Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Why do traffic delays jump in September? Obviously, fewer people are on vacation. But it’s not just commuters back to the grind getting to and from work. It’s parents dropping their kids off at school, often with even less forgiving start times than an adult workday.

Region Forward, a DC-based livability partnership, shows that the delay is getting worse year after year.

Source: Region Forward

According to the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, up to 20 or 30 percent of morning traffic can be generated by parents driving their children to school. Today, about three-quarters of school-aged kids in America get to and from school by car [PDF]. In 1969, half of all schoolkids walked or biked to school, but that rate has fallen to 13 percent, according to the SRTS Partnership.

This creates a dangerous mess of cars pulling over and merging back into traffic in front of schools — with small children walking around. The result: child injuries and deaths, especially on high-traffic streets with on-street parking. A 2007 Department of Justice report [PDF] found that, to make matters worse, delayed drivers often speed when congestion eases, in order to “make up time” and out of a perverse sense of road rage.

“One can view such threats to child safety as both a cause and a symptom of school congestion,” said the DOJ report. “On the one hand, parental concerns about traffic hazards could lead more parents to drive their children to school, thereby increasing congestion. On the other hand, traffic congestion could lead to more child pedestrian accidents, with backed up cars’ blocking the views of small children crossing the street to enter school.”

So perhaps it’s no surprise that this is a nasty week for local traffic congestion. Parents are working out the kinks in their morning routines, getting used to new commutes at the start of the school year and feeling stressed (and driving badly) when they don’t budget enough time.

Part of the problem is sprawl, says the DOJ — but even kids that live within easy walking distance hitch a ride to school these days. Hoofing it is seen as “uncool” in some quarters. Maybe enough parents will get stuck in enough traffic and be late to work enough times to finally encourage kids to get to school on their own steam — and encourage schools and towns to make the necessary changes to ensure there’s a safe way for their kids to do so.

A different kind of natural disaster stranded the car-dependent a few years ago in DC. Photo: We Love DC

As the country watches Hurricane Isaac’s massive spiral head straight for the Gulf Coast, we are all experiencing post-traumatic symptoms of Katrina, which, seven years ago today, was heading for the same target. But I’m also remembering a severe weather event that hit closer to home (for me) somewhat more recently: Snowpocalypse, followed by Snowmageddon, followed by Snoverkill. The three storms hit DC during the winter of 2009-2010, dumping a combined 55 to 72 inches of snow on the area (depending which airport you measure from).

I’m not comparing Isaac’s capacity for devastation to these snowstorms, but I do wonder if there are some comparisons.

That winter, I was working at WTOP, the DC area’s news/traffic/weather radio station. We were working overtime and much of the staff was sleeping at a nearby hotel to ensure they could get to the newsroom. (Most of them commuted in from surprisingly distant suburbs.) One of the more significant tasks we were assigned was fielding calls from people whose power was out. Dedicated to holding the utilities accountable, WTOP reporters tracked the places where the companies hadn’t yet gotten the power back up and aired the grievances of the people affected.

Those people were out of patience. They called in from the farthest reaches of the region, irate that they were stuck in their homes, two feet of snow blocking their driveways, with no heat and no light and an indoor temperature hovering around 45 degrees. They felt abandoned and vulnerable. I felt for them – but I also couldn’t help but notice how our different choices left us in very different situations.

I was living in a small apartment in Adams Morgan, a central neighborhood in DC with buried power lines. (Although calls to bury above-ground power lines recently hit a fever pitch in DC, 65 percent of the city’s lines actually are underground – mostly in downtown areas.) As a result, our power never went out.

We didn’t have a car, so there was nothing to dig out. I just tucked my rain pants into my boots and trekked around, and when I wasn’t staying at the hotel near the newsroom I would walk the three miles to work since bus service was limited (i.e. for days after the storms, buses wouldn’t go up big hills).

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood just announced the 47 transportation projects in 34 states (and DC) that will receive a total of almost $500 million from the TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) program. It’s the fourth round of TIGER grants, bringing the total up to over $3 billion for innovative transportation projects.

The grayed-out portion of the dotted line will be completed, thanks to a TIGER grant connecting DC and Maryland neighborhoods by bike. Image: DDOT

Houston received $15 million to improve bicycle and pedestrian access to transit. The city with the most bike commuters in the state of Texas will get 7.9 miles of on-street bike lanes, 2.8 miles of sidewalks, and 7.5 miles of off-street paths for that money. And Chicago got $20 million for infrastructure improvements to the high-traffic 95th Street terminal and another $10.4 million to untangle freight and passenger trains, potentially reducing travel times by 50 minutes.

Here in DC, $10 million will build four miles of missing links in the bike network, connecting hundreds of miles of off-street bike paths between DC and Maryland. Shane Farthing, director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, says there’s not much commuter traffic in that area now, partly because the connection to the vast bike network in the near Maryland suburbs was nearly impossible to access from many parts of DC. But this grant will be transformative, he says. “I don’t think a lot of people realize that for a lot of DC, you can actually bike to the University of Maryland faster than you can drive or metro. And this will make that possible for an entire new segment of the District.”

The College Park metro station is a half-hour walk to the University of Maryland library. This could create a whole new transportation option for the 58 percent of UMD students that commute to school from off-campus — and could make attendance possible for many in the District who otherwise would have no reasonable way of getting there. The university is a 25-minute bike ride from the neighborhood in DC the new trail will connect to. That neighborhood is a low-income, predominantly African-American part of DC, east of the Anacostia River.

Due to a lot of time-consuming and relatively expensive environmental remediation that needs to happen, the bike route will be built in stages. Before the off-road facilities can be built, they’ll install on-street signage, making neighborhood bicycle connections that will remain in place, Farthing says, even after the off-road path is built. “It’s the best of both worlds,” he said.

The League of American Bicyclists points out some other exciting bike projects that were awarded TIGER grants, including one to put downtown Concord, New Hampshire on a bicycle-friendly road diet, another to connect downtown Tampa by completing important greenways, and another to include bike lanes on a new bridge in the Maine bicycle system.

However, another DC proposal to improve bike and pedestrian access to seven transit stations and hubs was rejected, unfortunately — one of many disappointed applicants this time. This round of TIGER was vastly oversubscribed, like every round before it. According to U.S. DOT, the 703 applications the agency received amounted to 20 times the amount of money available.

A few notes from U.S. DOT about the winners:

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Last Thursday, Fox News commentator Chris Wallace was interrupted in the middle of a radio interview with KFTK, a St. Louis talk radio station, when one of D.C.’s finest gave him some fair and balanced treatment for driving while using a handheld cell phone — a practice banned by the District of Columbia in 2004.

Huge hat tip to Mediaite (via DCist) for the audio below.

DCist’s Ben Freed adds: “Driving while holding a phone to one’s head is, of course, inadvisable, but it’s not actually an arrest-worthy offense. Simply failing to use a hands-free device comes with a $100 fine, not a trip to the pokey.”

Other sites have confirmed that Wallace was pulled over, but not arrested. Maybe he was just protesting a massive government conspiracy bent on installing a totalitarian regime, or something.

Source: Center for Neighborhood Technology via Better Cities and Towns

$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.

Portland rules in Bicycling Magazine's 2012 bike-friendly city rankings. Photo: Bike Portland

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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A recent US News and World Report article explored the economics of bike sharing — noting that cities weren’t profiting from their new systems.

Since its launch, Washington D.C.'s Capital Bikeshare has recovered 97 percent of its operating costs through user fees. Photo: Bike Arlington

That is hardly news. Few cities expected the popular form of public transportation infrastructure to be a cash cow.

More remarkable is the news that Washington, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare, the country’s premier system, is nearly operationally profitable, according to the U.S. News story:

Since its start in September 2010, Capital Bikeshare has taken in $2.47 million and spent $2.54 million on operating expenses. And that doesn’t even include the expensive things, like docking stations—which can cost well over $50,000 each—plus the bikes themselves. Those capital costs, at $7 million thus far, are covered by federal funds.

Roads, transit, sidewalks — no one is going around asking why they aren’t profitable in their first year and a half. No one expects that.

From a purely financial standpoint, bike-sharing in Washington is a much better value, as Streetsblog Network blog Systemic Failure points out:

That is an astounding 97% “farebox” recovery. To put in perspective, the average rail system in the US is lucky to earn back more than 50%. The typical bus service gets back less than 20%.

And then there is the capital cost — a whopping $7 million. By comparison, a single 70-seat BART railcar will cost over $5 million.

There are dozens of reasons why bike-sharing is sweeping the country. The fact that they are cheap to build and operate, compared with the alternatives, is just icing on the cake.

The Bikes Belong Foundation has chosen six cities to fast track physically protected bikeway designs that make cycling safer and more accessible to a wide range of people.

Photo: NYC DOT/Bikes Belong

Austin, Chicago, Memphis, Portland, San Francisco and Washington D.C. will receive a leg up from Bikes Belong’s new “Green Lane Project.” The two-year, intensive technical assistance program is intended to help these cities develop protected on-street bike lanes and make this type of bike infrastructure a mainstream street design in the U.S.

The program attracted a total of 42 applicants, said project director Martha Roskowski, from “established leaders such as Minneapolis and Boulder” to relative newcomers like Wichita, Miami, and Pittsburgh.

“They are a range of sizes, spread across the country, and at various stages in terms of developing networks for bicycles,” said Roskowski. “What they share is a strong commitment to rethinking how city streets are used and making room for bicycles.”

Bikes Belong expects cities across the nation to benefit from the program, whether or not they were selected. The idea is to help build technical expertise on the design and implementation of protected bike lanes, and to collect data on how they perform.

Protected bike lanes are widely employed in countries that have achieved high rates of cycling, such as the Netherlands. In America they were pioneered by the New York City Department of Transportation in 2007, and have since been implemented in Washington, D.C., Portland, and Chicago.

Protected lanes have been shown to be safer than biking in the street and more likely to encourage people to take up cycling. But they are considered “experimental” treatments in the gospel of traffic engineering, the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which has stymied their adoption throughout the United States.

“The selected cities have ambitious goals and a vision for bicycling supported by their elected officials and communities,” said Bikes Belong President Tim Blumenthal. “They are poised to get projects on the ground quickly and will serve as excellent examples for other interested cities.”

The Green Lane Project represents a more focused iteration of the Bikes Belong Foundation’s Bicycling Design Best Practices Program, which has been dedicated to hosting workshops and taking city officials and engineers on study tours to leading U.S. and European cities.

Photo: Rally for Roads

The House of Representatives is back in town, and its members still don’t have a transportation bill. In fact, they probably won’t have one for weeks. But two groups holding conferences in Washington this week would be more than happy to help them out in the meantime.

First, the League of American Bicyclists kicks off its annual National Bike Summit tomorrow. Wednesday’s program will feature a welcome speech delivered by secretary of transportation and noted bicycle commuter Ray LaHood. (Streetsblog will be covering the Bike Summit all week long.)

In a twist that probably can’t be considered purely coincidental, tomorrow will also see the highway construction industry hold its second annual Rally for Roads on the National Mall.

The Hill reports that the Rally for Roads will be attended by a litany of House transportation committee members, including Chairman John Mica, ranking member Nick Rahall, and highway subcommittee chair John Duncan. A few congressmen will make appearances at both events, including Reps. Peter DeFazio and Tom Petri, both of whom have voiced their support for bike-ped and transit programs in the House.

With the fate of the House transportation bill still undecided, both groups are hoping to win key battles over federal funding. Bike advocates will be looking to protect the programs that keep streets safe for cyclists and pedestrians, which would be eliminated under the most recent House propsal. The road builders will be looking for looser regulations on labor and environmental review, but they will also be seeking more money — money they stand to gain if bike-ped and transit programs are de-funded.

Highway builders have long been an imposing lobbying force in Washington. But rather than using their influence to promote sustainable development or multimodalism, their chief objective is usually to get the government to spend as much money as possible on highway ingredients — steel, asphalt, cement, and so on. Though they certainly don’t reflect all of America’s transportation needs, especially for cities, highway builders’ voices are often the loudest to be heard — and just as often the only ones to whom Congress listens.

However, as we saw when the House threatened to cut off dedicated funding for transit, the highway builders are not the only voice in the debate anymore.

Back in December, Clackamas, Oregon-based United Streetcar won an $8.7 million contract to build two vehicles for Washington, DC’s streetcar system, currently under construction. The timing could not have been better for House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Ranking Member Nick Rahall, who had just introduced legislation to tighten “Buy America” requirements on future transportation investments. Rahall had even invited United Streetcar’s president, Chandra Brown, to speak at the press conference, to demonstrate how Buy America can benefit and revive the domestic rolling stock manufacturing industry.

Two Czech-built streetcars for Washington, DC. Two more were to be built in Oregon. Photo: The City Fix

But this week, the District Department of Transportation has withdrawn the award, in response to a complaint filed by a competing bidder. As the Washington Business Journal reported yesterday:

[Czech company] Inekon built the District’s first two streetcars. It offered to build the next two, slated to run on the H Street/Benning Road line, for $9.5 million. While its bid was higher than United Streetcar’s, Inekon argued in its protest that the winning contractor’s low technical score should have ruled it ineligible for the award.

Railway Age Magazine reports that United Streetcar’s Brown has “received no formal notice of the cancellation of our contract” according to a statement.

The decision could certainly be a setback for DC, but it could have national policy implications as well. Rep. Rahall’s Buy America proposal would require 100% of transit rolling stock components to be American-made by 2016. But United Streetcar is still the only domestic streetcar manufacturer, and if its “low technical score” in DC does indeed disqualify it, then other budding streetcar networks will surely take notice. (While it’s not clear exactly how the United Streetcar product failed to measure up, Inekon accused the company of failing to meet specifications in the city’s request for proposals.)

And there are plenty of streetcar networks in building or planning stages across the country. In today’s Fast Lane Blog post, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood showered praise on Dallas, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Tampa, Cincinnati, and Tucson — another United Streetcar client — saying, “this streetcar revival means greater mobility and more American jobs. DOT will continue to improve public transit services by supporting these critical projects…” (LaHood’s remarks coincide with the start of the first ever American Streetcar Conference in Portland, OR.) The possibility remains, however, that USDOT’s support for streetcar expansions could be complicated by Congress’s own attempts to ramp up Buy America requirements.

Read the Washington Contract Appeals Board’s decision on DDOT here [PDF].