Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Last month, the Senate’s notorious vote-blocker, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, tried to obstruct Senate process until they voted on his measure to take bike/ped funding out of the transportation bill. He failed.

Then last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) suggested keeping bike/ped money but stripping out lots of other budget items that serve cyclists and pedestrians (as well as everybody else), like streetscaping. He failed too.

And now here comes Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the kookiest of Congress’s Tea Party-affiliated newcomers, with a brilliant idea to shift all bike/ped funding — and everything else that gets funded through the embattled Transportation Enhancement program — over to bridge repair. Paul characterizes TE as a fund for “turtle tunnels and squirrel sanctuaries and all this craziness.”

Now, we’re all in favor of bridge repair. We agree that the crumbling of our nation’s infrastructure is shameful and dangerous. But really, you’re going to restore bridge safety by cutting bike safety? Get real, Senator.

Paul’s spooky amendment is scheduled for a vote the day after Halloween. It’ll be attached to the Senate transportation appropriations bill, which comes up for a vote that day by the full chamber.

Darren Flusche of the League of American Bicyclists noted in his blog post that Sen. Paul should let the Senate EPW Committee, which has jurisdiction over writing the next transportation bill, do its job. Flusche argues that the committee’s November 9 bill markup “would be the appropriate time to discuss changes to the overall transportation program, not during the appropriations process.”

Transportation for America recently criticized Sen. Paul for his misguided attack on active transportation:

Read more…

“Have you cried at your desk at work yet today? Would you like to?” Time Magazine recently asked, inviting its readers to indulge in emotion on behalf of an Iowa couple whose story went viral last week. Gordon and Norma Yeager died as the result of a car crash, the same way about 630 Americans die per week but with scant media attention. The Yeagers, after seven decades of marriage, passed away holding hands in the hospital.

And while this heartwarming story (more about the couple’s sweet life than their sad death) seems unique, it is not. It is quite common for the media to miss the point in stories about crashes involving older drivers.

While we don’t know the medical facts of this particular case, the elderly are more likely to die or sustain debilitating injuries in crashes that would cause less serious harm to younger people. After age 70, drivers are twice as likely to be involved in fatal crashes, per mile driven, as they were when middle-aged; after age 85, they are nine times more dangerous to themselves and others.

Two weeks ago, Gordon Yeager failed to yield at an intersection. He and his wife died. The crash sent another couple to the hospital. Missing from most media reports was the fact that Gordon Yeager “was facing pending action by the Iowa Department of Transportation to have his license removed” at the time.

The media conversation around aging drivers tends to focus on the anguish surrounding the question of when and how to take the car keys from Grandma or Grandpa, but rarely do these stories take us all the way to a family’s decision to do so. In a landscape built for cars and a culture built on the sanctity of independence, it feels horrible to be responsible for circumscribing a loved one’s life. As hinted at by the inconclusiveness of these stories, we often avoid this responsibility. Because there’s more hand-wringing than decision-making going on, it can take several traffic crashes before a driver is barred from the road, whether voluntarily or by family members or the government.

The desirability of extending the driving life of older people is largely taken as a given. Consequently, the media tend to play up assuaging statistics showing that older drivers tend to self-regulate and drive less; they offer non-threatening solutions such as more driver education, more automotive technology, or use of car-based services.

It would be better to focus not on the means — driving the car — but the motive, which is maintaining the mobility that a landscape built around personal vehicles will inevitably deny the aged.

Read more…

This year’s Rail~volution conference — the annual gathering of livability advocates, urban sustainability coordinators, and transit agency officials – kicked off today with remarks by Chris Leinberger of the Brookings Institution and Manuel Pastor, who teaches demographics and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Leinberger noted that Hollywood does more consumer research than anyone else, and it portrays what audiences aspire to. So, we can see in the difference between TV shows of past decades and current shows the evolution of tastes in the U.S. Where we had I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, and The Brady Bunch, all set in the suburbs, we now have Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex in the City – all set in cities.

Indeed, Leinberger often talks about the increased demand for urbanism, especially among young people, but he also noted the downsizing trend as baby boomers move out of big houses to smaller spaces in more walkable, urban neighborhoods. And he credited the trend of people having fewer children with the expansion of the demand for walkable urbanism: Only 25 percent of households have children now, as opposed to 50 percent in the 1950s. Singles and couples without children are the “target market” for walkable urbanism, he said, and that constituency is only growing.

At the same time, Manuel Pastor argued that the main catalysts of walkable urbanism in the future are going to be the people with the highest fertility rate in the nation, having the most children: Latinos. (Latina women have an average of three children each, while each white woman has an average of 2.1.)

Pastor said the age gap between whites and “non-white Hispanics” (Latinos) – the median age among whites is 41; among Latinos it’s 27 – is causing significant tension. The state with the largest age gap between whites and Latinos is Arizona, which notoriously passed (what was then) the country’s most repressive anti-immigrant law last year. The gap is also responsible for low levels of per capita spending on education, since older whites “don’t see themselves” in the younger generation using the schools. And good urban schools are key to keeping families in cities as their children grow up.

Even with their big families and many children, Latinos prefer to live in cities, Pastor said. New arrivals, especially, disproportionately use transit. The walkable urbanism in immigrant neighborhoods is characterized by “taquerías, not cappuccino bars,” Pastor said. Latinos simply don’t follow the same trends as white Americans when it comes to suburban flight when kids come into the picture.

Read more…

In a couple of hours, the House will vote on the transportation extension bill – under unanimous consent rules. That means a single vote in opposition could delay passage.

It’s unclear how we went from a House determined to cut spending levels by more than 30 percent to a House unanimously committed to passing a bill with current spending levels. It’s unclear even that this unanimous vote plan will work. Republican party discipline isn’t what it used to be, what with the Tea Party revolt just loving to accuse House Speaker John Boehner of being a tax-and-spend liberal.

However, rumor has it that House Republicans are being told that the extension’s spending levels don’t change the appropriations levels the House is willing to approve, and that’s $27.7 billion for the year for highways and $5.2 billion for transit. So if the extension authorizes $19.8 billion for highways for the first six months and $4.2 billion for transit, that’s fine: It just means that for the whole second half of the year, highways would only get $7.9 billion and transit would only get $800 million. Those are deadly cuts, but it appears that transportation leaders are putting off that fight till later in order to pass an extension now.

Meanwhile, if the extension bill doesn’t pass the House by unanimous consent, the House will need to follow normal rules of order to pass it by majority vote. That means it’ll need to wait a full 72 hours between the posting of the bill and the vote, and that would mean a Wednesday vote. It could also open the door to a messy amendment process.

Speaking of amendments: In the Senate, Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn is planning to file an amendment to cut Transportation Enhancements from the six-month extension. It’s good news that he’s doing it as an amendment and not a hold on the bill, since a hold is a unilateral move to force the Senate to utilize a much more time-consuming process to vote on the bill. His amendment will likely fail, since many senators who would normally vote with him to cut bike/ped funding are committed to passing a clean extension, with no amendments.

If Coburn’s amendment does fail, he can lose graciously — or he can try to filibuster. It’s unclear whether he plans to do that. While the House is hoping to have 100 percent support for the bill, insiders fear that in the Senate, the bill could fall short of the 60 percent majority it needs to overcome a filibuster.

Read more…

Maybe we can finally lay the whole “drive till you qualify” myth to rest now.

You probably already suspected that driving farther and farther outside the city limits until you found a house you could afford was not the smartest way to go about buying a home. You may have been tipped off by the fact that the word “drive” was in that not-so-sage piece of advice.

Well, your suspicions are confirmed. The Center for Neighborhood Technology has long been a champion of what they call the H+T (Housing + Transportation) index. They say that instead of measuring affordability strictly by housing costs (typically determined to be “affordable” if housing eats up less than 30 percent of household income), we should look at a combined index and determine affordability as a home where housing costs plus transportation costs make up less than 45 percent of income.

To make this real for the people of the national capital region, CNT teamed up with Washington, D.C.’s forward-looking Office of Planning to analyze how the H+T index changes notions of affordability in the D.C. area. Their report, “H+T in D.C.: Housing + Transportation Affordability in Washington, D.C.” [PDF]

In her foreward, Planning Director Harriet Tregoning (who, incidentally, got hit by a car on her bike last week) says that she wanted to go deeper than the CNT’s previous research, which used 2000 census data. She wanted to know what had happened during the “turbulent period” between 2006 and 2008.

“During that time some outer jurisdictions experienced drops in the median home sales price of 41 percent, while the District’s median sales price dropped by only 2 percent,” she wrote. “This happened while real gas prices grew by 18 percent.”

In any given location, transportation costs vary inversely to housing costs – meaning that in walkable, compact neighborhoods where transit access is convenient and housing prices are high, transportation costs are low – in some cases, low enough to offset the higher cost of housing.

It becomes apparent that “affordable” housing in the farthest-reaching areas of the region is much less so when transportation costs are added. Average H+T burdens in Spotsylvania, Charles, and Calvert counties are largely over 45 percent of AMI [area median income], and even exceed 55 percent of AMI in areas. Conversely, the District of Columbia, Prince George’s County, Arlington County, and Alexandria present some of the most affordable areas in the region. Here, even where housing costs are relatively high, average H+T burdens are largely less than 45 percent of AMI.

Read more…

Got five minutes to help strengthen and refine pedestrian advocacy? America Walks has put out a survey on walking habits, and they hope the answers will advance understanding of why people walk and what would motivate people to walk more. The survey explores, among other questions:

• What motivates and sustains avid walkers? What deters others?
• How did they start walking, and what are their routines?
• What makes a neighborhood walkable or not?
• What do walkers believe are the psychological and physical benefits?

America Walks is the only national organization dedicated exclusively to the rights of pedestrians. After 15 years of advocacy, it’s in the process of reinventing itself, partnering with organizations from AARP to the National Associations of Realtors to get more people “up off couch and walking out the door.”

The survey closes in early June. Click here to start.

Slate has posted this map to illustrate the concentration of “food deserts,” where large numbers of people don’t have access to fresh food. The USDA considers households more than a mile from a supermarket and without access to a car to be in food deserts, often with only convenience-store junk food for nourishment. In 2009, the agency found 2.3 million of these households. Here, Slate shows the preponderance of those households in Appalachia and the Deep South, and on Indian reservations.

Access to healthy food is just one reason to build walkable places with a mix of uses and diverse transportation options. The places on this map are where people have been stranded — how walkable can your neighborhood be if you can’t walk to buy fresh produce? Many of the people identified here are poor and can’t afford cars. Some are elderly or disabled and can’t drive.

The most vulnerable members of our communities are the ones most hurt by transportation policies that keep a singular focus on automobile transportation and ignore those who need other ways to get around. What Slate is calling a food desert, you could also call an unlivable neighborhood, where even residents’ most basic needs — like access to healthy food — are denied.

It makes intuitive sense that cycling and walking to work regularly would help people stay healthy, but until now there's only been anecdotal evidence suggesting that places where walking or cycling to work is common also have lower rates of obesity.

That changed in a significant way yesterday when the American Journal of Public Health published new findings from researchers at Rutgers, Virginia Tech, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that show a clear link between high levels of walking and bicycling to work and positive health outcomes. The study was led by John Pucher, an urban planning professor at Rutgers.

The researchers analyzed health and travel data from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey, and the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

Among the 50 states, obesity rates range from 19 percent to 35 percent, while rates of active commuting vary from two to nine percent.

The study found that there are significant connections between having a low obesity rate and a high rate of walking or biking to work. The same is true for diabetes. In statistical terms, about 30 percent of the variation in obesity among states -- and more than half of the variation in diabetes -- was linked to differences in walking and cycling rates.

Read more...

Two reports released last week underscored the increasing severity of America's obesity epidemic. And the eye-opening findings add to the mounting evidence that stopping the spread of obesity and its attendant health risks will require changes to the nation’s transportation system as surely as it demands altering our diets.

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Tuesday showed the number of obese Americans has increased by 2.4 million since 2007. There are now nine states where more than 30 percent of the population qualifies as obese -- up from three states in 2007. (Just ten years ago, no state had obesity levels above 30 percent). 

The following day, Gallup released a ranking of the nation’s most and least obese states as part of a broader index of well-being. By its accounting, a cluster of states in the southeast -- West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina -- have the highest rates of obesity, while the thinnest states, mainly in the west and New England, tend to have obesity rates about ten percentage points lower.

In the CDC ranking of states (which varies slightly from the Gallup ranking), Colorado and the District of Columbia are the only states with obesity rates under 20 percent, making their rate nearly 15 points lower than the most obese states. Their secret? During a press briefing, the CDC's Bill Dietz speculated that Colorado’s investment in biking and walking trails, as well as District residents' frequent use of public transportation, which goes hand in hand with walking and thus burns more calories than driving, are possible factors.

Indeed, if you look at rates of active commuting (walking and biking) in the most and least obese states, a revealing correlation emerges. Three of the five most obese states in the Gallup ranking are also among the five states with the smallest percentage of people who bike to work. At the other end of the spectrum, four of the ten thinnest states are among those where people bike to work most frequently. (The commuting rates come from Census data detailed in this League of American Bicyclists report.)

Read more...

Federal funding for pedestrian and bicycle projects reached a new high last year, according to a report released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. In terms of dollars, federal investment in walking and biking more than doubled compared to the previous high, set in 2007, thanks largely to an infusion of $400 million in stimulus funds.

The share of all federal transportation spending devoted to bike-ped projects also rose to an unprecedented level — all of two percent. Advocates for walking and biking applauded the trend while pointing out the potential for much greater federal commitment to active transportation.

"It continues to be an improvement, and it continues to be a tiny
fraction of the money that’s available to potentially be spent on
biking and walking," said Andy Clarke of the League of American
Bicyclists.

Subtracting the $400 million one-shot in stimulus funding, Clarke noted, yields a less impressive year-on-year increase. And part of the increase in reported bike-ped spending might also simply reflect better record keeping by state DOTs, as agencies document the construction of sidewalks and bike lanes as part of larger projects, according to Barbara McCann of the National Complete Streets Coalition.

The spending figures come from an update on the state of walking and biking that the feds release every five years. The original National Bicycling and Walking Study, released in 1994, set two major targets: to double walk and bike mode-share, from 7.9 percent of all trips to 15.8 percent; and to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities by 10 percent.

Read more…