Streetsblog Capitol Hill

As Washington conventional wisdom has it, raising gas taxes or creating a vehicle miles traveled tax to pay for transportation is impossible during the current recession. After all, who would want to squeeze cash-strapped commuters during tough economic times?

As it turns out, the public is very willing to pay for the shorter commuting times that result from less traffic -- and they're willing to pay top dollar, as IBM's new Commuter Pain Index (CPI) shows.

When asked what value they would place on every 15 minutes sliced from their daily commute, 36.5 percent of CPI respondents said between $10 and $20. That's about five times the recent trading price of a ton of carbon emissions on the nation's climate-change exchanges.

And the price of a shorter commute was higher in more congested cities. In Los Angeles, 22 percent of residents said every 15 minutes not spent en route to work would be worth between $31 and $40 -- or more than $100 per hour.

What does the data mean? For one thing, those who fear that voters would revolt if asked to pay more for a more efficient, less congested transport network shouldn't let that stop policy-making. As every successful politician knows (and the president is re-learning on health care), messaging is the key to winning over the public.

In other words, Democrats who feign unwillingness to subject voters to higher gas taxes are ignoring their ability to control the message. When a greater contribution to transportation is pitched as a way to shorten commutes and give workers more free time, the prospect becomes more desirable.

And it's not that lawmakers don't know how to decrease congestion, particularly in the urban areas that were polled to produce the CPI. Reducing the number of car trips and lowering demand during peak travel times are proven to be a cheaper and more effective method of battling congestion than expanding highway capacity.

Is it time to nickname the White House's Sustainable Communities Initiative the "Shorter Commutes Initiative"?

The latest edition of the Texas Transportation Institute's influential urban mobility report was released today, prompting a flurry of mainstream media coverage focused largely on a faux-ironic theme that would do Alanis Morrissette proud -- the bad economy is giving us less traffic!

The TTI found a one-hour drop in the annual traffic delays suffered by the average urban American in 2007, a result attributed to the run-up in fuel prices and the beginning of the economic slowdown. The Wall Street Journal deemed the one-hour reprieve "The Upside of Recession," while LA Weekly dubbed Southern California's congestion decrease a "Recession Bonus."

Other coverage of the TTI report emphasized a different breed of cold comfort, playing up the congestion rankings that were given to major cities. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution resorted to surveying drivers on their local roads' drop from second-worst to third-worst in the nation (surprisingly, no one was celebrating), while D.C.-area outlets seemed to take morbid pride in their ascension to the No. 2 spot.

If only the TTI report had a solution to urban traffic woes that had a measurable impact on congestion! Oh, wait. As the chart above shows, transit service saved the nation's cities 645 million hours of delay in 2007. That's more than double the number of hours saved by all five most prominent road "operational improvements" combined -- with HOV lanes being the most notable of those latter options.

The report's authors devote an entire section to solutions to congestion, recommending "a balanced and diversified approach" tailored to the needs of each area. Promoting "denser developments with a mix of jobs, shops and homes, so that more people can walk, bike or take transit" is featured on the list.

But unfortunately, the value of transit and denser urban development got only sporadic mention in most coverage of the TTI report. The Oregonian was one of the exceptions; its reporter drew a line between Portland's less grim traffic situation and its planning priorities. Here's an excerpt:

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A new report [PDF] on the costs of aging roads has gotten a lot of attention over the past week, with both Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and the Washington Post touting its conclusion on the danger of "deficient roadways."

On its face, the report sounds like an argument for prioritizing road repair and modernization over new construction, which is certain to be a flashpoint as Congress works on a new federal transportation bill. But some of the upgrades that the authors suggest rely on outmoded assumptions about driver safety -- not to mention pedestrian safety, a concept never mentioned in the report.

Here's an excerpt:

Numerous solutions -- some simple, some complex -- could help make the roadway environment safer for users. These improvements include structural changes such as adding or widening shoulders, improving roadway alignment, replacing or widening narrow bridges, reducing pavement edges or drop-offs, and providing more clear space in the area adjacent to roadways.

Adding or widening shoulders for bike lanes or pedestrian paths is one thing, but the notion that driving can be made safer by widening and straightening roads (or "improving roadway alignment," as the report puts it) has been debunked by Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt, transportation planner Eric Dumbaugh, and others. In fact, making roads more complex and curvy can often serve as a deterrent to unsafe driving practices, particularly on urban streets.

But the new report, commissioned by the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC), seems to have concluded that urban areas don't need to be considered separately from interstates.

"Although this study did not break out costs by class of roads, interstate highways are built to higher safety standards than other roads," the authors state -- as if a new four-lane freeway through Chicago or Brooklyn would be a reasonable safety-enhancement move.

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The disparity between the 13 percent of road fatalities suffered by non-drivers and the amount that the federal government spends on their safety -- less than 1 percent -- may come as a surprise to some Americans. But the situation is far worse in the developing world, according to a new World Health Organization report.

Surveying data on crashes and driving from 178 nations, the WHO found that wealthy nations such as the U.S., U.K. and Germany own more than half of the world's registered cars but suffer only 8.5 percent of global traffic fatalities.

It is low-income nations, from Vietnam to Ghana to Nepal, that must contend with more than 40 percent of worldwide traffic deaths despite owning less than 10 percent of all registered cars.

The WHO also found that non-drivers bear a significant share of traffic's health risks. Pedestrians and bike riders of all types account for nearly one-half of the world's 1.27 million annual deaths on the road.

Only 15 percent of nations, according to the report, have laws that fully address the five risk factors for traffic safety: speed, helmets, child restraints, seat belts and drunk driving.

As the Washington Post noted, the report's authors (who received funding from New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg's philanthropic group) think their conclusions can provide momentum for something resembling a global "complete streets" movement:

Until the current recession, auto sales in some developing countries were increasing by more than 10 percent a year. The authors hope the report will help stimulate governments and engineers to design roads that can accommodate a huge influx of cars but also out-of-car users.

It's the New Math: a dollar-a-trip rise in the cost of fuel for a car trip to Manhattan is cutting traffic almost as much as Mayor Bloomberg's eight-dollar toll plan would have done.

Too good to be true, right? But that's the slant of the front-page headline in today's Times, "Politics Failed, but Fuel Prices Cut Congestion":

Soaring gas prices and higher tolls seem to be doing for traffic in New York what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's ambitious congestion pricing was supposed to do: reducing the number of cars clogging the city’s streets and pushing more people to use mass transit.

The article reports that traffic on MTA bridges and tunnels within the city and the Port Authority's Hudson River crossings was down this spring by 4-5 percent compared with a year ago -- within hailing distance of the 6.3 percent drop sought by the mayor's plan.

Good news, but how much of the decline is due to the price of gas and how much to the toll increases that took effect around the same time?

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On Friday, Streetsblog looked at how northern Virginia can't get enough road widening. As a follow-up, Gary Toth of Project for Public Spaces directed us to another example of how smart growth faces hurdles in the places that need it most -- in this case, the Trenton suburb of Bordentown, New Jersey (right: the main drag).

Residents in the village of 4,000 recently voiced their opposition to a proposal that would encourage mixed-use and infill development, reports the Burlington County Times:

The ordinance would allow for the addition of up to 100 dwellings downtown. It would allow developers to put apartments or condominiums above storefronts and would increase the allowable height for buildings. Currently, developers have to obtain variances to do such things.

The rejection of the zoning changes was stoked by fears that the town's historic character would be threatened, among other things:

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Suburbanites in northern Virginia are finding their streets more clogged with traffic than ever, and, as the Washington Post reported earlier this week, they aren't about to get bailed out by road-widening projects. Here's the crux of the problem, told from the Post reporter's decidedly windshield perspective:

Thoroughfares like Rolling Road are the blood vessels that connect suburbia, the secondary roads that carry commuters to interstates, residents to supermarkets and children to school. They include Braddock Road in Fairfax County, Colesville Road in Montgomery, and even such larger highways as routes 7 and 50. They are the roads that Washington area residents traverse every day, sometimes several times a day.

Just months ago, Northern Virginia residents and elected officials were expecting hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements to such roads. Now, because of budget cuts and state lawmakers' failure to reach a deal on regional transportation funding, drivers can expect only more misery.

The Virginia Department of Transportation recently announced a 51 percent cut in the region's road-building program. Dozens of projects have been eliminated or postponed indefinitely. And rising maintenance costs are eating away at what little remains.

The Post assumes that expanding road capacity is the only answer, and casts the problem as purely a budgetary shortfall. It neglects to mention the role of land use in bringing about this state of affairs. The pattern described in the article is similar to what regions all over the country are facing, as past decisions to separate housing from other land uses come back to haunt them in the form of ever-mounting traffic.

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Yesterday's New York Times editorial on transportation policy makes a strong case for linking concerns about traffic congestion to concerns about health. It's worth looking at the full text of All Choked Up, the report from Environmental Defense that the paper references when arguing that in order to achieve his goal of a sustainable city,

The mayor will have to deal aggressively with a vexing problem, traffic congestion. If that piece of the plan falls short, the rest of Mr. Bloomberg's vision won't much matter. In just a couple of decades, New York is expected to add nearly a million more people. To have any hope of keeping people moving, the city will need to take real and substantial action to unclog its roads - including some form of congestion fee and other disincentives to driving on the busiest streets.

Besides helping business and boosting the general quality of life, congestion relief would also produce cleaner air, to the enormous benefit of public health, a fact that has so far mostly been missed in the debate over congestion pricing. But a newly released report from Environmental Defense, a nonpartisan group, is likely to give these issues more prominence.

The report shows that vehicle emissions - especially dangerous diesel soot - can pollute the air as far as 1,500 feet from the source. In New York City, that means it's hard to escape them, which is troubling in a city with high asthma rates. And not just asthma but lung problems, as well as heart disease, have been linked to vehicle emissions, which are also thought to contribute to strokes and some kinds of cancers.

That is all worth considering as Mr. Bloomberg's team tries to balance good policy with what is politically achievable.

Is it too much to hope that traffic can someday soon be seen as a public health issue? Don't forget that not long ago, banning smoking in bars would have seemed more political suicide than "politically achievable."

The second phase of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 outreach campaign, which has been soliciting feedback from the public through meetings with community leaders and on PlaNYC's website, has been completed, and the word is in: People in New York want to do something about traffic congestion.

So far, the website has received 52,000 visits from almost 15,000 unique visitors who have sent more than 2,500 different suggestions.  These suggestions have ranged from using an invention to eliminate double-parked cars, to greening our Building Code, to creating more bike lanes, and developing new rapid bus transit routes.  The largest numbers of responses, accounting for 45% percent of the feedback, have been about reducing traffic congestion and ensuring that every New Yorker lives within 10 minutes of a park. 

The third phase of the outreach effort will kick off with a Feb. 16 forum with immigrant community leaders at Gracie Mansion, with "issue-oriented meetings and public town hall-style meetings in each borough" beginning the week of February 22nd.