Streetsblog Capitol Hill

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:

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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The Portland area is the only place in the country that manufactures streetcars these days. United Streetcar, in the suburb of Clackamas, opened last year to build Portland’s streetcars — and to serve as a lesson, perhaps, that rail transit manufacturing doesn’t all need to happen overseas.

Ray LaHood’s deputy, John Porcari, said as much at Rail~volution. His idea for reviving the domestic transit manufacturing industry? Common design standards for transit companies all over the country.

Streetcars are springing up, almost spontaneously, around the country as a great transportation alternative. Make no mistake about it, we are going to use that as an economic development opportunity, and by that I mean we are insistent that this is a Buy America opportunity. These dollars are actually going to stay in America.

This is not about getting final assembly jobs that come and go with each order. This is about capturing the entire value chain so that in all 50 states throughout the country, the transit manufacturing, from streetcars to subways, will be there.

There are a couple ways we’re doing that. One way is common sense writ large: We’re not going to make the mistake we made as a nation with subways and then with light rail, where every transit property orders their own rolling stock and it’s different than everybody else’s. You pay more to buy it, you pay more for parts, you pay more for mid-life overhaul.

We think the right way to do this is have common design standards and let as many American manufacturers as possible compete for every single part, every wheel bearing.

It’s a significant suggestion, especially since political support for transportation often hinges on job creation as much as improving capacity and service. Keeping more transportation-related jobs in the country would strengthen the case for investing in transit. Do you think standardizing rail car designs would help create these types of jobs in the U.S.?

Rail~volution’s participants were treated to a whole series of workshops titled “Portland: How Did We Do It?” on the last day of the four-day conference. The sessions touted Portland’s excellence on everything from regional partnerships to bike innovations to Metro. But outside the conference, just as TriMet’s General Manager took the stage, dozens of picketing transit union members reminded us that all is not rosy in Portland transit-land.

Contract negotiations between TriMet and the union are stalled, nearly a year after the previous contract expired. President Jonathan Hunt said that binding arbitration with TriMet has yielded nothing but impasses and retaliation. The union filed an unfair labor practice complaint last month with the state Employment Relations Board, charging that TriMet was bargaining in bad faith.

Now that TriMet is telling workers and retirees they’ll have to pay their own health insurance, Hunt wants to take action. He said his members have already made big sacrifices to keep the health care and it shouldn’t be taken away. “We took wage freezes; we took rollbacks,” he said.

But the union won’t go on strike, Hunt said, because the consequences for riders would be too severe. “When we walk, everybody walks.” (In any case, it’s against Oregon law for them to strike.)

This was new to me: Hunt said the transit sector faces higher rates of disability than any other industry. “People don’t recognize,” he said, “that a transit operator in their normal daily operation is equivalent to a firefighter or a police officer in their 911 mode. There’s a lot of stress.”

All the more reason, he added, for TriMet to negotiate in good faith. “[The workers] lived up to their agreement,” he said. “Now TriMet needs to do the same.”

I promised in my last post to tell you the triumphant stories of citizens beating back highways, both planned and already built. Here are more stories from the Rail~volution bike tour around Portland’s “lost highways.”

Exhibit A: The Mount Hood Freeway

“There was a period of ignorance, a period of enlightenment and catharsis, and a period of change.”

Longtime local planning official Dick Feeney says Portlanders shouldn’t be too smug about their much-touted bicycle network and strides on transit. After all, he says, “Portland founded the Good Roads movement,” which had its basis in the gas tax. “And the gas tax became this monumental engine to give a private subsidy to the private automobile. It started right here, folks… part of our own destruction started right here.”

The Mount Hood Freeway was almost part of that destruction. Proposed by the Oregon State Highway Department in 1955, the road would have been eight lanes wide and removed one percent of all the private housing stock in the city. An estimated 3,700 children would have had to cross it to get to school.

In the 1960s, the city of Portland set about buying up houses they’d need to demolish to build the freeway – including the home next door to State Rep. Grace Peck, who wanted her neighbor’s house torn down early “to keep hippies from living there,” according to Richard Ross, former head of planning for the Portland suburb of Gresham.

Before long, the freeways became the polarizing issue in Portland, on which every aspiring politician had to take a position, firmly in one camp or another. Unions wanted highway construction to provide jobs. Environmentalists and farmers sided against it. Finally, popular opposition to the project reached the point where the city and county withdrew support, and the project died.

Exhibit B: Harbor Drive

Okay, Portland, you can get a little smug about Harbor Drive.

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Rail~volution is underway in Portland, Oregon, bringing together more than 1,000 city planners, engineers, transit advocates, bike policy experts, and elected officials to strategize about making cities and towns better for transit, walking, and biking.

Monday started with 15 different workshops that took place around the city, including one highlighting Portland’s “Lost Freeways” – the roads that were never built, and one that was actually torn out. These battles happened decades ago, but in many cities, highway fights continue to this day, and in some, teardowns are looking more and more possible. (Take note, readers in New Orleans, St. Louis, Seattle, New York, and New Haven.)

Traveling around on bikes and on foot, two groups visited some notable sites in Portland’s battles against freeways. First, we saw some battlegrounds where the anti-freeway movement lost.

South Park Blocks and I-405

In 1943, Portland invited New York’s master freeway planner, Robert Moses, to come to town. After a month of study, he came out with an 86-page document mapping out the “future of Portland”: 14 freeways and a tangle of limited-access parkways to re-make the city. Portland would have become what longtime local transit official Dick Feeney calls “a wonderful place to drive a car through,” where “the neighborhoods would have all vanished.”

Today, one of those highways, I-405, runs right through downtown. Tour guide Sarah Mirk, author of Oregon history comic books (including one about dead highways), took us to a little grassy patch just across the I-405 overpass from the South Park Blocks, built in the mid-1960s.

This little marooned park over here is an orphan of when they built the I-405 freeway right here. The South Park Blocks are something people love in Portland; it’s a historic part of our city. And when they built I-405 through, they not only tore out two solid blocks of dense housing here in this neighborhood – which was really diverse, low-income housing – they also tore out two blocks of the South Park Blocks. People were really upset about that. And as a concession to people who were really upset about tearing out the park blocks, they said, we’ll do a ‘park-like treatment’ on the overpass coming over here. So you can see the overgrown bramble, and the cement, and the weeds. This is the ‘park-like treatment’ given to the South Park Blocks.

The freeway cut the neighborhood off from their school and library on the other side, becoming a “wall” between the residents and the services they used. Developers put in a bike-ped trail along the freeway as a concession.

That trail – unsigned, virtually unknown and unused – is known informally as the Ho Chi Minh trail. “Not to honor the Vietnamese leader,” says Mirk, “but because it was so dangerous and there were lots of muggings along here at night. There’s zero lighting, the neighbors have put up barbed wire, and it’s out of sight, out of sound. No one can hear you scream over the sound of the freeway.”

In my next post, I’ll get to the good stuff: the freeway plans that never saw the light of day, and one that came tumbling down.

This week, I was fortunate to attend the Open Cities conference in Washington (along with fellow Streetsbloggers Elana Schor and Aaron Naparstek), on the ways in which new media is shaping urban policy.

The takeaway, for me at least, was a clear sense that technology is dramatically changing the lay of the land for local urbanists. Better data (and access to data) are helping to identify potential targets for planning improvements and easier navigation of cities and transit systems. Blogs and social network technologies have allowed urbanists to better communicate with each other, inform the public, and influence local governments.

Rare is the big American city that lacks a vibrant urban blogospheric community.

But there was an odd disconnect at this conference whenever a national policy figure took the podium. Speakers came across as detached and awkward where the web's potential was concerned (Adolfo Carrion) or warm and interested but fundamentally unsure of the best opportunities for engagement (Raphel Bostic).

Whereas New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan's talk to the gathering was invigorating because it was clear to all involved how speaker and audience could help each other be effective in achieving common goals, speeches from federal figures landed with the hard thump of uncertainty.

However promising the speakers' expressed goals were, it was less than obvious to all involved how the web might support or influence policy, and how the federal government might deliver tangible results.

I thought of this disconnect as I sat in a meeting on climate policy last night with Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley (D). In that discussion, it quickly became clear that the messages that are resonating with voters are not related to the economic consequences of warming or the moral case for reducing emissions. The messages carrying the day have very little to do with climate at all.

What works with the American people? A focus on ending dependence on oil and on generating clean energy jobs. Those are the priorities that convince voters to support the passage of a climate bill even after being confronted by an opposition message on the cost, real or exaggerated, of proposed plans.

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On Tuesday, voters in Portland, Oregon elected Sam Adams as their next mayor. A former Congressional staffer and current Portland city commissioner, Adams -- who is a cyclist -- ran on a platform that emphasized environmental and progressive growth initiatives, including, in the words of the Oregonian, "use [of] the Portland Streetcar and better planning to spur urban renewal." Adams received strong support from the livable streets community, which helped earn him a 52-34 percent margin of victory.

There is speculation that the Adams camp got a last-minute boost from Barack Obama, who came to town ahead of Tuesday's primary and drew a crowd of some 75,000 -- with an estimated 8,000+ arriving on bicycles. As quoted on BikePortland.org, Obama responded with some fairly breathtaking comments on transportation policy.

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Ahead of this week's National Bike Summit in Washington, DC, syndicated columnist Neal Peirce wonders if 2008 will be "bicycling's best year since the start of the auto age." He writes about developments promoting the bicycle as a legitimate form of transportation around the world, many of which have been featured right here on Streetsblog:

First the trends: oil costs are surpassing $100 a barrel, global warming alarm calls are mounting, polluting autos and trucks increasingly clog city streets, and health concerns about a sedentary and fattening society are mounting.

And now the developments: Handy bike-for-hire stations are proving instant hits in Paris and other European cities and seem poised to invade urban America. Moves to add painted bike lanes along city roadways are being eclipsed by proposals for entire networks of "bike boulevards" -- roadways altered radically to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. And a companion "Complete Streets" movement -- making roadway space for cyclists and pedestrians, not just cars and trucks -- is gaining traction nationwide.

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This is the second installment in a five-part rail travel series that began yesterday.

In between all that fun Amtrak travel I described yesterday, my wife Susan and I stopped on our honeymoon at six great cities with an eye toward observing their built environments and transportation systems (but mostly just being plain old tourists). Below are photos and brief observations from the first three, in the order we visited.

Chicago 

The railroading capital of the United States is a great, great town, loved by New Yorkers for generations. We love it too, right?

Chicago had a lakefront exhibit of great big globes encouraging people to adopt environmentally friendly but inoffensive habits, like setting one's washing machine to cold or switching to compact florescent light bulbs. But next to the exhibit, when we tried to hail a pedicab to take us downtown, we were told that pedicabs are not allowed in the Loop. Ouch. Our recently imposed pedicab restrictions were bad enough, but this takes it to a whole new level. On the plus side, Chicago has the coolest-sounding train-related terminology that we found: the Metra Electric District.

Seattle

We had hoped not to get into a single automobile on the whole trip, but in Seattle (and only in Seattle), that broke down, mostly because we had a friend in town who owned a car and was putting us up at his place. This city has what seems like hundreds of bus routes, but the one we needed never came, even though two drivers on other routes and other passengers all swore it was running on the Sunday we arrived. After we got off the train we waited and waited for our bus. Then we took a different bus to a more central stop to try our luck there. Then our friend Matt offered to pick us up from the bus stop. We accepted because he said he completely understood our motivating principle, but was downtown anyway and would be burning the same amount of gasoline either way. He drove us again a few more times, including to Lake Union go kayaking, which was worth it.

However we still wanted to explore Seattle on foot, so we walked through downtown, adjacent Belltown, where new condos are going up like mad, and residential Queen Anne Hill. Somewhere in there we noticed the signs all around Seattle encouraging people to ride transit. They have sayings like "Take the monorail, Abigail," and "Take the bus and relax, Max." Slogans aside, Seattle already had what Ted Kheel knows is a better incentive. At least downtown, its buses are free.

Portland

Like Seattle's downtown buses, Portland's downtown light rail does not charge a fare. Our hotel was in the free zone, and we felt a little guilty riding so much for free, so we vowed to spend our extra money in various Portland businesses, like the worker-owned bicycle cooperative where we rented bikes. The bikes were great, as they allowed us to really see the city and its nearby bike trails up close and personal. As I stood watching cyclists pass by on a fully-separated bike lane next to a light rail line and a aerial tram depot, I realized why it is said that Portland has the most diverse multimodal transportation network in the country for a city its size. One of those modes is the automobile, which in places is catered to as much as any suburb. On the way to the rail, we'd pass curb cuts used by cars and SUVs in the drive-thru restaurant and drive-thru Starbucks across from our hotel, engines idling as their occupants awaited their morning venti mocha frap. Portland leads the nation in many ways, but hey, it's not perfect.

And even in Portland, we learned, bike and transit networks are under attack. This newspaper article described the efforts of one Craig Flynn, a local activist and one-time city council candidate who "thinks city transportation funds should go toward relieving congestion on freeways and other main roads, specifically adding lanes or building new freeways." He told the paper: "I feel like honking my horn going over a speed bump to irritate the people who want them there."

In tomorrow's installment, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans.

My wife and I were married last month in Brooklyn. For our honeymoon, we wanted to see as many great American cities as we could. In 19 days of travel, we visited Chicago, Seattle, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans (and also stopped briefly in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia).

How could two people as obsessed as we are with minimizing our transportation carbon footprints possibly justify taking so many flights for leisure travel? We didn't take any flights. We also didn't rent any cars or even set foot in a single taxi. We learned that thanks to the magic of transit-oriented hotel development (often inadvertent), it is entirely possible to travel this great country from sea to shining sea without any of those carbon-belching modes of travel -- and still have a fantastic time.

Our intercity travel consisted of 33 miles on Metro-North (because we couldn't allow ourselves to depart for such a historic trip from Penn Station), 48 miles on CalTrain, and 7,840 miles on our underfunded national railroad, Amtrak. To travel about in town, we rented bikes in Portland but mostly used an amazing variety of light rail, bus and subway transportation, including trips on Chicago's El, Portland's TriMet light rail, San Francisco's Muni and BART and New Orleans' streetcars. All of which worked perfectly well for our purposes.

Despite the large number of transit providers, it was Amtrak that did the heavy lifting and made our vacation possible. Amtrak employees are painfully aware of the railroad's reputation as habitually late. They desperately wanted to provide an on-time, high quality service, but were demoralized when the trains ran late and frustrated because it was almost always for reasons beyond their control.

We took six Amtrak trains more or less through the entire length of their routes: The Lake Shore Limited, the Empire Builder, the Cascades, the Coast Starlight, the Sunset Limited and the Crescent. All of these trains left their departure stations on time to the minute. It wasn't until we got moving that delays occured, and these were caused by chronic underinvestment in rail infrastructure that has left many lines with just a single track. The lines are owned by freight railroads, which Amtrak pays for the rights use. The freight railroads are in increasingly intense competition with one another for customers, and have a habit of having passenger trains wait at a siding while freight trains roll through. Despite this, the Empire Builder managed to travel 2,206 miles from Chicago to Seattle and still arrive 38 minutes ahead of schedule. If our national government invested in rail improvements just a fraction of the billions of dollars it spends annually on highway maintenance and widening, Amtrak would run on time and more people would ride it.

As gasoline prices have gone up and congestion at airports has increased, Amtrak has had record ridership for multiple years in a row, despite being starved by the Bush administration, which wanted to disband the railroad, and the Republican-led Congress. Many threats remain. On the day we rode rode the Sunset Limited across Texas, a Republican congressman from Texas introduced legislation that would have eliminated the Sunset Limited. (It was defeated with the help of our region's congressional delegation by a vote of 299-130.)

But the trains are still running and we had the time of our lives on this trip. Even if its running late, and even if they've replaced the chefs in the dining car with microwave ovens, there remains something inherently enjoyable and relaxing about riding on a train across vast distances. You have time to yourself to sit and watch the world roll by, completely stress free, and sleeping in a real honest-to-God bed while rolling along through the undulating darkness is just incomparable to anything else experienced in travel. Now with the addition of laptop computers, you can watch a DVD or play tetris to pass the time, but I prefer to leave the screen off and look out the window.

This is the first part of a five-part series on our travels to run this week. Parts two and three will focus on the cities we visited, with brief updates on their struggles for livable streets. Part four will describe in greater detail the trains we rode and the sights we saw. Part five will compare the cities to one another in terms of livable streets, pedestrian-friendly development and intermodal transportation.

The great American poet Robert Hunter has written that he and the other members of the Grateful Dead had the greatest time of their lives aboard a train across Canada that carried themselves, Janice Joplin, The Band and many other musicians. That's high praise from people who spent their lives rocking out. The trip inspired Hunter to write some lines that became the motto for our honeymoon:

No big hurry
What do you say
Might as well travel
The elegant way

UPDATE: Here are the other entries in this series:

• Part 2: Chicago, Seattle, Portland
• Part 3: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans
• Part 4: The Trains
• Part 5: Wrap-Up