Transportation agencies struggle to maximize the benefits of transportation infrastructure while minimizing environmental harm. This dissertation examines institutional collaborations that integrate capital investments (e.g. highway and rail projects) with regional Habitat Conservation Plans (RHCPs) under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). It addresses ways of maintaining these collaborations over time.

The ESA requires that public and private project developers mitigate any harm to endangered species and receive a permit from US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Projects are typically permitted individually, but RHCPs streamline permitting by allowing one permit to cover projects in multiple jurisdictions for up to 75 years. There is broad-based support for coordination across jurisdictional boundaries to address the increasingly regional scale of environmental issues. Unfortunately, multi-jurisdictional collaborations often face political and financial roadblocks.

I examined 21 RHCPs, including analysis of planning documents and semi-structured interviews with RHCP, FWS, and transportation agency representatives. The case studies include urban, suburban, and rural counties in multiple states, focusing on California and Texas.

I show that acceleration of transportation projects garners political support for RHCPs and increases the biological efficacy of conservation initiatives. Transportation agencies benefit from reduced permitting time, costs, and fewer lawsuits. Participation promotes synergy between transportation and local funding that bolsters successful implementation of RHCPs. RHCPs can guide environmentally-responsible development patterns through several mechanisms —including strategic land acquisitions that limit urban growth and creating market incentives— even where they lack formal land use control.

Increasing the institutional capacity for regional conservation planning is an incremental process. RHCPs can strengthen regional organizations, but participating in RHCPs is predicated on providing advantages for governments, public agencies, and private landowners. I recommend that organizations managing RHCPs can be an important institutional catalyst for expanding the ability to address environmental issues—including air and water pollution, and climate change—but they must allow flexibility for opportunistic participation. My research finds that transportation agencies should play an integral role in meeting increasingly regional environmental planning challenges. The results of this research can inform existing and future conservation programs, and contribute to the improvement of state laws that govern conservation planning.

"This report examines the performance measures requirements in California’s Transportation Development Act (TDA) of 1971. The TDA is an important source of funding for the state’s public transit agencies, representing approximately 18 percent of their total (2018) revenue between the TDA’s two funds (LTF and STA). Since the TDA’s passage in 1971, the transit operating environment in California has changed, in some cases dramatically. The state has nearly doubled in population (20.4 million in 1971 to 39.8 million in 2019), traffic has worsened considerably, climate change is now a central public policy focus, and many places around the state are investing heavily in making public transit a viable alternative to driving. Our research examined the TDA’s performance requirements and their effects on the state’s transit operators. We also considered alternative approaches to both transit finance and performance requirements, by studying transit funding programs in 13 other states that invest significant amounts of funding in transit. In brief, we find that the TDA’s use of performance measurements to allocate funding is unusual. The states we studied do not for the most part make funding contingent on performance, thereby avoiding the unproductive and difficult-to-implement “death penalty” (Taylor, 1995) of withholding subsidies for a much-needed public service. In several of the cases analyzed, by contrast, states guarantee specific levels or amounts of funding for transit service.

To examine how the TDA’s performance measures are working, we conducted a survey of California transit professionals at agencies and at Regional Transportation Planning Agencies (RTPAs). That California’s aspirations for transit have evolved over the years is reflected in the frequent loopholes and exemptions the legislature has added to the TDA to give struggling operators more latitude to receive funding in order to meet multiple goals and objectives while staying in compliance with a single cost-effectiveness goal. The extent and frequency with which these exemptions have occurred suggests that the larger aims for public transit, and indeed the goals for the TDA program itself, have evolved, and need to be re-thought holistically, rather than incrementally.

Accordingly we offer six recommendations concerning transit performance assessment in the TDA."