Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Today we’re getting a look at the last two contestants in Streetsblog’s Parking Madness bracket, the tournament that will “crown” the worst parking crater in the U.S. But don’t worry. Milwaukee, Tulsa, Dallas, Atlanta, Louisville, Cleveland, Houston, and today’s winner still need to do battle to determine the final victor. The final first round match-up is Minneapolis versus Columbia, South Carolina.

First, Minneapolis. Twin Cities resident Eddie Cunat sent us these photos, taken from his downtown office building.

This crater is located on the corner of 9th Street and 2nd Avenue South in the City of Lakes. It takes up an entire city block, with the exception of two very tiny-looking buildings. Eddie tells us: “That structure in the upper right is also a parking ramp, formerly home to the Leamington Hotel.”

An alternate view shows the crater nestled against some of the city’s tallest buildings.

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Percent change in average residential sales prices relative to the region, 2006-11. Image: APTA and NAR

If you live close to a transit station, chances are you’ve weathered the recession better than your friends who don’t.

Your transportation costs are probably lower, since you can take transit instead of driving. Transit-served areas are usually more walkable and bikeable too, multiplying your options. And while home values plummeted during a recession that was triggered by a massive housing bubble, your home probably held its value relatively well – if you live near transit.

The National Association of Realtors and the American Public Transportation Association commissioned the Center for Neighborhood Technology to study the impact of transit access on home values during the recession. For the report, “The New Real Estate Mantra: Location Near Public Transportation” [PDF], CNT looked at five metro regions — Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

While nearly everyone in hard-hit cities experienced some setback from tanking housing prices, transit-served areas were largely insulated from the worst of it, CNT found:

Across the study regions, the transit shed outperformed the region as a whole by 41.6 percent. In all of the regions the drop in average residential sales prices within the transit shed was smaller than in the region as a whole or the non-transit area. Boston station areas outperformed the region the most (129 percent), followed by Minneapolis-St. Paul (48 percent), San Francisco and Phoenix (37 percent), and Chicago (30 percent).

This is consistent with a study released last year by the Center for Housing Policy showing that access to rail transit created a “transit premium” for nearby home values of between six and 50 percent. That study, like CNT’s, looked at Minneapolis and Chicago, as well as Portland. The Center for Transit Oriented Development has also looked at this phenomenon and found transit premiums as high as 150 percent.

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Pittsburgh was the newest city to announce its bike-share plans this week, when it confirmed the city would add a 500-bike system by the spring of next year.

Kansas City was one of the first cities in the Midwest to launch a bike-share system, when it did so last summer. But soon it will have plenty of company. Image: Missouri Bicycle Federation

But nearby Columbus, Ohio, will beat them to the punch. Ohio’s capital city is planning to add 300 bikes this summer. Meanwhile, Indianapolis’ plan was to roll out its system next month.

The truth is you would be hard-pressed to find a large Midwestern city that hasn’t taken formal steps toward adding a bike-share system.

Both Cleveland and Detroit are studying bike-share. Cincinnati completed a bike-share study late last year, and is now seeking proposals from contractors. Milwaukee is assembling money for a system. Chicago hopes to add 3,000 bikes this spring.

And of course there’s the grandaddy of them all: Minneapolis’ Nice Ride. Launched in 2010, this system currently boasts more than 1,200 bikes. Late last year, the system surpassed half a million trips.

Midwestern cities have been inspired by some of the more spectacular examples on the coasts, according to Eric Rogers, executive director of BikeWalkKC, the nonprofit organization that manages Kansas City’s bike-share system. Kansas City was a little ahead of the pack when it launched Kansas City B-Cycle, with 200 bikes at 12 stations, last summer.

“The last few years a lot of cities, especially in the Midwest, have seen good examples from places like Chicago and Portland and New York and D.C. of a lot of innovative facilities that are out there: cycle tracks, bike boxes, bike-sharing,” he said. “There’s so much more knowledge out there now that it’s easier to develop a solution and pursue it.”

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Minneapolis versus Portland: This is shaping up to be quite a rivalry.

Portland rules in Bicycling Magazine's 2012 bike-friendly city rankings. Photo: Bike Portland

Today, Pacific coast sustainability standard bearer Portland topped Midwestern standout Minneapolis in Bicycling Magazine’s bike-friendly city rankings, bi-annual source of bragging rights or shame, depending on your locale.

The top-two results were a reversal of the 2010 rankings. Bicycling Magazine did not explain what boosted Portland but did mention the city’s stature as the only large city to receive the League of American Bicyclists’ “Platinum-Level” Bike Friendly City Award, as well as its tendency to be the earliest of early adopters when it comes to innovations like bike boxes (Portland had the nation’s first).

Meanwhile, Minneapolis recently snagged national bragging rights with its Bike Score — the new bikeability scoring system that the creators of Walk Score unveiled last week.

Overall, big cities enjoy a growing prominence in Bicycling’s top ten, reflecting a trend in bike-friendly political leadership in America’s major metropolises.

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Anxious about Congress messing up the federal transportation bill? There’s a lot at stake in Washington, but consider this: 78 percent of transportation funds come from the state and local levels.

Delaware Governor Jack Markell. Photo: Delaware Bicycle Council

At a National Bike Summit panel yesterday on state-level bike advocacy campaigns, Dan Grunig of Bicycle Colorado spoke about the importance of reforming the agencies that spend the lion’s share of America’s transportation funding. “If you were starting from scratch and you said, ‘Where do I want to put my limited resources, where can I get the biggest bang for the buck?’, the federal piece of the pie is the smallest,” said Grunig, “and the states’ is the biggest.”

States even influence local spending, and they govern traffic laws. And who owns the roads? Grunig gave his own state as an example. Of 35,754 miles of roads in Colorado, 41 percent is city-owned, 26 percent is state-owned, and 33 percent is county-owned.

The federal transportation bill is extremely important, and national programs like Safe Routes to School have prompted state and local agencies to think about more than just moving cars and trucks. But advocates shouldn’t let Congress dictate the pace of change. Sure, it would be huge if Washington raised the gas tax, Grunig said, but “the states aren’t waiting.” Between 2008 and 2010, 17 states enacted 29 new transportation funding bills.

A regressive transportation agency can stymie good federal programs at the state level, too. State DOTs don’t spend all the money that should be allocated for Safe Routes to School and other key bike/ped programs, for instance, choosing instead to rescind that money back to the federal government. Robert Ping of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership said SRTS was allocated $978 million for 2005-2011, but a lot of it “still needs to get out the door” or else it’s vulnerable to rescission.

“We’re saying this is an important investment into our state’s transportation network. We can’t just keep building our roads and building our roads and not providing other alternatives.”

Delaware Secretary of Transportation Shailen Bhatt

Delaware Secretary of Transportation Shailen Bhatt oversaw the state’s first uses of Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) money for bike/ped projects. He says his counterparts in other state DOTs aren’t so bad. “Lots of secretaries ‘get it’,” he said, pointing to Paula Hammond in Washington and DOT chiefs in Oregon, Tennessee, and Minnesota. But he added that a secretary that “gets it” can only do so much if she or he doesn’t work for a governor that “gets it.”

Bhatt says he doesn’t act alone. He half-jokingly offered a four-part recipe for advocacy success:

1. Elect a governor who bikes.
2. Elect senators who bike.
3. Elect a congressmember who bikes.
4. Get them all to show up at all of your events.

Easier said than done, right? Bhatt put the onus on advocates to close the deal by figuring out what message will speak to officials, some of whom haven’t seen a bicycle since their elementary school days. The desire to increase biking for biking’s sake might not resonate with them. Recreational cycling might not seem to be a cause worth spending scarce state dollars on. But they might listen to arguments about household budgets in times of high gas prices.

And state budgets are even closer to governors’ hearts. Most states are suffering under tremendous burdens of cutbacks and debt. Bhatt said 36 percent of Delaware’s transportation operating budget goes to debt service.

And yet, his agency proposed $13 million for bike/ped improvements this year. “We’re not saying that this is a nice thing to have,” he said. “We’re saying this is important. This is an important investment that we’re making into our state’s transportation network. And we’re doing it in the face of all of these rising costs because we can’t just keep building our roads and building our roads and not providing other alternatives.”

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As more people bike in Minneapolis, the rate of cyclist-involved crashes has decreased. Image: Dept. of Public Works

Good news out of the Sierra Club Green Transportation Campaign, whose national conservation organizer Rachel Butler brings our attention to Minneapolis’s first ever Bicycle Account [PDF]. The compilation of cycling-related data shows a marked increase in the number of cyclists and a steadily decreasing injury rate to go along with substantial investments in bicycle infrastructure on city streets.

According to the report, some 7,000 Minneapolis residents used a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation to and from work in 2010. That’s nearly twice as many as in 1990 or 2000, when the number of cyclists stayed relatively flat. And, as a share of all commuters, it’s good enough to rank Minneapolis the number two city for bike commuting in the U.S.

Mayor R. T. Rybak hopes Minneapolis will become "a truly welcoming and world-class bicycling city." Photo: Dept. of Public Works

The news is yet more evidence that cold weather cities can make cycling an attractive option. In fact, according to the rankings compiled by Copenhagenize, many of the cities with the highest cycling rates are in Northern Europe and Japan. While bicyclists in Minneapolis account for four percent of commute trips, compared to 55 percent in Copenhagen, the number is growing.

“I anticipate that we will see this report as a regular register of our collective bicycle accomplishments throughout the city,” Mayor R. T. Rybak writes in the report. “Minneapolis is going to keep at it, and we can all look forward to the benefits as we become a truly welcoming and world-class bicycle city.”

The mayor is serious about cycling in Minneapolis, and he has plenty to brag about already, including the launch of the Nice Ride Minnesota bike-share system and the growth of the city’s bike network to 167 miles of on-street bikeways, a 75 percent increase from 2010 to 2011 alone.

The report comes on the heels of Minneapolis’s first ever Bicycle Master Plan, adopted in July, which set ambitious goals for the growth of the city’s bicycle network over the next 30 years. Additionally, in December, the city hired its first full-time bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, Shaun Murphy.

The report also highlighted the city’s steadily improving record of bicyclist safety:

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Last fall, Streetsblog reported on the complex relationship between economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and the transit-oriented development projects intended to revitalize them. Often, the same people who stand to gain the most quality-of-life benefits from new transit also face the greatest risk of being displaced by the rising property values associated with TOD.

Protesters opposing the Central Corridor's TOD zoning in April 2011. Photo: Metro Lutheran

Such is the quandary facing some communities along the Central Corridor light rail project in Minnesota. The 11-mile line between the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul originally called for 16 stations, spaced half a mile apart at either end, but spaced up to a mile apart in some places – including in the high-poverty, predominantly minority neighborhoods of Frogtown and Midway in St. Paul. Initially, planners claimed that adding stops in those areas would jeopardize the project by tipping the Federal Transit Administration’s cost effectiveness rating into unfavorable territory. However, a grassroots campaign called “Stops for Us” took their case directly to FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff, and in January 2010 the agency altered its priorities so that cost effectiveness alone could no longer disqualify an otherwise sound transit project from funding under the New Starts and Small Starts programs.

But now that these neighborhoods, among St. Paul’s poorest, were getting their transit stations, what could be done to prevent them from being gentrified out of existence by jumps in property value? This was the question that the Healthy Corridor for All Health Impact Assessment [PDF], published in December, intended to answer.

The health impact assessment (HIA), which was completed by PolicyLink with the cooperation of local community groups ISAIAH and Take Action MN, “judges the potential, and sometimes unintended, effects of a policy, plan, program or project on the health of a population.” It’s roughly analogous to an Environmental Impact Statement, but with an emphasis on human factors such as “community health, health inequities, and underlying conditions that determine health” rather than an EIS’s impersonal approach to quantifying the effects of a given project.

The report authors lay out a plan to ensure that the new transit line pays dividends for current residents. “Having largely been the victims of disinvestment,” the foreword reads, “they are still hungry to take advantage of this new investment as long as they can be sure that their communities will benefit.”

A map from the HIA showing the level of ethnic diversity along the Central Corridor rail line. Image: PolicyLink/ISAIAH/TakeActionMN

The report confirmed much of what Streetsblog surmised last October: The communities along the Central Corridor are at risk of displacement.

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Yesterday, we started our year-end 2011 round-up. We lamented transit cuts in places where transit is more important than ever, cheered the successful ballot initiatives that will fund transportation lifelines, took a moment to explore the nuances of some difficult issues, and called out Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin for some hare-brained ideas about the best way to spend money.

Now we continue with the second installment: What cities shone a little brighter and what cities lost their luster?

Let’s start with the good.

Cities That Led the Way: Bike-share caught on in 2011 like never before. New York City announced a system to dwarf all others, complete with 10,000 bikes. Boston had a great first season. DC and Arlington expanded Capital Bikeshare. Chicago got a TIGER grant to go full-tilt on its system. And bike-share is popping up in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect it – most recently, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. All those cities deserve credit for investing in active transportation options for their residents.

Minneapolis took the Greenway to a more sustainable future. Photo: Micah Taylor / Flickr

Meanwhile, in the DC area, suburban retrofits in White Flint and Tysons Corner started transforming these into urban, transit-rich communities with vibrant daytime and nighttime populations.

And Salt Lake City showed the country how to solve some of the most vexing geographic, political, cultural, and ecological challenges of urbanism. The city got behind a set of growth principles that champion walkability, density, transit options, and land conservation. The city’s new, sustainable developments are wildly popular and incredibly successful at encouraging active transportation.

But it was Minneapolis that stole our hearts this year. The city rocketed to the top of the Bike-Friendliness charts with its Nice Ride bike-share system and its beloved Midtown Greenway, which transformed an old industrial railroad trench into a major cyclist thoroughfare connecting key parts of the city. And that’s not all – Minneapolis has gone through the whole complete streets shopping list, from road diets to bike parking to improved crossings to bike boulevards.

Perhaps even more significantly, the Twin Cities aren’t just tacking some nice cycling amenities onto an otherwise roads-heavy transportation program. They’re actually divesting from road infrastructure, tabling 14 planned highway expansions and improving transit options instead. They’re maximizing existing highways by adding bus lanes and priced shoulder lanes, and they’re investing in transit-oriented development. As one city transportation planner said, “We couldn’t keep going on acting as if we were going to get money to build our way out of congestion.”

Cities That Lagged Behind: We at Streetsblog aren’t shy about calling out state leaders who make bad decisions in favor of sprawl and against smart transportation options. We talked about some of those yesterday (we’re looking at you, Scott Walker). But sometimes it’s not the state but the cities themselves that have a special knack for making bad decisions. And this was a big year for it.

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For many neighborhoods, a shiny new light rail line can be a blessing and a curse. Yes, it provides access to affordable transportation options that can be the avenue to jobs and economic opportunity. But it can also bring higher housing costs and drive up retail rents, exiling area residents and local businesses.

Scene from the "Stops for Us" campaign in the Twin Cities. Photo: District Councils Collaborative

And so sometimes, vulnerable communities oppose the introduction of new transit opportunities, even if they would benefit from more frequent and reliable transit service.

As Jeremie Greer of DC’s Local Initiatives Support Corporation said at Rail~Volution last week, building broad support for new community services is essential. “If everyone feels like they’ve put forth an effort to develop a plan or vision, hopefully people will feel committed to seeing it out,” he said. “And you wont get Reverend So-and-So in the paper saying, ‘These racist people are trying to drive us out of the community.’ Because Reverend So-and-So, hopefully, was at the table expressing his vision or her vision.”

But low-income communities’ relationship to transit cuts both ways. Just as they sometimes resist new amenities they fear will raise rents out of their reach, they’re also often on the front lines of the fight for better transit access.

The “Stops for Us” campaign in the Twin Cities provides a model example of a successful, neighborhood-led effort to ensure equitable transportation access and spark a change in federal policy.

It all started in 2006, when the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit stations were announced. The 11-mile line, connecting the downtown districts of Minneapolis and St. Paul, had gaping holes in the neighborhoods with the greatest poverty, biggest minority populations, and most car-free households. While the stations in St. Paul (17 percent poverty rate, 36 percent minority) were spaced just a half-mile apart, in the Frogtown neighborhood (35 percent poverty, 73 percent minority) the distance stretched to a mile between stops.

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In the increasingly heated competition to see who deserves the title of America’s most bike-friendly city, Minneapolis has plenty going for it. Last year Bicycling magazine anointed the city tops in the nation, knocking Portland off its long-held perch.

The Twin Cities are undergoing a steady transformation into a more bike-oriented region thanks to nearly 100 miles of greenways and off-street paths, giving residents safe and quick travel options. By far the best-known of those paths is the 5.7 mile long Midtown Greenway, which connects cyclists to destinations through the heart of Minneapolis, from east to west. As you’ll see, the path isn’t just giving people a great place to bike, walk, and run — it’s attracting development and new businesses as well.

Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation for funding this Streetfilm, our third in a series on innovations in Minneapolis.  Check out the Nice Ride MN and Sabo Bridge Streetfilms if you haven’t already!