Streetsblog Capitol Hill

In 2010, DOT Secretary Ray LaHood mounted a table at the National Bike Summit and proclaimed, “I’ve been all over America, and…people want alternatives. They want out of their cars, they want out of congestion, they want to live in… livable communities.” He added, to thunderous applause, “You’ve got a partner in Ray LaHood.”

Shortly thereafter he blogged, “People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.”

Last night, LaHood addressed the same conference for his fifth and final time as DOT secretary. He echoed that sentiment: People across the country are hungry for safer streets for bicycling. He reflected on what he and the Obama administration had accomplished over the past four years, including awarding a record $3.8 billion of FHWA funding and $130 million in TIGER funds for bicycle and pedestrian projects.

But the secretary recognizes there is still more to be done. Bicyclists deaths grew by 9 percent from 2010 to 2011. And while LaHood is well known for his campaigns against unsafe behaviors like distracted driving, last night he called for increased, high-quality infrastructure to protect people who bike and prevent crashes.

LaHood told AASHTO last week that “DOT is looking to create a standard guide for how we will build modern streets that work for everyone who depends on them.” Last night, he told the crowd that DOT would hold two bike safety summits this spring, in which DOT will convene experts and advocates to get input into these new standards.

NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan followed LaHood. As the head of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, Sadik-Khan helped oversee the development of the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, which sets forth a well-conceived precedent for the feds to follow. She thanked LaHood heartily for his service and presented him with an honorary New York City street sign, and an offer to rename a real street after him. Maybe Prospect Park West, she joked, to the delight of the crowd.

On Friday, we put this question to our readers: Who should be the next Transportation Secretary? And lucky for us, 323 of you had nothing better to do with your weekend than answer our poll.

The runaway winner, starting as soon as the polls opened, was Janette Sadik-Khan of New York City DOT. Under her leadership, safety and mobility features for bicyclists have increased exponentially, Select Bus Service has made aboveground transit a more viable option, 23 plazas have been installed, Times Square has gone from car-plagued nightmare to pedestrian public space, and Summer Streets car-free days have shown neighborhoods what it’s like to replace automobile traffic with ziplines. If there ever was a beautiful experiment in livability, JSK’s NYC is it.

No one wants to see Sadik-Khan leave New York, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg is leaving office at the end of next year (no fourth term for this guy) and word is she’ll be looking for a new job. Plus, as commenter Joe R. said, “If she makes what we’ve done here in NYC federal policy there’s far less chance of a future mayor undoing the progress we’ve made.”

Sadik-Khan got 108 of the 499 votes cast (voters were allowed to check up to three boxes) — one-third of the total — despite the fact that she was up against nine other candidates, plus “other.”

That’s a pretty solid margin. President Obama, if you were wracking your brain for another DOT secretary that would make Streetsblog readers as happy as Ray LaHood has, now you know.

Runners-up were Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Chicago DOT Director Gabe Klein, with 73 and 72 votes, respectively. They’ve both shown how some smart and strategic changes can result in a seismic culture shift in how people move around the city. Villaraigosa has also shown a special genius for creative financing of infrastructure mega-projects — a rare and exceedingly practical gift in today’s cash-poor transportation world.

And in fourth place was a plea to Ray LaHood to stay put. He’s done so much to make the U.S. DOT a bastion of livability efforts, and our readers know he could do so much more.

One of the interesting developments to come out of the National Association of City Transportation Officials “Designing Cities” conference (currently in its second day) was the announcement of a wide-ranging new design guide to be released next year. NACTO’s “Urban Streets Design Guide” will show how streets of every size can be re-oriented to prioritize transit, safe walking and biking, and public activity.

In much the same way that NACTO’s “Urban Bikeway Design Guide” helped cities implement projects like protected bike lanes, which aren’t included in more conservative engineering manuals, the Urban Streets Design Guide will help accelerate the adoption of a range of multi-modal improvements, from bus lanes to curbside public spaces. As NYC DOT chief and NACTO President Janette Sadik-Khan writes in the foreword:

These innovations are at the center of improvements for urban roadways in the U.S., but they are still often treated as marginal or exceptional by other national design guides. This guide will fill that gap and give cities the tools they need as they strive to make the most of their streets.

The full Urban Streets Design Guide is slated to come out in March. For now there’s a short overview and some excerpts online, which give a sense of what will be in the finished version.

When it comes to re-engineering streets, the importance of this type of design guidance is hard to overstate. At a panel yesterday afternoon, Seleta Reynolds of the San Francisco MTA’s Livable Streets program shared a terrific example of how the NACTO bikeway guide helped accelerate change at her agency.

When SF was planning bike lanes for JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, she said, the release of NACTO’s guide prompted her agency to reconsider the standard approach — placing the bike lanes between parked cars and traffic. “We decided the regular bike lane wouldn’t be good enough,” she said. “We opted for one-way cycle tracks.”

Read more…

America’s streets are changing for the better. The signs are everywhere: Whether it’s bike sharing in Chattanooga, complete streets in New Orleans or bus rapid transit in Cleveland — cities across the country are trying new things and making impressive progress in the pursuit of safer streets and sustainable transportation.

It’s all thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people — advocates, elected officials, and a new breed of policy maker you might call the visionary bureaucrat. This series is about those bureaucrats — the people who are transforming transportation and planning agencies from public sector backwaters into centers of bold innovation and change.

Every day this week, Streetsblog will be highlighting well-known and not-so-well-known transportation officials who are working to put new ideas into action. They’re overcoming bureaucratic and political obstacles, building coalitions, and demonstrating how American transportation systems should adapt for the 21st century.

We compiled this list with help from the Congress for the New Urbanism, Smart Growth America, Transportation for America, Project for Public Spaces, and the State Smart Transportation Initiative. Recognizing that a truly comprehensive list of innovators would be impossible, we aimed to put together a broad cross-section of officials working at different levels of local government, from city agencies to state DOTs. Everyone here is deserving, but not everyone who’s deserving is on the list.

Here’s the first of our five installments.

Janette Sadik-Khan

Commissioner, New York City Department of Transportation

What new superlatives can one use to describe Janette Sadik-Khan? At a time when progressive transportation policy is gaining momentum in many American cities, her tenure as commissioner of New York City DOT has set the standard for innovation. This list had to start with her.

Sadik-Khan is in sort of a unique position for a working transportation official, says John Norquist at the Congress for New Urbanism. Most visionary bureaucrats toil away in obscurity, often pushed out of office in a political shuffle before they can see their plans realized. Sadik-Khan has shown remarkable creativity in cutting through the red tape.

Read more…

Addressing a packed house in Washington last night, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), founder of the Congressional Bike Caucus, posed a Zen-like 'universalist cyclist question'.

"How many people, right now," he asked, "are stuck in traffic on their way to ride a stationary bike in a health club?"

The quip got a big laugh. But at yesterday's launch of Cities for Cycling, a new project spearheaded by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), Blumenauer urged fellow cyclists to consider their cause "serious business."

The mission of C4C, as outlined by New York City Transportation Commissioner and NACTO President Janette Sadik-Khan, is to collect and share best practices for the introduction of local bike lanes and other cycling infrastructure -- the type of strategies that have succeeded in cities but not yet been added to the Federal Highway Administration's traffic control manual, also known as the MUTCD.

"Some of the most celebrated and popular [bike] improvements are not even in the national guidelines," Sadik-Khan explained, adding that C4C ultimately aims to help develop "a new MUTCD, designed for cities, not highways."

The C4C kickoff, held in the shadow of the Capitol and sponsored by the Brookings Institution, was imbued with a sense of hope for future federal and local policies to encourage bicycling expansion. The Obama administration had a strong presence in the room, including Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff, befitting its public push for more sustainable community development.

Still, Blumenauer and Sadik-Khan emphasized that bolstering the uneven federal commitment to bicycling, and its urban benefits in particular, would require hard work and political organizing on the part of bike advocates.

Read more...

This week, I was fortunate to attend the Open Cities conference in Washington (along with fellow Streetsbloggers Elana Schor and Aaron Naparstek), on the ways in which new media is shaping urban policy.

The takeaway, for me at least, was a clear sense that technology is dramatically changing the lay of the land for local urbanists. Better data (and access to data) are helping to identify potential targets for planning improvements and easier navigation of cities and transit systems. Blogs and social network technologies have allowed urbanists to better communicate with each other, inform the public, and influence local governments.

Rare is the big American city that lacks a vibrant urban blogospheric community.

But there was an odd disconnect at this conference whenever a national policy figure took the podium. Speakers came across as detached and awkward where the web's potential was concerned (Adolfo Carrion) or warm and interested but fundamentally unsure of the best opportunities for engagement (Raphel Bostic).

Whereas New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan's talk to the gathering was invigorating because it was clear to all involved how speaker and audience could help each other be effective in achieving common goals, speeches from federal figures landed with the hard thump of uncertainty.

However promising the speakers' expressed goals were, it was less than obvious to all involved how the web might support or influence policy, and how the federal government might deliver tangible results.

I thought of this disconnect as I sat in a meeting on climate policy last night with Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley (D). In that discussion, it quickly became clear that the messages that are resonating with voters are not related to the economic consequences of warming or the moral case for reducing emissions. The messages carrying the day have very little to do with climate at all.

What works with the American people? A focus on ending dependence on oil and on generating clean energy jobs. Those are the priorities that convince voters to support the passage of a climate bill even after being confronted by an opposition message on the cost, real or exaggerated, of proposed plans.

Read more...

I've lived in New York City for just about twenty years now but yesterday was my first trip to Times Square.

Sure, I've been to Times Square before. Plenty of times. But until yesterday Times Square had never ever been a destination for me. Rather, it had always been a place to avoid or, if unavoidable, a place to get in and out of as fast as possible on my way to somewhere else.

The New York City Department of Transportation's "Green Light for Midtown" plan brought me and a lot of other people to Times Square yesterday. And it kept us there. By simply removing motor vehicles from Broadway around Times and Herald Squares and inviting pedestrians in with seating, street performers, good people-watching -- and a naked cowboy -- New York City has created two great new public spaces for tourists, office workers and, yes, even jaded residents.

The space is still raw and unfinished and it'll be interesting to see how it works during the weekday, but my two young sons and I had a blast yesterday along with thousands of others. Times Square is suddenly a place worth visiting and staying a while (especially if you're a parent desperate for an easy, low-cost weekend adventure for your kids).

Read more...

Before hitting the "World Class Streets" launch Thursday night, Jan Gehl addressed about 70 staffers from DOT, City Planning, and NYCEDC, part of a day-long exercise that introduced participants to the Danish planner's site evaluation methods. Commissioners Amanda Burden and Janette Sadik-Khan gave a hero's welcome to Gehl, whom they called "instrumental" to revamping New York's approach to planning.

Calling the assembled city staff "the pied pipers of the new way of doing business," Sadik-Khan touted the city's transition to more human-centered street metrics. "The tools that we've used in the past have done a really good job of helping us measure cars and traffic," she said, "but as we're looking to improve the condition of our streets for other users of the system -- for pedestrians, for cyclists, for people whether they're walking around, riding around, chatting, strolling, having lunch -- we need a much more comprehensive approach."

After a powerpoint from team Gehl, everyone got a feel for what Sadik-Khan was referring to. Fanning out from City Planning's Reade Street headquarters, 11 groups headed to different sites downtown, timers in hand, to see how well New York's streets and public spaces serve the people who use them. The evaluation combines hard stats like pedestrian and cyclist counts with open-ended questions that touch on the quality of the public environment and how well it supports social activity. The same technique underlies much of the data presented in World Class Streets.

DOT Assistant Commissioner Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who heads up the Public Plaza Program, said that the day's events presage permanent changes. "We are going to be working on different ways of building some of these methodologies into our standard operating procedure," he said, "so that we are more versed in studying street life." DOT will both perform the evaluations on its own, he added, and insert the work into consultant contracts.

Read more...

When DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, together with consultant and Danish urban planner Jan Gehl,  introduced the new "World Class Streets" doc [PDF] to a crowd of over 300 last Thursday evening at the Center for Architecture, the event seemed equal parts town hall meeting and celebrity book launch.

Building upon PlaNYC and DOT's Sustainable Streets, World Class Streets focuses on improving the public realm by concentrating on plazas, complete street design, and Summer Streets-style pedestrian and cycling events. Together these measures aim to transform New York streets into "an environment that is enjoyable as well as functional" for pedestrians, cyclists and transit users of all ages.

For the report, Gehl Architects and DOT conducted a "Public Life Survey," gathering a wealth of data that identifies overcrowded sidewalks, streets without seats, excessive scaffolding, isolated public spaces, and a low ratio of stationary activities as shortcomings to address. "Often the most crowded areas (such as sidewalks near subway stops and street corners) are the places where most obstacles exist," it observes, also noting that "a vastly disproportionate amount of space is allocated to parking cars than to public seating spaces." One telling example is Main Street in Flushing, Queens, where pedestrians outnumber vehicle passengers by a ratio of two to one, yet pedestrians must squeeze into less than one-third of the space.

Among other interesting tidbits in the report:

• Stroget in Copenhagen has 444 cafe seats per 1,000 yards, vs. 15 on Broadway (p. 15).
• Just six percent of pedestrians on Broadway are either under the age of 14 or over 65 (p. 31).
• Sixty percent of storefronts in the Lower Manhattan survey area had closed metal gates on a Sunday at noon (p. 35).

Read more...

Her post-Bloomberg career has been the province of wishful speculation. But a report published today indicates that DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan may be considered for a position in Barack Obama's Department of Transportation -- possibly its top spot. 

Conventional wisdom held that front runners for transpo secretary were known progressive brands like Reps. Earl Blumenauer and Jim Oberstar. But that's not necessarily the case, reports Traffic World (via Bike Portland).

Transportation industry executives close to the Obama campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity, say it is more likely ... that the incoming administration will seek to put a new stamp on the department through new appointments less familiar to Washington's political establishment.

There is a wide array of transportation officials at the state and local level who could have a role at the top of DOT or in agency posts, including Steve Heminger, executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay area, and New York City Transportation Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Khan [sic]. 

Whether or not Sadik-Khan is tapped for the top job, sounds like change is coming.

Photo: Brad Aaron