Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The National Bike Summit begins tomorrow, bringing together an estimated 750 cycling advocates. They’ll hear from NYCDOT Chief Janette Sadik-Khan, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and they’ll descend on Congress in droves, plastic bike pins fastened to their lapels, to deliver a message about safe cycling access.

Don't look to AASHTO's manual for advice about bike boxes. The organization's guide, which often dictates whether projects get federal funding, does not incorporate the latest developments in cycling infrastructure. Photo: World Changing

We’ll be covering the Bike Summit like other Washington reporters cover the State of the Union. For people who care about sustainable transportation, this event is a high point of the year.

As bicycling infrastructure improves, advocates refine their demands. These days, the call is not just for bike lanes, but separated bike lanes. Bike Summit attendees are sure to be talking about it. Yesterday, Streetfilms released a new video about floating parking and separated cycletracks. And last month, Harvard’s School of Public Health released a study about the superior safety of separated bike tracks.

So why does the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials still advise against cycle tracks on safety grounds? AASHTO’s design manual is the “bible” used by traffic engineers and planners around the country, along with the FHWA’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, and it can be hard for localities to get approval — or funding — for projects that deviate from the prescriptions laid out in these guides.

A group of urban transportation officials, called Cities for Cycling, has been working to update AASHTO’s Bikeway Design Standard Manual and the MUTCD for years to include better cycling infrastructure. Eric Gilliland, executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, the sponsoring organization for Cities for Cycling, says the Harvard study confirms the benefits of separated bike lanes. “The trend, it seems, in bikeway planning is to provide more of a buffer between bicycle traffic and main street traffic, from a safety standpoint but also from an encouragement standpoint,” Gilliland said.

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Bet you weren’t expecting to hear any good news from the floor of the House today, were you? Turns out not everyone in Congress is as axe-happy as some high-profile Republicans. For example, Amtrak survived one attempt to cut all its funding and another to cut $447 million. (Amtrak funding does stand to lose $224 million in cuts already included in HR 1, the budget bill for the rest of FY2011.)

A bike/ped trail in Binghamton, NY funded by the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

Over the weekend, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy sent out a pre-emptive action alert, afraid that any spending-cut frenzy would inevitably end up targeting the always vulnerable “transportation enhancements” program that funds bike/ped projects. RTC feared Safe Routes to School and other trail funding would lose out too.

“We knew there was going to be this open amendment process with hundreds of amendments flying around,” said RTC’s policy VP Kevin Mills. “And with some people critical of these core programs, we were on alert.”

You can take your hands off your eyes now – it’s not as bad as they feared.

No amendment directly targeted the transportation enhancements program. An amendment that would cut funding for the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund, which funds some trails, was defeated by a “nail-biting” 213-216 vote, with 32 Republicans voting against the cuts.

It’s not all good news, of course. The House has passed lots of Republican amendments to cut even deeper than the proposed bill allowed, while restricting Democratic amendments to restore funding by insisting that any funding added back in had to be taken out somewhere else.

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If you attended last week’s annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, you were one of 10,900 people presenting 2,200 papers and 2,500 slide presentations on everything from the conspicuity of pavement markings to complete streets for blind pedestrians.

Some of the bicycle research presented at TRB, like Jennifer Dill's work on route selection, could be of great use to advocates. Photo: L.E. Baskow / Pamplin Media Group

TRB changed in 1976 from a highway research board to a multimodal focus, and now “TRB can be just about anything to anyone depending on where you are in the industry,” attendee Erik Weber told Streetsblog. He works on mobility for seniors at the Federal Transit Administration. And there’s a TRB subcommittee that focuses on senior transportation issues. “Whether you’re an academic, or a professional, or a policymaker, there are sessions for any of that.”

For some policy types, though, the strict focus on research can be alienating. “It’s a research crowd, and they’re wary of people that want to talk policy,” says Andy Clarke, Executive Director of the League of American Bicyclists. Still, he says, it’s encouraging to see how bicycle research has taken off. “When I first went to TRB in 1988, there were about seven people out of a crowd of 7,000 that were interested in bicycle issues. Now there are two pages of bike-specific sessions on the agenda.”

And some of the research coming out could result in better bicycling facilities.

Take, for example, Jennifer Dill’s research at Portland State on how cyclists choose routes. By monitoring a cyclist’s entire trip, Dill can tell what the shortest route would have been, and how much the cyclist was willing to go out of his way to ride on a bike boulevard or cycletrack or to avoid a steep hill. It helps engineers understand how strongly cyclists prefer to use bike facilities and where those facilities should go. Ralph Buehler’s work on the correlation between miles of bike facilities and higher mode share for bikes has a similar impact.

Still, as a research institution that keeps some distance from the world of transportation activism, TRB isn’t always focused on the research that would be the most useful to advocates.

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Rep. Richard Hanna, recently named the vice chair of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, is one of 19 freshmen Republicans on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. (Duncan Hunter is the 20th new Republican on the committee, but he’s not a freshman.) He represents New York’s 24th District, which includes Cooperstown, Utica, Norwich and the Finger Lakes. He’s a licensed pilot, an NRA member, and the founder of a crisis fund for women. We caught up with him to talk transportation and asked him some questions from our readers.

Richard Hanna outside the old GE building in Utica. Image: Bryon Ackerman / Utica Observer-Dispatch

Streetsblog: [Yesterday] was your debut on the T&I Committee. I wanted to ask about your priorities for the reauthorization. Are you hoping for a six year bill?

Hanna: Yes, absolutely. And Chairman Mica has made it clear that that’s also his goal. So I think if we work together, hopefully we can put something together before the August recess.

SB: And you owned a construction company.

RH: Yes, maybe you heard what I said; I said I hope to add value at the intersection of practicality and what goes on here. So we’ll see if my world and this world have something in common.

SB: There’s some tension between building highways and building transit: which is more cost effective, what should we be focusing our time and scarce resources on – where do you come down on that?

RH: I’m going to wait and see. I think mass transit and high speed rail are interesting concepts. But you have to remember, we’re at a point in our history – it’s not like building the transcontinental highway or railroad – it’s a little different now. We’re really in a budget crisis and we have to be a little more thoughtful about where we spend money. But if something makes sense – if there are corridors that are dense enough that at some point they can break even or self-support mass transit between certain areas – I’d certainly be happy to look at it.

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Streetsblog Capitol Hill caught up with Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) yesterday after the T&I Committee meeting wrapped up. He’s the only new Republican on the committee who’s not also a new member of Congress. He followed his father, also named Duncan Hunter, into the seat in 2008. Hunter is on the Republican Study Committee that recently pushed for cutting $100 billion from the federal budget. New to transportation and infrastructure issues, Hunter has mainly focused on military matters and immigration.

Photo from Duncan Hunter's Congressional website

Streetsblog: You’ve recently joined the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. What are your priorities for the committee in this session?

Hunter: Southern California is pretty easy. In the past there was only one Republican Californian on Transportation – Gary Miller – and he’s Orange County. There’s now three: Jeff Denham from north California and myself in south California. We all have different needs; water’s one of them. I asked to be on the Water Subcommittee and I am. We have a lot of military bases too, we have desalinization issues we’re working with, all of us having water shortages.

And I kind of like the fact, frankly – it sounds kind of corny – but the constitution talks about having a military and being able to pay for your postal roads. It’s one thing Congress does and it’s nice to be able to do something constitutional here. It’s actually backed up and actually it’s in the constitution. I like that.

SB: Are you interested in looking for ways of getting people out of their cars and into other modes of transportation?

DH: Sure – where it’s feasible. In San Diego, it’s not feasible. San Diego’s one of those places where a lot of people live who work in the more expensive places in Southern California and they can’t afford to live there. They have to drive in – and in my district, everybody works everywhere. So no, it’s not one of my priorities at all to get people out of their cars. I like my car.

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“We need to take care of this sooner than later,” Sen. Barbara Boxer said this morning in reference to a surface transportation reauthorization. “We can’t keep doing extension after extension.”

Photo from Zagasi

Before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee even has all its members named (that should happen in the next day or so, according to Sen. Boxer), it held a hearing to get the ball rolling on a new transportation bill.

“China is building railroads that will be going hundreds of miles an hour,” said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), “while America retreats more towards the rickshaw.”

Top committee Republican James Inhofe is all in favor of a big infrastructure bill, but his brand of support includes limiting the scope of the bill. “Our problem in getting the bill we need to get is really not as much the Democrats as it is the Republicans,” he acknowledged. “‘Cause I can hear it right now. They will get it to the floor and say, wait a minute, we’ve got museums in here and these other things.”

Later he clarified that “these other things” are “state capitol domes and bike trails,” which let loose a flurry of trash-talking about bike trails. “I wasn’t aware there were things in the infrastructure bill that aren’t real infrastructure,” said Raymond Poupore of the National Construction Alliance, who was testifying before the committee. “I always thought it was just highways.” And Bill Dorey of the Associated General Contractors of America added, “It’s hard for me to defend a bike path.”

Inhofe suggested that getting back to a meat-and-potatoes highway bill was the key to Republican support. “The best way I can get the full cooperation of the Republicans is if we took this back to the way it was originally, when we had the highway trust fund and the people who paid to use our highways would confine it to maintenance, new construction, bridges, highways then that would be sellable to the conservative community,” he said.

Some Democrats did rush to cyclists’ defense. Boxer herself let it be known that “to me, a bike path is a way of transport; a lot of my people use it to get to work.”

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This was a big week for bike advocates: They had a pow-wow with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, launched a new coalition, and refined their strategy for the 112th Congress.

LaHood listens to Bike League director Andy Clarke. Photo: Todd Solomon

LaHood blogged about the meeting, encouraging bike advocates to stay engaged in the political process. He assured advocates that they “have a friend in the administration” but warned that they’ll have to work harder than ever to educate members of Congress. Beneath those words is a clear message about the challenges they’ll face in communicating the benefits of federal funding for bicycle infrastructure to fiscal super-conservatives.

That’s a tough pill to swallow for advocates who’ve been working their tails off for decades to support biking and walking as modes of transportation. “At some point we’d like to think this battle is over,” Caron Whitaker of America Bikes told Streetsblog. “We fought it in ‘91, we fought it in ‘98, we fought it in 2003, we fought it in 2005. And we’re prepared to fight it again. But given all the success at the local level, it feels like Congress is increasingly out of step.”

Speaking of local efforts: also this week, advocates got together to work on a strategy to better coordinate efforts at the state and local levels. “With the contraction of the federal bill you’re going to see even less in the way of mandates coming out of the federal level, and decision-making at the state and local level is going to be even more important,” says Randy Neufeld, who’s heading up the effort. He told Streetsblog that a new coalition effort to focus on state and local campaigns will be launched at the Bike Summit in March.

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A bummer of a jobs report came out today, showing that although unemployment dropped to its lowest point in 19 months, it’s still way higher than economists had hoped.

But here’s some good news: according to the League of American Bicyclists, bike infrastructure creates more jobs for the money than roads.

How can that be, if the same amount of money is spent? A new report from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst [PDF] examined the costs of engineering, construction, and materials for different projects in Baltimore and found that bike lanes create about twice as many jobs as road construction for the same amount of money.

“The difference lies in the varying labor intensity and the ratio of engineering costs to construction expenses across project types,” writes the League’s Darren Flusche. “Footway repairs and bike lane signing are labor intensive, meaning that a greater share of the total cost goes to pay people than in material heavy road projects.”

So if lawmakers aren’t swayed by the environmental or public health arguments for greater investment in cycling infrastructure, maybe they’ll get on board once they see that they can get a greater bang for their job-creation bucks by paving cycletracks, not highways.

We couldn’t put a bow on 2010 until we’d thanked those who contributed to the cause of sustainable transportation and smart growth last year and shaken our fist at those who’d done their darnedest for sprawl and highways. Check out our first two installments of national, state and local Streetsie winners. Here are our parting thoughts and your final votes. Then we can really move into 2011.

Ray LaHood stands on a table to thank bicyclists for working with him to reduce car dependency. Photo: Jonathan Maus

Happiest Occasion: 2010 did have its winning moments. It’s hard to debate that LaHood’s “Tabletop Speech” at the Bike Summit in March was one of the best – along with his subsequent declaration that “this is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.” It still gives me chills.

LaHood literally jumped on a table in front of hundreds of cyclists and said that people around the country “want out of their cars; they want out of congestion; they want to live in livable neighborhoods.” And then he thanked the cyclists for hanging in there with the DOT as it transitions to being an engine of sustainability. “I’m very, very grateful!” Nearly 40 percent of Streetsblog readers agreed that this was the highlight of the year.

Good stuff, indeed. And we have LaHood to thank for some of the other bright spots last year, like two rounds of TIGER grants, providing over $2 billion to states for innovative transportation projects.

Some a-ha moments at the federal level won us over. For one, the feds are taking big strides on bringing health and environmental impacts, as well as performance metrics, into consideration when they make grants (instead of just looking at costs). And they’re realizing that transportation reform is health reform – Michelle Obama’s obesity task force even made the connection between active transportation options and healthy kids. Federal funding of bike/ped projects dipped from 2009’s all time high, but it’s still at impressive levels.

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In July of last year, when AAA launched their roadside bicycle repair service, cyclists got a warm fuzzy feeling for a minute and thought AAA was about as bike-friendly as an automobile organization could be. That bubble burst in July when AAA Mid-Atlantic President and CEO Don Gagnon editorialized that highway trust fund money should be reserved just for highways [PDF].

This trail goes right past the AAA HQ in Heathrow, Florida. Bike/ped advocates say AAA is trying to take dedicated funding away from trails. Image: American Trails

The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy shot back:

“Highway Trust Fund” is a misleading name dating to the 1950s and the founding of the Interstate system. It is a transportation trust fund that has supported transit for 40 years and trails, bicycling and walking for nearly 20 years.

Since September, RTC President Keith Laughlin has engaged in correspondence with AAA representatives, asking them to change their position. AAA insists they’re not trying to de-fund bike programs – they just think those programs should be funded through general revenues, not the trust fund. “That’s like, after 20 years of stellar job performance in a highly specialized field with scant job prospects, your boss fires you but says he hopes you find another job somewhere else,” says RTC.

This morning, Rails-to-Trails staff and members took their message directly to AAA headquarters in Florida (in the Congressional district represented by incoming Transportation Committee Chair John Mica.) They rode there on the federally-funded Seminole Wekiva Trail—“a trail in AAA’s front yard that, ironically, was developed using the same funding programs AAA would eliminate”— to hand-deliver petitions with 51,377 signatures. Two-thirds of the signatures were from AAA members.

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