Streetsblog Capitol Hill

A bill moving through Congress could help struggling transit systems around the country.

The Senate approved the Marketplace Fairness Act on Monday, a bill that would impose sales taxes on most items sold online to residents of the 45 states (and the District of Columbia) where stores charge sales tax.

PubliCola at SeattleMet highlighted the benefit to public transportation: “Local transit agencies rely heavily on sales taxes — in King County, for example, sales taxes contribute 54 percent of Metro funding — so a larger sales tax base translates into more funding for transit infrastructure.”

In fact, it could mean an additional $45.4 million each for Seattle’s metro and Sound Transit between 2014 and 2017. “For cash-strapped systems like Metro, that windfall could mean the difference between systemwide cuts and the first new service in years,” according to the SeattleMet article.

Seattle’s not the only city that stands to see a windfall for transit. More than a dozen other cities fund their public transportation systems using sales taxes, including Boston, Dallas, and San Francisco [PDF].

The Senate’s filibuster-proof 69-27 majority vote was a good sign, but the House is more divided on the bill. It’s not clear when the House will bring the measure up for a vote.

Not one to back away from a terrible argument, CNN’s Anderson Cooper is sticking with his series exposing the “boondoggle” of federal high-speed rail funding. In a segment aired Monday night, he and reporter Drew Griffin hammered away yet again at their argument that high-speed rail has been a waste of money. Under the tagline “Keeping Them Honest,” Cooper and Griffin hope to raise public ire about the taxpayer money “dumped” into a program sold as high-speed rail but is really just moving slow trains “a little faster.”

After four years and $12 billion poured into high-speed rail, Griffin says it’s nothing but a pipe dream held by those who “stand to make money” from it. After all, “not a single piece of rail has been laid.”

Griffin and Cooper made essentially the same arguments as their last segment, which cast hellfire and brimstone on a successful little project in Vermont that came in on time and under budget, cutting trip times and improving performance. And Streetsblog’s response is essentially the same.

Still, I can’t help calling out a few notable points that surfaced in this week’s story.

This time, they’re focused on improvements between Portland and Seattle, which, Griffin said, cut 10 minutes off a three hour, 40 minute trip. He doesn’t say how much the improvements cost, but he does mention that Washington state got $800 million of stimulus high-speed rail money, “mostly” for these rail improvements. (A small portion of those funds were actually appropriated in 2010, separate from the stimulus.)

If it makes him feel any better, the rest of Washington’s stimulus money for transportation was spent like this:

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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.

Like a lot of cities, Seattle has seen a much-hyped “bikelash” against efforts to make the city safer for cycling. But it turns out that this bikelash might be just that: hype.

A recent telephone poll of 400 Seattle voters [PDF], conducted via landlines and cellphones, found strong support for cycling — despite what a local newspaper says.

The poll, conducted by local opinion survey group FM3 and commissioned by the Cascade Bicycle Club, found that 79 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of cyclists. Almost 60 percent of voters support devoting more road space to bike facilities. Another 78 percent said they ride a bike at least once a year. A slight majority, 51 percent, reported disagreeing with the notion that Seattle is waging a “war on cars.” Only 31 percent agreed.

Local alt weekly The Stranger said high-pitched, anti-bike rhetoric from the Seattle Times has been a factor in the upcoming mayoral race. Some critics have taken shots at Mayor Mike McGinn for his efforts to make cycling safer, and have taken to calling him Mayor McSchwinn.

But that might not be such a good strategy, The Stranger’s Dominic Holden writes. “The problem is that this is a losing wedge issue,” he said. “Anti-bicycle advocates speak for less than one-third of Seattle residents. These holdouts, the polling shows, are largely older, white, conservative men. Candidates who pander to those blocs with anti-bike talking points will be losing more votes than they’re gaining.”

It’s well-established that density and mixed-use development reduce driving. Right? But strategies like those don’t work the same way everywhere, according to new research published in the Journal of Transport and Land Use. While in major cities, denser development is linked to lower rates of driving, researchers found that in smaller cities it might not have much effect at all. The research suggests that for smaller cities, a focus on reducing block sizes and improving street connectivity may be the most effective way to cut down on driving, though the authors caution that more research is needed to draw universal conclusions.

The research team, sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration, sought to drill down and identify how urban characteristics affect driving levels in different types of places. They looked at four different case studies: Seattle, WA; Richmond-Petersburg and Norfolk-Virginia Beach, VA (grouped together as one case study); Baltimore, MD; and Washington, DC. Using travel surveys and land use information, they modeled the impact on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) of five factors: residential density, employment density, mixed-use development, average block size (which they use as a stand-in for “measuring transit/walking friendliness”), and infill development (or distance to city center).

While the authors knew from previous research that these five factors all contributed to reducing VMT, they found that the Virginia regions didn’t follow the same patterns as the other three. In the smaller urban areas of Richmond-Petersburg and Norfolk-Virginia Beach, they found, mixed-use development did not have a significant impact on reducing driving.

“This is probably because in smaller urban areas, even those living in neighborhoods with well mixed land development may still need to travel far to reach work and non-work destinations,” the researchers write. “In other words, mixed development areas are less likely to be self-sufficient in smaller urban areas.” Mixing uses proved to be a good way to reduce driving in the larger metros.

These findings would seem to show a major weakness of New Urbanist-style “town centers” developed in otherwise suburban areas. A small walkable area isn’t enough to actually spark a real shift in transportation habits – the urban area has to be big enough that most people’s needs can be satisfied without a car. But lead researcher Lei Zhang said the findings don’t warrant that conclusion. “The paper has a small sample size,” Zhang said. “I wouldn’t want to generalize the results to other places.”

Zhang and his team are working on another paper that broadens the scope of their analysis to 20 urban areas. They hope this bigger data set will help planners evaluate land-use plans and how those decisions affect driving rates in different types of places.

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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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Parking reformers, this is one you’re going to want to bookmark.

The announcement that Seattle would be raising parking rates in certain neighborhoods was greeted with a good bit of teeth gnashing — and that continues, especially among some business owners. But the data just doesn’t bear out all the concern, according to an analysis by the Sightline Institute, a Northwest policy think tank.

Gross receipts for downtown restaurants have actually risen since the parking meter hikes went into effect.

According to Sightline’s Eric de Place:

It may sound counter-intuitive at first, but on inspection it turns about to be totally sensible. By increasing turnover in on-street parking and ensuring that spaces are available for customers, well-calibrated parking policies really can increase patronage. (After all, would you rather grind through congested downtown streets in the rain while hunting for a parking space or pay a few bucks to stash the car curbside until 8?) In fact, boosting business is exactly what Seattle set out to do when officials adjusted meter rates and extended paid hours downtown.

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Under the headline, “Okay, Fine, It’s War,” Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger, this week published a manifesto “of and by the nondrivers themselves.” They’re sick of being called “militants” for caring about pedestrian safety, and they’re tired of the specter of a “war on cars.”

We heartily recommend that you read the whole thing, but here are some of our favorite parts. Like this, from the first plank of the manifesto: “The car-driving class must pay its own way!”

For cars we have paved our forests, spanned our lakes, and burrowed under our cities. Yet drivers throw tantrums at the painting of a mere bicycle lane on the street. They balk at the mere suggestion of hiking a car-tab fee, raising the gas tax, or tolling to help pay for their insatiable demands, even as downtrodden transit riders have seen fares rise 80 percent over four years.

No more! We demand that car drivers pay their own way, bearing the full cost of the automobile-petroleum-industrial complex that has depleted our environment, strangled our cities, and drawn our nation into foreign wars. Reinstate the progressive motor vehicle excise tax, hike the gas tax, and toll every freeway, bridge, and neighborhood street until the true cost of driving lies as heavy and noxious as our smog-laden air. Our present system of hidden subsidies is the opiate of the car-driving masses; only when it is totally withdrawn will our road-building addiction finally be broken.

They go on to demand better, more expansive transit, safer streets and sidewalks, and traffic calming. And this:

This antagonism [between car driver and nondriver] traces directly to the creation of the modern car driver, a privileged individual who, as noted, is the beneficiary of a long course of subsidies, tax incentives, and wars for cheap oil. But the same subsidies that created this creature (who now rages about the roads while simultaneously screaming of being a victim in some war) can—and must, beginning now—be used to build bike lanes, sidewalks, light rail, and other benefits to the nondriving classes.

That’s the kind of manifesto we can get on board with.

After the manifesto, The Stranger goes on to report on the rising numbers of crashes between cars and cyclists, the violent anti-bike rhetoric being spewed by car drivers that are the  “victims” of some imagined war on cars, the massive disparity between funding for car infrastructure and everything else, and the heroes of the non-driver, beloved both for their advocacy and their tight asses. Read it, read it all.

Seattle's South Lake Union Streetcar is a 1.3-mile line that opened in December 2007, the first leg in the city's commitment to new transit and light rail. It passed the half million passenger milestone in its first year, surpassing ridership projections.

The streetcar features many top-of-the-line tech amenities, including real time arrival message boards, solar-powered ticket vending machines, and human-activated doors to save energy while the train is in layover mode. If you go to the Seattle Streetcar web site, you can find out the next arrival time and actually watch the streetcars moving via GPS trackers.

As you'll see in the film, development is booming along the South Lake Union corridor. "If you build it, they will come" certainly seems to apply here.

One of our favorite recent discoveries on the national transpo blogging scene is Carla Saulter, a third-generation Seattleite who documents her transit-going life in a blog called Bus Chick for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A lot of people who do without cars before they become parents think that once they do have a kid, life without a vehicle is no longer possible. Not Carla, who recently wrote a post about what she's learned in her first year as a "bus parent." Here's some of what she has to say:

Planning is essential. The single biggest difference between being a bus parent and being a car parent is the amount of mental energy that's required to make it through the day efficiently, productively, and free of stress.

Comfort is key. As a childless bus chick, I advocated shoes that were comfortable and cute. Today, I say: Cute, schmute! When I'm traveling with Chicklet, it's all about comfort.

Crying is not an option. If you take a cranky baby on a car trip, you're the only one who has to endure the howling. Cranky babies on buses, on the other hand, share their howling with dozens of innocent bystanders. Because of this, I consider it my responsibility to keep Chicklet content and well-behaved for the duration of every ride.

On the plus side: Car free is gear free. (or, Who needs a baby travel system?)

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