Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Streetsblog’s own “Sweet 16″ of the worst downtown parking craters in America — Parking Madness! — continues today with two cities that grew up in the auto age.

Known for their mega-highways and congestion, Los Angeles and Dallas have the parking scars to go along with all those cars.

An anonymous commenter submitted this entry, calling it ”the vast expanse of nothing in-between the Civic Center and Bunker Hill in downtown L.A.”

The Civic Center area is home to Los Angeles’s city, state, and federal government buildings.

Streetsblog LA editor Damien Newton filled in some background on this eyesore:

Located a mere two blocks from City Hall, and basically adjacent to the busy “Civic Center” subway station, this particular lot is a true abomination on the L.A. landscape. While some sanity is coming to Los Angeles’s parking policy, the city has a long way to go. Consider this image, put together by Gehl architects, showing a shocking 545 acres of parking lots within 1 km of the Figueroa Corridor connecting Downtown Los Angeles with South Los Angeles.

The competition, submitted by Streetsblog Network member Systemic Failure, is this depression in Dallas:

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Last night delivered some good results — and some disappointment — for transit-related ballot initiatives around the country.

Transit supporters in Virginia Beach celebrate the passage of a ballot measure that will bring Norfolk's The Tide light rail to town. Photo: The Virginian

The biggest disappointments came from Los Angeles, Memphis, and Houston.

A measure to continue the half-cent sales tax for transit in Los Angeles County until 2069 was narrowly defeated, falling less than two percent short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage, Damien Newton reports at Streetsblog Los Angeles.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had championed Measure J, which would have raised revenues to accelerate the pace of construction projects like the West Side Subway. But a coalition of bus riders and other interests who don’t fit the “anti-transit” label opposed the 30-year measure, saying the projects favored new construction over existing riders. Still, the referendum got a “yea” from 65 percent of voters — a clear majority, but not quite the two-thirds vote required in California.

Meanwhile, residents of the city of Memphis rejected, in a 60-40 vote, an innovative measure to impose a one-cent gas tax hike to fund transit improvements. The measure would have generated between $3 and $6 million annually to shore up the city’s bare-bones transit system, the local ABC affiliate reports. Memphis is unusual in having the authority to impose its own gas tax, separate from state and federal gas taxes, but it appears that resident declined to use that authority this time around.

Transit suffered a loss in Houston as well. The region’s voters upheld Metro’s policy of diverting one-quarter of the revenues collected for transit to road projects. The measure was opposed by transit advocates like Houston Tomorrow‘s David Crossley, who argued that this transfer has cost the Houston region $2.7 billion in transit improvements over the past 35 years.

On to the good news: There was cause for jubilation in Virginia Beach and in Orange County, North Carolina.

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Next month, 19 transit-related measures will come before voters. If the rest of this year is any guide, 16 of them will pass.

The "Transportation Penny" in Richland County, South Carolina will fund some pedestrian improvements, along with roads and transit, if voters approve it November 6. Image: Richland County

Despite a high-profile loss in Atlanta a few months ago, transit referenda have an 86 percent success rate so far this year, according to the Center For Transportation Excellence.

It strikes some as counterintuitive: During an economic downturn, in a virulently anti-tax climate, why are voters deciding time and time again to tax themselves to support transit?

CFTE Director Jason Jordan says the lousy economy is one reason so many of these measures keep popping up — more this year than any other since CTFE started counting in 2000. With states crying poverty and the federal government, for the first time ever, passing a transportation bill that was no bigger than the one that preceded it, local governments have had to take matters into their own hands.

Jordan says the most unique of all of next month’s ballot initiatives is a gas tax measure in Memphis. Almost all the initiatives we see are sales taxes or property taxes, with a handful of bond measures and vehicle fees. Most cities don’t have the authority to raise gas taxes independent of the state — but Memphis does, and it’s trying to increase the tax by one cent to raise $3 million to $6 million for the transit authority. “Here we have an example of communities being pushed to be as creative as possible,” Jordan said.

No other local gas tax measure is on the ballot. Indianapolis has a citywide income tax hike in the works, which will also be novel, but they didn’t make it happen for this year.

Another one to watch is the half-cent sales tax in Orange County, North Carolina, which includes the city of Chapel Hill. If it succeeds, the three counties of the so-called Research Triangle will likely join together to improve their regional transit system. If it fails, the whole thing falls apart.

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The overwhelming sentiment that greeted our story on the gas consumption maps the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club put out last week went something like this: These are almost useful. Just about everyone agreed that looking at total fuel consumption per county wasn’t very informative without weighing that number against population.

There were problems with doing per-capita fuel comparisons, but after hearing from several sources (including Streetsblog) that it was needed, NRDC’s Deron Lovaas has put out a follow-up post with new maps and charts that have, in my opinion, much more useful information.

First, the map of per-capita fuel consumption:

This per-capita map of gas consumption provides more nuance than the previous map, giving totals per country, but it still doesn't answer all the questions. Graphic: NRDC.

As Lovaas mentioned last week, there are problems with this map too. Some of these places are so rural and lightly populated that massive per-capita fuel consumption just isn’t a big enough problem to worry about, since there are few capitas there. Plus, there’s the problem of through-traffic — in many rural states, most traffic neither originates nor ends up there. So, since NRDC and the Sierra Club designed these maps, in part, to help them strategize where to focus their efforts, this per-capita map is of limited value.

This chart is where it starts getting good. It shows the counties with the highest total gasoline usage and ranks them by per-capita gas usage, showing where there are a whole lot of people using a whole lot of gas:

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Gasoline consumption by county. Graphic: NRDC

Have you ever thought to yourself, “What I really need is a map showing what U.S. counties use the most gasoline, so that I can target my sustainability efforts there?” Funny, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club were thinking the same thing. What they came up with gets us partway there.

“We were curious about which geographic areas were most oil dependent, and thus, driving the country’s oil addiction the most,” said Deron Lovaas of NRDC in his blog post. So they made this map of 2010 oil consumption by county.

It has the potential to be a useful tool, especially for groups like these that might be trying to figure out where to concentrate their field organizing efforts. But the map doesn’t tell us quite enough to be useful. This chart they made of the top ten gasoline consuming counties is a little more revealing:

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What is it with kids today? They just don’t seem to be that interested in driving.

Kids these days: They'd rather work on their fixies than drive an Impala. Photo: LA Streetsblog

Over the weekend, the LA Times ran a long story about Crenshaw Boulevard, a corridor under transformation by light rail. The story’s subtitle was: “Optimism and anxiety travel along its route, as a revived rail service push and an auto-free younger generation herald changes for one close-knit community.”

Auto-free? In LA? Yes, LA is undergoing major changes from the car-centric sprawl of yesterday. But, auto-free? Here it is from the LA Times:

This is the L.A. intersection in its emerging 21st century incarnation: full of cars, to be sure, but also kids in school uniforms on bikes and a steady stream of pedestrians heading to and from the Expo Line, which opened in April.

The story showcases the enthusiasm over the coming of rail, where even business owners being pushed out of their locations by rail construction are ardent supporters.

Cars used to be an essential element of LA’s youth culture — from cruising in low-riders in the 60s and 70s to an 80s and 90s rap scene centered around big cars — but things are changing. The Times notes that many of the car dealerships are closed or have moved. But more importantly, gasoline no longer runs through the veins of the city’s youth.
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Increased business for a cafe on CicLAvia route benefiting from higher foot traffic and bicyclists stopped for a break.

In order for our society to tackle the challenge of creating a more walkable and bikeable North America, with the appropriate devotion of money, resources and public space, we have to build a solid political consensus. Unfortunately, some of the compelling reasons to prioritize active transportation have been unnecessarily politicized into partisan issues. We can approach this dilemma by attempting to trek up the hill of overturning deeply imbedded political opinions, or we can find universal common ground and build up from there.

The fact that issues like deliberate policy measures to cap or tax carbon dioxide emissions as part of climate change mitigation are untouchably controversial in much of the United States doesn’t mean we can’t move forward on an active transportation agenda sold under less controversial banners. This is why I love the growing dialogue around the economic benefits of bicycling and walking.

When it comes to walking, many businesses understand pretty intuitively the value of fostering good foot traffic — the ones that are surviving, anyway. With bicycling, however, a lot of business owners and political decision-makers just don’t get it at all. When Elly Blue wrote “Why an additional road tax for bicyclists would be unfair,” which was later followed by a series of posts on Grist under the banner of bikenomics, I started to view bicycling under a completely different lens. This view and emphasis on economics has influenced my own writing and advocacy ever since.

Elly Blue (left) & April Economides (right) At Pro Walk-Pro Bike

April Economides, principle of Green Octopus Consulting, who headed up the program to create bicycling friendly business districts in Long Beach, is another voice in the bike movement who has been emphasizing economics. She was recently hired by Bike Nation to manage their bike share program proposed in Long Beach. Blue and Economides got together for the first time for a presentation at Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike titled “Bikenomics & the Business Case for Bike-Friendly Business Districts”.

Their presentations complemented each other very well, with Blue setting up some of the conceptual framework for why looking at the economics of bicycling is important, while Economides outlined the nuts and bolts of the outreach and programs done so far in Long Beach. April encouraged people early on in her talk “to engage the business community; we can’t just preach to the choir”. Read more…

Long Beach engineer Rock Miller, standing beside League of American Bicyclists president Andy Clarke, discussing the first test case of cycle-track facilities in the city with the CNU Bikeway Networks groups.

Preceding the start of the Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike/Pro-Place conference this week, the Congress for the New Urbanism met at the Renaissance Hotel across from the Long Beach Convention Center to convene their annual CNU Transportation Summit. At the summit, CNU develops its transportation agenda, including new and existing projects. Having caught the new urbanist bug in Florida at CNU 20, I was eager to have another opportunity to both learn and contribute to their dialogue.

The summit is organized in a manner similar to the “open source” sessions of the full CNU conference each year. Smaller breakout groups, with a leader for each, split off to tackle various topics in a close circle of collaboration. The summit groups included: Transit Networks, Highways to Boulevards, Transportation Reform Modeling, Regional Policy & Functional Classification Reform, Transportation Reform Research Agenda, Street Vitality Index, and Bikeway Networks. Behind many of the big ideas, reports and documents distributed by the CNU and its membership over the years, there were first small groups hashing things out together on note pads. Read more…

New plans and developments, such as the Cornfield Arroyo Seco Plan pictured above, are great for the environment, but what impact does it have on the community it's placed in? Image via City Planning

Note: The authors are active advocates in the urban sustainability movement, focusing on non-motorized transportation in low-income urban areas. As mixed race women of color, we believe that we are in a unique position to bridge the advocacy communities trying to better conditions for the urban poor and for the environment. In this series, we draw on our experiences in the bicycle and environmental movements to shed light on the unfortunate divides we have noticed between urban sustainability communities and low-income communities of color.

When environmental advocates talk about urban sustainability, we often focus on how people use space and how we can encourage design that has a lesser impact on the environment.  How do people get around, are there single or mixed use developments, how can we minimize commutes between work, the grocery store, and home? Rarely do we mention class differences in who lives in the same neighborhoods or, crucially, the issue of segregation and how discrimination has shaped where Americans live and with whom they associate.

Surely we’re aware of the legacies of 1950’s white flight and urban redevelopment, where cars enabled Americans to flee the supposed contamination of newly integrating city centers. We know about the subsequent trend where city agencies labeled those neighborhoods left behind as “blighted slums” ripe for redevelopment. And yet we remain silent about the parallel between these twentieth century traumas and our current interest in promoting urban sustainability in these same areas through large scale economic redevelopment. Because race and class inequalities have been left out of the conversation, eco-friendly developments that aim to increase property values and, consequently, reduce affordable housing stock, get promoted as the key to urban sustainability.

Sustaining the ethnic and cultural diversity of our shared spaces should be an explicit priority of the environmental movement, and this means confronting the trend toward making “eco-friendly” neighborhoods primarily exclusive enclaves of wealth. We have seen this in countless neighborhoods in Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, where bike lanes often get striped in “up and coming” neighborhoods only after more affluent residents move in.

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St. Louis' Arch grounds will get better pedestrian connectivity across I-70, thanks to a $20 million TIGER grant. Image: NextSTL

If you live in Stamford, Connecticut and your walk to the train station gets safer next year, you can thank USDOT’s TIGER grant program. Or when your hometown of American Falls, Idaho suddenly gets complete streets downtown, accommodating people on foot, on bikes, on buses, in cars, and in wheelchairs, encouraging local shopping. Or when you realize that traffic congestion between Olympia and Tacoma, Washington has eased, not by adding lanes but by installing intelligent technology to manage traffic and encourage ridesharing.

All 46 of the TIGER III award grantees have been announced now, and there are sure to be more communities disappointed than excited, given that there were 828 applications totaling $14.1 billion and USDOT had only $511 million to give. The money went to 33 states and Puerto Rico. USDOT was careful to include many rural projects, though those tend to be the smallest grant awards. Twenty of the 46 projects are in rural areas, but they only amount to about 30 percent of the total outlay. (Check out Transportation for America’s fantastic interactive map of grantees from all three rounds of TIGER.)

All in all, 48 percent of the projects fund roadwork, with about a quarter of those funds paying for complete streets treatments like the one in American Falls. Another 29 percent goes to transit – a far better shake for transit than generally comes of the normal Congressional appropriations process. Twelve percent went to ports, 10 percent for freight rail, and two percent for passenger rail.

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