Streetsblog USA

Road Fatality Rates Reach Highest Level in 15 Years

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 18:34:44 GMT

It’s official: walkers who ventured outdoors during COVID-19 lockdowns had a greater chance of being killed than any time in the past 15 years, despite historic declines in driving — suggesting that the real problem remains streets that are designed only to move cars quickly.

The rate of roadway fatalities skyrocketed to 1.42 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in the second quarter of 2020, according to the National Highway Safety Administration’s just-released report. The rate was just 1.08 deaths per 100,000 miles over the same period last year — a five-year low. This year’s spike represents a 32-percent increase.

The data cements the findings of street safety journalists who have speculated for months that rising state and local fatality rates were signs of a bloody national trend — including Streetsblog, which has reported on the phenomenon since the beginning of citywide lockdowns. Traffic violence experts have consistently attributed the death toll to our nation’s penchant for road designs that induce drivers to speed when roadways are empty — and many roads were indeed wide open because of the pandemic.

“We do have fewer car crashes right now, because there are fewer cars,” said Jacque Knight, a St. Louis-based traffic planner, told Streetsblog back in March. “But the crashes we do have are likely to be more severe because speed is the biggest determinant of serious injury and mortality — especially for pedestrians. Our hospitals can’t handle that right now.”

With so many fewer cars on the road, the raw number of deadly crashes did decrease during the height of quarantine orders, but not by very much. NHTSA reports that 8,870 people lost their lives on U.S. roadways between April and June of this year — just a 3.3-percent decrease over the same period last year, despite declines of driving of as much as 94 percent in many areas of the country.

Unfortunately, the federal agency blamed the bloodshed on everything but bad road design. In an exclusive to Reuters, a spokesperson for NHTSA speculated that “drivers who remained on the roads engaged in more risky behavior, including speeding, failing to wear seat belts, and driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol,” but provided no evidence that those behaviors increased during the second quarter. Speeding, of course, was indisputably on the rise this spring, but that was likely less a matter of individual drivers exercising bad judgment than the systemic impact of wide open roadways inducing drivers to go too fast.

Source: Strong Towns

One reason the Administration might not have that data is because law enforcement officers largely didn’t stop bad drivers during the early days of the pandemic, which departments attributed to the need for officers to practice social distancing. NHTSA also speculated to Reuters that it was “possible that drivers’ perception that they may be caught breaking a law was reduced.” There’s no definitive data to disprove that yet, but it bears repeating that America’s heavily policed roads have never really succeeded in curbing our traffic violence crisis at any point in modern history — and have precipitated an unacceptable police violence crisis among communities of color.

Infrastructure-based solutions, of course, do have a proven track record of saving lives without increasing interactions between the public and police — and since traffic volumes may not rebound to pre-pandemic levels ever, it’s past time to put our money and energy behind what works.

Talking Headways Podcast: Uber’s Transit Moves

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 17:10:18 GMT

This week, we’re joined by Chris Pangilinan, head of Global Policy for Public Transportation at Uber. He talks with us about walled gardens, Uber’s partnerships with transit agencies, accessibility on transit and much more.

Many people tell us they prefer to read the news than listen to it, so we have a full transcript (with typos!) here and excerpted highlights below the audio player. Enjoy it either way:

Jeff Wood: There’s been a lot of discussion about the competition between say Uber and transit agencies. I understand specifically the idea behind paratransit and routing. I know that for example, my grandmother used to use paratransit and it was a slog. You called somebody and then it came to the next day and maybe in two hours and maybe they didn’t come, and it was super frustrating. But for a regular transit service, what’s the benefit?

Chris Pangilinan: Yeah. So you kind of alluded to two things here. One is this competition/complementarianism between the two modes, but also the other one is, “What’s the benefit?” And I think focusing on the benefit, first, is an interesting area here where I think we could all argue that buses and trains can probably take off 90 percent plus have all public transportation demand the United States. And it does great job of it — moving to a lot of people within high-frequency corridors. But transit can sometimes fall apart a little bit when its outer area is less dense or areas that are dense during the day, but perhaps are not as dense at night, either by land use or by travel pattern.

And there is potential benefit of having a TNC-style service or on-demand service that can reach places faster. Let’s say than an hour or half-hour headway, maybe as fast as 10 minutes or five minutes and get people directly or with a carpool at the same price, potentially, as a bus in terms of subsidy per rider or maybe more expensive, but it is providing a much higher quality of service than like a one-hour bus frequency. And so I think that’s the benefit right there is complementing and covering where transit potentially can be weak. TNCs happen to be the exact opposite, they are lower capacity on demand vehicles versus transit with your high capacity, fixed route vehicles.

And so they can cover each other’s weaknesses. But in terms of the complimentary or a competition, I think it’s fair to say that there are some times when a person might be trying to decide how to get somewhere — bus or train or Uber? And they are choosing between those three modes in the moment. They might choose Uber over transit or vice versa, but in the long haul and especially because Uber is so much more expensive than transit, it’s not going to be an everyday decision that you’re taking Uber. In fact, in Seattle, we found that 85 percent of people are taking Uber less than once a week or so. It’s infrequent.

And that shows that a lot of people, again, it’s 85 percent, are not using this every day, but more of like a mobility insurance type of usage. And there’s a potential here of how does on-demand service allow someone to live a car-free lifestyle when paired with all the other modes into like a multi-modal basket of goods. If you can take a bus, a train, bike, walk, TNC, that’s good enough to avoid buying a private car. But if you pull any of those legs out, which unfortunately we’re seeing here with COVID, you end up buying a car.

And for a lot of people are right now, that transit leg is being pulled and in some sense, the ride hail leg too, because of either fear of COVID or lower service and car ownership is on the rise. And I think what we’re trying to do is plug into the multimodal basket to prevent that car ownership rise. And so I think that’s how the complementarianism can come into play,

Jeff Wood: But you have places like Miami, which is replacing late night bus trips with some subsidized Uber trips. How does this benefit the agency specifically when they are replacing trips or replacing service necessarily? Cause you talk about the complementarian, and I think for most people it does act as what you called mobility insurance for being able to live a car-free lifestyle. And of course now are seeing all kinds of people buying cars and then wondering why there’s no parking in places like San Francisco and New York. But how does a program like Miami-Dade’s work?

Chris Pangilinan: So in Miami during the height of the lockdowns in April, they ended up suspending overnight bus service between, I think, midnight and 5 a.m. and partnered with us and Lyft to cover those rides. And so I believe the way it worked was if you a rider, you can take an on-demand ride with an a quarter-mile, which was generally the watershed people of the bus route that was canceled, and get around the city on an Uber. And so as ridership plummeted during the lockdowns, they were able to reallocate their buses, which have a much higher fixed cost on them than a TNC, to daytime service. And that way they could, for example, run more routes during the day and have more spacing when there’s more crowds riding the buses and attempt to keep more in social distancing.

And at night, they turned the service over to TNCs. As a result, that agency was able to spend less money per rider, saving overall money and reallocating that money during the day. And so I think that’s is an interesting example there of that kind of dynamic at play where TNCs, or any kind of on-demand service, can fulfill that service while transit agencies can spend more of their resources during the day when the demand is higher.

Jeff Wood: You know, one of the things that I think about a lot is land use and land-use patterns. And I know that these types of services are responses to land-use patterns as they exist now. But do you think that also they might be perpetuating them into the future? What I mean is, on-demand transportation seems to be a response to the land-use patterns that exist and the lack of transportation options that we’ve built into the system. In urban places such as New York, San Francisco, downtown Chicago, et cetera., we have a really good transit. But outside of that, we don’t have a good transit, but it’s kind of like a chicken-and-egg thing, right? Does low-density land-use perpetuate the existence of more vehicles, more ride hailing, more of that type of service rather than transit? And then if you continue with the ride haling and more of those types of services, does that mean that are just going to continuously built more low-density suburbs and those types of developments that like I said, chicken-and-egg the whole, pardon my French, shitshow?

Chris Pangilinan: Definitely. I think land use is the major questions and also schools, which was a huge part of this equation of what drives people to move into suburbs versus staying in more dense areas. But we’ll leave schools aside for now and focus on land use. So I’ve in Portland right now. People think of Portland as this great bastion of transit and in some respects it is, but the outer parts are just like winding roads out to a high school where there’s a giant parking lot and single family homes. Nothing against a single-family home, but it kind of drives me crazy. It’s the way the single family homes are laid out in the cul-de-sac and you’re not going to serve well with transit. To get downtown to get to a job, with multiple transfers on a low-frequency bus route means we’re setting up transit to fail these areas. We’re also setting up ride hail to fail, frankly, because people are going to be buying cars there. No one’s gonna be needing a ride hail. And actually if you look at where ride hail usage is some of the highest, it is and areas like New York City, like in San Francisco where it’s people who don’t own cars in the first place and who aren’t using a combination of transit biking, walking, and they occasional ride hail to get around. Ride-hailing and transit together — mostly transit frankly — can play a role at helping cities grow in a more dense and transit friendly fashion. If we don’t do that, we are going to get more of this car-oriented land use.

When we say a transit-oriented land use, I don’t mean like the newer New Urbanism style building a light rail station and then surrounding with apartments. That might work for some, but I’m thinking more of like actual urban development, you know, putting apartments in cities, the whole Scott Wiener argument in California, right? How do we build around transit areas? And that’s kind of what we’re going to have to do to encourage people to avoid car use and avoid private car ownership.

And I hope we don’t continue too far down the development of car-oriented development, post-COVID.

Thursday’s Headlines from Across the Country

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 04:27:28 GMT

Unless Congress provides funding, more than 3 million households and 1.4 million workplaces will lose access to transit as agencies make cuts. (Streetsblog)
People who walk, bike or take transit to work are more satisfied with their commutes than those who drive. (Mobility Lab)
The system, not the backup driver, is responsible for the death of an Arizona woman killed by a self-driving Uber in 2018, writes former Streetsblog editor Angie Schmitt. (Next City)
The Kinder Institute suggests that a rebate program for e-bikes would give people incentive to buy a vehicle that doesn’t run on fossil fuels — especially those who can’t afford an electric car.
President Trump took credit for an Obama-era incentive to buy electric vehicles at Tuesday’s presidential debate. (Electrek)
Uber and Lyft are stocked with former Obama administration officials lobbying for regressive labor and environmental policies. Would a President Biden embrace them? (New Republic)
The National Association of City Transportation Officials suggests repurposing streets as outdoor voting booths. (Government Tech)
Passenger rail company Brightline is selling $3.2 billion in bonds to finance the first leg of a line between Las Vegas and California. (Las Vegas Sun)
The Seattle City Council approved a new pay formula that will ensure Uber and Lyft drivers make the city minimum wage of $16.39 an hour after expenses. (Seattle Times)
A pilot program will bring a fleet of shared electric vehicles to Minneapolis and St. Paul. (MinnPost)
Charlotte opened new bus-only lanes on one of its most congested streets. (WCNC)
Aided by investment in 5G wireless internet, China is about to unleash fleets of self-driving taxis in congested cities. (Fast Company)
And, finally, a man has biked across the country from Poo Poo Point to Pee Pee Creek. (Yosef Kessler via Twitter)

Advocates to Chao: First ‘Pedestrian Safety Month’ Must Be More Than Just A Press Release

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 19:28:32 GMT

Safety first.

The first federal National Pedestrian Safety Month starts tomorrow, but activists are demanding that the Trump Administration save the platitudes and pedestrian-blaming and actually pass policy reforms that will save lives.

A diverse coalition of powerful transportation safety, public health and consumer advocacy groups co-authored an open letter yesterday urging Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to push for laws aimed at decreasing the pedestrian death toll on America’s roadways, which reached a 30-year high of 6,590 last year.

The letter is pragmatic rather than visionary by design. All five of the coalition’s recommendations concern vehicle design, rather than more politically challenging reforms to infrastructure and traffic laws, and all of them have already approved by Congress in July as a part of the Democratic transportation mega-bill the Moving Forward Act. The larger bill languished in the Senate because of its aggressive stance on ending transportation-related climate change emissions, but nothing is stopping the DOT from implementing the aspects of the proposed legislation related to saving walkers’ lives — and advocates think Chao has a moral obligation to do so.

“There is a groundswell of support for these measures in Congress,” said Catherine Chase, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the lead signatory on the letter. “These types of technologies have already been proven to work, but the problem is, they’re not standard equipment. They’re typically only features in luxury cars that get bundled together with other bells and whistles like heated seats and heated steering wheels. We don’t think that safety should just be a luxury for people who have a lot of money.”

The coalition wants the US DOT to:

Require the installation of pedestrian detection systems, automatic emergency braking, and other automated driver assistance technology on all new cars;
Require the installation of systems that onboard alcohol sensors or other technologies that detect erratic driving behavior from drunk motorists on all new cars;
Require automakers to redesign hoods and bumpers to make cars more forgiving in crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists, using better crumple zone technology;
Enhance headlight visibility standards for new cars to help prevent the 76 percent of pedestrians crashes that happen at night;
And last but not least, finally join the rest of the planet in requiring automakers to test how safe their vehicles are for vulnerable road users in the event of a crash, rather than just the people inside vehicles.

Those kinds of common-sense reforms, though, are decidedly not the focus of National Pedestrian Safety Month, which is little more than a public awareness campaign dedicated to amplifying the myth that pedestrians can always prevent their own deaths by simply being alert to their surroundings. (Our coverage is here.)

The National Transportation Safety Administration kicked off the festivities yesterday with a webinar that emphasized dubious catchphrases like “safety is a shared responsibility” — ignoring the fact that the “responsibilities” of walkers, who have little more than a bit of protected infrastructure to keep them safe, are drastically different than the responsibilities of drivers, who are operating multi-ton vehicles capable of taking a human life with the press of a toe.

Within 10 seconds, @NHTSAgov's "National Pedestrian Safety Month" kickoff webinar leads with "safety is a shared responsibility," and police officers talking about "engagement and enforcement."

Not a good start, but let's see what the presenters have to say. pic.twitter.com/4zyyj4vLLi

— WalkSafe (@iWalkSafe) September 29, 2020

The Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, which authored the letter before the Administration revealed the details of its effort, were disappointed but not surprised to learn they had a fight ahead of them.

“They’re taking the easy way out,” said Chase. “It’s always easier to put the onus on a pedestrian, when what [NHTSA] should be doing, as the agency charged with protecting all road users, is rulemaking on making vehicles and road users safer.”

The signatories of the letter — including members of organizations such as Consumers for America, Families for Safe Streets, the League of American Bicyclists, and even a former administrator of NHTSA itself, Joan Claybrook — say continuing pressure on the Administration will be key in getting them to take action.

“I would encourage everyone to reach out to their members of Congress and members of the Administration and express support for these policies, and remind them that they are charged with protecting the safety of all road users, says Chase. “We could make every month Pedestrian Safety Month, but until pass these measures, the bottom line is that people are going to continue to die.”

‘National Pedestrian Safety Month’ Campaign Is An Offensive Parade of Dangerous Traffic ...

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 19:07:18 GMT

The first-ever federally funded “National Pedestrian Safety Month” kicks off tomorrow, and — surprise! — it’s centered around a press campaign aimed at convincing Americans of the debunked myth that the key to ending traffic violence is personal responsibility, mostly for walkers themselves.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released its plans for the month-long public awareness effort yesterday, which includes a cache of social media graphics rife with some of the most toxic myths and misperceptions about how to keep walkers safe — and zero mention of real policy and infrastructure reforms that could actually saves lives.

Here are just a few of the low-lights.

Pedestrians have to do it themselves

This Instagram graphic trots out one of the most stubborn myths in the book: that walkers can save their own lives if they just turn themselves into human disco balls after dark.

Rather than a graphic announcing that the agency is funding streetlight improvements to make pedestrians visible without hi-viz vests, mandating better headlights on cars, or even simply acknowledging that people wearing light-colored clothing get killed by drivers, too, NHTSA chooses to focus on the personal responsibility of walkers — and ignore the responsibilities of every other contributor to fatal crashes.

The myth of the distracted pedestrian

Here’s another oldie-but-goodie: the myth of the distracted pedestrian, rampaging through American streets, somehow endangering everyone around her with her…cell phone.

But here’s the problem: only about 2 percent of pedestrian crashes involve the use of a mobile phone by the walker, and it’s a safe bet that none of them injured anyone but the walker herself, since a human body doesn’t tend to do much damage to a motor vehicle, much less the driver inside it. Distracted driving, meanwhile, was considered a factor in the deaths of at least 2,841 people in 2018 according to the Administration’s own data, or about 7.7 percent of all fatalities. And that may even be an undercount, since many states don’t even include a field for law enforcement officers to report driver distraction on crash reports.

There is no graphic about the dangers of distracted driving in the Administration’s toolkit.

Drunk DRIVING is the issue, not drunk walking

This graphic needs a little demystifying: yes, alcohol is a factor in many pedestrian deaths, and a lot of the time — roughly a third — walkers themselves are drunk when they’re struck by car drivers. But here’s the thing: walking while drunk, in and of itself, is not a crime, nor is it inherently dangerous to other road users. And in some cases — say, when you can’t afford a taxi, and your city has insufficient public transit — it’s a responsible way to get home from the bar, at least compared to climbing behind the wheel after you’ve had a few beers.

Driving while drunk, of course, is illegal, and for good reason — and despite decades of public awareness campaigns and millions of dollars in advocacy efforts, 16 percent of drivers who killed walkers last year were drunk, according to NHTSA’s press materials.

Operating an easily weaponizable motor vehicle is indisputably an activity that demands a maximum amount of mental and physical acuity, and staying sober is the absolute least a driver can do. Using a sidewalk, on the other hand, shouldn’t require that level of acumen, because differently abled people, children, the elderly, and — yes — addicts all have a fundamental human right to public space that they don’t have to the space behind a wheel. A sidewalk that does requires that walkers maintain total self awareness and lightning-fast response times should be redesigned — period.

Conflating the non-crime of drunk walking and the massive public health threat of drunk driving is a dangerous and manipulative way to blame pedestrians for their own death — not to mention adding dangerous stigma to addiction in a society that already fails to support recovery from the disease of alcoholism.

Let’s blame old people, too!

Okay, this one’s just confusing. Yes, friends, it’s true: older people are more likely to be killed by cars! But is NHTSA’s graphic announcing that cities must lengthen crosswalk signal timing to give elderly people with physical disabilities more time?

Or enhance zoning codes so older Americans, 14 percent of whom live in poverty, can afford to live in comprehensively walkable areas?

Or give the elderly better transit options when walking is no longer a great option for them?

Nope! None of that. The Administration’s just letting you know that a lot of dead walkers are seniors…and maybe implying, offensively, they shouldn’t walk outside their homes at all if they have the misfortune to live in an area whose streets weren’t designed with their needs in mind.

Let’s make kids responsible for looking out for drivers!

Here’s another baffling insinuation: that surviving the walk to your local elementary school starts with…uh, someone around here, surely!

Let’s be clear: a safe route to school starts — and ends — with drivers not running over children. (And, in the case of non-white children, especially, police officers not murdering children.) Engineers can make that a whole lot easier by designing roads that compel drivers to slow down and reduce their chances of committing vehicular manslaughter, even when a little kid gets excited and jogs into the intersection a moment too soon.

But if the difference between life and death of a preschooler is the judgment of the preschooler, rather than the choices of the adults behind the wheel and behind the road design, we’ve got a problem on our hands that a public awareness alone campaign can’t solve.

The Administration also assembled a handy packet of press releases that you can customize to put all manner of bogus traffic violence facts into the mouths of your local officials or non-profit leaders of choice. Those are already getting pretty well dragged on Twitter, but here’s a quick fix on this one to inspire you to join the fray:

Wednesday’s Headlines — With No Mention of Last Night’s Presidential Debate!

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 04:01:36 GMT

Is the carpocalypse canceled? Vehicle miles driven in the U.S. stabilized in July at 11 percent below 2019 levels, according to Federal Highway Administration data, and that may be the new normal because so few people are commuting. (Eno Center for Transportation)
Driving and transit use are down and walking and biking are up in the UK, and two-thirds of poll respondents believe those changes are permanent. (Traffic Technology Today)
If the carmageddon does happen, a new campaign by Streetsblog’s parent company, the nonprofit Open Plans, called CityRise will be ready to advocate for safer streets. (Smart Cities Dive)
Data indicates that during the pandemic, people in blue states have been driving less than people in red states. (Green Car Congress)
Five years ago, autonomous cars were supposed to be here by 2021. Turns out, it’s harder than engineers expected to teach a computer to predict what a human driver will do. (Vox)
Bird has survived the pandemic by switching from a business model where it hires contractors to recharge scooters to one where the contractor basically leases the scooters from Bird and splits the profits. Some are making good money, but others have gone thousands of dollars into debt. (One Zero)
Uber has done enough to address concerns about imposter drivers and can continue operating in London, a British judge ruled. (Associated Press)
A new poll by the League of American Bicyclists found that 60 percent of Americans want the federal government to invest more in bike infrastructure, and 78 percent believe their community would be better if biking were safer.
A bill signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom will allow infrastructure projects like bike lanes and transit lines that reduce carbon emissions to skip lengthy environmental reviews (San Francisco Chronicle). However, The Week is pessimistic that another Newsom initiative — the sale of new gas-powered cars starting in 2035 — will accomplish much of anything.
After the recent failure of a referendum to join the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, suburban Gwinnett County officials are emphasizing local control in the latest referendum to fund a transit expansion. (Saporta Report)
Northern Indiana officials are getting ready to submit the Gary-to-Michigan City double-tracking project to the Federal Transit Administration for funding approval. (Chicago Tribune)
Chicago lags behind other cities in building protected bike lanes as cyclists keep dying. (Block Club)
Oslo has already cut traffic deaths to zero, and now it’s looking to do the same to carbon emissions (Fast Company). Meanwhile, our friends at Streetsblog NYC offered another reason to love the Norwegians: they know how to dine outdoors!

Report: Three Million People Could Lose Transit Access Soon

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:47:55 GMT

Without immediate federal cash, more than three million households and 1.4 million workplaces will lose their access to life-sustaining public transportation, a new study finds – and Black, brown and low-income city residents will bear the brunt.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, the Denver Regional Transportation District, and most of the country’s largest networks have all warned they may be forced to slash service — some by as much as 40 percent – but for the first time, TransitCenter has put numbers, and more important, a face on those cuts.

That face is disproportionately of color.

In a new report that looked at 10 American cities that are likely facing 50-percent service cuts during peak hours, plus 30-percent cuts during off-peak hours, a few chilling highlights stood out (the full report, compiled with the Center for Neighborhood Technology, is embedded below):

In Atlanta, a stunning 142,557 people would lose access to frequent all-day transit — and more than half of impacted workers would be Black residents.
A significant 33.8 percent of households in Boston don’t own private vehicles, which means Beantown would be hit especially hard by transportation cuts. An unacceptable 10,538 households would be left stranded if transit were cut by 40 percent, and the clawbacks would disproportionately affect Hispanic and Black Bostonians.
A lot of people could be forced to walk this winter in epically cold Chicago: cuts in the Windy City would leave 65,281 without access to a reliable, indoor way to get around without an often-unaffordable private vehicle.
Cincinnati would be particularly devastated by the type of deep budget slashing the researchers modeled — so much so that it would functionally eliminate frequent transit service city wide. All 16,599 people and 65,422 job-creators currently served by frequent transit would be cut off from it, which could swiftly paralyze the city’s economy.
The Mile High City of Denver would also have one of the highest disparities in impact among racial groups, with BIPOC Denverites shouldering 54 percent of the burden of lost service despite making up just 36 percent of the population.
Three-quarters of the Miami residents who would lose access to full-day service would be non-White, and some of them are already feeling the pain: “If public transit were cut further, that would be even more time and money out of my pocket, and I can’t afford it,” reported a worker named Ayanna, who’s currently being forced to pay for an Uber she can’t afford multiple times per week just to make it to work.
In Philadelphia, second-shift workers would face particular struggles, including the 21,948 commuters who leave work between midnight and 5 a.m. who would lose access to frequent transit. Philly is also home to the largest concentration of people with disabilities of any U.S. city, a population which disproportionately relies on public transportation.
By sheer numbers, Seattle would face one of the deepest craters in ridership, with 349,364 people losing access to frequent service. That’s larger than the entire population of Anaheim, Calif.
New York City is also particularly in trouble, as Streetsblog reported today.

Advocates reacted to the report with fear for the future of cities — and a call to action.

“If we want the economy to recover then we need people who can work to be able to get to work,” said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “Congress needs to step up and pass the $32 billion in emergency relief that public transportation needs to survive this crisis.”

The report comes as the federal government has repeatedly stalled over another round of emergency funding for the transit agencies nationwide, which are experiencing catastrophic ridership shortfalls due to the coronavirus pandemic. By July, for example, the MTA had exhausted all of the $3.7 billion that federal authorities allocated early in the pandemic under the CARES Act. Overall, the agency is facing a $16-billion overall budget gap.

“Our analysis shows [transit cuts] would have profound impacts,” said TransitCenter Director of Research Steven Higashide. “Millions of people would lose access to high-quality transit near their home and workplace. Late-night commuters trying to get to essential jobs would be stranded. And, as has happened so often in this pandemic, the blow would fall most heavily on Black riders and communities of color.”

Meanwhile, the federal logjam may be about to break as House Democrats apparently are negotiating with the Trump administration on a smaller relief bill that may include some transit funding. Neither the Washington Post story nor the House Democrats’ own press release mentioned transit, but the transit news is buried on pages 12 and 13 in a longer bill summary here.

It would allocate $32 billion in “transit emergency relief,” plus $2.4 billion to support Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor and elsewhere.

MTA CEO Pat Foye applauded the bill.

“We applaud Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats for including $32 billion desperately-needed relief for mass transit we’ve been advocating for in the new version of the HEROES Act,” Foye said in a statement. “I also want to thank the bipartisan New York delegation for their hard work and steadfast support.

“It’s a fact that mass transit systems across the country move local economies forward and this aid will help power the nation’s recovery. We urge Senate Republicans to pass this legislation quickly — and the President to sign it. Public transit systems simply can’t afford anything less. There is no time to waste — the jobs of millions of Americans depend on it.”

Guest Column: Will the COVID Bicycle Surge Last?

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:14:43 GMT

Like far too many traditions under COVID, the annual Bay State Bike Month was postponed and reimagined this year. Typically scheduled in May to coincide with the start of peak cycling season, Bike Month officially started on September 1 and people across Massachusetts are encouraged to join events that are largely virtual. But this year, encouragement is hardly necessary as cycling has become an increasingly popular, socially distant, and reliable way to move around during the pandemic. Even prior to COVID, ‘micromobility’ – including shared and owned bicycles, e-bikes, e-scooters, e-skateboards, etc. – was already poised to breakout in 2020. Rates of bicycle commuting continue to rise due to the crippling gridlock in metro-Boston. BlueBikes expanded into Everett last year and is currently launching in Arlington, Chelsea, Newton, Revere and Watertown. The ‘Emerald Network’, a growing system of bike paths that will ultimately span 200 miles throughout the region, has several key connections and extensions currently under construction, with many more coming. Still, we face a fundamental question: Is this a tipping point, or will cars continue to dominate? National and international trends provide some positive signals. The 2019 Shared Micromobility report by the National Association of City Transportation Officials measured 136 million trips on shared bikes and scooters, a 60% increase over 2018. According to the North American Bikeshare Association, 36% of those rides replaced a car trip. And e-bikes, the fastest growing segment of bicycle sales globally, are projected to reach 40 million units in annual sales by 2023. E-bikes extend practical cycling distances, accommodate a wider range of ages and abilities, and make hauling groceries or children by bike a real option for many. E-bikes also free riders from worrying about sweat and needing special clothes, which are huge barriers for most would-be commuters. This growth has occurred despite significant challenges, both physical and political. Safe bicycle infrastructure has been substandard, disconnected, and overly contentious for cities to build. Regulations remain vague and disjointed, leaving many riders unsure if it is legal to ride an e-bike on the Minuteman Bikeway, or if scooters are allowed on the Paul Dudley White Path. This confusion extends to enforcement agents and public officials as well. Regulatory inconsistency does not help riders on the street, and the current enforcement pattern disproportionately punishes riders of color. Action at the state level is required to classify these vehicles and where they can operate. Hopefully, these important policies can be passed into state law this fall. COVID as a Catalyst When Governor Baker ordered a statewide lockdown, he ultimately deemed bike shops as ‘essential businesses,’ allowing them to remain open. Within weeks, low to mid-priced bikes and child models sold out. Demand for repairs surged as well. With peak commute traffic gone, those once hesitant to ride on busy roads began to venture out. Cycling flourished as a physically distant and responsible way to spend time outside during the lockdown. For those essential workers still commuting, owned and shared bicycles offered an alternative to public transit during a time when little was known about coronavirus transmission. In April, BlueBikes offered free 90-day passes to hospital workers, a program since extended to include grocery, retail, and pharmacy workers. Several A Better City (ABC) member companies have reported high demand for bicycle parking, both in their garages and at public bike racks. In line with the changing times, Boston released an Electric Cargo Bike RFI to understand how e-cargo bikes could fit into Boston’s delivery landscape. For context, Amazon is already piloting ebike delivery in NYC. Such innovative yet practical solutions are desperately needed in our cramped metro where delivery drivers and large trucks flout the rules, endangering all other road users. Shared Streets have been implemented across the region, slowing cars down, restricting access to cut-through traffic, and allowing people to keep 6’ apart. Boston’s “Healthy Streets” program – initially a temporary network – will be made permanent this fall. This represents the type of roadway rethink that is crucial to encourage non-car trips as teleworkers come back to the office. Dedicated bus lanes, painted in red to prioritize public transit, are being installed across the Greater Boston area. In July, Boston completed a dedicated bus lane lane on Washington Street that shaved 12 minutes off the travel time between Nubian Square and Downtown Crossing. The MBTA plans to install 14 additional miles of bus lanes this fall. In support of collaboration and realizing economies of scale, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) has announced a regional purchasing agreement for materials needed to create those lanes. This collective buying power will save an estimated $2 million and support a massive expansion of this infrastructure that prioritizes the movement of people, not just vehicles. And since bus lanes are de facto bike lanes, they further improve the conditions that will make people comfortable riding. Finally, we see EU countries offering e-bike subsidies like the ones the U.S. offers for electric cars. Would that work here? All options should be considered to avert a return to gridlock. Roadblocks and Realities Sadly, cycling is not the only mode that is surging. Driving trips have rebounded roughly 80% despite a shift to telework for a large portion of the downtown workforce. Despite the MBTA’s increased cleaning protocols, added capacity to busy bus lines, mask distribution at key stations and more, ridership data confirms many people have yet to return to mass transit. So, why does that matter for bicycling? For many people, bicycles complement transit rides for the first or last mile of their journey. And for the average person, cycling is largely a three-season endeavor. Without trust in the T by winter, commuters with a choice will likely choose to drive. Cars account for 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in metropolitan Boston and half of all car trips are 4 miles or less, so it is critical we avert that outcome. If we rethink our streets and policies for healthier, more efficient movement and socially distant interactions, we’ll get that. If we don’t, pre-COVID gridlock will likely return. We have a real choice for a safer, more resilient, and more equitable transportation future and every action matters. This year’s unique Bay State Bike Month is nearly over, but there are year-round opportunities for us to get out there, experience the new infrastructure, and help make Boston a better city. The best part? It’s just like riding a bike.

Scott Mullen is the TDM Director for A Better City, focusing on innovative transportation policies that will enable institutions and individuals to ’think outside the car’. Through roles that spanned operations, development, and public affairs, ‘Mully’ had a front row seat in the formation and growth of three transportation sectors: car sharing; bike sharing; and micromobility.

Why Your City Doesn’t Map Its Worst Car Crashes

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 04:08:09 GMT

Time for a pop quiz! (Don’t worry, it’s open book: feel free to hop on Google.) What are the 10 most dangerous intersections or corridors for pedestrians in your city, and what percentage of total crashes occur in these areas?

If you don’t know the answer, and can’t easily can’t find it using the search function on your city’s website, you’re not alone. According to an analysis from Streetsblog, seven of the 20 largest cities in the U.S. do not have an easily accessible High Injury Network map, which details the regions of a road system where pedestrians and cyclists are most often severely injured or killed.

And often, those concentrations are staggering. In Minneapolis, just 9 percent of streets are the site of 70 percent of the worst crashes; in Cleveland, a third of all road fatalities occur on just 7 percent of roadways; in Austin, a shocking 70 percent of deaths and serious injuries happen on just 7 percent of streets; and the list goes on.

But in other cities — including behemoths such as Chicago, Houston, and Phoenix — High Injury Network maps can’t be found on city websites. In New York, for example, such frequent crash zones are called pedestrian “priority” areas — and they’re buried inside annual pedestrian master plans that vaguely promise change but don’t always translate into meaningful action or fatality reductions.

And without transparent and accurate information, transportation professionals may overlook the lowest-hanging fruit in the fight to end traffic violence — and advocates may struggle to hold leaders accountable.

Where crashes happen

High Injury Network mapping is relatively new. The first one was born in San Francisco in just 2015, one year after the city adopted its Vision Zero plan to end roadway fatalities by 2024 and set about finding the most urgent battlefronts in the war to build a safe road network.

“We knew we wanted to have our initiative be very data-driven,” said Tom Maguire, director of sustainable streets for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. “We also knew that reengineering our streets was going to be a huge part of any success we had, so we knew we had to prioritize.”

The agency worked closely with the Department of Health to cross-reference crash reports from the previous five years with hospital data that offered more thorough documentation on crash severity than police reports alone. Maguire admits that this kind of close collaboration between two government agencies can be unusual — the fact that San Francisco has just one trauma center didn’t hurt — but it was indispensable to understanding the full scope of the problem.

“Over a third of the crashes we found actually didn’t appear in any police report — they were only in the hospital data,” said Maguire. “Some people just prefer not to interact with police. … There’s a whole skill set that epidemiologists have that traffic engineers can learn from.”

What Maguire and his colleagues found surprised them: a whopping 70 percent of severe injuries and deaths on their roadways occurred on just 12 percent of city streets. And the majority of those crashes happened in historically disinvested areas, rather than the moneyed corridors that were more often being targeted for street improvements as part of economic development projects.

“There’s a huge overlap between the map of neighborhoods that are more dangerous in terms of traffic violence and the maps of neighborhoods that are disproportionately elderly, low income, low English proficiency, and non-white,” said Maguire.

Mapping — and solving — an unequal epidemic

San Francisco isn’t the only city that’s found economic disparities in crash data. Atlanta’s network analysis showed that 88 percent of fatalities were concentrated in just 8 percent of streets, and that “neighborhoods with High-Injury Network streets had lower median incomes, a larger share of Black residents, higher rates of walking and taking transit to work, and lower rates of vehicle ownership,” according to advocates at Atlanta Bike. Denver advocates found that areas designated “communities of concern” accounted for about 30 percent of the city’s land area but 38 percent of all traffic deaths and 44 percent of pedestrian deaths.

Maguire notes that savvy local advocates have been among the biggest proponents of his own city’s injury network, and that they’ve used the data to hold the city accountable for its Vision Zero failures.

“Our advocates regularly use the data to put pressure on us,” he says. “And that’s a very good thing.”

As of now, city DOTs that make the data available are doing so out of the goodness of their hearts. High Injury Networks are not mandated by any state or federal law, and cities rarely face consequences for failing to collect that data — though some people think that should change.

“I bet every one of those cities [that doesn’t have a High Injury Network] measures average daily traffic volume, and it’s visible to the public,” says Mike McGinn, executive director of America Walks. “They’re sharing these things because they believe that moving a lot of cars really fast is the core of their mission. If they thought their mission was safety, they’d be identifying those high injury corridors and prioritizing getting them fixed.”

And when it comes to obligating cities to actually act on the evidence that some areas are worse for traffic violence than others, there’s even less accountability. The Federal Highway Administration still allows states to set their own lenient safety goals for total annual deaths on their roadways — and there’s no penalty for setting “goals” that are higher than the number of people who lost their lives in a previous year.

On the local scale, Washington, D.C. made headlines last week for passing a law that would require the Department of Transportation to submit plans to redesign the 15 most dangerous intersections in the district, but it may not actually require the city actually implement those redesigns in a timely manner.

That’s why some advocates think that requiring High Injury Network maps are only the first step — and requiring real action on the basis of that data must follow.

“When you make that level of service the standard by which your road is measured, you have a situation where an engineer says, ‘Well, I’ve gotta meet the design guidelines,'” said McGinn. “If we were to put teeth to this, we’d have the engineers who write the design guidelines to affirmatively put safety above everything. Theoretically, the right metric is the number of deaths and serious injuries — and the only acceptable answer should be zero.”

Tuesday’s Headlines from Around Our Large Land

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 04:01:12 GMT

Joe Biden has a progressive plan to limit carbon emissions, build green infrastructure and rejoin the Paris accords, while President Trump doesn’t care about climate change. (The World). But climate change will not be one of the topics discussed at tonight’s debate (NPR).
The Guardian has four ways to inoculate cities against the next pandemic, including bike superhighways, walkable green streets and mixed-use neighborhoods.
The L.A. Metro’s updated 30-year plan includes $80 billion to add 100 new miles of passenger rail. (Railway Age)
Facing criticism that it’s not doing enough to support transit during the pandemic (Sun-Times), Chicago is installing pop-up bus-only lanes on two routes that serve essential workers (Smart Cities Dive).
Akron officials say $125 million earmarked for widening I-77 would be better spent on maintenance, and the project could worsen stormwater runoff problems. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Miami-Dade is close to a deal with Brightline to access the tracks the private commuter rail services uses, which would replace a planned publicly run TriRail expansion. Next up is a fight over where to put stations. (Miami Herald)
Honolulu is pulling out the effort to find a private partner to complete a light-rail line, which is a b blow to the project, but doesn’t mean it’s dead. (Civil Beat)
Maryland and Virginia senators chided the D.C. Metro over an audit that found 21 safety and workplace problems at the transit agency. (Washington Post)
The Atlanta suburb of Cobb County wants its own BeltLine connecting several major developments like the Braves’ Truist Park and other attractions. (Rome News-Tribune)
The Bay Area is mandating that large office-based employers require people to work from home. But in an expensive market where housing tends to be crowded, not everyone has the space. Adding an option to commute sustainably might be a better route. (City Lab)
Decades of auto-centric planning are fueling racial inequality in Minneapolis. (Star Tribune)
Deputies in Orange County, Calif. shot and killed a homeless Black man they had initially stopped for jaywalking. (Revolt)
A new bike-leasing service taking Europe by storm will fix flat tires for you. (Fast Company)

Monday’s Headlines to Start the Week Off Right

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 05:01:53 GMT

Having armed police enforce traffic laws actually does little to make streets safer. Design and education are more important. (LAist)
A new poll found that 39 percent of California voters support Prop 22, the effort backed by Uber and Lyft to overturn the state’s gig-worker law, while 36 percent oppose it and 25 percent are undecided. (Forbes)
Cities should be investing in infrastructure to make sure the pandemic bike boom is permanent. (Fast Company)
The pandemic has accelerated the trend toward flexible work patterns, more walkable neighborhoods and fewer cars in cities. (The Guardian)
The Driven has extensive coverage of Tesla’s announcement that it’s working on a new battery that will make electric vehicles cheaper and reduce their environmental impact. But experts say it’s still years off, and the company might not be able to bring down costs as much as it says.
Federal infrastructure programs designed to build highways in the 1950s no longer give cities and states enough flexibility to meet their needs, according to a new report from the Brookings Institute.
Off-board fare collection, dedicated lanes, stop consolidation and signal priority can help speed up buses and lure more people to ride them. (Pedestrian Observations)
Austin has some of the worst traffic in the country; drivers killed 89 people last year; and fines and fees hit those the least able to pay them the hardest. The Project Connect transit plan is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix all that. (Austin Chronicle)
In other news out of Austin, the city’s B-Cycle bike-share is rebranding as MetroBike and will be integrated into the public transit system. (Monitor)
Oklahoma City opened its first protected bike lane on Bike to Work Day last Thursday. (Fox 25)
The L.A. Metro bike-share’s “smart bikes” proved to be unpopular because of their limited service range and are being replaced. (CBS Los Angeles)
Bike sales are up more than 50 percent in Oregon compared to last year. (Bike Portland)
The Illinois Railway Museum is restoring one of the few surviving early-20th-century streetcars. (Terre Haute Tribune-Star)

D.C. Shows What To Do When Your Vision Zero Plan Is Failing

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 04:01:51 GMT

The nation’s capital is finally putting some teeth into its failing Vision Zero initiative.

With fatalities so far this year exceeding all of last year’s road deaths, the Washington, D.C. City Council last week passed the Vision Zero Omnibus bill, which will rethink city policy from the ground up. Advocates are hopeful that the bill will save more lives than the city’s current Vision Zero initiative, which set an ambitious goal — the “zero” part — without ambitious policies.

“We have a goal of Vision Zero; we don’t have a goal of Vision 10, and we don’t have a goal of Vision 29,” said Jeremiah Lowery, advocacy director for the Washington Area Bicyclists Association, which has been pressuring the City Council this year as traffic deaths reached 29 so far, up from 27 in all of 2019, despite an historic drop-off in car traffic during the coronavirus lockdown.

“This bill is a great first step, but it’s not the conclusion,” he said. “Once this bill gets funded, we’re going to be right back at it.”

The bill would:

require the city to draw up a safety redesign for any roadways where a collision resulted in a death or serious injury (though it’s not clear whether the department will be required to actually execute the design changes).
accelerate the district’s Complete Streets programs, requring an update every four years. The city DOT must also submit “a Vision Zero infrastructure progress report” on the District’s 15 most dangerous pedestrian and cyclist corridors — with a plan to keep vulnerable road users safe.
add at least 125 new red-light cameras by 2024
ban right turns on red at intersections within 400 feet of schools, Metrorail stations, and other areas with high pedestrian traffic.
cut speed limits to 20 miles per hour or less on local and collector roads, though some advocates think D.C.’s high-speed arterials should also have been tamed.

Several areas of D.C. have notoriously high rates of pedestrian crashes — including in some of its most historically disinvested Black neighborhoods.

“There are still neighborhoods in D.C. without stop signs and crosswalks — basic things like that,” said Lowery, adding that he will also push to make the limited right-on-red ban citywide at some point.

The bill will now proceed to the mayor’s desk for approval, and then to Congress, both of which it is expected to pass. (Yes, your vague memory of high school civics class is correct: changes to D.C.’s local laws actually require House approval.)

These measures have been a long time coming. Vision Zero meant nothing without real actual steps. https://t.co/zBLc1IKSbN

— BicycleTrash (@BicycleTrashDC) September 23, 2020

The bill is a rare example of a city charting a new Vision Zero course midstream. Of the dozens of communities that have adopted VZ goals, no U.S. city has succeeded yet in saving all pedestrian and cyclists’ lives in a single year— even though international communities like Oslo and Helsinki pulled off the feat last year (D.C. is giving itself until 2024). Experts say that leaders around the country are waking up to the need to course-correct and adopt more aggressive strategies if deaths start climbing.

“These early adopting cities, including D.C., have been at it for long enough to recognize where bigger changes are needed,” said Leah Shahum, founder and director of the national Vision Zero Network. “It’s not surprising that the low-hanging fruit is what a lot of cities went after first, but now, they’re really recognizing the need for deeper and more systemic change. This omnibus bill is a really good example of that recognition, and it’s a good step forward.”

DC just passed a law that requires sidewalks on both sides of the street, which will not only save lives, but just makes common sense. I wish more places did the same. https://t.co/c3jaDF0pxH

— dan reed ? (@justupthepike) September 24, 2020

The legislation will open the door for better collaboration between dangerous driving enforcement efforts in adjacent Virginia and Maryland, a perennial problem from a city of commuters. Lowery expressed particular disappointment that the council failed to prioritize a protected bike lane network; the District only has 12 miles of separated facilities, despite having the second highest rate of bicycle commuters per capita in the nation, behind only Portland (the one in Oregon).

Other common-sense land-use reforms, like aggressive parking pricing and the conversion of heavily walked streets to pedestrian plazas, were left out entirely. National experts agree that there’s even more that the council could have done — particularly for the most vulnerable road groups. The bill may indirectly help address some baked-in racial disparities, but it did not specifically address equity issues.

“Historically, traffic safety efforts have been racially inequitable and unjust. I didn’t see a lot addressing that in this bill,” said Shahum. “Looking at the inequitable impact of traffic fees and fines, and tying them to income, is one example. It’s great that D.C. putting in more automated enforcement rather than officer enforcement, because that’s been proven to work better, but there’s still the question of where the cameras will be placed. And then, there are some really good accountability measures in this bill, but I don’t see a lot of that around racial equity concerns. I don’t think D.C. is any further behind on equity than other U.S. community, but the whole country is struggling with this, and we need to confront it.”

Top Highway Safety Org Recommends Reform in Traffic Policing; Activists Say We Need Abolition

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 04:01:48 GMT

An influential transportation safety organization recommended ways to cut racism from traffic policing — but stopped short of advocating to get police out of traffic enforcement altogether, which anti-racist advocates say is the real key to keeping Black and brown road users comprehensively safe.

The Governors Highway Safety Association — a non-profit which provides guidance on matters of traffic enforcement and driver education to transportation leaders at the state, territory and tribal lands level — issued eight safety recommendations that it says it will advise all of its member organization to follow. The recommendations aren’t legally binding, but because the Association plays a role in administering many federal grants related to enforcement and education programs, they’re likely to have a strong pull with member agencies.

Notably, the Association urged transportation agencies to support “initiatives to collect and report standardized data about race in traffic enforcement,” which many advocates say is particularly crucial to ending racial disparities in enforcement and police brutality. Only 10 states require officers to record the race of the driver during traffic stops, and even fewer require departments to analyze that data and take action to address racial disparities — which the Association is also recommending that states mandate of their officers.

But some of the other recommendations drew strong criticism from activists — especially from those who argue the institution of policing itself is inherently racist beyond reform.

See, when I say “abolish the police” I really mean “get rid of them,” “breakup the departments,” “create a new system from the ground up because the existing one is fundamentally fucked up.”

— ashley fairbanks (@ziibiing) September 24, 2020

In a release, the executive director of the Association, Jonathan Adkins, restated his support for armed police involvement in traffic enforcement, citing the “proven role of traffic enforcement and the wider criminal justice system to prevent crashes, deaths and injuries.” The association recommended that its members increase investments in “social and criminal justice programs to alleviate law enforcement burdens and prevent recidivism, particularly among impaired drivers,” but did not recommend a commensurate reduction in police budgets.

“We’re really concerned about the ‘Defund the Police’ effort,” Adkins added in an interview. “That would have a drastic effect on highway safety.”

Adkins argues that law enforcement efforts have long been crucial to reducing the roadway death toll, citing the impact of states’ “Click it or Ticket” campaign in the early 1990s, which helped bring seat belt usage rates up from just 15 percent in the late 1970s to over 90 percent today. He also says the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown — when many police departments instructed their officers to be lenient on “minor” driving infractions to allow officers to socially distance — illustrated the importance of armed officers in traffic stops in promoting safe driving.

“In the early days of COVID, law enforcement wasn’t out, and what happened? We saw a lot of speeding,” Adkins says. “We know what happens when law enforcement is taken out of the safety equation. So we want to continue law enforcement, but we want it to be done equitably. We’re saying, ‘Mend it, don’t end it.'”

The national “Click it or Ticket” campaign began in 1993, and had a strong impact on driver and passenger safety. Source: Washington Traffic Safety Commission

But many transportation experts argue that a lack of car traffic itself played a far bigger role in encouraging drivers to speed on wide-open roads during lockdowns, rather than a lack of police presence. To its credit, the Association did recommend that states invest in the development of “public safety programs or technologies that can supplement” traffic enforcement by cops. But it declined to say that interventions like better road engineering should be so strongly emphasized that they render enforcement “a tactic of last resort in traffic safety efforts,” as the roadway safety nonprofit Vision Zero said when it revised its own position on policing in July.

And some were flat out offended by the Association’s suggestion that police officers are essential to maintaining broader traffic safety — particularly among those who recognize the disproportionate threat of police brutality and murder faced by Black and other road users of color. The Association released its recommendations on the same day that communities around the nation protested the non-indictment of the Louisville police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor.

“It’s just factually not true that police make our streets safer,” said Tamika Butler, an expert on antiracist transportation reform. “And if you are someone who has to travel through this world in a Black body, like I am, you are keenly aware of the fact that the only things that are ‘proven’ about law enforcement’s ability to keep anything safe applies to the safety of White people.”

Source: National Academy of Sciences

Antiracist activists call for replacing armed traffic officers with unarmed civilian services, like social workers — and some have even been successful. Adkins supports their involvement in many instances, but argues they’re not suited to the dangerous work of traffic stops themselves.

“Take a drunk driving stop; we do want social workers involved, especially when there’s an issue of addiction,” Adkins says. “But we don’t want social workers to actually pull over drunk drivers. A lot more drivers in America have guns [than in countries that rely on unarmed civilian traffic forces]; there are hardened criminals out there who get pulled over every day. The Oklahoma City bomber was pulled over for a traffic violation; that’s an extreme example, but it happens.”

Adkins is hopeful that these new recommendations can help fewer traffic stops end in death — particularly for the non-White road users who are most frequently killed in traffic stops. The Association is also encouraging its members to implement officer training programs on “racism, bias, de-escalation, use of force and officer intervention,” as well as enhanced measures to hold police officers accountable when they do kill; it also urges better community engagement with minority and low-income communities, and racially representative hiring practices in police departments themselves.

But activists say all those strategies have already been tried by police departments across the country — and most research has shown they haven’t consistently worked. And some say that the stakes for non-white Americans are simply too high to experiment with reform any longer.

“I hope that folks realize that you can only reform things so much — and we have to get honest about where we’re investing our money, where we are not investing our money, and the fact that those choices are not working, because Black people are dying,” said Butler. “I understand people’s fears about big words like ‘abolish,’ but the reality is, our lives have never been valued by the policing system. I truly don’t see any other way around it.”

Friday’s Headlines Before Your Weekend

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 04:01:07 GMT

The House of Representatives passed a stop-gap bill that will keep money flowing to transit and other programs through December. (Transport Topics)
Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies have spent $170 million to overturn California’s law classifying their drivers as employees, making it the most expensive referendum in state history (Quartz). The Los Angeles Times is urging readers to vote against Prop 22. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor is finalizing a new rule categorizing gig workers as contractors, but it wouldn’t affect the California law (New York Times)
The pandemic bike boom is even hitting cities that aren’t normally cycling havens, like Houston and Los Angeles. (City Lab)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an order banning the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines starting in 2035. (The Verge)
The Washington, D.C. city council passed a Vision Zero package that includes banning some right turns on red, requiring sidewalks on both sides of the street and adding red-light cameras, among other measures. (Washington Post)
The Austin Chronicle breaks down the new bus and rail lines in Project Connect, the city’s ambitious transit plan that’s on the November ballot.
The Twin Cities’ transit union overwhelmingly rejected a contract offer and could go on strike. (Star-Tribune)
Washington, D.C. made $5 million in improper payments to a streetcar contractor, according to an inspector general report. (DCist)
Tucson’s buses and streetcars are currently free, and the city is considering getting rid of fares permanently. (Arizona Public Media)
Dallas Area Rapid Transit is offering free rides to the polls Oct. 17 and 24 and Nov. 3. (CBS DFW)
A Chattanooga pilot project aims to save gas and lower emissions by making traffic more efficient. (Pulse)
A Jeep wound up hanging off a California cliff because some idiot decided to drive it on an off-road bike trail. (The Drive)

Talking Headways Podcast: A Community Champion

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 16:26:04 GMT

This week on the podcast, we are chatting with Stephanie Gidigbi, director of policy and partnerships for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Gidigbi talks about federal policy, connections between transportation and race, the importance of performance measures, and much more!

For those of you who prefer to listen than to read, there’s an edited transcript below. If you want the full transcript (with typos!), click here.

Jeff Wood: I’m wondering if there’s something in that, you know, house bill that you really liked or that you really focused on that was different than say previous bills.

Stephanie Gidigbi

Stephanie Gidigbi: I mean so many different things. I think one big piece that we thought really hard on his really making sure that we could measure what matters and really start to establish some standards. So being able to establish a new greenhouse gas performance measure, and this isn’t unique we had in the previous bill call the FAST Act, there were other performance measures. But I think really thinking through how we also measure the impact of climate change definitely needs to be part of that discussion. And particularly because transportation is the dirtiest sector at this point in terms of air pollution in communities.

And from an equity perspective, it speaks to the higher asthma rates that we may see. And just from an environmental justice perspective, being able to ensure that, especially during this time of COVID, the compounding effects and the cumulative impacts of bad air impacting lives was a big piece. It was really great to see overall the critical investment in focusing, not just on climate change, but also if there were a lot of different pieces that were really even calling out environmental justice goals around cleaner ports, making sure that we are really thinking about the expansion of zero emission vehicles as part of that.

And then there were a lot of studies from an equity perspective of just even simple pieces in terms of who’s been stopped for safety violations. And what does that look like? And during this time of racial reckoning, where we are seeing the impacts of both of our policies and sector policies and practices, there’s a real opportunity for us to all examine ourselves. And I think transportation is not unique to that. So seeing a lot of those pieces and the invest in America act was definitely encouraging and things that we had been pushing for our, for some time.

Jeff Wood: You mentioned traffic stops and enforcement. I’m wondering why do we have police doing those things now? It seems a little bit overwhelming over the last month to see what’s been happening and then not quite understand why things aren’t changing.

Stephanie Gidigbi: It’s really interesting. One of the things that I also say that I had the opportunity to be as a cultural bearer and I practice the art of remembering. So a lot of the things that I focus and study and read is really on history and it comes from a Ghanian term in Akan, which says “san coca,” which means to return to do a look back to move forward. And when we think about just the over-policing of spaces, a lot of it comes from foundational clauses in our constitution and the notion of being able to have the right to move and who has the right to move and what that means.

So Black codes, when slavery was a practice in the United States, being a criminalization of where and how Black people were able to move. And the notion of being able to have the right to stop someone who seemed like they didn’t belong — and that never changed. And we still see that notion of that third-party policing emerging in places like we saw in the summer with a young Black men from Georgia – the ways in which we continue to see it, even in the New York park situation that played itself out as well.

And even just the thought process of sundown towns. I mean, every state in America had a sundown town that essentially had some sort of distinct discriminatory policy that said that no Black resident should be caught alive in that town [after] sundown and so and these sundown towns where we are not talking about 1800s, we are talking about 1960s. So that’s literally our parents are maybe our grandparents right? And so when you think about that, being the legacy of what we are building from, and then seeing now the notion of how people are able to move and defining Black movement in terms of the over-policing of space, you can understand a little bit more from the historical standpoint of where we’ve come from as to why it feels acceptable. As to who, who gets to decide, who belongs where, it’s pretty concerning.

So I think it’s important for us to really understand some of those inherent pieces where we feel we have the right to determine how and who can move — and where.

Jeff Wood: You also had a piece recently in Politico talking about the history of transportation decisions and how they’ve worsened the racial divide. I’m curious how you connect those dots to state and federal policy in a way that equity discussions and the action with them aren’t so siloed as they’ve been in the past.

Stephanie Gidigbi: It’s so interesting because when we think about the legacy of racism and exclusionary practices, even right now, many folks kind of look at the police, but the reality is the notion of separate but equal and segregation began on a railcar with the legacy around Plessy v. Ferguson, which was a landmark case that essentially said that rail cars had the right to be separate and equal. And that would then lead to two generations until we got to the Civil Rights movement of the notion of separate but equal practices. And fast forwarding to the Montgomery boycotts, and Rosa Parks, who chose not to get up from the bus. But that was an intentional action of really wanting to change the public transportation system in Montgomery, Alabama. And, you know, it’s interesting because I think sometimes when we tell this story, we don’t speak to the resilience that was birthed from those experiences. So, for example, what came out of what was the boycotts for that year was also what I often refer to as some of the first ride shares that we see play out.

So as part of the boycotts — and actually there’s a really great book that just got released this year and called Driving While Black, Gretchen Sorin, where talks about just the purchases of small fleets and station wagons that help to transport and to allow folks to organize via carpools, to navigate the city during the boycotts. At first the boycotts were just simply saying, “Hey, just treat us just well. We’re paying for a service, or can we at least have the right to be able to be treated like everyone else?” And when they said, “No,” that was where folks were like, “Okay, at a basic level, at a basic human level, you can’t see me as human. I’m not sure that we’re going to really be able to move past anything else.”

And, you know, I think sometimes when we have this conversation, we say that we’ve evolved from equality to equity, but at its core it’s just saying, well, “Could you just see me as human?” Right. And I think even as we’ve been having these conversations around the Black Lives Matter movement is really just saying like that I am a human being who has a life and that it is worthy, to be acknowledged and treated as such. And when you fast forward to even now, the separate but equal clause has been taken out, but we still see that notion of things being separate, but still unequal in a lot of the ways that we think about just funding prioritization: highways vs. public transit on what that looks like in terms of state transportation dollars that are made available; bus vs. rail on the transit side of things; neighborhoods where sidewalks are actually not allowed because you actively don’t want people in your neighborhood; the over-policing of spaces. So it’s really interesting because when you really think about the laws and the practices that have shaped our nation, a lot of it has revolved around transportation.

I, you know, I’ll add a couple of pieces because I think as a Black woman, a lot of my learnings and focus is on Black people, but I would say that, you know, the challenges that we saw in the early parts of the formation of our country, wasn’t just, you know, a Black experience. We saw it even with indigenous folks and the trans-continental roadways and railways that were built during that time. So I want to come back to that piece because I think it’s easy to just think of it as black and white. And I think that’s because that’s where a lot of our foundation has come from, but you see that same notion and the connection to transportation and the movement of people and where they’re able to go to freely as something that is still a problem today. So we definitely have work to do.

Op-Ed: It Shouldn’t Cost 31x More To Take Transit Than Park

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 04:01:55 GMT

Joe Cortright

Everything you need to know about equity and privilege in urban transportation is reflected in how much we charge for parking compared to transit.

The triumph of asphalt socialism is reflected in providing unlimited free or underpriced private car storage on public streets — a scarce and valuable commodity — while charging people to make use of transit — a public good with positive externalities, and plenty of excess capacity.

The benefits of free private car storage of city streets accrue to those wealthy enough to own cars. Those who can’t afford cars get no benefit, plus they have to pay to use the only feasible alternative for many trips: transit.

No one should invoke the term “equity” in urban transportation without insisting that we start asking those who convert public property to private use for car storage pay for the privilege.

University of Northern Illinois professor Chris Goodman recently compiled data for the nation’s 30 largest cities on the price cities charge for on street parking permits compared to the price of a transit pass. In every single city, the price of a transit pass exceeds the price of parking by a factor of ten to twenty or more. For the median city in Goodman’s sample, the monthly cost of a parking pass was $2.25, compared to the a cost of $77.00 for a monthly transit pass. (Our calculation of the median price of parking permit includes only those cities that charge for on-street parking permits; ten of the top 30 cities don’t). Even when cities charge for on street parking, the monthly cost is usually less than a single bus ticket.

We’ve reproduced Goodman’s tabulations in graphic form here. Cities are ranked according to the amount charged for transit passes, from lowest to highest.

For an interactive version of this chart, click here.

It’s worth noting that the prices of parking permits are only for those areas where cities require permits, and on most streets, in most cities — including, bizarrely New York City — street parking is completely unpriced almost everywhere. In effect, the prices shown for parking in Goodman’s sample overstate what city’s actually charge for parking: it’s mostly zero.

The disparity between what people pay to park their cars on the public street (nothing or very little) and what they have to pay to use transit speaks volumes about privilege and equity in transportation. To take advantage of free or low cost on street parking, you have to own a car, which automatically means the poorest households receive little or no benefit; meanwhile, because car ownership is highly correlated with income, more of the benefits go to high income households.

It’s also worth noting that private car storage on the street has all the aspects of a private good: In economic terms its rivalrous and excludable. When you park your car along a street you deprive others of the opportunity to use that space. Others can include other car owners who might like to park there, as well as other road users, who might want to walk, cycle, or say, in the era of Covid, set up tables for a bar or restaurant.

In contrast, transit has many of the characteristics of a public good. Except at peak hours (in pre-Covid times, that is,) buses and trains almost always have excess capacity, so your use of a train or bus seldom deprives others of its utility. And again, transit has positive externalities: it results it less traffic congestion and pollution, and lower energy use than car travel, and supports walkable urban destinations. Finally, it’s worth noting that the only places where transit really works well in the United States are in the areas where cities charge for parking. When street parking is free, people own cars and drive, depriving transit systems of customers and revenue, and skewing the transit ridership to the dispossessed and powerless.

From an economic and an equity standpoint, it would make vastly more sense to make on-street parking expensive (to reflect its real costs) and to make transit cheap or free.

The way we price transit, and don’t price private car storage in the public realm, is evidence of “Asphalt Socialism“–subsidies for cars and driving, and high prices and penalties for those who take transit. As Dr. King once observed, we have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise discipline of the market for the poor. In an era when so many urbanists and transportation advocates profess great concern for equity, the subsidies to parking are one of the most inequitable aspects of the urban realm.

Joe Cortright is President and principal economist of Impresa, a consulting firm specializing in regional economic analysis, innovation and industry clusters. This article originally appeared on his site, City Observatory, and is republished here with permission.

Thursday’s Headlines Hear That Train A’ Comin’

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 04:01:01 GMT

Transit systems are in danger of falling into a death spiral and need government support as part of a green, sustainable economic recovery. (Policy Options)
Think cities don’t privilege drivers over transit riders? A monthly transit pass in the 30 largest U.S. cities costs an average of $77, while a monthly parking pass costs $2.25. And that doesn’t even take into account cities where on-street parking is free. (City Observatory)
The West Coast wildfires are a reminder of the need to take cars off the road to protect our air quality. (National Resources Defense Council)
Desperate for revenue to repair roads while motorists are staying off the road, some states are raising the gas tax. (USA Today)
Contractors have stopped work on the Purple Line and are preparing to walk off the job as they negotiate a settlement with Maryland on cost overruns. (Washington Post)
A new report from a transit advocacy group calls for the Pittsburgh Port Authority to let low-income people ride fare-free and tweak routes to meet pandemic-related changes in demand. The program would work by letting Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program-eligible riders show their EBT cards to board. (Post-Gazette)
Portland transportation officials are studying four different options for congestion pricing. While one of the goals is to change driver behavior, about two-thirds of commuters don’t have any choice but to drive. E-bikes could give them an alternative. (Bike Portland)
Austin TV station KVUE interviews Mayor Steve Adler and Cap Metro board chairman Wade Cooper about the upcoming $7 billion Project Connect transit referendum.
A new method of building tunnels will shave almost a year off the construction time for Brightline’s West Palm Beach-to-Orlando extension. (Construction Dive)
Ridership on the recently reopened — and free — Cincinnati streetcar is starting to tick up. (WKRC)
Workers discovered the century-old remains of a Native American woman during construction on the Orange County streetcar. (NBC Los Angeles)
Want to start commuting by bike? Here’s how to do it with confidence. (Bicycling Magazine)

Congress Sells Out Non-Drivers by Reauthorizing FAST Act

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 19:58:05 GMT

Congress passed a short-term spending bill on Tuesday that will renew funding for our existing car-focused infrastructure for another year, missing an historic opportunity to reform a broken system that’s killing our planet and thousands of people in an ongoing traffic violence pandemic.

The bipartisan House Continuing Appropriations Act 2021, which includes a one-year reauthorization of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, passed 359 to 57 (with progressive Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez protesting by merely voting “present”) and is expected to glide through the GOP-controlled Senate.

The move will help avoid a government shutdown just days before the FAST Act is due to expire on Sept. 30 — but it comes at the expense of transportation funding reform that transit and active transportation advocates say is long overdue.

House Democrats put forward an alternative infrastructure bill, the INVEST Act, as part of the Moving Forward Act early in July. The forward-thinking legislation would have upped funding for traffic violence prevention initiatives and active transportation infrastructure, as well as placing guardrails around states’ ability to build new highways before they repair the ones they already have. INVEST garnered the support of prominent organizations like the Safe Routes to School Partnership and Transportation for America, but was declared dead on arrival by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who called it “a Green New Deal masquerading as a highway bill.”

McConnell will get his desired highway bill with the renewal of FAST, which devotes less than 2 percent of transportation dollars to active transportation and just 17 percent to public transit, while pouring about 80 percent into roads and interstates. That’s roughly on par with the funding distribution proposed by Senate Republicans in 2019 in their own America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act, though FAST will actually give states a little more money for highways and transit next year than the conservatives’ proposed reform legislation would have (roughly $61 billion compared to $57.4 billion.)

Sustainable transportation activists have mixed feelings on the reauthorization of the bill — particularly when it comes to its continued lack of support for vulnerable road users. A recent poll from the League of American Bicyclists found that when they were told how few of their tax dollars went to supporting bikers, walkers and wheelchair users, 60 percent of Americans across all demographics thought active modes should get more — the highest level of public support in the eight years of the survey.

Source: League of American Bicyclists

Still, some advocates are crossing their fingers that Washington lawmakers will make a little room for non-drivers as amendments are introduced.

“We’re hoping Congress will respect the desire of 60 percent of Americans to increase funding for bicycling and walking, and to see bicycling as a critical part of a equitable transportation system — and part of the solution to recovering from COVID, building back local economies and to solving the climate crisis,” said Caron Whitaker of the League of American Bicyclists. “Our strongest support remains among Democrats, Black Americans, people living in cities and parents.”

Even if the bill sails through without changes, at least its renewal will only last for a year — after which a possibly very different House and Senate will have a chance at crafting another five-year transportation bill. Until then, Americans may simply be stuck with the status quo.

No, We Don’t Need Drive-Thrus — Even During COVID-19

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 15:33:47 GMT

COVID-19 has upended the restaurant business. And cities around the world have scrambled to figure out what they can do to help the sector adapt and survive. One disappointing outcome of this scramble has been a resurgence of interest in drive-thru restaurants. As Fast Company reported in early September, we’ve seen the restaurant of the future, and it looks like this nightmarish Burger King:

Image via Burger King.

Chains that already have a drive-thru model have leaned heavily on them to drive business: for example, drive-thru now accounts for 90% of total sales at Wendy’s. And they’re taking their cues for the future from this trend—just read the Fast Company piece:

Ask any fast food company, from Taco Bell to McDonald’s, and they will tell you: COVID-19 accelerated everything….

Nowhere is that more evident than in a series of new stores Burger King plans to start building next year — where the car is treated like royalty.

…. [C]hain restaurants are investing in the higher-margin, higher-demand drive-through instead of dining rooms. (And Burger King is anything but alone in this regard — as we detailed in a recent feature, this trend is happening across the industry.)

Yet the idea that this is the “restaurant of the future” is more than a little dismaying. Especially because there’s been a growing trend in recent years of cities actually restricting the creation of new drive-thrus — for multiple very good reasons. I’m here to say that despite the pandemic, those reasons are still valid.

No doubt there will be strong pressure from chains on city planning departments to approve their new, drive-thru-heavy, template designs even in urban environments where they’re not appropriate. Cities should be prepared to resist that pressure. But will they be? Or will they buy into the simplistic notion that the drive-thru, thanks to COVID-19, is now the future?

If they do buy into it, it’ll be because of the natural human tendency to overreact to temporary circumstances with far-reaching solutions—typically the first solution that comes to mind, feels good, and is politically or practically feasible in a hurry. A good example is the widespread adoption of “security theater” measures shortly after the September 11 attacks. Even though many of the changes likely did nothing to enhance traveler safety, they were driven by the need to appear to be “doing something” rather than a sober analysis of risks, costs, and benefits.

The pandemic equivalent of this seems to include the rush in some quarters to declare that anything that fosters socially-distanced consumption is an unqualified good, regardless of its other downsides or trade-offs. And because cars are the dominant way we currently avoid breathing the same air as other people, this simplistic mindset threatens to reinforce auto-centric policies and design assumptions, at the expense of everyone who doesn’t or can’t drive. And of our cities’ resilience, financial and otherwise.

If someone in your city is telling you that the drive-thru is now the inevitable future of the restaurant biz, here’s what you tell them:

1. Drive-thrus are a bad financial deal for cities.

Total value of the “Old and Blighted” block: $1,104,000. Total value of the “Shiny and New” drive-thru Taco John’s block: $618,000.

A drive-thru is a markedly low-returning land use, in terms of the tax revenue it brings in versus other uses of the same land. It just so happens that the article that first brought Strong Towns to many readers’ attention way back in 2012 was a proof of exactly this concept: a brand new Taco John’s in Brainerd, Minnesota, when you actually do the math, is significantly less valuable than even a fairly drab, run-down strip of small local storefronts.

The reason is simple: the amount of non-place a drive-thru restaurant requires is massive, and this drives the value down. It’s not just the driving lanes and parking lot; it’s things like stormwater buffers that end up being required to make up for all that asphalt.

2. Drive-thrus are traffic nightmares.

The flip side of revenue is expenses, and drive-thrus also impose more costs on your city than a lot of other things that could occupy the same piece of land. One reason is that they are absolutely massive local traffic generators. Sean Hayford Oleary made a striking comparison on Twitter between a Taco Bell and a 185-unit apartment building: which do you think brings in more revenue per acre? Which do you think is responsible for more traffic?

A nice side-by-side example on Southdale Circle in Edina. That T-Bell likely generates more traffic than the 185-unit apartment building behind it.

Despite being lower-taxed residential, the apartment generates 1.4x as much property tax as the T-Bell (per acre — or 6.7x total). pic.twitter.com/jIjJQldPXZ

— Sean Hayford Oleary (@sdho) August 25, 2020

It’s an odd quirk of Your Brain on Cars that it’s rare to see a groundswell of NIMBY opposition to a new Taco Bell because of traffic, but nearby traffic impacts are a common theme of the opponents of new apartment construction. Go figure.

In the worst cases, a drive-thru not only generates a ton of local traffic, but it is so poorly designed and configured to accommodate this influx that it creates hellish back-ups on the adjoining street. The now-locally-infamous “Carbucks” in St. Paul, Minnesota ought to be a cautionary tale. But did the Carbucks experience deter St. Paul from recently approving a conditional use permit for a Taco Bell drive-thru, two blocks from a popular light rail and rapid bus station? No, gentle reader, no, it did not. (You can read St. Paul planning commissioner Bill Lindeke’s excellent take-down of this decision on Streets.mn.)

I suspect a big part of the reason is the unexamined notion that we somehow “need” these drive-thrus — not least now that sit-down dining is not an option for many.

3. Drive-thrus are pedestrian nightmares.

A drive-thru makes for a miserable environment to walk, ride a bike, or use a wheelchair or other assistive mobility device. Every driveway access to or from the street is a potential conflict point where crashes can happen, because it’s a site for unexpected behavior. Drivers may not be looking for people on the sidewalk, or someone may not expect the vehicle in front of them to brake.

On top of this, you have the “wasteland” factor: people on sidewalks feel most comfortable when there is a space-defining, hard edge to follow (a psychological phenomenon called thigmotaxis), such as a continuous wall of storefronts. Driveways break up this wall, and create an imposing and unpleasant environment to walk thru.

There are few things that can more quickly sap a street’s appeal as a walkable commercial destination than a drive-thru or two.

4. Drive-thrus just aren’t necessary. The needs they meet can be met in other ways.

The most common argument against restricting drive-thru — other than the simple “Some people like them,” which shouldn’t hold water against the obvious harm them do to the surrounding environment and your city’s finances — concerns people with unique needs that are served by a drive-thru arrangement.

Maybe you have a disability and going inside the business is a significant hassle, unsafe, or impossible for you.
Maybe you are high risk for COVID complications for one or more reasons, and so you are really are not comfortable going in, even just to stand in line for take-out.
Maybe you are a parent with a young child, who is spared by the drive-thru from the need to unbuckle your kid from a car seat and get them into a stroller all while averting any meltdowns.

What I would say here is don’t fall into the trap — or let your local leaders and advocates fall into the trap — of conflating “Solving Problem X is necessary” with “Solution Y is one way to solve Problem X, and therefore Solution Y is necessary.”

There are a lot of ways to meet these needs, when we start to get creative. Establishments are doing creative things with take-out windows, or similar makeshift solutions such as putting a table at your restaurant or coffee shop’s front door and letting it serve as the take-out station. Curbside pickup is now common at many stores, so that you can wait for your order in a nearby parking space without leaving your vehicle (or unbuckling that car seat). In an urban environment where many businesses do not have their own parking lots, I would extend this and say an employee will deliver your order anywhere within a couple blocks of the restaurant. You could wait on a park bench if you want! Delivery within a very localized area can easily employ technologies such as bikes, scooters, or even (let’s take a page out of famously car-centric fast-food chain Sonic’s book here) roller skates to speed up the process.

Jaime Izurieta, an architect and urban designer who is an expert on storefronts, has written a thread suggesting a number of directions that these innovations might take. They will be local and responsive, but the point is that there are lots of ways to address customer convenience, social distancing, and a range of mobility issues within a walkable urban environment.

Post pandemic trends that will likely stick: curbside pickup.

The interaction with storefronts might be greatest at the display window. Curbside pickup stations, Interactive media, staging of store activities and limited-contact service will revolutionize storefront design.

— Jaime J. Izurieta (@izurietavarea) August 21, 2020

The drive-thru just happens to be the tool that a certain set of corporate chains have already adapted to their needs and business model. It’s one that comes with heavy downsides for cities, so don’t let COVID be the reason your town thinks twice about limiting or banning new ones. You’ll be fine without them.

Daniel Herriges

Daniel Herriges is the Senior Editor of Strong Towns. This article originally appeared on the Strong Towns blog; it is republished here with permission.

OPINION: States Must Subsidize E-Bike Purchases

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 14:07:49 GMT

Assembly Member Robert Carroll and Michael Francoeur

Since the pandemic broke out in March, we’ve witnessed a nationwide surge in bike sales as old patterns of transportation have been upended. New York City has experienced its own “bike boom”: at a City Council hearing in New York City earlier this month, DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg testified that weekend bike ridership is up 57 percent over last year and weekday ridership up 26% (remarkable given that only 10 percent of workers were commuting to the office as of last month). Alongside traditional bicycles, e-bikes — bicycles with integrated electric motors — have also increased in popularity, with reported year-over-year sales doubling. Transportation in New York State accounts for 36 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. If we are going to meet the goals enshrined in the landmark climate bill passed by our state legislature last year (which commits the state to an 85 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050), we need to expand the scope of our efforts to shift New Yorkers away from fossil-fuel powered vehicles. To build on the momentum of the bike boom and work toward our climate goals, Assembly Member Robert Carroll, co-author of this op-ed, introduced, A10974, which would expand New York State’s existing electric car rebate program, Drive Clean, to cover e-bikes. The current Drive Clean program offers a direct, point-of-sale rebate of up to $2,000 to buyers of electric cars. A10974 would allow the state to offer a similar rebate for the purchase of e-bikes, covering 50 percent of the purchase price with a maximum rebate amount of $1,100. By offering a rebate, we can remake the existing electric subsidy program into a more progressive version of itself, bringing into the fold an even more affordable and sustainable form of transportation with additional benefits.

A sustainable and more inclusive transportation alternative

Around the world, cities are looking to bicycles, e-bikes, and investments in biking infrastructure to get residents and workers back on the move – and to ensure that when we emerge from this pandemic, it won’t be to traffic-clogged streets. Research has shown that e-bikes can be extremely effective in replacing trips traditionally made by car. Studies from Europe, where e-bike subsidies are more common and adoption rates higher, have shown that 35-50 percent of e-bike trips replace car trips. Closer to home, according to the most recent National Household Travel Survey, 76.8 percent of car trips in the U.S. are 10 miles or shorter, putting these trips squarely within the range of an e-bike. In fact, in a survey of e-bike owners in North America, the average distance of respondents’ last three trips was 9.3 miles, and nearly 65 percent of respondents stated that replacing car trips was a main reason for buying an e-bike. Owners of e-bikes report being able to ride further, more often, and with greater ease, and to carry more cargo than owners of traditional bikes. As a result, they quickly become the primary mode of transit for utilitarian trips, like commutes and errands. With their comparative ease of use, e-bikes represent an opportunity for segments of the population affected by barriers to traditional bike riding, notably those with physical limitations. E-bikes also provide extended mobility for those who do not or cannot drive cars, or who live in areas that are not yet well served by public transportation.

Bring rebates within the reach of more New Yorkers

The majority of New York City residents don’t own a car, and therefore cannot benefit from the current rebate program. New Yorkers who are in the market for a new vehicle will discover that the average base price of one of the 40 electric car models eligible under the Drive Clean program is $51,984. Even after taking advantage of federal and state rebates, this leaves electric cars, many marketed by manufacturers as luxury models, outside the reach of most New Yorkers. In contrast, some of the most popular e-bikes range from $1,100 to $8,000 in price — a fraction of the cost of an electric car. Still, according to a policy brief published by the UC Davis Institute of Transportation, “e-bike costs are one of the strongest barriers to adoption.” Our rebate will make e-bikes much more affordable for those who need them. And, because the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority program is already funded, it won’t require any new budget to provide an immediate impact. An e-bike rebate is a logical expansion of the Drive Clean program. We find ourselves at an inflection point, coming on the heels of the legalization of e-bikes this past year and the decarbonization mandate of the state climate bill passed in 2019. As our underfunded public transportation systems strain under the stress of operating during a pandemic, some New Yorkers line up in front of their local bike shop, while others file into neighboring car dealerships. With this bill, New York can choose to incentivize the adoption of a broader set of low-carbon mobility options over the fossil-fuel powered status quo. There is much more to be done to address the non-financial barriers to biking, from over-policing to lack of infrastructure. This is just one of many steps towards a cleaner, more accessible transportation system — and we should take it. Robert Carroll (on Twitter: @bobby4brooklyn) represents the 44th Assembly District in the state Assembly. Michael Francoeur (@mjfrancoeur) is a member of the Ecosocialist Working Group of NYC-Democratic Socialists of America and resident of Lower Manhattan.