Streetsblog Capitol Hill

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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You don’t need to look too hard to find signs that the ground is shifting when it comes to highway construction. Around the country, state DOTs are running out of money. Headlines ask “Are Freeways Doomed?” Overall vehicle miles traveled are down in the Pacific Northwest.

Multiple protests have been held in Portland in opposition to the CRC Bridge project, which Federal Transit Administration officials yesterday praised as "forward-leaning." Photo: Stop the CRC

But many state and regional transportation agencies continue to operate as if it were still the 1980s, when highway budgets were flush, gas was cheap and the destructive impacts of auto-centric planning were less well understood.

It’s especially discouraging to see those old-fashioned attitudes prevailing in greater Portland, which enjoys a reputation as the country’s most progressive transportation city. The fact that the $3-plus billion mega-bridge project known as the Columbia River Crossing remains a regional transportation priority is a testament to the pervasive grip of highway-building interests.

Just yesterday, this “highway boondoggle in disguise” passed another milestone when it was given environmental clearance from U.S. DOT, opening the way for land acquisition and construction. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced yesterday that the project has been granted a “record of decision,” a disappointing endorsement from an administration that has made “livability” a key issue.

Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff even praised the project as a break from carbon-intensive traditions, saying, “This is the type of forward-leaning project that will greatly benefit the entire region well into the future.”

It’s true that the project does include a transit component. About $800 million will be spent on light rail through this corridor between Portland and suburban Vancouver, Washington. But project opponents like David Osborn, head of the community group Stop the CRC, point out that a much greater share of the money will be spent widening the highway to 10 lanes and adding a number of interchanges. This is fundamentally at odds with Portland’s professed emphasis on environmental stewardship and sustainability, Osborn told Streetsblog in April.

“If we build transportation infrastructure that supports single-occupancy-vehicles, it will increase low-density sprawl,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of opposition to this project in the community.”

Joe Cortright, a consultant with Impresa and one of the project’s most vocal opponents, says he is disappointed but not surprised by the U.S. DOT announcement. “This has been clearly in the pipeline for some time,” he said. “It reflects kind of the internal consensus of the state DOTs.”

But he added that the federal government has yet to award the CRC any funding — and the project plan assumes a $1.2 billion contribution from the federal government. Nor has either state DOT committed any money, he said. He added that legal challenges to the environmental impact statement were likely forthcoming.

So the fight certainly isn’t over yet in Portland.

White Flint, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, should be a shining example of transit-oriented development. It’s centered on a metro station on the busy red line, sandwiched between the bustling suburban downtowns of Bethesda and Rockville.

Developers and the public are together preparing to turn White Flint's Rockville Pike from this...

... into this. Images: MontCo Planning Director's Blog (above) and White Flint Partnership (below).

But instead, it’s “sprawling suburbia,” covered in surface parking lots and lacking a true road network. “Community members say they’re within spitting distance of White Flint Mall but they have to drive to get there because of the road network,” says developer Francine Waters, who manages the transportation and smart growth program at Lerner Enterprises.

Seeing the wasted potential of the area, Lerner and five other developers that own much of the land in White Flint came together to figure out how to make Rockville Pike, White Flint’s main artery, a destination and not just a thoroughfare. Waters told the story this week at Rail~Volution to an audience eager to learn how public-private partnerships and value capture strategies could work in their neck of the woods.

Not only are the White Flint developers looking to include more mixed-use development in the community, they want to build new local streets to fill in a viable street grid and redesign the eight-lane Rockville Pike into a “21st century boulevard” with wide sidewalks, bike lanes, six rows of trees, and dedicated transit lanes. They want to fill those lanes with bus rapid transit to take short-haul commuters off of the at-capacity red line.

The infrastructure total is estimated to cost $601 million – and the federal government isn’t picking up a dime of it.

White Flint is at the forefront of a new kind of infrastructure financing – one which involves the private sector more than the government. As federal funds dry up, all eyes have turned to public-private partnerships, but the topic is still often the subject of much head-scratching and hand-wringing in Congress. Indeed, some have rung the alarm bell about over-reliance on the private sector when it comes to building high-speed rail, saying the public often bears too much of the risk while the private developers carry off all the profit.

Through an extended series of community consultations, White Flint’s developers appear to have gained the public’s trust, and now they’re charging forward with ambitious plans to remake an auto-centric suburban sprawl zone. And by bypassing federal aid, they’re also bypassing the reams of paperwork and bureaucratic processes that come with it, which often add years and millions of dollars to total project cost.

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In an old supermarket space in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, a diverse community of bicycle aficionados are getting greasy. Young and old, Latino and white, they are truing wheels and replacing cables and adjusting brakes in L.A.’s newest, and completely unplanned, bike co-op.

Volunteers' meeting, Bici Libre. Photo: Jonny Green, LACBC Bike Wrangler

Bici Libre, as it’s called, got its start when the County Cycling Collaborative received a stimulus grant of $200,000 to spruce up “stray” bikes, with the help of volunteers gaining job skills. They rented the vacant grocery store to be just a warehouse to store the old bikes, but it quickly evolved into a hub of bicycle education, advocacy, and community.

But Bici Libre could disappear as quickly as it materialized. The stimulus grant that funds it runs out next March, and the CCC doesn’t know how – or if – it’ll be able to keep the new bike co-op alive.

Bici Libre is just one of many potential casualties of the boom-and-bust stimulus cycle. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act breathed life into countless worthy projects, including many planning and education programs that promote green transportation, but they can’t all last forever. Some, like Bici Libre, are now scrounging for future funding. Others may just close up shop.

In Portland, for example, the Bureau of Transportation expanded its Smart Trips program, where people can order information about transit that runs through their neighborhood, a bike kit, a walking kit, or information about carpooling. A customized packet of information is then delivered to them by bicycle, along with a calendar of events like group rides for seniors or women.

Eight hundred thousand dollars of stimulus money launched a Smart Trips program for new residents and helped augment the programs that worked with schools and businesses. But that money will be spent soon. “Smart Trips to School is probably going to disappear,” said Marni Glick of PBOT. “The New Resident Program will probably disappear. And we will try to find funding for the Smart Trips Business.”

A pot of stimulus money called CPPW (Communities Putting Prevention to Work), distributed through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, aims to reduce obesity through nutrition and physical activity. Another branch of its work focuses on smoking cessation. The money is granted to city and state public health departments, which then partner with local nonprofits to carry out the work.

Several active transportation projects got funded this way, including Philadelphia’s Safe Routes Philly program, which “promotes biking and walking as fun, healthy forms of transportation in Philadelphia Elementary Schools.” The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia joined forces with the school district, the health department and the Food Trust (a local nonprofit working on nutrition issues) to start a campaign for healthier schools, funded at $680,000 over two years, thanks to the stimulus.

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Earlier this week, in a forum about intelligent cities and the ways data can improve urban planning, Carolyn Young of Portland’s TriMet let it slip that Portland was one of the first cities to share its real-time transit tracking data on Google Maps. (Google announced the news two days later.)

Google's MBTA trip planner now includes real-time data, not just schedules.

For transit agencies, letting Google provide useful transit data to their customers (and the bazillions of other people who log on to Google every day) seems to be a win-win situation, but Young observed that not all agencies feel that way. “There are a lot of barriers,” she said. “Some think, ‘It’s our data, we don’t want to give it to anybody, maybe we can make money with it.’”

Boston’s MBTA has a different perspective on data-sharing. The agency doesn’t even show real-time tracking on its website – instead it links to an App Showcase of third-party software developers that have created tracking tools on their own.

“We believe very strongly that not only can working with third party developers get information to our riders more quickly, it helps us do it more innovatively, and at a lower cost,” MBTA’s Joshua Robin told Streetsblog. “We started releasing real-time bus information as a pilot back in November of 2009 as part of this big developer conference we had. The first application was developed within an hour. No application developed by a transit agency is going to come out that quickly. You wouldn’t even be in the first stage of any kind of procurement by then.”

There are now more than 30 third-party apps that connect T riders with real-time tracking data – all at no cost to the MBTA. Robin says people almost always get traffic and weather information from a third party like news radio. He sees transit data the same way.

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Costing at least a cold $3 billion, the CRC project and its ten freeway lanes could bankrupt the Portland region's road budget while undermining its progress on sustainable transportation. Image: Spencer Boomhower

The Columbia River Crossing is a mega-project by any standard. A bridge replacement, a highway widening, and light rail project wrapped into one, the CRC is a proposal to span the distance between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington. With a $3.2 billion price tag — by conservative estimates — it would be the largest public works project the region has ever undertaken.

Any project of the CRC’s transformative scope raises a great many questions. For starters, is it worth the investment? Can the region afford it? Will it promote a healthy environment? Will it induce sprawl?

In the five years since project engineers began honing their plan, more and more local observers have become adamant that it fails on all counts. “It’s a disaster of a project, really,” said Jonathan Maus of Bike Portland. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” But while governors are killing worthy transit and rail projects left and right, this fantastically expensive sprawl generator still has a pulse.

The full length of the project is five miles. Image: Columbia River Crossing

Planning efforts alone for the Columbia River Crossing have thus far consumed $110 million. After all that expense and all those meetings, local observers say there’s still little agreement about what form it should take — or whether it should move forward at all.

The project is intended to reduce congestion on Interstate 5 between Portland and suburban Vancouver, which, officials say, backs up for six hours daily. Their plan is to expand the interstate from six to 10 lanes, demolish the existing drawbridge and build a replacement.

But $3+ billion is a lot of money to spend on a five-mile stretch of roadway, particularly when the Portland region is facing a $6 billion road budget shortfall by 2030. And at least one analysis has said the actual fiscal damage could be a lot worse.

Financial questions aside, the project runs contrary to the values of sustainability and walkability on which Portland has built its reputation, says David Osborn of the grassroots opposition group Stop the CRC. According to Osborn, the CRC typifies the kind of single-occupancy-vehicle infrastructure that the region has expressly rejected.

“We’re known for and really value alternative transportation,” Osborn said. “That’s the kind of transportation solutions that our region is looking for — transportation infrastructure that favors small, walkable communities. Building freeways doesn’t create that kind of community.”

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How long do you have to wait for a bus in your city? How much does it cost? Does every family on your block have two cars? And tell us about your bikeshare program…

Mayor Thomas Menino: “The car is no longer the king in Boston.” Photo courtesy of the City of Boston

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has been asking questions like these to determine their list of 15 Smarter Cities – places with shorter, cheaper, and more efficient commutes.

They split the list into big, medium and small cities. Have a look:

Eight percent of Chicago is green space and they're planning 500 miles of bike paths. Photo: Chicago Tourism Bureau

2011 Smarter Cities for Transportation

Large (population > 1 million)

Boston, MA/NH
Chicago, IL
New York, NY
Portland, OR
Philadelphia, PA/NJ
San Francisco, CA
Washington, DC/MD/VA/WV

Medium (pop. between 250,000 – 1 million)

Boulder-Longmont, CO
Honolulu, HI
Jersey City, NJ
New Haven, CT

Small (pop. < 250,000)

Bremerton, WA
Champaign-Urbana, IL
Lincoln, NE
Yolo, CA

Philly got bonus points for its transit initiative to connect people to fresh food. Boulder scored high for its brand-new Transportation Master Plan, which incorporated the public in the planning process and indicates “a serious commitment to responsible travel within the county.” And Yolo, California boasts a higher degree of transit access – 91 percent of households – than any other similarly sized metro region.

It’s innovations like these that are going to light the way to a future of cleaner air, financially stable households, and healthier cities.

The T&I Committee has fleshed out the schedule of its nationwide tour to solicit input on transportation issues. The tour is an opportunity for lawmakers to hear what communities around the country would like to see in a new transportation authorization bill.

Since we published the first, tentative schedule last week, the committee has added several locations in the South: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and the Memphis metropolitan area.

When you google "Beckley, WV transit" this is what you get. Photo: Automobile Magazine

Observers note that the addition of Oklahoma could be an attempt to get the attention of Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and that Tennessee is the home state of new Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chair John Duncan, though he’s from the other side of the state. Committee Democrat Steve Cohen is from Memphis, where the hearing will be. Freshman Republican Rick Crawford will play host to the Jonesboro hearing.

Meanwhile, the committee confirms that the Los Angeles hearing will be a joint House and Senate hearing, with Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the EPW Committee, co-chairing the session with Rep. John Mica.

The committee also added a date in Scranton, Pennsylvania (home of Vice President Joe Biden and Dunder Mifflin). Their stop in West Virginia now includes two different locations, 60 miles apart.

“It’s very encouraging that the hearings are happening in a lot of different kinds of metro areas,” said David Goldberg, communications director of Transportation for America – though he did note that the Portland, Oregon/Vancouver, Washington location is now firmly listed as just Vancouver.

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More committee news…

Field hearings don't have the pomp and circumstance of Washington events, but don't expect to testify unless you're invited. Image: Rep. Tim Bishop's office

Yesterday’s field hearing of the House Transportation Committee on high-speed rail in New York City wasn’t officially part of the series of field hearings on the reauthorization. The tentative schedule hits small towns, big cities, and suburbs:

• February 14th – West Virginia (Ranking Democrat Nick Rahall’s home state)
• February 17th – Philadelphia area (Republican committee freshmen Patrick Meehan and Lou Barletta are from the area, as is Democratic T&I member Tim Holden)
• February 18th – Rochester, NY (freshman Republican Tom Reed’s district and not too far for some of Richard Hanna’s constituents)
• February 19-20 – Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, and suburbs of Chicago (within reach of four Republican members’ districts and one Democrat)
• February 21-23 – Portland, OR; Vancouver, WA; Fresno and Southern California (reaching four Republican districts and two Democrat)

The hearings may be focused on specific topics, which haven’t been announced yet. Witnesses must be invited to speak.

Check out our first installment of the Streetsie winners for who will be missed, who will be a hero, and the best  ideas and legislation that didn’t come to pass.

We continue our look back at 2010 with some state- and local-level highs and lows for the year. Starting with:

Gov. Chris Christie's short-sightedness in killing the ARC tunnel made him the runaway winner of this dubious Streetsie honor. Photo: Star-Ledger

Most short-sighted governor: When it comes to transportation policy, there’s quite a crop of new (and not-so-new) residents of governors’ mansions around the country who seem to have a hard time taking the long view. But Chris Christie of New Jersey really distinguished himself as a special kind of obstructionist when he killed the ARC tunnel, a project set to receive the largest federal transit funding commitment in U.S. history. Yes, even though the tunnel, which would have doubled capacity for New Jersey Transit into Manhattan, was being paid for with federal dollars, Christie’s panic over cost overruns (or was it raising the gas tax?) won the day. Meanwhile, he’s been more than happy to borrow $2 billion for highway widening.

Of course, Christie had some fierce competition. After all, Scott Walker and John Kasich are killing federally-funded high speed rail projects left and right in the Midwest. And Ray LaHood has found himself forced to single out Florida’s new governor, Rick Scott, for some stern lectures about how rail is the key to America’s future.

You didn’t win the Streetsie this time, fellas, but you sure do get honorable mention for your efforts to deny transportation options to the people of your states.

The Next Portland: As I was reminded when I visited Portland last fall for the Rail~volution conference, the city is a bike-commuting mecca with model streetcar lines and light rail facilities. I’ll admit to my inferiority complex upon returning to my own city of Washington, DC, but then I realized DC has cred to spare on the livable streets front. We launched the country’s biggest bike share! And we’ve got the second-busiest commuter rail system! And check out our new bi-directional cycle tracks!

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