• IN THE NEWS;  It's the infrastructure, stupid!!!
  
• Latest on new Commissioner;
  
• FAA airspace plan story and why we think it doesn't work for us or the rest of CT;
  
• Intermodal news;
• Bike-ped use/issue a part of CT Long-Term Transportation Plan - more here!
• Congestion Pricing: gasoline price accomplishing the same thing in N.Y.C.;  who's doing it;  new application of the term;  sell off toll roads?
  
• Legislature wants change - first, a study;  link to study website here;  some other ideas from the 2007 Long Session below.
  

• MIANUS RIVER BRIDGE, above, top left;  Minnesota reconstruction, below.
  
• former CT DOT Commissioner and Weston Selectman Emil Frankel; 
• New Jersey "Transit Village" next. 
  
• INTERMODAL:  How about CT?  New bike-rack/bike-on-train policy!
  
• Link to SWRPA. 
  
• For the record...registered vehicles in CT.  
• The seven page Courant article can be read on our webpage; I-95 bridge in West Haven (no disaster yet), left, below, Minnesota collapse, Groton span, next;
  
• finally, how about air traffic control?
• Accidents?

The state Department of Transportation, a powerful agency that can trace its origins to the 19th century, has lost its way. For a variety of reasons - the loss of hundreds of workers, a diminished sense of mission, political interference, weak leadership, poor state planning and a departmental culture still mired in the interstate highway era - the DOT has become a sluggish, uncertain and often inept bureaucracy.

Two corruption investigations have led to arrests of DOT employees. The New Britain-Hartford busway is years behind schedule. Someone botched the paperwork needed to overhaul rail cars. A massive snafu came to light last winter involving a $60 million reconstruction project on I-84 in the Waterbury area in which hundreds of defective storm drains were installed and two bridges and an exit ramp were improperly built. The most recent revelation was a cutback in bridge inspections, an unsettling surprise to the many residents who remember the 1983 Mianus River bridge collapse.

This bureaucratic meltdown has come at a time when the state's highway-oriented transportation system is increasingly challenged by traffic congestion, fuel costs, pollution concerns and a backlash against land-gobbling sprawl development. In a 1999 report, consultant Michael Gallis said increasing congestion in the vital I-95 corridor toward New York threatened the state's economic dynamism, putting the state in danger of becoming "a giant cul-de-sac, or dead zone" in the global economic network. Since then, traffic has gotten worse.

But crisis is often a prerequisite for change, and there have been stirrings of change in the past two years. Gov. M. Jodi Rell and legislative leaders pushed for $3.6 billion in transportation funding, the largest financial commitment to transportation in two decades. Mrs. Rell named a new DOT commissioner, Ralph J. Carpenter, last year.

After more revelations about the I-84 fiasco, she announced in late April that a task force headed by Pitney Bowes Chairman Michael Critelli would lead a "top-to-bottom reorganization" of the DOT. The group is charged with "examining and redesigning the DOT, its mission, direction, business practices and organizational structure."

Thus there is a rare chance to break out of the cul-de-sac, to create a new vision and mission for the DOT that will provide the mobility the state needs for 21st-century prosperity.

"Connecticut has a huge opportunity right now," said Jonathan Orcutt, former executive director of the nonprofit Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which did a study of the DOT in 2004. But change won't come easily to a department that has done things its own way for a long time.

The Highwaymen

The DOT began as the State Highway Commission in 1895, a time when privately owned railroads dominated intercity transportation and the advocates for paved roads were bicyclists.

The commission, later called the Department of Highways, moved ahead, paving the old turnpikes and post roads that crisscrossed the state. Traffic congestion started becoming a problem in the 1920s, as cheap cars and cheap gas foretold a revolution in transportation. The department began what has been an eight-decade response to congestion - it widened the roads. It also built elegant new roads. The first section of the Merritt Parkway was completed in 1938, and people rode out on Sundays to picnic alongside the park-like thoroughfare.

After the restrictions attendant to World War II were lifted in the mid-1940s, road-building began in earnest. With the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, building the interstate highway system became the state and national transportation mission. With the highways came the unprecedented era of postwar suburbanization, a force that took thousands of middle-class people out of the state's large cities to new ranch or split-level houses in the suburbs.

In 1969, the highway department merged with the Department of Aeronautics, the Connecticut Transportation Authority and the Commission of Steamship Terminals into a new Department of Transportation, one of the first comprehensive transportation departments in the country.

The DOT would almost by happenstance pick up oversight of commuter rail and bus operations, as increasing use of cars made both services unprofitable. But it remained overwhelmingly a highway agency. In 1975, DOT commissioner Samuel Kanell told an interviewer, "I don't think you'll ever get Americans out of their cars." Other commissioners would echo his sentiment and its underlying philosophy.

What developed in the department was what planning consultant Toni Gold of Hartford calls a "highway engineer culture." The leaders, and often the commissioners, were civil engineers who specialized in building highways.

Although road-building demands engineering expertise, the danger of having the engineers in charge was that the entire focus would be on highway efficiency.

"There was a mentality that we design roads to move people from point A to point B and all else is nonsense," said state Rep. David McCluskey, a member of the legislature's transportation committee.

This thinking led to the disastrous decision - here and across the country - to run interstate highways through cities. That continued until "highway fighters" pushed back. Had activists not stopped them in the 1970s, there would have been highways built through the West Hartford reservoirs and Hartford's Bushnell Park.

Over the years, the DOT developed a symbiotic relationship with highway engineering and construction companies, often locally owned entities that solidified their positions with substantial political contributions to gubernatorial candidates. Though its downside has become apparent in recent years, this was the system that got the roads built.

The mania for cars and highways all but killed train, trolley and bus service. It is said the last time the late and lamented New Haven Railroad made money was hauling fill for I-95.

For a time, it didn't matter. The interstate highway system transformed the state, connecting it to national markets and providing a previously unimagined level of mobility. The roads could handle the load.

But eventually the loss of public transit did matter. This is a lesson from the state's bold and innovative but ultimately inadequate response to the Mianus tragedy.

Collapse

On June 28, 1983, a section of I-95 highway bridge over the Mianus River in Greenwich collapsed, killing three people and seriously injuring three more. The tangle of bodies and mangled vehicles that fell 70 feet to the peaceful little river sent a horrific message that Connecticut's transportation system was in dire need of repair.

The collapse was followed by another embarrassment, a series of Courant stories about the ineffectiveness of the state's bridge inspection program. Gov. William A. O'Neill vowed that would change.

Transportation had suffered in the lean fiscal years of the mid-1970s because it competed for funds from the general budget. Mr. O'Neill understood that the state needed a reliable and sustainable means of paying for its transportation infrastructure.

At the governor's direction, Anthony V. Milano, secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, DOT Commissioner J. William Burns and others prepared a plan.

Its principal innovation was a 10-year, $5.6 billion Special Transportation Fund, to be supported by an increase in the gas tax, motor vehicle fees and other revenue sources.

The Special Transportation Fund worked, and worked well. By 1993, the 10-year anniversary of the Mianus collapse, the state's reconstruction program had become a national model. Connecticut had gone from 35th to fifth in the nation in transportation capital expenditures. Road capacity and safety were improved and many major highway projects were completed. Bridges were repaired or replaced, and bridge inspections were brought up to national standards.

The fund grew to $10 billion and beyond as more projects were added. By moving ahead of most other states, Connecticut captured a disproportionate amount of federal money for the work. Connecticut was on the move again.

Yet by 1999, just six years later, consultant Gallis was saying - in a report written for the nonprofit Connecticut Regional Institute for the 21st Century - that the state's transportation system was choked and becoming a major drag on the economy. What happened?

Former state senator and transportation committee co-chairman Michael P. Meotti, who now heads the United Way of Connecticut, said the post-Mianus effort fixed a specific problem - the deterioration of roads and bridges - but not the whole problem. It was not a comprehensive statewide mobility strategy. There was no plan to reduce the use of roads and highways. Investment in mass transit in this period, as would soon enough become apparent, was woefully inadequate. Traffic got worse.

Congestion was particularly severe on I-95 in Fairfield County. As Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy put it, "I-95 is a parking lot and the Merritt Parkway is a museum." So bad was the situation that officials considered letting drivers use breakdown lanes or even the prohibitively expensive option of adding another deck to the highway.

House Speaker Moira Lyons of Stamford badgered Gov. John G. Rowland to do something. In 2000, he called a transportation summit, which led to the creation of the Transportation Strategy Board the following year.

The board reported back in 2003 with a $6 billion list of projects for highways as well as transit. Mr. Orcutt, now senior policy adviser to New York City transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, said that although the Transportation Strategy Board had some good ideas, it was advisory and thus reliant on the governor, the DOT and the legislature: "the very actors whose inaction or lack of innovation led to the strategy board's creation."

Breakdown

Meanwhile, the DOT was almost literally going off the rails. In what was soon called the "winter of woe," in 2003-04, about 35 percent of the rail cars on the Metro-North New Haven line broke down, leaving commuters stranded in the cold. Some of the well-worn rolling stock was 30 years old.

As a stopgap measure, the state bought 33 used rail cars from Virginia. These needed to be overhauled before they could be used. The DOT put out a flawed request for proposals to get the work done. There was no response. The department then failed to issue another RFP. The cars sat idle for months, until Mrs. Rell learned of the oversight by happenstance and went ballistic on DOT Commissioner Stephen Korta II.

The rail car bungle was not an isolated incident.

Increasing congestion in the I-84 corridor west of Hartford in the late 1990s had led to plans for a 9.6-mile bus-only route from New Britain to Hartford. Studies showed a busway would be the least expensive way to ease highway traffic and would lure the most riders.

Part of the appeal of busways is that they can be built relatively quickly, but that hasn't happened here. In 2005, the Federal Transit Administration lost confidence in the state's ability to deliver the $335 million project and downgraded it from "recommended" to "not recommended" for federal funding.

Mrs. Rell, DOT officials and Capitol Region Council of Governments planners scrambled to get federal funding approved again. Construction of the project is now scheduled to begin in 2009 - three years after the busway was initially supposed to open.

Also, the risk inherent in the close relationship between DOT workers and contractors was becoming apparent. In 2004, a department inspector, James Murray, pleaded no contest to three counts of taking bribes from contractors in exchange for overlooking shoddy work.

In 2004, federal authorities uncovered irregularities in how the DOT's rail operations unit awarded contracts. Last year, a high-ranking official, Raymond Cox, pleaded guilty to theft and obstruction of justice. Three senior officials resigned or retired because of the contract scandal.

In early 2006, five employees of the highway agency, as well as a Massachusetts contractor, were arrested in connection with a bid-rigging scheme. The charges allege that the contractor bribed the employees to win a road-sealant contract. Perjury charges against one DOT employee have been dropped; the other cases are pending.

These may not be the only arrests. Mrs. Rell's promise earlier this year to overhaul the department followed the fouled-up rebuilding of I-84 in Waterbury and Cheshire, one of the worst highway construction failures in state history. Incredibly, some 300 defective storm drains were installed as part of a badly flawed underground drainage system. Also, two bridges and an exit ramp were improperly built. And 70 light poles with faulty brackets were put up, among other problems.

The I-84 job had been given in 2002 to a contracting firm, L.G. DeFelice Inc. of North Haven. The firm, apparently beset with financial problems, went out of business in 2006 with the project unfinished. DeFelice had gotten into trouble in 2004 for installing concrete curbing for free at the home of a DOT regional engineer.

The engineering firm paid to inspect DeFelice's work on I-84, the Maguire Group, failed to do so, state officials say. The DOT violated its own policy by assigning a project engineer to the job who was simultaneously heading two other construction jobs. Project engineers are supposed to oversee one job at a time to prevent construction errors.

"There were serious mistakes at all levels," said Office of Policy and Management Secretary Robert L. Genuario at a legislative hearing Wednesday. "The people of Connecticut did not get what they paid for."

The state has sued the contractors. State and federal criminal authorities are digging into the $60 million fiasco.

DeFelice has regrouped as Hallberg Contracting Corp. and been hired by a bonding company to work on two state jobs.

The I-84 debacle made it clear that it was time to overhaul the DOT. Highway construction was what the department was supposed to be good at.

What Went Wrong

In its postwar heyday, the DOT was a powerful and semi-autonomous fiefdom that could make big things happen. But in recent years, forces inside and outside the department have challenged it as never before. These include:

MISSION. In the decades following World War II, the state and federal transportation mission had a clear focus - to build the interstate highway system, with its related network of state highways. The system is all but finished. Now what?

The loss of a clear mission may explain the pointless, pork-laden bridge-to-nowhere projects in the most recent federal transportation bill. Lack of direction in any organization can lead to inertia and incompetence.

While federal authorities search for a new mission - the National Surface Transportation Study Commission is holding hearings around the country on this issue - some states have aggressively defined their own missions involving transit and transit-oriented development. Connecticut is still building highways.

When the Tri-State Transportation Campaign examined 2005 DOT figures, it found that 76 percent of the state transportation improvement money and 84 percent of its "flexible funds" go to highways. With the authorization in the past two years of $3.6 billion toward highway and mass transit projects, the percentage of spending shifts somewhat to transit, but still favors highways.

BUREAUCRACY. Reductions spearheaded by Mr. Rowland early in this decade took more than 900 employees from the DOT. The workforce dropped from 4,058 in 1999 to 3,151 in 2004. First came layoffs, which took younger workers. Then, in 2003, came an early retirement buyout aimed at senior people. In 2003-2004 alone, the department lost 436 employees. Out the door went experience, institutional knowledge and management talent.

The cuts were not spread evenly; some DOT departments were harmed more than others. For example, three layers of management were pared off the top of the DOT's finance and administration bureau. There and elsewhere, inexperienced people had to step into jobs for which they were not yet prepared, often with no support structure or mentors.

Also, budget cuts led to the elimination of some leadership training programs, meaning the department wasn't developing the mid- and upper-level managers at the rate it needed them.

"It made for a very difficult time for everybody," said Gale Mattison, a finance and administration expert who has been lent to the DOT by the Office of Policy and Management to help rebuild the department.

In any event, the DOT became a bureaucracy that is sometimes overwhelmed, sluggish and - although the I-84 mess might suggest otherwise - cautious to a fault.

"The Rowland years created a bureaucracy that is totally risk-averse," said Robert W. Santy, head of the Connecticut Economic Resource Center. "We have government by regulatory compliance. There is no reward for trying something different, and there are thousands of reports mandated by the legislature to cover any eventuality,"

Those who do business with the DOT complain that layers of review, inside and outside the agency, add months to the process of awarding bids and executing contracts. Planning and design contracts that took three to six months to process just five years ago now typically take six to 12 months. These delays can have serious impacts on project schedules and cost. Yet for all of this, oversight of the I-84 project was stunningly inadequate.

The department has also endured its share of patronage appointments. Under Mr. Rowland, for example, one of the DOT's deputy commissioners was James A. Adams, brother-in-law of powerful lobbyist and Rowland confidant Jay Malcynsky. Another deputy was former Waterbury state senator and lobbyist Louis S. Cutillo, an early Democratic backer of Mr. Rowland's. Neither appointee had a compelling background in transportation.

INNOVATION. The creation of the Special Transportation Fund in 1985 was an inventive, cutting-edge response to a major problem, and applauded as such around the country. There's been very little innovation at the DOT since. The department resisted new ventures such as the Griffin Line light-rail project from Hartford to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks and instead continued to focus on highways.

But projects such as the Q Bridge in New Haven point to the need for innovation. The department plans to spend $1.5 billion to rebuild and expand the elevated bridge on I-95 that crosses New Haven Harbor, even though, by the department's own estimates, the new bridge will have the same level of congestion the old one does in just three years.

PLANNING. The Transportation Strategy Board was created in 2001 to develop a long-term transportation plan for the state. The board's 2007 report, "Moving Forward," promotes a progressive, multimodal transportation system tied to land-use policy.

Ideally these recommendations would inform the DOT's long-range and master plans, which would ultimately generate the projects that would realize the vision.

But the planning process is subject to political caprice and gets whipsawed from all sides.

The governor, the State Bond Commission and the legislature all have a say in funding for DOT projects, and often call the tune. The department, for example, planned to replace aging rail cars several times in the past decade, but Mr. Rowland chose not to pay for them. He considered opening the shoulders of I-95 to rush hour traffic, something not in any DOT plan.

The federal government also interferes with DOT plans via congressional earmarks - funds for special projects - a bridge, road, deck or study - that can interrupt the flow of work. "Earmarks just kill us," said former deputy commissioner Carl Bard, a civil engineer who retired last year.

Then there is town planning. Sometimes, the DOT will come in and fix an intersection to resolve traffic congestion, then the town will allow a mall to be built, creating a new traffic problem.

Conversely, local officials and residents have ended up battling the department over the design of road projects, in some cases regretting the day they asked the department for help. "Many to