Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Last year, the D.C. region ran away with the dubious honor of Most Congested Metro Area. D.C. area drivers wasted 74 hours and 37 gallons of fuel sitting in traffic last year, which would have cost about $100 over the course of the year. But the gasoline cost is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to the 2011 Urban Mobility Report, released today by the Texas Transportation Institute, this delay cost the average D.C. driver $1,495 once you factor in lost productivity and increased trucking times. In Chicago, it’s $1,568. L.A., $1,334.

Every year, TTI puts out their Urban Mobility Report, and every year we criticize it for its autocentrism. After all, its sole measure is how fast a vehicle can speed down a given mile of roadway. Maybe your city is dense and friendly to pedestrians and bikes, so that it’s easy to glide past the automobile gridlock on your short commute to work. Or maybe transit provides an excellent and affordable alternative to traffic jams. None of that matters to TTI. If someone, somewhere, is sitting in traffic, that’s all that matters. All other measures and modes of urban mobility are ignored.

TTI doesn’t bother to figure out how much time is saved if one avoids that congestion by taking transit, but they do examine how much time transit riders save drivers by taking vehicles off the road.

How public transportation reduces delays for drivers, 2010. Source: 2011 Urban Mobility Report, via APTA.

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Bikeshare is coming. Photo: Mr. T in DC via The City Fix

Readers, all that awful news about Republicans trying to kill active transportation’s tiny share of federal support is getting me down. So even though I don’t normally post anything new this late in the day, I just can’t leave you without some good news.

In July, the Park Service made an inscrutably ridiculous decision to keep Capital Bikeshare off the National Mall because it would “violate the National Historic Preservation Act” — because, you know, there wasn’t bikeshare in the time of our forefathers, but there sure were lots of cars and charter buses!

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The areas in red are the parts of the D.C. region that are "affordable" if you only consider housing costs but become "unaffordable" once you add in transport. Source: CNT

Maybe we can finally lay the whole “drive till you qualify” myth to rest now.

You probably already suspected that driving farther and farther outside the city limits until you found a house you could afford was not the smartest way to go about buying a home. You may have been tipped off by the fact that the word “drive” was in that not-so-sage piece of advice.

Well, your suspicions are confirmed. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has long been a champion of what they call the H+T (Housing + Transportation) index. They say that instead of measuring affordability strictly by housing costs (typically determined to be “affordable” if housing eats up less than 30 percent of household income), we should look at a combined index and determine affordability as a home where housing costs plus transportation costs make up less than 45 percent of income.

To make this real for the people of the national capital region, CNT teamed up with Washington, D.C.’s forward-looking Office of Planning to analyze how the H+T index changes notions of affordability in the D.C. area. Their report, “H+T in D.C.: Housing + Transportation Affordability in Washington, D.C.” [PDF]

In her foreward, Planning Director Harriet Tregoning (who, incidentally, got hit by a car on her bike last week) says that she wanted to go deeper than the CNT’s previous research, which used 2000 census data. She wanted to know what had happened during the “turbulent period” between 2006 and 2008.

“During that time some outer jurisdictions experienced drops in the median home sales price of 41 percent, while the District’s median sales price dropped by only 2 percent,” she wrote. “This happened while real gas prices grew by 18 percent.”

In any given location, transportation costs vary inversely to housing costs – meaning that in walkable, compact neighborhoods where transit access is convenient and housing prices are high, transportation costs are low – in some cases, low enough to offset the higher cost of housing.

It becomes apparent that “affordable” housing in the farthest-reaching areas of the region is much less so when transportation costs are added. Average H+T burdens in Spotsylvania, Charles, and Calvert counties are largely over 45 percent of AMI [area median income], and even exceed 55 percent of AMI in areas. Conversely, the District of Columbia, Prince George’s County, Arlington County, and Alexandria present some of the most affordable areas in the region. Here, even where housing costs are relatively high, average H+T burdens are largely less than 45 percent of AMI.

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In 2007, Boston had one city block of bike lane. It was considered one of the world’s least bike-friendly cities. But Mayor Thomas Menino set out to change all that. The Boston Globe reports that today, Menino signed an agreement to create a bike-sharing network in the style of Washington, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare and Paris’ Vélib’.

Boston's new system will be modeled, in part, after Washington, D.C.'s Capital Bikeshare and will be designed and operated by the same company, Alta Bicycle Share. Photo: DDOT

The $6 million, 600-bike system, called the Hubway as a clever play on Boston’s nickname “Hub of the Universe” (funny, I thought D.C. was the hub of the universe), is set to open in July. Boston officials envision it expanding to 5,000 bikes at more than 300 kiosks, a size which would eclipse D.C.’s current 1,100 bikes.

The bike-share and bicycle network are, in part, a way for Boston to complement its historic transit system. Proponents often point to the usefulness of bicycling for “last-mile connectivity,” helping people get the final stretch from the transit stop to their destination. The Federal Transit Administration acknowledged that potential and awarded Boston’s bike-share program $3 million last year.

Planners are hoping the Hubway will generate 100,000 trips in its first year, but the city isn’t on the hook if ridership is disappointing – Alta Bicycle Share, the company which will build and operate the Hubway, bears the risk.

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Chicago Mayor-Elect Rahm Emanuel has snapped up Gabe Klein, former head of the District Department of Transportation in Washington, to head up his transportation team in the Windy City.

Gabe Klein helped build a bike-friendlier DC. Now's he's headed to the nation's third-largest city. Photo: Ready Set DC

Klein earned a reputation as a transportation star in the nation’s capital, helping put Washington on the national map as a leading bike- and transit-friendly city. During his tenure, he oversaw the creation of the country’s largest bike sharing system and built DC’s first separated bike lanes. Klein was also instrumental in helping move forward a streetcar system for the District, and under his leadership, the city pursued a wide-ranging parking reform effort [PDF].

The hiring decision signals Emanuel’s commitment to making Chicago a world-class biking city, one of his campaign promises. Emanuel has also made transit the centerpiece of his proposed transportation plan. According to the Washington Post, Klein turned down offers to run state DOTs before accepting Emanuel’s offer.

Klein was ousted in the political shuffle when Vincent Gray took over the Washington mayoralty from Adrian Fenty in the fall. His ascension to the top transportation spot in the nation’s third-largest city is unusual — DOT chiefs rarely leap from one city to another. Emanuel’s decision to hire a well-known DOT leader from another city speaks to the newfound emphasis on transportation policy in urban politics, and the star quality that some innovators in the field have attained.

In a statement on his blog, Klein said he was excited to help make Chicago a leader in progressive transportation planning:

This is an opportunity to continue public service in the 5th largest urban economy in the world, for a leader every bit as reform-minded and results oriented as former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty; to make Chicago an example nationally for innovation in transportation and public space, and most importantly, to positively impact quality of life for the 2.6 million residents of Chi-town.

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Here in the Washington, D.C. area, our Metro system is expanding. A new Silver Line will go all the way to Dulles airport and beyond, into exurban Loudon County. The projected station stops are named for highways, not neighborhoods or landmarks: Reston Parkway, Route 28, Route 606, Route 772. Ten of the 11 new stations will be outside the Capital Beltway, almost doubling the number of metro stations outside the unofficial boundary of D.C.’s urban territory.

I’m always happy to see transit flourishing, and it will be nice to be able to take the metro all the way to Dulles without switching to the bus. But does transit expansion give the official thumbs-up to people moving farther and farther outside the urban core? This Silver Line isn’t being built to get me from the inner city to our ridiculously far-flung airport. It’s to provide all the benefits of transit – a reliable, congestion-free ride to work while you read the paper or doze off to your iTunes – to people who have chosen to live several counties away from their work.

Land use expert Reid Ewing, a professor of urban planning at the University of Utah and associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, said transit leads to development – both sprawling and compact – because it improves accessibility. And increased accessibility to jobs in a shorter amount of time is an engine for development.

“It’s the fact that you can reach lots of trip attractions within short period of time on transit that causes development around the station,” Ewing said. “It doesn’t happen inherently. And accessibility, likewise, is a driving force in highway oriented sprawl.”

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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 House is still voting on amendment after amendment to the continuing resolution that will fund the federal government for the rest of FY2011. Just a quick recap as we go into the weekend. The “base bill” of HR 1 – not the amendments – would do the following:

Texas Republican Pete Sessions introduced an amendment to cut $447 million from Amtrak's budget. Photo: AP

• Eliminate the entire high-speed rail program.
• Cut $430 million of the $2 billion allocated for the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts program, the federal government’s primary means of support for transit capital investments.
• Eliminate TIGER, which provided more than $2 billion to innovative state and local transportation programs around the country last year, and rescind all unspent funds from last year.
• Cancel federal payments to the Washington, D.C. metro system.

As for the amendments:

• Republican Pete Sessions of Texas failed to cut $447 million out of Amtrak’s budget.
• Democrat Jared Polis of Colorado tried to keep the government from rescinding unused TIFIA and TIGER grant money from the stimulus. Polis’ amendment failed.

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A pair of bills making their way through Virginia’s House of Delegates threaten to slam the brakes on smart growth and livability efforts in Arlington and throughout Northern Virginia.

Virginia House Delegate Jim LeMunyon wants to make highways and congestion reduction the centerpiece of transportation policy in Northern Virginia. Photo: LeMunyon.com

House Bills 1998 and 1999, put forward by Delegate Jim LeMunyon (R-Fairfax), have been dubbed the “Anti-Livability” bills by local transportation reformers. HB 1998 seeks to mandate that congestion reduction be used as the primary criterion for evaluating transportation projects. HB 1999 would require that highway construction take priority in all funds flowing from the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.

Dan Malouff, a transportation planner with the Arlington County Department of Transportation, said his organization has been watching the bills with concern, particularly HB 1999, which employs the more hard-line inducement of the purse strings.

“If 1999 passed, we would be very strictly reduced to spending money only on a few key highways,” Malouff said. “It means we can’t think about local growth. It means we can’t think about local streets. It means we can’t think about transit.”

“It essentially forces us to spend money only applying Band-aids instead of addressing real problems.”

Reporting on the progress of HB 1998, David Alpert of Streetsblog Network blog Greater Greater Washington said:

This bill is, in essence, the exact opposite of the USDOT’s “livability” push. That agency has been retooling the formulas for federal transit funding to move away from only favoring projects that move the most people the longest distance.

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A new Republican proposal would eliminate federal subsidies to Amtrak; kill New Starts, the primary federal transit funding program; and make painful cuts to dozens of other federal programs. It’s a plan by the Republican Study Committee, which is trying to keep alive House Speaker John Boehner’s campaign pledge to reduce the budget by $100 billion. Boehner himself has been backing off from the pledge, given the popularity of many of the programs the Study Committee is now proposing to axe.

Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is sworn in by House Speaker John Boehner Jan. 5, 2011. Jordan is sponsoring the Spending Reduction Act. Photo: AP

According to a Committee press release, “Compared to current projections, the Spending Reduction Act would save taxpayers $2.5 trillion through 2021. It starts by keeping House Republicans’ pledge to take current spending back to 2008 levels and repeal unspent funds from the failed ‘stimulus.’ At the beginning of the next fiscal year on October 1, 2011, spending is further reduced to 2006 levels and frozen there for the next decade.”

The proposal would shift some spending, like Medicaid costs, to the states, which are even more cash-strapped than the federal government. Media attention is focusing on proposed cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, USAID, and veterans’ programs. But the cuts to transportation are deep.

The FTA’s New Starts program is, in its own words, “the federal government’s primary financial resource for supporting locally planned, implemented, and operated major transit capital investments.” SAFETEA-LU authorized $6.6 billion for the program through 2009, and the extension gave another $2 billion for last year. It funds commuter rail, light rail, heavy rail, bus rapid transit, streetcars, and ferries.

According to Bureau of Transportation Statistics contributor William Mallett, “Partly as a result of federal support, rail transit route mileage in the United States almost doubled between 1985 and 2008, and rail transit passenger trips and passenger miles grew by 66 percent and 73 percent, respectively.”

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