Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Jeffrey Tumlin was managing transportation programs at Stanford in the mid-1990s, when he made an important finding: It was cheaper for the university to pay people not to drive than to build new parking structures.

Offering employees just $90 a year not to drive to campus was enough to entice many of them to use transit, carpools, or bicycles. Meanwhile, the annualized cost of each parking space can range from about $650 for surface spots in suburban locations to over $4,000 for structured spaces in cities, according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute [PDF].

Biking means big savings at Stanford. Image: FHWA

Stanford offered further incentive by raising parking prices 15 percent. Then, it invested $4 million in bicycle facilities, including turning a main road through campus into a bike and transit mall. This $4 million enticed 900 people out of their cars and onto bicycles, according to a case study in Transportation & Sustainable Campus Communities, by Will Toor and Spenser Havlick. Building parking facilities to accommodate those 900 people would have cost $18 million.

What Stanford had discovered was “transportation demand management,” or strategies to minimize transportation costs by reducing driving. Today almost every college and university in the country employs some form of TDM, whether it’s providing discounted transit passes for students or offering special parking rates to carpoolers.

Colleges and universities — by nature of their fixed locations and limited resources — are excellent laboratories for transportation innovation, says Tumlin, who now works for the firm Nelson\Nygaard.

“Even the well-funded institutions have to make a choice about putting money into parking or putting money in a classroom,” said Tumlin.

Many schools are now well ahead of even the most progressive cities and state DOTs when it comes to saving money and improving public health by reducing car trips.

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Percent change in average residential sales prices relative to the region, 2006-11. Image: APTA and NAR

If you live close to a transit station, chances are you’ve weathered the recession better than your friends who don’t.

Your transportation costs are probably lower, since you can take transit instead of driving. Transit-served areas are usually more walkable and bikeable too, multiplying your options. And while home values plummeted during a recession that was triggered by a massive housing bubble, your home probably held its value relatively well – if you live near transit.

The National Association of Realtors and the American Public Transportation Association commissioned the Center for Neighborhood Technology to study the impact of transit access on home values during the recession. For the report, “The New Real Estate Mantra: Location Near Public Transportation” [PDF], CNT looked at five metro regions — Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

While nearly everyone in hard-hit cities experienced some setback from tanking housing prices, transit-served areas were largely insulated from the worst of it, CNT found:

Across the study regions, the transit shed outperformed the region as a whole by 41.6 percent. In all of the regions the drop in average residential sales prices within the transit shed was smaller than in the region as a whole or the non-transit area. Boston station areas outperformed the region the most (129 percent), followed by Minneapolis-St. Paul (48 percent), San Francisco and Phoenix (37 percent), and Chicago (30 percent).

This is consistent with a study released last year by the Center for Housing Policy showing that access to rail transit created a “transit premium” for nearby home values of between six and 50 percent. That study, like CNT’s, looked at Minneapolis and Chicago, as well as Portland. The Center for Transit Oriented Development has also looked at this phenomenon and found transit premiums as high as 150 percent.

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If bicyclists want to convince policymakers of the benefits of cycling, they need to stop talking about cycling. That was one major lesson of this year’s National Bike Summit, thanks to some strategic research done by a friendly consultant. So the Summit’s theme was “Bicycling Means Business” – and the economic impacts of a healthy cycling culture don’t end with the cyclist.

New York's Eighth Avenue bike lane increased profits for neighboring businesses. Photo: BicyclesOnly/Flickr

“Bicycling is a good investment, not just for cyclists, but for the entire city, state and region,” said the Bike League’s Darren Flusche at a morning panel of the Summit. He warned activists against showing up to a lawmaker’s office and spewing data without the personal narratives that really get people’s attention. But data is important to back up that personal testimony – and here’s the data.

Business Is Booming, Thanks to Bikes

As Janette Sadik-Khan told the Women’s Bike Forum, businesses on Eighth and Ninth Avenues in New York saw a 50 percent increase in sales receipts after protected bike lanes were installed on the corridor. On San Francisco’s Valencia Street, two-thirds of the merchants said bike lanes had been good for business. If a business has a bike-share station out front, bike-share users are more likely to patronize it.

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns told the story of a Memphis neighborhood where people, without authorization, spent $500 on paint and made their own bike lanes. Six months later, commercial rents on the strip had doubled, and all the storefronts – half of which had been vacant – were full.

Bike Infrastructure Is a Better Value Than Car Parking

Businesses in some cities are also beginning to see the spatial logic of the bicycle. After all, 12 bikes fit in one car parking space. Providing bike parking is also an extraordinary bargain compared to building structured parking: one parking space in a garage costs at least $15,000 to build and hundreds of dollars per year to maintain, while building a rack for two bikes costs $150 to $300.

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Congratulations are owed to Bob McDonnell. He’s scored a victory on his transportation funding plan, cementing his legacy (though infuriating conservatives, including his hand-picked successor). His achievement is being called the first bipartisan initiative to pass in Virginia in decades. And what does this great deed accomplish? Secure revenue to fuel a new era of wasteful road-building in the commonwealth of Virginia.

McDonnell's new transportation funding plan will pay for the wasteful and unnecessary expansion of Route 460. Photo: Doug Kerr/flickr

Virginia’s state House and Senate both voted this weekend to approve McDonnell’s funding plan for transportation, despite opposition from anti-tax activists. McDonnell’s original proposal to eliminate the gas tax entirely got massaged a little bit, turning into a 3.5 percent tax on the wholesale price of gas.

His proposal to raise the sales tax survived the legislature, as did the $100 tax on alternative fuels – an idea that is somewhat less backward now that some semblance of gas tax remains. Democrats hate it, though, and McDonnell has already signaled a vague willingness to “review” it.

The sales tax hike, however, is as backwards as ever. McDonnell is raising the sales tax 0.3 percent in most parts of the state but 6 percent in the populous Hampton Roads and northern Virginia areas. Much of the extra funds raised in those areas will go to local projects, but it still means the most urban and transit-rich areas, where most of the state’s non-drivers live, will pay more for a plan that disproportionately funds rural roads.

Drivers will pay five cents per gallon less than they did under the old gas tax, given current prices — shrinking their contribution by about 30 percent. Rather than strengthen the gas tax’s small but important incentive to drive less, McDonnell’s plan turns it the other way.

The other reason the sales tax hike won’t do the trick is that sales taxes aren’t an appropriate tool when what you need is a stable source of funding.

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The most significant part of the fiscal cliff deal for transportation was the bump that some transit riders got in the form of a commuter tax break that’s now on par with what drivers get. There are two more minor elements in the bill for transportation — both of them random enough to fit into the Washington Post’s list of “weird” provisions in the deal — but Congress punted on the bigger questions for another two months.

Electric motorcycle enthusiasts got a tax break in the fiscal cliff deal, but there wasn't much else for transportation. Photo: Engadget

Here’s what they did decide:

Extension of the Railroad Track Maintenance Credit. This provision has been around since 2004 but expired last January. It gives a tax credit to shortline railroads for maintenance work they do on their tracks. The fiscal cliff deal extends this tax credit until next January.

The credit encourages shortline railroads to invest in repair, rather than abandon the lines that serve 11,000 rail shippers in 49 states.

“This bill is not about saving short line railroads,” lobbyist Adam Nordstrom told a trade magazine. “It is about keeping short line railroad customers connected to the national railroad network with adequate and safe rail service, which is why this provision has such broad appeal.”

Extension of Credit For 2- or 3-Wheeled Plug-In Electric Vehicles. This tax credit, which can cover up to 10 percent of the vehicle’s cost up to a maximum of $2,500, applies to electric motorcycles but not electric bikes. To qualify, the vehicle has to have a 2.5 kilowatt-hour battery and be capable of speeds higher than 45 miles per hour. Electric bikes top out at about 20 miles an hour by law.

Meanwhile, the fiscal cliff agreement between Congress and the White House postponed the day of reckoning for the “budget sequester” two more months. The cuts in the sequester included an 8 percent reduction in all discretionary spending, which would have taken a bite out of new transit construction and Amtrak funding. The threat of those cuts still hangs over the next round of budget negotiations, which face a March 1 deadline.

At that time, the debt ceiling will need to be raised again and the interim federal budget will be expiring. So don’t expect a measured, thoughtful debate over solutions to long-term policy and economic issues. Expect another frenzied bout of negotiations, characterized more by finger-pointing and name-calling than substance, and another punt of some kind.

Matt Yglesias made an excellent point about NIMBYs over at Slate yesterday. Writing about opposition to multifamily residential construction in the tony neighborhood near Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis, Yglesias wondered how much value residents really place on keeping the area a “single-family residential community.”

The Alaskan Way Viaduct will cost 20 times more than drivers themselves will pay. So everyone else will pay instead.Image: WSDOT

Just because there’s value in something doesn’t mean people are willing to pay for it. Yglesias likens it to his third-generation iPad. “There would undeniably be a value in upgrading it to a fourth-generation iPad,” he says, but “it’s not worth what it would cost.”

So how much do the residents of Lake Calhoun value keeping their neighborhood single-family? Enough to let the entire rest of the city pay for it. But enough to pay for it themselves? Not a chance. Yglesias lays it out:

One thing [the] neighborhood group could do is look at the land they don’t want to see developed and buy it, thus leaving them free to do what they want with it. But they don’t want to do that, presumably because even though there’s “a value” in getting their way it’s less than the value of using the land for higher-density construction. What they want to do instead is get the city government to block the high-density construction, because that way the cost is spread across the entire population of Minneapolis in the form of foregone tax revenue.

The Minneapolis housing example reminds me of debates around the value of congestion-free roads. When roads are congested, many commuters jump to the “let’s build a wider road” approach, meaning all the taxpayers should pick up the tab to make their morning drive to work faster. But would these same commuters pay directly to speed their commute?

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So, how did Washington, D.C. — widely perceived as one of the most expensive cities in the country — end up topping a “most affordable” housing list?

First and most importantly, adjust for average income levels. Then, factor in transportation costs. Using that formula, the D.C. region is tops among 25 American metro areas in a new study from the Center for Housing Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology that looks at the ability of moderate-income households to shoulder the burden of housing and transportation costs [PDF]. The notoriously pricey Boston and San Francisco also make it into the top six.

The joint study came up with some other surprising findings. For example, it turns out it’s more affordable to live in New York City than it is to live in Cincinnati, based on the metrics used. And in general, renters fare better than homeowners in covering their costs of living.

In all 25 cities, middle-class households spent more than half of their incomes on combined housing and transportation costs between 2000 and 2010. Miami had it worst, with housing and transportation eating up 72 percent of the average income.

The study, titled “Losing Ground,” focuses on the disparity between income levels and steadily rising housing and transportation costs. Over the decade, researchers found, for every $1 in income gains, combined housing and transportation costs rose $1.75.

“Losing Ground” follows a 2006 study from the same organizations that took the novel approach of factoring in transportation costs to gauge the affordability of different metro areas. Measuring affordable living by looking strictly at housing costs, without including transportation, “tends to mislead people,” said Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, in a teleconference yesterday. Gathering this information comprehensively, he said, “has profound implications for a set of policy choices.”

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Increased business for a cafe on CicLAvia route benefiting from higher foot traffic and bicyclists stopped for a break.

In order for our society to tackle the challenge of creating a more walkable and bikeable North America, with the appropriate devotion of money, resources and public space, we have to build a solid political consensus. Unfortunately, some of the compelling reasons to prioritize active transportation have been unnecessarily politicized into partisan issues. We can approach this dilemma by attempting to trek up the hill of overturning deeply imbedded political opinions, or we can find universal common ground and build up from there.

The fact that issues like deliberate policy measures to cap or tax carbon dioxide emissions as part of climate change mitigation are untouchably controversial in much of the United States doesn’t mean we can’t move forward on an active transportation agenda sold under less controversial banners. This is why I love the growing dialogue around the economic benefits of bicycling and walking.

When it comes to walking, many businesses understand pretty intuitively the value of fostering good foot traffic — the ones that are surviving, anyway. With bicycling, however, a lot of business owners and political decision-makers just don’t get it at all. When Elly Blue wrote “Why an additional road tax for bicyclists would be unfair,” which was later followed by a series of posts on Grist under the banner of bikenomics, I started to view bicycling under a completely different lens. This view and emphasis on economics has influenced my own writing and advocacy ever since.

Elly Blue (left) & April Economides (right) At Pro Walk-Pro Bike

April Economides, principle of Green Octopus Consulting, who headed up the program to create bicycling friendly business districts in Long Beach, is another voice in the bike movement who has been emphasizing economics. She was recently hired by Bike Nation to manage their bike share program proposed in Long Beach. Blue and Economides got together for the first time for a presentation at Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike titled “Bikenomics & the Business Case for Bike-Friendly Business Districts”.

Their presentations complemented each other very well, with Blue setting up some of the conceptual framework for why looking at the economics of bicycling is important, while Economides outlined the nuts and bolts of the outreach and programs done so far in Long Beach. April encouraged people early on in her talk “to engage the business community; we can’t just preach to the choir”. Read more…

In the late eighties and nineties, every traffic issue the Tennessee Department of Transportation faced was assigned the same solution: a bypass. But over the years, the department has come around to a new way of doing things, according to 40-year TDOT veteran Ralph Comer. Comer says the current commissioner, John Schroer, wants to become known as the “no-bypass commissioner.” He simply believes there are usually more cost-effective ways of solving transportation problems.

"Context sensitive solutions" preserve main streets like this one in Franklin, Tennessee instead of turning them into high-speed thoroughfares. Photo: Westhaven

This way of thinking led Schroer, Comer, and the department into a conversation with Smart Growth America. They teamed up to examine the state of Tennessee’s transportation system and devise a path forward, bringing together an impressively diverse coalition, from the Tennessee Disability Coalition to the Sierra Club, the public transit association to the road builders association. One irrefutable fact brought them together: The TDOT project pipeline would cost nine times more to construct than available funding would permit. Something had to change.

Tennessee is in better fiscal shape than most states and is one of a small handful of states with zero debt – meaning it pays zero percent of its budget toward debt service, leaving a lot more for infrastructure. That’s a luxurious position in today’s economic context. So if a close examination of cost-effective transportation strategies can be transformative for Tennessee, just imagine what it can do for states even more desperate to get costs under control.

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Bike and pedestrian funding got slashed. Federal assistance for transit operations was rejected. Even the performance measures – arguably the high point of the recently passed federal transportation bill – are too weak to be very meaningful. For Americans who want federal policy to support safe streets, sustainable transportation, and livable neighborhoods, there were few bright spots in the transportation bill Congress passed last month.

AASHTO Director John Horsley is thrilled with the new transportation bill, which gave state DOTs just about everything they wanted. Photo: International Transport Forum

But state transportation departments are celebrating. They scored victory after victory, getting a bigger share of federal funding with fewer rules and regulations attached.

In the Senate, advocates were able to work some reforms into the bill and mobilize grassroots support for amendments like the Cardin-Cochran provision, which put funds for street safety projects in the hands of local governments, not state DOTs. But the House never managed to pass a bill of its own, and the opaque conference committee process was an exercise in horse-trading that advocates found difficult to penetrate.

The final product, which included measures like raising the federal contribution for certain highway expansions, seemed finely tailored to benefit DOTs in several ways. “This is a bill written by and for the benefit of state DOTs at the expense of both federal oversight and regional and community outcomes,” wrote David Burwell, director of the climate change program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in an email shortly after the bill passed. He said the policy changes “are too elegantly crafted and specific in their effect to have been written, or even conceived, by members of Congress or their staff.”

For state DOTs, access to lawmakers is a given. “We worked very closely with the House and Senate to craft those measures,” AASHTO Director John Horsley confirmed to Streetsblog in an interview yesterday. He said that while AASHTO offered recommendations, no text written by AASHTO made it into the bill verbatim, as far as he knows.

According to Horsley’s account, AASHTO followed a pretty standard script when it came to advocating for their interests on the Hill. Every stakeholder and special interest under the sun had its lobbyists knocking on lawmakers’ doors, offering their two cents – everyone from gravel producers to equipment manufacturers to environmentalists to free market fundamentalists. It’s just that the state DOTs seemed to get everything on their wish list.

Horsley said AASHTO had been laying the groundwork for many, many months before conference started, working with Republican House Transportation Committee staffers as well as aides of both parties in the Senate. (He didn’t mention working with House Democrats, who were shut out of the process from day one.)

The House is where the magic happened for AASHTO. “We’ve been very pleased with where the Senate bill started,” Horsley said. “And we were even more pleased when the House and the Senate in conference agreed to incorporate a lot of the House provisions that were even better for states.”

What were those House provisions? Horsley went through the list:

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