Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The election is less than a week away. Americans have a choice between a) a president who has overseen notable transportation and land use innovations but failed to provide leadership when the national transportation bill could have been reformed, and b) a former governor who enacted a progressive, pro-smart-growth agenda but who has renounced those positions as a candidate.

City Council Member Carl DeMaio has a plan to make San Diego a more walkable, bikeable city.

So the San Diego mayoralty probably isn’t what’s keeping you up at night, glued to Nate Silver’s election forecasting. But it’s been a nasty and surprisingly close race between U.S. Rep. Bob Filner, a Democrat, and Republican City Council Member Carl DeMaio. According to some (admittedly confusing and poorly conducted) polls, it could go either way. So it may be reassuring to know that no matter who is elected mayor of San Diego, the victor says he will wholeheartedly support biking, walking, and sustainability.

Three San Diego active transportation organizations – Move San Diego, WalkSanDiego, and the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition – did an impressive job not only getting these candidates on the record, but getting them to spend an hour battling over who could be the walkingest, bikingest, livabilityest mayor San Diego had ever seen. (The debate they sponsored is available for your viewing pleasure here.)

U.S. Rep. Bob Filner wants to know where that plan was three years ago.

Remember that according to one of San Diego’s members of Congress, non-automobile modes of transportation are “not feasible” here. (Side note: Rep. Duncan Hunter, who told me nearly two years ago that bicycling isn’t real transportation and highway building is enshrined in the constitution, just switched districts as a result of redistricting, and he now represents a far more urban portion of San Diego County. Perhaps he’ll be educated on active transportation by the great folks who hosted the mayor’s debate.)

But in this city where, according to Rep. Hunter, no one could ever possibly get around without a car, both major candidates fell all over themselves to prove that they would build the most bike lanes and bulb-outs.

Before a mayoral debate sponsored by the walking and biking groups last month, DeMaio released his bike plan for the city [PDF]. Filner said he was willing to “stipulate” that it’s a great plan – but he countered that DeMaio is a new kid on the sustainability block, whereas he’s been doing the work for years. DeMaio’s plan includes everything from pedestrian master planning to making San Diego “the most bike-friendly city in the world.” (During the debate, the candidates only agreed that it should be among the top 50 in the country.)

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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched their “New Public Health” website last year with the goal of meeting community members where they are to talk about public health. A lot of those conversations happen online, and they explore the connections between public health and policy decisions related to everything from education to transportation. Last week, they published an interview with U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood.

They also put out a complete and convincing infographic showing why sustainable transportation modes are a key component of any public health strategy — and any healthy and prosperous community.

It highlights the positive health correlation between transit and health — and suggests that maybe the walk home from the train station is the best part of your commute. Experts say people are willing to walk a quarter mile to a bus stop and a half mile to a rail station. The more bus stops and rail stations there are, the more people get those healthy 19 minutes of walking, too.

Walking and biking as part of your commute can reduce obesity and your risk of a crash. And job sprawl that makes it harder for people to walk or bike to work cost communities money.

But don’t take my word for it — take it from the public health experts. Full infographic after the jump:

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OK, everybody, pack your bags. We’re all moving to Massachusetts.

MassDOT Chief Richard Davey said yesterday he wouldn't be building any more "superhighways" and wanted to focus on transit, biking, and walking instead. Photo: The Republican/Mark M. Murray

The Bay State’s transportation secretary, Richard Davey, has launched a “mode shift” campaign, saying in no uncertain terms that it’s time for people to get out of their cars and onto trains, buses, bikes, and their own two feet. His goal is to triple the share of trips taken by those modes, as opposed to single-occupancy vehicles, by improving transit service and active transportation amenities like lighting, sidewalks, curb cuts and rail-trails.

Here’s the part that gives me the shivers: “I have news for you,” Davey said at a news conference yesterday. “We will build no more superhighways in this state. There is no room.”

Massachusetts has 76,200 lane-miles of roadway, in a state that’s just 190 miles long. That’s a lot more asphalt than any other state in New England.

Eric Sundquist works with innovative state DOTs for a living, as director of the State Smart Transportation Initiative. What Massachusetts is doing is “leading edge but not bleeding edge,” Sundquist told Streetsblog. “There are other states that, even if they haven’t packaged a campaign around mode shift explicitly, are doing a lot of things to encourage mode shift.”

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Detroit gets major style points for the Dequindre Cut, a sunken bike and walk trail that connects two of the city's most popular destinations. Photo: Detroit Riverfront Conservancy

In central Detroit, on the site of a former railroad, there’s a place just for bikes and pedestrians. In many ways, the Dequindre Cut is a cyclist’s (or a jogger’s) dream: a separated, below-grade bike path that at no point intersects with car traffic. It’s wide enough for a two-way cycle track plus a path for pedestrians off to the side, so bicyclists and joggers don’t have to compete for space. It goes right through the heart of the city, serving as a passage between two of Detroit’s biggest attractions — the Riverfront and the Eastern Market.

This could be one of the coolest active transportation projects in the country, and the fact that it’s happening in the Motor City makes it that much more awesome. The only downside is that right now the Dequindre Cut (pronounced “duh-QUIN-der”) is just less than a mile and a half long. But philanthropic groups are looking ahead to phase two: a half-mile extension that will take the path out past Gratiot Road to the Eastern Market. Eventually, the plan is to connect the cut with greenways running through Hamtramck all the way to inner-ring suburb Royal Oak, and destinations throughout the city.

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Last week, U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood helped NYC transpo commish Janette Sadik-Khan launch a new phase of the “LOOK!” campaign, with pavement markings instructing texting pedestrians to wake the hell up. He made a comment that made its way into his blog post about the event, as well as other media reports on the event, and it caught the attention of Streetsblog NYC’s crack reporting team.

Sadik-Khan and LaHood show off new sidewalk safety markings in NYC, just after LaHood said 80 percent of dead pedestrians were victims of their own jaywalking. Photo: Stephen Miller

What LaHood said was that many pedestrian deaths that occurred nationwide in 2010 were easily preventable, as “nearly 80 percent happened because someone was jaywalking.”

That hits like a ton of bricks, doesn’t it? Drivers dart around in powerful, heavy, dangerous contraptions at high speeds while texting, tweeting, eating, and shuffling through their iPods, and it’s the person hoofing it that’s to blame? Eighty percent of the time?

Turns out he was misquoting some data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which showed that in 2010, 79 percent of pedestrian fatalities occurred at non-intersections. Someone on LaHood’s staff looked at that statistic and figured “jaywalking” was pretty much a synonym for whatever was happening there.

A U.S. DOT spokesperson acknowledged that LaHood was referring to the NHTSA numbers and said, “He was not speaking about the fault or cause of those accidents.”

I don’t know who was ruled at fault in all of those crashes, but I do know for sure that being killed at a non-intersection doesn’t necessarily mean you were jaywalking. Maybe a drunk driver swerved off the road and onto the sidewalk. Or a motorist didn’t look when pulling out of an alley or driveway — U.S. DOT confirmed that curb cuts don’t count as “intersections” in this case. Besides, not all crosswalks are at intersections.

And then there are cases, like that of Raquel Nelson in Georgia, where there simply is no intersection. In suburban areas, you can walk half a mile before you get to an intersection or even a crosswalk. It’s not that no one ever needs to walk across the street, it’s just that planners have ruled that they must take their lives into their own hands when they do.

NHTSA already laid enough blame on pedestrian crash victims with its report, by focusing on how often they were intoxicated. For the secretary himself to say at a major press event that fully four out of five people mowed down by cars were “jaywalking” and therefore at fault is just wrong. It obscures the truth that motorists —  not pedestrians – cause the most havoc on our streets.

Walk Score is a service that quantifies how walkable your neighborhood is and helps connect people with housing in areas where they can live car-free or car-lite. It’s a widely-used and practical tool, but it can be a little frustrating: Like anything so data-driven, it can leave out some of the intangible things you love most about where you live. Today, Walk Score is trying to solve that problem by launching a new iPhone app and website, seeking to harvest all those unquantifiable neighborhood attributes.

Screen shot of Walk Score's new iPhone app, which can uncover the unquantifiable aspects of a neighborhood that makes it great. Image: Walk Score.

“Nobody knows your neighborhood better than you do,” said Josh Herst, CEO of Walk Score. “Every day we hear from people telling us how special their neighborhoods are, pointing out their wonderful tree-lined sidewalks, outdoor spaces, nearby restaurants and locally owned shops.”

“They might say, ‘Well, I got a walk score of 50, which seems about right because I can’t actually walk that many places, but I just want you to know we have the most beautiful, old, tree-lined streets, and the architecture here is really wonderful,’” added Walk Score co-founder Matt Lerner. “’And we feel like when people look up the score on Walk Score they just get this number, 50, that doesn’t capture why we love our neighborhood.’”

Herst says that by adding this “rich local insight” to Walk Score, they’ll be able to provide more accurate depictions of different areas, all toward their goal of allowing people to “drive less and live more.”

They point to a 2010 study by the Knight Foundation and Gallup, which identified the three qualities that create emotional attachment to neighborhoods:

• Social and cultural opportunities and gathering spots
• Community openness to diversity
• Appealing aesthetics

“So that’s the thing we’re trying to capture,”” Lerner said, “the aesthetics and experience of a neighborhood, which has always been the weakness of walk score. It’s always just kind of been a number and a map.”

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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…

Chris Leinberger wears too many hats to count – real estate developer, George Washington University professor, Brookings fellow – but he has one message: “Walkable urbanism is the future.”

Capital Bikeshare riders under DC's Chinatown arch. Photo: DC: The WalkUP Wake-Up Call

For years now, Leinberger has been preaching the gospel that the postwar era of automobile-oriented “drivable suburbanism” is over – and urbanism is the new wave. He’s even developed his own lingo for it: He now refers to walkable urban places as WalkUPs.

In a report released this week called DC: The WalkUP Wake-Up Call [PDF], Leinberger explores the six different kinds of “regionally significant” WalkUPs, using Washington, DC as the model. Indeed, he claims DC is the model of walkable urbanism, a pioneer of the trend.

Of the six types of WalkUPs in Leinberger’s framework, three are urban and three are suburban. Cities have the traditional downtown, “downtown adjacent” neighborhoods like Dupont Circle or Capitol Hill, and “urban commercial” areas like Adams Morgan or H Street. Suburbs have their own town centers like Bethesda, strip commercial redevelopment like White Flint, and greenfield development, like Reston.

Most growth over next 30 years will happen in strip commercial redevelopments, according to Leinberger, and at the vanguard is Tysons Corner – “the world’s largest drivable sub-urban concentration of commercial enterprises” — now on its way toward walkable, transit-oriented urbanism.

Indeed, Leinberger’s brand of urbanism largely looks outside central cities. It’s Washington’s suburbs that have really caught his attention. Of the 43 WalkUPs he identifies in the DC area, “a surprising 58 percent are in the suburbs,” comprising 51 percent of the square footage.

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Childless urbanites love to hate the stroller. New Yorker Laura Miller started a blog, “Too Big For Stroller,” dedicated to mocking older children who get around the easy way. Commenters on a Greater Greater Washington story about strollers on buses last year showcased surprising vitriol, saying, “Carry your child, like an able-bodied adult should” and “Pretty lousy parenting, when you could fold the stroller and hold the child” and “Keep those strollers off our buses.” There are internet rants against giant, SUV-style strollers (and, five years ago on Streetsblog, a defense). A New York Times story about stroller rage ended up plumbing deeper emotional issues around unequal social status for breeders and non-breeders.

Check out a stroller, return it to any station. Photo: Undercover Tourist

It’s all well and good to be smug about your smaller footprint when your baby is still small enough to be carried long distances in a sling. But let’s be clear: For car-free, city-dwelling parents, strollers are a necessity — and sometimes even for bigger kids. A four-year-old can certainly walk on his own from the parking lot to the mall, but if your day involves miles of walking as your primary mode of transportation, you’re going to end up carrying that kid a lot.

“For urban parents, the stroller is the equivalent of a suburbanite’s automobile,” said the designers of a transit-compatible stroller a few months ago. ”It is the vehicle that enables mobility and freedom in day-to-day life for families with young children. But navigating metro rail systems with conventional strollers can be exceedingly taxing — and dangerous.”

Indeed, strollers don’t always make things easy. Or rather, cities don’t always make things easy for parents with strollers.

Cobblestone streets, missing curb cuts, crowded buses, revolving doors – and then subways, with their own set of obstacles like turnstiles and stairs – make baby-strolling a major challenge. Sometimes it’s easier just to carry the kid.

Here’s where Stroller-Share would come in. It’s easier for me, and for the other passengers, to carry my seven-month-old daughter Luna to the bus and hold her in my lap while we ride. Taking the stroller on the bus (where policy dictates that strollers be folded) involves quickly taking my child out as the bus pulls up, collapsing it with one hand while holding a wriggling baby with the other (including fastening a latch that is decidedly a two-handed job), and paying my fare with my third hand. Oh yeah, I don’t have a third hand. This is why I’m happy to carry her short distances. And as she gets too big to be carried, she’ll be able to walk short distances.

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This map shows roughly how much states are spending on bike and pedestrian projects that are not part of a larger road project. Click on the image to see the full interactive map.

How’s your state doing on bike and pedestrian investment? Transit? Bridge repair?

Congress just reauthorized the national law that funnels tens of billions of dollars each year to state departments of transportation, but tracking how these agencies spend all their federal money is notoriously difficult. A lack of uniformity in the way states report spending has made it difficult to compare these numbers, even though all states are required to abide by certain federal filing standards. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign recently sorted through piles of documents to establish a basis for comparison.

Their new report, “Tracking State Transportation Dollars” [PDF], breaks down the funding levels for each State Transportation Improvement Program, or STIP, a document that lists all projects that states plan to fund with federal dollars. Although the STIP doesn’t account for all of a state’s transportation funding, it does reveal some interesting patterns.

Overall, states spend an average of 20 percent on transit, the report found. Bicycle and pedestrian programs made up an average of 2 percent. Meanwhile, states are spending an average of 38.5 percent of the STIP on maintenance, and about 22.5 percent to add or expand roads and bridges.

The results also reveal wide variations from state to state, made available in a handy interactive map.

Hawaii — thanks to its construction of a major passenger rail system — is the only state to best New York in transit spending, devoting 74 percent of its STIP budget to transit. The Empire State, with a much larger system to maintain, stands at a still-formidable 62 percent. Virginia is another standout at 49 percent, with Colorado (44 percent) and Utah (42 percent) not far behind. Meanwhile, Nebraska (1 percent), Mississippi and Kentucky (2 percent each) exemplify states on the lower end of the transit-spending spectrum.

Meanwhile, North Carolina is the worst sprawl-inducer, spending 58 percent of its STIP on expanding highways. Arizona and Arkansas also spend more than half of their STIP on adding roads, with Indiana (45 percent), Mississippi (also 45), and Texas (36 percent) especially prone to highway expansion as well. Not surprisingly, several of these states also devote a low proportion of their STIP to maintenance, with Texas and Arizona giving just a shred to upkeep of their existing transportation network.

You have to be cautious about making comparisons, however, says report author Renata Silberblatt.

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