy to imagine how that might lead to inefficiencies when line items get carried over year after year.

Priority-based budgeting, on the other hand, maps every single dollar a city spends to a specific program - everything from "rodent baiting" to recycling collection - then scores each one according to how it achieves the city's priorities. Although the method could be used in the private sector, it was developed for local governments, which work toward the common good rather than a profit margin.

"There are so many societal objectives that are really up to local governments to mount a charge to try to solve," says Chris Fabian, who developed the approach to budgeting around 2010. After years in the public sector, he saw that municipal budgets were not designed to reveal how much money was going toward objectives like climate action, equity, or resilience. Such efforts were often bundled into many different line items, making accountability difficult. He wanted to develop a system that would help cities see how they could redistribute resources to finance their top priorities - from general goals like fostering safe, healthy communities to specific projects like addressing homelessness.

Fabian cofounded the software and consulting company ResourceX in 2015 and has since helped over 300 local governments across the U.S. and Canada adopt priority-based budgeting. Common priorities the company helps cities advance include equity, safety, and thriving economies. "It does vary," Fabian says. "If you go into some conservative communities, they might not feel that they have a role in economic vitality. They're like, 'The business sector should figure it out on their own.' Whereas other places invest heavily in visitors bureaus and convention centers and so on."

Climate, he says, is something of a new focus for the municipalities he and his team work with. In 2020, Pittsburgh became the first to use the process to develop a climate-first budget for the entire city.

Pittsburgh's goal: a zero-carbon budget

When Ervin worked for the city of Pittsburgh, he visited towns around the world to learn how they were integrating climate priorities into their spending. Although some Scandinavian cities employ "carbon budgeting" - a greenhouse-gas accounting system that resembles a fiscal plan - Ervin never found an example of a comprehensive financial plan that accounted for climate and equity priorities.

"One of the things that we had as a goal was to eventually have a zero-carbon budget" - one that wouldn't cause any net increase in carbon emissions - says Will Bernstein, who became an advisor to Pittsburgh through its participation in Bloomberg Philanthropies' American Cities Climate Challenge, and is now the city's climate and energy manager. "But we didn't really know exactly how to get there in terms of understanding the budget, and how you construct that and how you measure that." With the help of a $50,000 grant from the challenge, Pittsburgh hired ResourceX to pursue its goal.

"They reached out and said, 'We found you guys through a Google search,'" Fabian recounts, "'and it seems like you might have the tool that we're looking for, to get budget alignment toward a priority. Have you ever done it on climate?'"

Over a period of roughly three months in the fall of 2020, city officials tracked nearly every dollar in the $600 million operating budget to a specific program, then scored each program against Pittsburgh's climate and equity priorities. Of 27 departments, only four did not participate in the process. Then, in early 2021, over 50 representatives from those departments joined a series of workshops to pitch ideas for where costs could be cut and revenue generated, and how that money could finance the city's climate goals. Pittsburgh identified $41 million that could be reallocated toward climate and equity initiatives. However, those dollars didn't move right away - and some still haven't.

"Sometimes it's difficult to see a one-to-one transition," says Patrick Cornell, deputy director of Pittsburgh's Office of Management and Budget. The goal of a priority-based budget isn't necessarily to kill any program that doesn't score highly and move the money to ones that do. It's an iterative process, more akin to what Ervin hoped to do with the budget: see where the city's spending might be running counter to its climate objectives, and how that could be fixed over time - whether by ending a program, or changing the way work gets done.

One example of a relatively straightforward shift is electrifying the city's fleet. "Currently, any sedans that need to be replaced are being replaced with electric," says Rebecca Kiernan, assistant director of the Department of City Planning, who leads the sustainability and resilience division. But, she adds, the budget is always tight, and the city was already decades behind in updating its fleet. She and her team are also accelerating the EV transition with the help of federal money. This year, the city is getting eight electric recycling trucks, with funding from the American Rescue Plan and the EPA's Targeted Airshed Grants Program. "Those are gonna be our first [electric] heavy-duty fleet vehicles. So that's really exciting," Kiernan says.

Eliminating paper contracts - something Ervin called "master of the obvious" - is an example of changing the way work gets done. A city ordinance approved in November 2021 requires the use of electronic signatures for all city business. Not only did that free up around $50,000 a year by Kiernan's estimate, it reduced waste.

Priority-based budgeting: one tool in the box

Pittsburgh enacted its first priority-based spending plan in 2022, a $615 million operating budget that provided, among other things, the money to create Bernstein's position. The city is still quite a ways off from having a zero-carbon budget. But the priority-based approach appears to have staying power. The city will continue working with ResourceX for at least another three years, aiming to get closer with each iteration to a budget that reflects its climate and equity goals.

Prior to working with the American Cities Climate Challenge, Cornell wouldn't have considered priority-based budgeting much more than a fad. "Different things become popular depending on what major cities are doing, or what is new in the thrilling world of municipal budgeting," he says. And he admits that some departments found the process more intuitive than others. But he and his team have gotten behind the approach - so much so that he took up the mantle of pitching it to the new administration when the mayor's office changed hands in 2022. Everyone was keen to keep going with it. "We're able to think more holistically about different programs that residents are concerned about," he says.

And the city has also used that holistic thinking as an opportunity to communicate more openly with residents. In the fall of 2022, Pittsburgh launched a public-facing tool that allows anyone to explore the city's new priority-based budget and see how various city-funded programs benefit residents. "That's a brave act," says Erik Fabian, Chris's brother and the business development manager at ResourceX. "It's transparent - some programs are more aligned than others. So that's being communicated, and putting the city in a position of accountability."


Claire Elise Thompson wrote this article for Grist.


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