Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Beginning at Niagara Falls State Park, you can hike around the great gorge carved out of the base of the falls over thousands of years. But you’d best arrive in a car.

If you want to access this area from Niagara Falls neighborhoods on foot, you have to climb fences, scale embankments and race across a four-lane expressway — the aptly named Robert Moses Parkway.

In as little as three years’ time, however, this struggling town will be reconnected with the natural asset that serves as the basis for its economy. New York officials gave the thumbs-up last week to a plan to tear down a two-mile section of the Robert Moses Parkway, stretching from near downtown Niagara Falls to the town’s northern neighborhoods, and possibly further.

The Buffalo News reports that local residents have been pleading for the teardown for years. The town, which has suffered disinvestment and population loss while its Canadian counterpart thrives, hopes the expansion of the park will help spur more eco-tourism. The paper reports that the state plans to replace the segment with “native plantings and a multi-use nature trail that could feature hiking, biking, cross-country skiing, horseback riding and even zip-lining.” It also seems likely that the highway removal will increase property values and investment in the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, the debate continues about the fate of another stretch of freeway from the city’s northern neighborhoods to the suburb of Lewiston. The Buffalo News reports that environmentalists are fighting to convert that portion back into forestland while the local state senator wants to turn it into a two-lane park road, matching the one in Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Nothing like a little friendly competition between mayors. It seems a feud of sorts has developed between Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn over who can build the best bike lanes.

At a speech in December marking the opening of the Dearborn Street protected bike lanes, Emanuel boasted that Chicago was going to lure Seattle’s tech workers — and companies — with state of the art bicycling infrastructure.

Now I think it’s self-evident that I am a competitive, let alone an impatient person. So when my staff gave me this headline from Portland, it did bring a smile. The editorial from a magazine in Portland [the blog BikePortland.org] read, ‘Talk in Portland, Action in Chicago,’ as it reflected on Dearborn Street. The Seattle Bike Blog wrote, ‘Seattle can’t wait longer. We’re suddenly in a place where we’re envious of Chicago bike lanes.’ So I want them to be envious because I expect not only to take all of their bikers but I also want all the jobs that come with this.

Now Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn is firing back, Seattle Bike Blog reports. McGinn addressed the challenge explicitly in his State of the City address earlier this week.

McGinn held up the city’s new 7th Avenue separated bike lane — which is being built with financial support from Amazon — as evidence that the city is working hard to support cycling:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, when he announced bike routes in downtown Chicago, called out Seattle, saying he wanted our bikers and our tech jobs. We’re going to work to keep them here.

Sounds like good, healthy fun. If only more mayors were competitive about making streets safer for their residents.

If it can work on Edgewater Drive in Orlando, it can work anywhere.

This road diet — or “street rightsizing” — removed one traffic lane on a four lane road through 1.5 miles of the city’s College Park neighborhood. Since then, traffic collisions are down 34 percent. Pedestrian activity increased 23 percent and cycling rose 30 percent.

Virtually none of the problems opponents predicted have materialized. Immediate property values have held steady with regional trends. Nearby streets haven’t seen a major increase in traffic. And because the project was a simple striping, the road diet cost the city only an additional $50,000 over a basic resurfacing.

So why doesn’t every city in America get busy “rightsizing”? A new guide from Project for Public Spaces seeks to make that possible. PPS’s Rightsizing Streets Guide highlights case studies and best practices from Philadelphia, Seattle, Tampa, Poughkeepsie, and elsewhere to show jurisdictions how they, too, can right-size their streets.

Philadelphia took a unique approach. “The Porch” project outside 30th Street Station removed only parking and replaced it with a wide sidewalk, seating, and public gathering space. This new destination, featured last year on Streetfilms, seats 250 people and is home to regular events like yoga and farmer’s markets, and it is a favorite spot for West Philadelphia workers to eat lunch on nice days.

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If there’s any good news to come out of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, it’s that political leaders and the press are actually talking about climate change. At the end of a long campaign season with barely a mention of the issue, it’s a relief to hear some sane discussion of the issue based on the premise that global warming is real.

While climate scientists hesitate to attribute any single weather event to global warming, many agree that elevated temperatures and sea levels conspired to make this storm especially damaging. And the frequency of storms like Sandy, they warn, will only escalate as global temperatures rise.

We’ve collected, below, some of the most notable statements about the connection between Sandy and climate change, and what it means for the future:

• Bloomberg Businessweek made the scene of a flooded NYC street its cover, carrying the news that global insurers are beginning to warn about the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. A Germany-based insurer reported that the number of weather-related loss events in North America has nearly quintupled over the past three decades.
• The Center for American Progress reports that the United States experienced a record 14 extreme weather events that caused more than $1 billion in damage and there have been seven so far this year. Only five states were spared damage.
• New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wasn’t mincing words on the topic. “Part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality,” he said Wednesday during a helicopter tour of the damage. “Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable. There’s only so long you can say, ‘This is once in a lifetime, and it’s not going to happen again.’”

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As the East Coast surveys the damage from Hurricane Sandy, cities are still struggling to get their transit systems back up and running.

In New York City, there is no firm timetable for restoring subway service after train tunnels were flooded with a surge of saltwater, in what New York MTA Chair Joe Lhota has called the most devastating event to ever strike the subway system.

In Philadelphia, SEPTA is slowly bringing back service on subway and bus lines. The regional rail system is down at least until tomorrow, with the majority of the damage apparently from downed trees. Amtrak has also continued its suspension of service on the Northeast Corridor, with repairs pending on the track and signal systems, as well as the removal of trees and other debris.

New Jersey Transit was hit hard, with “major damage on each and every one of New Jersey rail lines,” according to Governor Chris Christie, including washouts along the North Jersey Coast Line and at Kearny Junction, as well as flooding at rail hubs in Secaucus, Hoboken and Newark Penn Station, according to the AP. It could be seven to 10 days before PATH train service is restored.

DC’s metro came back online at 2:00 p.m. today, and there was no major flooding or damage reported to Baltimore’s and Boston’s transit systems.

Damage to infrastructure isn’t the only cost of the hurricane — lost productivity will also ding the economy, as workplaces up and down the coast stay shuttered for another day today.

One early estimate pegged the total damage caused by the storm at more than $20 billion, with insured losses at about $7 billion. Infrastructure repairs figure to account for a substantial portion of the costs. With transit agencies and local governments still feeling the fiscal squeeze, who will foot the bill?

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The leaders of the nation’s big city transportation agencies have formed a tight-knit circle, brought together by the National Association of City Transportation Officials to share best practices, and yes, battle scars.

As NACTO’s first ever national conference drew to a close Friday, transportation chiefs from Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and New York all talked about the progress their cities have made and shared their frustration at the lack of attention to cities and transportation in the state and national political arenas.

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg set the tone by blasting the state government in his introductory remarks. “Our economy is dependent on transportation,” he said. “But our state refused to give us money for a new subway line, so we said ‘screw you’ and took city taxpayer money to extend a subway line.”

NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan put it even more starkly. She said that instead of the old New Yorker cartoon, a New Yorker’s view of the world, in which the map falls off dramatically after the Hudson River, “Washington’s view of the world is made up of Iowa, Ohio and lots of highways. And some dollar signs on the map where New York and Los Angeles are.”

Despite the lack of attention from Congress and the presidential contenders, Sadik-Khan explained that transportation innovations at the city level can cumulatively affect the nation’s economy, echoing the previous day’s plenary speaker Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution. “You’ve got two-thirds of Americans living in top 100 metropolitans areas, where three-quarters of US GDP is generated,” Sadik-Khan said. “Yet there is no mention of cities in presidential debates.” Added San Francisco Municipal Transportation Commissioner Ed Reiskin, “There was no mention at all of transportation in any of the debates.”

Given the progress that cities across the country are making on transportation reform, the question arises: How much more can cities do without the active support of Washington and state governments?

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Transit and bike activists are creative folks. More and more young, car-eschewing millennials are making their case in amateur music videos. The result is funnier and more imaginative than anything you’ll find on basic cable.

Check out this one from the University of Michigan. Production value, casting, script — this video is almost too good. Extra points for creative use of puppets and originality in drawing on the tradition of the Broadway musical:

More than Broadway, however, the active transportation advocacy music video genre tends to draw its inspiration from hip hop. Who could forget this Legoman rap video promoting center-running light rail for Detroit? This was also produced by some wildly talented folks at the University of Michigan.

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Attacks on transit drivers are not a new problem. But it seems to be getting worse.

A bus driver now gets assaulted every three days in the United States, estimates the Amalgated Transit Union. Headlines abound of drivers getting kicked, punched, stabbed and shot, while the lower-profile offenses – spitting and verbal harassment – have almost become part of the job description.

For many transit workers, it’s plain to see how the recession has inflated a trend that already existed. Working alone and dealing with money, drivers have always been vulnerable. Mix in a more frustrated, downtrodden population of passengers with a host of service cuts and fare increases, and you get combustion.

“People who are poorer than they were, … who rely more on transit than they did, who are waiting longer at bus stops for the bus to come because the service has been cut,” said Larry Hanley, president of the ATU. When they board the bus, “the driver’s sitting there in a uniform, representing the government, telling them, you got to pay a higher tax for this service,” he said.

Nationwide statistics are lacking, but many jurisdictions have reported recent increases in driver attacks. The Philadelphia Transport Workers Union local reports that assaults there more than doubled in 2011 compared to 2010. New York City has seen a 30 percent increase in 2012. There’s also not a lot of hard data linking an uptick in assaults to fare increases or service cuts, said Robin Gillespie, program director of safety and health at the Transportation Learning Center. But “people feel that way,” she said.

And attacks occur most commonly during fare collection. “The conflict is over money,” said Hanley. “It’s people who have a pocket full of empty and have to get to a place.”

As the problem gets more prevalent, transit unions are getting more organized in their efforts to deal with it.

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$10,860 in New York City. $5,694 in St. Louis. $4,199 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

That’s what it will cost you, on average, in additional transportation costs to live in a sprawling, car-dependent neighborhood over one that is well-connected and transit-rich. That’s according to a new analysis by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, produced for Better Cities and Towns.

CNT analyzed 20 “representative” metropolitan areas. Each area was divided into seven quartiles ranging from most walkable and transit-friendly to the most disconnected and car-dependent. The difference? Well, it adds up.

Transportation costs varied widely from a low of $5,053 in New York City’s most well-connected neighborhoods, to a high of almost $17,807 in Olympia, Washington’s low-density suburbs.

Some of the most striking differences in transportation costs were between cities with extremely vibrant urban cores and strong transit systems — New York, Washington, Boston — and those without. Notice that residents of average neighborhoods in Atlanta, Georgia pay $3,337 more in transportation costs annually than those from New York City’s comparable neighborhoods.

Even though many of these transportation bargain cities are known for having relatively high housing costs, the analysis showed that their residents of more location-efficient neighborhoods come out ahead in every MSA.  In the most walkable ‘hoods in all 20 areas, combined housing and transportation costs accounted for 30-51 percent of area median household income. In the most sprawling neighborhoods — the least efficient — these same costs ate up 50 to 75 percent of the average household’s budget, according to CNT.

Notably, in some poor-transit, especially sprawling areas, transportation costs were well in excess of annual housing costs. In an especially remarkable case — Fayetteville, Arkansas’s distant suburbs — transportation costs were more than double those of housing costs.

This research builds in an earlier study from CNT that found combined housing and transportation costs were rising faster in exurban areas than urban. No wonder the exurbs are losing their luster!

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

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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