Streetsblog Capitol Hill

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.

But this week, the District Department of Transportation has withdrawn the award, in response to a complaint filed by a competing bidder.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].

Yesterday, we started our year-end 2011 round-up. We lamented transit cuts in places where transit is more important than ever, cheered the successful ballot initiatives that will fund transportation lifelines, took a moment to explore the nuances of some difficult issues, and called out Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin for some hare-brained ideas about the best way to spend money.

Now we continue with the second installment: What cities shone a little brighter and what cities lost their luster?

Let’s start with the good.

Cities That Led the Way: Bike-share caught on in 2011 like never before. New York City announced a system to dwarf all others, complete with 10,000 bikes. Boston had a great first season. DC and Arlington expanded Capital Bikeshare. Chicago got a TIGER grant to go full-tilt on its system. And bike-share is popping up in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect it – most recently, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. All those cities deserve credit for investing in active transportation options for their residents.

Meanwhile, in the DC area, suburban retrofits in White Flint and Tysons Corner started transforming these into urban, transit-rich communities with vibrant daytime and nighttime populations.

And Salt Lake City showed the country how to solve some of the most vexing geographic, political, cultural, and ecological challenges of urbanism. The city got behind a set of growth principles that champion walkability, density, transit options, and land conservation. The city’s new, sustainable developments are wildly popular and incredibly successful at encouraging active transportation.

But it was Minneapolis that stole our hearts this year. The city rocketed to the top of the Bike-Friendliness charts with its Nice Ride bike-share system and its beloved Midtown Greenway, which transformed an old industrial railroad trench into a major cyclist thoroughfare connecting key parts of the city. And that’s not all – Minneapolis has gone through the whole complete streets shopping list, from road diets to bike parking to improved crossings to bike boulevards.

Perhaps even more significantly, the Twin Cities aren’t just tacking some nice cycling amenities onto an otherwise roads-heavy transportation program. They’re actually divesting from road infrastructure, tabling 14 planned highway expansions and improving transit options instead. They’re maximizing existing highways by adding bus lanes and priced shoulder lanes, and they’re investing in transit-oriented development. As one city transportation planner said, “We couldn’t keep going on acting as if we were going to get money to build our way out of congestion.”

Cities That Lagged Behind: We at Streetsblog aren’t shy about calling out state leaders who make bad decisions in favor of sprawl and against smart transportation options. We talked about some of those yesterday (we’re looking at you, Scott Walker). But sometimes it’s not the state but the cities themselves that have a special knack for making bad decisions. And this was a big year for it.

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Our hearts are with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords today as she struggles to recover from the brutal attack this weekend. By now you must have heard about Saturday’s shocking massacre in a Tucson supermarket parking lot, leaving six dead and 13 wounded. Among the wounded is the Tucson area Congresswoman, shot point-blank in the head and now fighting for her life.

Giffords is a member of the Blue Dog coalition, the conservative wing of the Democratic party. She’s also a regular cyclist and has taken some important actions for transit and against car-centric policy. As we keep Giffords in our thoughts, we wanted to share these with you.

Michael McKisson of Tucson Velo caught up with Giffords for a quick interview this fall while she took a break from her tough re-election campaign for a ride with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly. McKisson learned that it was another senseless tragedy that spurred Giffords to action when it comes to bike safety: In 2002, her friend Chris Nakamura, a Tucson triathlete, was killed when a commercial delivery truck made a right turn in front of him. Nakamura was crushed and killed instantly.

When the driver who killed Nakamura received no penalty stronger than a traffic citation, Giffords was outraged and worked in the state legislature for stiffer penalties for hitting a cyclist.

Giffords herself rides a custom-made bike with her name in western-style rope on the top tube and an Arizona flag. A member of the Congressional Bike Caucus, she bike commutes to the Capitol from her home in Washington.

She admits “she’ll yell at motorists who pull out in front of her or cut her off when she is on her bike and but says most of the time they don’t mean to do it, they are in their own world and aren’t looking for cyclists,” according to Tucson Velo.

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FTA chief Peter Rogoff announced the winners of $293 million in competitive grants for bus and streetcar projects today. The biggest chunks of funding will help build streetcar projects in Cincinnati, Charlotte, Fort Worth, and St. Louis, as well as rapid bus corridors in New York and Chicago. All told, the funding will be distributed among 53 projects, chosen from more than 300 applicants.

While streetcar projects got the largest individual grants, most of the funding will go toward bus projects, including a number of grants for smaller cities to build, expand, or improve stations like Des Moines's Multi-Modal Transit Hub. Several bus projects have an information component, promising to make service more predictable and convenient by giving riders a clear sense of when buses will arrive.

Also on the list is Boston's regional bike-share network, slated to receive $3 million to help build more than 500 public bicycle stations. The bike-share project made the cut because of its potential to expand the reach and accessibility of the bus and rail system. Boston's bike-share launch recently got pushed back to 2011, but at that scale, it would be, by far, the largest system in the country.

Here's a sample of the major projects that got a boost:

• Cincinnati will receive $25 million to help build a six-mile streetcar route, with an eye toward spurring mixed-use development downtown. The city planning commission recently took the enlightened step of reducing parking requirements along the future streetcar route.
  
• Chicago received support for a pair of rapid bus projects: $11 million for the Jeffery BRT corridor, which will improve service to major job center on a route with poor access to trains, and $25 million for a two-mile, east-west bus priority street serving several routes downtown.
  
• New York City's 34th Street busway got an $18 million grant. Streetsblog NYC readers have been following this project for a couple of years. NYCDOT recently announced its intention to make 34th Street the first physically separated busway in the city.
  
• One of the surprise winners was Fort Worth, which received about $25 million for a 2.5-mile one-way streetcar loop, intended to serve as the hub in a future network. Streetsblog Network member Fort Worthology called the grant "incredible and extremely positive news" for the larger streetcar project.
  

You can see the complete list of projects here.

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After announcing $130 million in new streetcar grants in December, the Obama administration received more than $1.1 billion in applications, Federal Transit Administration (FTA) chief Peter Rogoff told lawmakers today -- offering more evidence of the growing local enthusiasm for competitive transportation funding that began with the stimulus law's TIGER grant program.

Testifying before the House Appropriations Committee, Rogoff said the winners of the streetcar grants as well as a corresponding bus funding program would be named in June. The bus grants, totaling $150 million, were even more popular than the streetcar funding, with more than $2 billion worth of applications submitted to the FTA.

Rogoff, a veteran congressional aide before his nomination to the FTA, described the streetcar and bus programs as elements of the administration's broader plan to promote transit-oriented development and sustainable transportation under the "livable communities" aegis.

The FTA, he said, will keep pursuing "more integrated regional planning to guide state, metropolitan and local decisions that link land use, transportation and housing policy," with a special emphasis on making the most of increasingly scarce federal funds.

The stimulus law's $1.5 billion TIGER program (short for Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery) was even more oversubscribed than the streetcar or bus grants, with more than $57 billion in bids pouring in. The grants were so in-demand that several Republicans took political flak for supporting local applications after criticizing the stimulus law as a whole, and Democrats from states that came up short were not shy about airing their frustrations.

The significant demand for streetcar and bus funds, coming on the heels of TIGER's success, could bolster the U.S. DOT's case for more merit-based grant programs that disburse aid on the basis of environmental and economic metrics rather than state-based formulas. The White House already has signaled that it supports an expansion of the TIGER program beyond the $600 million in extra grants approved during last year's appropriations process.

During a visit to New Orleans, where city planners are seeking nearly $100 million in federal stimulus money for three new streetcar lines, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood today announced plans to award $280 million in grants for streetcar and bus networks.

The grants, set to be awarded this spring, do not require new spending -- the money will come from unallocated funding lawmakers have already approved for transit New Starts and buses, according to a statement released by the U.S. DOT.

The streetcar and bus investments are being depicted as the first phase in the Obama administration's inter-agency sustainable communities partnership, headed by longtime transit advocate Shelley Poticha. The legislation officially starting that push, which would also authorize $4 billion for transit-oriented development projects, has yet to see action in Congress.

“Fostering the concept of livability in transportation projects will stimulate America’s neighborhoods to become safer, healthier and more vibrant," LaHood said in a statement on the grants.

The money is set to be divided into two parts. The first would award $130 million to streetcars and "urban circulators," with a focus on proposals that promote mixed-use development in local neighborhoods. No project can win more than $25 million from that pot, however, which would provide about 12 percent of the funding New Orleans needs for its ambitious streetcar expansion plan.

The second $150 million group of bus grants would go to proposals that "provide access to jobs, healthcare, and education, and/or contribute to the redevelopment of neighborhoods into pedestrian-friendly vibrant environments," the U.S. DOT said in its announcement.

As part of his trip to New Orleans, the first leg of a nationwide transportation tour, LaHood toured local transit stations that were hit by Hurricane Katrina. He stopped by the Union Passenger Terminal (home of the Amtrak Crescent line) and the Willow Street barn, where the city's famous cherry-red streetcars were repaired following hurricane-related flooding.

Back in the late 1970s, when Washington's Metrorail system first began operating in Arlington County, Virginia, the future of Arlington and other old, inner suburbs was far from certain. Across the Potomac, the District of Columbia was suffering from depopulation, rapidly rising crime rates, and serious fiscal difficulties.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Arlington, Fairfax County was enjoying a stunning period of growth. People were flocking by the hundreds of thousands to Fairfax's sprawling residential subdivisions, and employment centers popped up and grew rapidly around freeway interchanges.

The future looked as though it belonged to Fairfax County, and Arlington's decision to target development around its new Metro stations seemed quixotic and anachronistic.

But now, with the benefit of thirty years of hindsight, Arlington seems to have been extraordinarily foresighted in its decision to grow around Metro. From 2000 to 2008, Arlington's population grew by 10% -- all of it infill development, and a remarkable achievement for an inner suburb.

Even more remarkably, this growth has led to a negligible impact on local traffic. Daniel Malouff, author of the BeyondDC blog, reported yesterday morning on a meeting with Arlington's Department of Transportation, at which officials recounted some numbers that had emerged from research on the effects of county development choices.

Among the remarkable statistics:

1. Auto traffic counts in the Pentagon City area are level today compared with counts from 1975. Despite all the development that has occurred there in that time frame, including construction of one of the region’s largest and busiest shopping malls, there has been no measurable increase in traffic congestion.

2. 1,000 units of urban-format TOD housing generates fewer auto trips per day than a single suburban-format McDonalds or 7-11. You can build 1,000,000 square feet of residential TOD and generate less congestion than 2,000 square feet of auto-oriented retail.

Arlington has very nearly maximized the development potential of available land around Metro stations, but it's looking to create new transit access for its communities by building a streetcar line along one of the county's busier thoroughfares (and running along its busiest bus routes). Already, denser, walkable, and mixed-used developments are replacing older strip malls on the planned line.

And of course, Fairfax County has been busily working to reverse its approach to transit and development, its streets and highways having bogged down under the weight of constant congestion.

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Seattle's South Lake Union Streetcar is a 1.3-mile line that opened in December 2007, the first leg in the city's commitment to new transit and light rail. It passed the half million passenger milestone in its first year, surpassing ridership projections.

The streetcar features many top-of-the-line tech amenities, including real time arrival message boards, solar-powered ticket vending machines, and human-activated doors to save energy while the train is in layover mode. If you go to the Seattle Streetcar web site, you can find out the next arrival time and actually watch the streetcars moving via GPS trackers.

As you'll see in the film, development is booming along the South Lake Union corridor. "If you build it, they will come" certainly seems to apply here.

 
On Tuesday, voters in Portland, Oregon elected Sam Adams as their next mayor. A former Congressional staffer and current Portland city commissioner, Adams -- who is a cyclist -- ran on a platform that emphasized environmental and progressive growth initiatives, including, in the words of the Oregonian, "use [of] the Portland Streetcar and better planning to spur urban renewal." Adams received strong support from the livable streets community, which helped earn him a 52-34 percent margin of victory.

There is speculation that the Adams camp got a last-minute boost from Barack Obama, who came to town ahead of Tuesday's primary and drew a crowd of some 75,000 -- with an estimated 8,000+ arriving on bicycles. As quoted on BikePortland.org, Obama responded with some fairly breathtaking comments on transportation policy.

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