Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Earlier today we brought you a story about a new and potentially dangerous technological innovation – Facebook in cars. To help end the week on a higher note, here’s some far more encouraging news on the transportation tech front.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in issuing a challenge to software developers: Create three new programs that combine real-time transit, bike-sharing, and even food truck data, in order to demonstrate how transit and bike-sharing complement each other.

Boston rolled out their new 60-station, 600-cycle bike-sharing system, called Hubway and sponsored by shoe maker New Balance, last July. It has been so successful — logging 140,000 trips in just four months — that Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council is overseeing its expansion to 90 stations and 900 bikes starting next year. But in addition to upping the number of bikes, Boston hopes to make Hubway more useful to its customers in other ways.

The MBTA/MassDOT challenge is really three separate challenges:

• A software application that combines transit schedules and real-time Hubway bike availability to display possible connections between the two modes;
• A visualization of “A day in the Life” of Boston’s transit and bike-sharing systems, possibly along the lines of what Oliver O’Brien has done for London; and, as a bonus,
• The BLT (Bikes, Lunch, & T) Challenge, with the goal of helping “residents and visitors learn about and get to Boston’s food trucks.”

The winners of the first two challenges will each receive a year-long transit pass and a year-long membership to Hubway; all three challenge winners will receive a free pass to area food truck festivals.

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They’ve logged more than 140,000 rides over just four months. And now Boston’s brand new Hubway bike sharing system is packing it in for the cold New England winter.

But when it returns in the spring, it will be expanding, adding stations in Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline. In total, the barely four-month-old bike sharing system will add 30 stations and roughly 300 bicycles — a 50 percent increase, according to a report from The Boston Globe.

Hubway has come out of the gate roaring, surpassing early ridership figures from some of the country’s most well known bike sharing systems, according to the paper.

Its first 2 ½ months, Hubway recorded 100,000 station-to-station rides, significantly eclipsing the pace of similar systems in Minneapolis (where Nice Ride needed six months to reach that mark) and Denver (where B-cycle needed 7 ½ months).

And it seems Boston’s neighboring cities and towns were feeling left out of the bike sharing excitement. Jeff Levine, director of planning and community development in Brookline, told the Globe that the “number one question” he gets is, “When is Hubway coming to Brookline?”

Local news site BostInno credited the system with helping make Boston more bike friendly overall. Writer Lisa DeCanio said that despite some lingering ambivalence about biking in Boston, growing enthusiasm cleared the way for the removal of 71 parking spots on Massachusetts Avenue to make way for a bike lane. She called the Hubway a “shining success,” noting that even the Bruins have gotten on board, “with players riding to and from practice.”

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Whether it’s just a short walk down the street or a five-mile bike ride, the journey between home and station is a major factor in people’s decision to take public transit.

For the transit officials and livability advocates gathered at the Rail~Volution conference this week, that key piece of the journey is known as the Last Mile. Frequent service and affordable fares, on their own, won’t entice people to make that trip. The route to the station also has to appeal to pedestrians and bicyclists.

Every transit trip is a multi-modal journey, pointed out Alan Lehto, director of project planning for TriMet in Portland, at the start of a panel yesterday. “Everybody who rides transit is a pedestrian or cyclist on at least one end of their trip,” Lehto said. “Getting people to and from the station is fundamentally important.”

But that aspect of transit is often overlooked. In fact, look no further than Portland itself, Lehto said. In a recent study, TriMet evaluated all 7,000 bus and transit stations within the region and found major gaps in bike-ped accessibility. “We realized that 1,500 of those don’t even have a sidewalk,” Lehto said.

Ensuring that transit stations are served by adequate pedestrian infrastructure is the bare minimum required to connect people to transit. Making the Last Mile truly appealing takes more than laying down sidewalks and adding a few bike racks.

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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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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’.

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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This is the third installment of Streetsblog Capitol Hill’s series on key governor’s races. Earlier we brought you stories about a candidate who likes bikes but isn’t sure about transit in Tennessee, and the choice between light rail and bus rapid transit in Maryland. Here we turn our attention to Colorado.

Colorado is a classic swing state. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by a margin of just 3.5 percent. The state voted for Obama in 2008, the first time it went blue in a presidential contest since Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. And before that, you had to go all the way back to LBJ.

But now this purple state may be losing its red. Gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes’ trainwreck of a campaign could leave the GOP a minor party in the state of Colorado. Could it have something to do with his bizarre allegations that bike-sharing in Denver is a UN plot? Or his zeal to de-regulate the oil and gas industries?

As Talking Points Memo reported yesterday, if Maes fails to attract just 10 percent of the votes next Tuesday, the GOP will be saddled with minor party status in Colorado until 2014. A recent Denver Post poll shows him at 9 percent. The Democratic-affiliated PPP poll gives him just 5 percent. Minor party status would leave the GOP at a serious disadvantage by limiting their fundraising and ceding their spot at the top of the ballot.

That doesn’t mean Democrat John Hickenlooper will just cruise into the governor’s mansion though. American Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo (formerly a Republican member of Congress) is making this race a contest, with Hickenlooper ahead by about 6 percent, according to the polling average cited on Real Clear Politics. They’re competing for the seat being vacated by Democrat Bill Ritter, who was rated the country’s greenest governor last year.

Tancredo is too singularly obsessed with immigration to talk much about transportation or environmental issues. But not Maes.

“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” he said in August of Denver’s bike-sharing program, which Hickenlooper had helped to launch as the city’s mayor. “This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms.”

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The Colorado governor’s race was always going to be one for sustainable transportation advocates to keep an eye on. The likely Democratic nominee, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, has built a solid resume of support for transit and bicycling. But recent events suggest the green transportation/livable streets stakes may be waaaaay higher than expected.

It turns out that Dan Maes, an insurgent with Tea Party cred vying for the GOP nomination, already has his sights trained on Hickenlooper’s transportation initiatives and their sinister origins.

The week after Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Hickenlooper, and a few other guys in suits saddled up to try out Denver’s new bike-share system, B-Cycle, Maes weighed in on what this advance in transportation really means. Read all about the paranoia in the Denver Post:

Maes is warning voters that Hickenlooper’s policies,
particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are "converting Denver
into a United Nations community."

"This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed," Maes told
about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in
Centennial.

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s
efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were
harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes "that’s exactly the attitude
they want you to have."

"This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms," Maes said.

I work in the shadow of UN global headquarters and, being an enterprising journalist, I’ve seen a draft of this plan. It goes like this: First they lull you into submission with the public bikes. Then they nullify the Bill of Rights, outlaw the English language, and strip away your American citizenship. Then they seize your SUV.

Anyway… Before you dismiss Maes as a fringe character who just showed too much of his crazy side to gain statewide public office, consider this. Three days ago he was edging out his competition in the race for the GOP nomination. If he’s elected, he’ll basically control Colorado DOT’s billion-dollar annual budget. So, all you global government-supporting bike riders out there, there’s no guarantee this will be a laughing matter in November.

The Transportation Planning Board (TPB), the Washington D.C. area's metropolitan planning organization (MPO), recently made a pitch to the U.S. DOT for a share of the economic stimulus law's $1.5 billion in innovative transport grants. Among the suggested projects was $13 million for bike sharing, enough to expand the D.C. program into a regional network that would use wi-fi internet to guide travelers.

How did the TPB make the case for federal help with bike-share expansion? At a Capitol briefing held yesterday by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, TPB planning director Ron Kirby laid out his numbers [PDF].

TPB found that expanding bike-share would pay for itself nearly three times over during the next 20 years, yielding $625 million in benefits at a cost of $231 million. But Kirby emphasized that the estimated emissions reductions of more bike sharing represented a relatively small share of its total benefits.

The project "would not be beneficial on CO2 alone," Kirby said, adding that the potential time and trip-cost savings of bike-share played a key role in TPB's proposal.

"Many of these projects have multiple benefits, and we need to approach it that way," he added.

Kirby and Caitlin Rayman, assistant secretary for policy at the Maryland DOT, used the briefing to outline their area's plans to make transportation networks less carbon-dependent and more efficient.

Rayman, however, stressed that not every MPO or state DOT has the experience and skills needed to craft effective plans for cutting transportation emissions -- plans that would be legally mandated by the pending congressional climate change bills.

Should the climate bill provision become law, Rayman said, states and MPOs should receive "technical assistance from the federal government" on the process. "I can't see [it] being a good strategy for state plans or MPO plans to get rejected," Rayman said.

With the dialogue in Washington starting to consider a substantial future role for MPOs -- check out Mark Muro, Matt Yglesias, and Streetsblog coverage from last week for more on this -- support appears to be growing for a dedicated federal role in assisting metro area planners.

I was in Seville last week for the first time since February 2007, and in the intervening year there's been something of a transportation revolution in the city. It's most visibly evident in the Sevici bike-share bikes (bicis in Spanish) that are everywhere. The system launched in April 2007, and ultimately there will be 250 stations and 2,500 bikes spread throughout the city of some 700,000 residents.

I saw the bikes in use by locals in all parts of town, including the rather bleak office parks and university complexes on the west side of the Guadalquivir River. The cycles seem less popular among tourists, although they're a great way to get around the very flat terrain -- and, at 5 euros for a weekly membership with the first half hour of each ride free, and very reasonable rates for longer use, they're a good option.

One of the most amazing things to me was how quickly the city has put in an extensive bike-lane network. The green-painted lanes lead you for miles and miles through the city's neighborhoods, and as far as I could tell, they're all protected. In many places, this is done by putting the bike lane in the street shielded by a low concrete barrier -- enough to deter cars, but far less unsightly than the Jersey barriers used in some parts of New York. Elsewhere -- and here is the revelation, as far as I'm concerned -- the bike lane shared the sidewalk with pedestrians. Not once, in nearly a week, did I see this causing any distress to pedestrians or cyclists (although one resident did grumble to me, somewhat half-heartedly, about reckless cyclists).

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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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