Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Despite the number of two-wheeled cop patrols around some cities, police aren’t always the most bike-minded bunch. When there’s a conflict between motorists and cyclists, they’re often inclined to take the motorist’s side. As Streetsblog has reported, police in New York City care more about drunk pedestrians than unsafe drivers, despite the fact that most fatalities are caused by motorists violating traffic laws. And then there’s the bizarre example of Los Altos, California, where police say cyclists are the ones causing crashes by speeding or even failing to yield automobile right-of-way. Huh?

Well, maybe you have to be within spitting distance of a platinum bike-friendly community to get police to care about cyclists’ safety. Last week, police in Longmont, Colorado, near Boulder, raised the bar for police work by actually pursuing charges against a driver who harassed cyclists.

Cyclist Dirk Friel took this harrowing video of the harassment he and a teammate faced last Sunday when they were out for a ride. Seventy-five-year-old James Ernst allegedly followed them for several minutes in his Ford SUV, honking constantly. He had plenty of room to pass, as they were riding to the right of the white line.

Also troubling is that a resident, quoted in Longmont Times-Call write-up of the incident, said the solution was to widen the road to four lanes. Granted, it was a Sunday, but the video hardly shows any other cars on the road. The only thing holding up traffic was Ernst’s massive SUV. Maybe we can hold off on the road expansion for now?

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Leave it to Texas. The Lone Star State just raised the speed limit on a toll road between San Antonio and Austin to 85 miles per hour, giving it the highest legal driving speed in the country.

Texas introduces the 85 mph speed limit. Photo: New York Times

Texas transportation officials, for their part, have been nonchalant. Veronica Beyer, a department spokeswoman, told the New York Times,”tests have shown the designated speed is a safe one.” In signing a legislative precursor to the law in 2006, State Transportation Commissioner Ted Houghton said, “it’ll be the Texas autobahn,” according to the paper.

But the move has raised eyebrows in the insurance industry. And no one’s exactly sure how motorists will react, although the FHWA allows states to set their own speed limits. Prior to last month, both Texas and Utah had the country’s fastest roads, with posted speed limits of up to 80 miles per hour.

“People tend to choose a speed at which they don’t think they’re likely to get a ticket. In most places that’s 5-10 mph over the speed limit,” Russ Rader, an Insurance Institute spokesman, told the Indianapolis Star. “But it’s hard to know when you get up to those extreme speeds what people are going to do.”

It seems logical to conclude that the change will result in more collisions and deaths. A 1999 report [PDF] by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that highway deaths increased 15 percent when states raise their speed limits.

“Drivers will think they can go 90 or 95 and will be unlikely to survive a crash at that speed,” Jonathan Adkins, spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, told the Indianapolis Star.

According to the Texas Tribune, the state of Texas received a $100 million payment from the operator of the toll road for raising the speed limit to 85. The state would only have won $65 million if the speed were 80. But what’s a few lives lost against tens of millions of dollars, right?

New, ever-higher speed limits are a trend of sorts, the Star reports. Since 2005, seven states — Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia — raised speed limits on at least some roads. The motivation seems to stem from the shortage of funds for infrastructure. As states become increasingly reliant on toll roads as a source of revenue, high speed limits are seen as an attractive amenity to lure paying customers.

Ohio recently raised the speed limit on its turnpike, trying to attract truckers from a nearby untolled state route. According to the Plain Dealer, the road saw a 5.6 percent increase in collisions the following year. The move was successful in luring new trucks onto the road, however. The paper reports their numbers rose 2.5 percent over the same period.

Correction: This article originally erroneously stated that Texas has the second-highest traffic fatality rate in the country. It has the second-highest total number of fatalities. It is also the second largest state by population.

Once again, the National Association of City Transportation Officials has proven what an agile, modern coalition of transportation agencies is capable of. It was just a year and a half ago that NACTO released its first Urban Bikeway Design Guide and today, it’s released the first update to that guide.

A bicycle boulevard sign in Madison, Wisconsin. Image: NACTO

NACTO’s guide is far ahead of the industry standard, old-guard manuals: the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials’ design guidelines.

NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide was the first to provide engineering guidance for protected bike lanes. It also laid out four different kinds of bike signals, four types of striped bike lanes and a variety of intersection treatments and signage recommendations. The update, released today, also includes bike boulevards, which NACTO defines as “enhanced, low-stress, low-speed streets parallel to major roads.” (Check out this Streetfilm to see bike boulevards in action.) All of the treatments NACTO highlights are in use internationally and around the U.S.

Meanwhile, AASHTO just published its first update in 13 years and is still not ready to embrace protected bike lanes. (Boulevards do get a mention.)

The speed with which updates are made and disseminated could be the biggest difference between the two guides. With just 18 months’ turnaround, NACTO is updating its guide with the newest ideas. Meanwhile, AASHTO is hoping to get around to an update within five years, but given their history, it could be two or three times that long. It’s not online, and it’s not free — you have to order a paper copy (how quaint!) for $144.

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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.

In the wake of the shocking and tragic massacre in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, many people are now, understandably, skittish about going to the movies. But the most dangerous part of going to the movies is driving there.

Crash fatalities jumped early this year after dropping for the five previous quarters. Photo: North County Times

In the first three months of this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 7,630 people died in traffic crashes on American streets. That’s 910 more than the first quarter of last year — a sobering 13.5 percent increase.

“If these projections for the first quarter of 2012 are realized, it will represent the second largest year-to-year quarterly increase in fatalities since NHTSA began recording traffic fatalities (1975),” the agency said in its report [PDF]. “The largest recorded year-to-year quarterly increase by NHTSA was a 15.3-percent increase in fatalities during the first quarter of 1979.”

This is only the third quarter since 2006 to see an increase in fatalities.

Change in traffic deaths compared to the same three month period of the previous year. The spike this quarter is the biggest jump since 1979. Source: NHTSA

An increase in distracted driving, which kills about 3,000 people a year, could be part of the reason. The National Safety Council estimates that about a quarter of all crashes involve cell phones [PDF]. While more and more states have banned cell phone while driving, the effectiveness of those bans is questionable.

The rise in fatalities this year could also have something to do with the mild winter. NHTSA says severe weather keeps people off the roads — though one might theorize that it also causes more crashes. In any event, the growth in fatalities far outpaced the growth in driving during this period. Vehicle miles traveled rose just 1.4 percent over the same time last year.

If the spike in traffic deaths continues, it might also indicate that the last three years of relatively low fatality rates were an aberration. The congratulatory rhetoric that greeted the 2010 death toll of 32,885 — down from 37,423 in 2008 and 43,510 in 2005 – might have been premature. The first three months of the year have America on pace for 36,672 traffic deaths in 2012 — close to 2008 levels.

In subsequent reports, the NHTSA will release a breakdown of the fatalities, including pedestrians and cyclists. In December, we reported that amid much celebration of lower crash fatalities, pedestrian deaths have been on the rise, increasing 4.2 percent while other kinds of traffic fatalities decreased.

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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Last fall, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) proposed diverting all transportation enhancements funding, which goes primarily to bike and pedestrian projects, to bridge repair. “With nearly 25 percent of our nation’s bridges deemed either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, we need to make their reconstruction a priority over errant beautification projects,” Sen. Paul said.

Republicans insisted they were all about bridge repair and couldn't spare a dime for biking and walking, but it turns out they didn't set aside anything for bridge repair either. Image: Partnership Border Study

He also said that the money spent on “movie theaters, squirrel sanctuaries, turtle tunnels and flower beds” could otherwise boost the Highway Bridge Program by $700 million.

Forget for a moment that that’s the world’s most preposterous definition of TE ever. Let’s take at face value the idea that keeping the nation’s bridges in a state of good repair is an important safety issue. Who could disagree with that?

In the MAP-21 transportation bill that the president will sign in just a couple of hours, the Republicans did manage to gut transporation enhancement spending. But did they divert that money over to bridge repair? Far from it. In fact, they gutted bridge repair spending too!

The bill consolidates two-thirds of highway programs out of existence, including the Highway Bridge Program for the rehabiliation or replacement of structurally deficient or functionally obsolete bridges.

Joshua Schank of the Eno Transportation Center says it’s not such a bad thing. “Program consolidation, which if anything didn’t go far enough, will result in more focus on where the money is going and therefore likely cause more funds to be dedicated to existing infrastructure,” he said in an email. “The old bridge program encouraged repair, but without regard to need or prioritization. By contrast, the new National Highway Performance Program focuses more on outcomes, such as pavement conditions, that are consistent with state of good repair and will help prioritize decision-making.”

Indeed, one of the few performance measures in the bill that really has teeth is the one for bridge repair, which requires states with inferior infrastructure conditions to spend more. However, not everyone is convinced that this will do the trick.

“The way they crafted it, yes, [states] could spend a lot on repair,” said James Corless, director of Transportation for America. “They could have spent a lot on repair under SAFETEA-LU.” But they didn’t.

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The House of Representatives approved the transportation bill conference report this afternoon by a vote of 373 to 52. [UPDATE 4:00 PM: The Senate has also approved the bill, 74-19.] This is a bill that’s been called “a death blow to mass transit” by the Amalgamated Transit Union, “a step backwards for America’s transportation system” by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, “a retreat from the goals of sustainability and economic resiliency” by Reconnecting America, “a substantial capitulation” by Transportation for America, and “bad news for biking and walking” by America Bikes.

Remember the empty highways that symbolized the House Republicans' vision of America's transportation system? The final transpo bill might as well have the same unfortunate cover.

After more than 1,000 days of waiting since the last transportation bill expired, the nation’s new transportation policy is a grave disappointment to people seeking to reform the current highway-centric system.

The fact that the House GOP tried and, for the most part, failed to reverse the progress made under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder offers a small degree of consolation. “Some of the worst ideas pushed initially by House Republicans went nowhere – funding the highway system with new oil drilling revenues, taking transit out of the highway trust fund, de-federalizing transportation funding – to mention some of the most radical proposals that were seriously being put forward,” wrote Deron Lovaas of NRDC this morning. “But… that pretty much exhausts the good news.”

So what does the bill actually do? Overall, it doesn’t change a whole lot, and the most significant changes tend not to benefit livable streets or sustainable transportation. Here’s a breakdown.

Length and funding. The bill lasts a year longer than the Senate bill would have, expiring at the end of September 2014. That gives states, cities, and the construction industry substantially more stability and allows them to move forward on projects that have been delayed for years because of the uncertainty surrounding federal funding. It maintains funding levels at around $54 billion a year, as did the Senate bill, which is roughly current levels plus inflation.

While some have criticized the complex funding mechanisms that prop it up and its departure from a user-pays model, the Congressional Budget Office reported this morning that the bill actually reduces the deficit by $16.3 billion.

Everyone seems to understand that Congress won’t be able to pull this kind of magic for long and will soon have to deal with the long-term insufficiency of current Highway Trust Fund revenues to cover the nation’s transportation needs. However, the gas tax was not raised, and at the same time the House passed this bill, it also approved an appropriations bill that prohibits even studying the possibility of moving toward a VMT fee.

Non-transportation-related items. The Keystone XL pipeline and the EPA’s ability to regulate coal ash as a hazardous substance, introduced into the transportation negotiations by the House Republicans, were stripped out of the bill. The RESTORE Act to spend BP oil spill fines on Gulf Coast restoration is included.

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America’s roads have suddenly become dangerous places for America’s children. At least, that’s what’s suggested by a flurry of viral stories involving kids and cars.

We can all agree this is a bad idea, right? A Colorado police officer snapped this picture. Photo: Jalopnik

In May, an inebriated Florida couple made news when they took their granddaughter for a joy ride, pulling her behind their SUV in a toy car. Then came the story of an Indiana dad, arrested after strapping his four children to the car hood to get them home from a quick liquor store stop. Next, it was the stoned Arizona mother who secured her weeks-old baby in its car seat, popped the seat on top of her vehicle, and drove off. The latest item grew out of a snapshot, taken by a Colorado police officer, of a diapered toddler restrained only by a seat belt while his child safety seat, buckled in next to him, cradled a can of gas.

While the nation may be experiencing a statistical rise in stupidity, substance abuse, or child neglect, more likely we’re just enjoying better access, through cable news and social media, to tales of bad parenting, tales we can take perverse pleasure in consuming and sharing. It’s simple and satisfying to stand in judgment of these “horrible parents” whose choices were so obviously wrong. Here are selfish people who put loved ones into terrible danger, something we would never do. Their evil, then, becomes our good.

Why, though, would we need these object lessons to highlight our own good parenting?  Perhaps such high-contrast, black and white stories help quell the anxiety of transporting our children through the problematic gray area that is modern American car culture.

Cars — equipped with safety seats or not, piloted by sober drivers or not — present real danger to kids. Despite improved auto and traffic safety, they remain the number one killer of young people aged 5-34. Yet many new parents relocate to car-dependent suburbs, and many towns resist expanded transit lines or walking and biking paths, theoretically to protect their families from crime. Feeling children are safer in remote communities, these parents end up driving them everywhere, often to school, despite the fact that they would be about 20 times safer taking the bus. Seeking to protect them from the horrors of climate (but not climate change), moms and dads drive their young ones to school in inclement weather or idle at bus stops to shuttle them, warm and dry, a short block home.

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Editor’s note: Last month, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood invited Streetsblog readers to submit questions for a Q&A installment on his blog, Fast Lane. Here are his answers.

In my “On The Go,” series, I only get time to answer a few questions. But — like the Streetsblog community — I never get tired of talking about transportation.

And because Streetsblog readers came through with so many good questions for the May installment of “On The Go,” I’m happy to answer more of those questions here on your home turf.

Jesse asks: What role does the government (at any level — not just federal) have in changing the public’s perception of the streets from a place that is the exclusive domain of cars to public space that should accommodate everyone’s needs?

That’s a terrific question, Jesse, because it covers a number of issues that are so important to the Streetsblog community. At the US DOT, we have said repeatedly that people on bicycles, people on foot, and people with disabilities are valued stakeholders in what happens with our roadways. At the federal level, we’re providing leadership by making it clear that we support all modes of transportation.

And we’ve put our actions behind those words with grants for complete streets initiatives, better sidewalks, and more bike infrastructure like bike-sharing programs, bike lanes, and off-road paths. The Federal Transit Administration has made it easier for commuters to access transit service by bicycle. The Federal Highway Administration’s Non-motorized Transportation Program has demonstrated that Americans want to use their feet to get where they’re going.

I’m proud of our record of active support for all who use our roads.

But if you also believe we should make room for everyone on America’s streets, there’s plenty that you can do. Municipal and county leaders need to know how strongly residents want to incorporate bicyclists and pedestrians into transportation planning. And governors and state legislators need to know as well. The Streetsblog community can certainly help by continuing to educate these leaders and the public about the value of investing in non-motorized transportation.

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