Streetsblog USA

Tuesday’s Headlines to Start the Week

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 12:08:58 GMT

President-elect Joe Biden’s $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan includes $20 billion for transit (Mass Transit Mag). But concerns remain about how the money will be distributed, whether it will be enough and whether it can even get through Congress (Streetsblog USA).
As mayor of South Bend, incoming Transportation Pete Buttigieg challenged the auto-centric status quo by building bike lanes and implementing a Complete Streets policy. (Washington Post)
Transportation is a public health issue: COVID-19 vaccines are here, but not everyone has a way to get to them. (NBC News)
The once-chaotic e-scooter industry looks like it’s finally breaking through to profitability. (Reuters)
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed a $16-billion transportation bill that will extend to passenger rail lines and modernize the system, but he also vetoed higher fees for Uber and Lyft rides, shot down a low-income fare program and declined to reverse transit service cuts. (NBC Boston)
Amtrak has returned to DuPont, near Seattle, for the first time since a deadly 2017 derailment. (Post-Intelligencer)
A year after B-Cycle disappeared, Denver’s transportation department is rolling out a new micromobility program with a mix of docked and dockless e-bikes and e-scooters. (Denverite)
Texas has committed $600 million to Vision Zero, but it’s also facing a $1.9-billion drop in gas-tax revenue. Ideas include making big-rig drivers pay and charging a fee on electric and hybrid vehicles. (KSAT)
Miami-Dade is trading in its pollution-belching diesel school buses for an electric fleet. (Miami Herald)
Even in auto-centric Houston, residents want to live in a 15-minute city. (Rice Kinder)

Monday’s Headlines to Honor Martin Luther King Jr.

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 05:01:42 GMT

We’re off today to honor Martin Luther King Jr. but we’ll be back tomorrow with our usual delightful mix of coverage. Until then, here are some headlines you might have missed from the weekend:

Cities should stop subsidizing parking and use a land value tax to make parking lots pay their own way. (Streetsblog via City Observatory)
Before heading out the door, the Trump administration exempted autonomous vehicles that carry only cargo from some safety regulations. (Reuters)
The U.S. DOT issued $40 million in grants to improve safety at commuter rail crossings in California, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington. (RT&S)
The California Supreme Court ruled that a state law governing who is a contractor and who is an employee applies retroactively to Uber and Lyft. (San Francisco Chronicle)
Excessive speeding and driving under the influence contributed to Portland’s spike in traffic deaths last year. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
Rising property values and unforseen construction challenges led to a $5-billion spike in the cost of Sound Transit light-rail projects. (Seattle Times)
As Charlotte plans to spend billions on transit in the coming decades, some officials seem fixated on pie-in-the-sky solutions like flying taxis. (UNC Charlotte)
Brightline West is aiming to start construction this spring on a rail line connecting Las Vegas and Southern California. (Review-Journal)
The planned 2023 opening of Minnesota’s Southwest light rail line has been delayed. (KSTP)
Utah cities could be connected by passenger rail in five years, if the state gets its act together. (Building Salt Lake)
Dallas received a $4-million federal grant to turn six-lane S.M. Wright Highway into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard. (Dallas Innovates)
Houston drivers face a $100 fine for parking in a bike lane now that the law’s grace period is over. Alternatively, they can take a safe-driving class. (Community Impact)
Washington, D.C.’s transportation director, the respected Jeff Marootian, is leaving to join President-elect Joe Biden’s climate change team. (WaPost)
This Streetsblog Chicago story on whether women would prefer female-only train cars generated quite a bit of debate.
New York City cyclists now have to worry about getting doored by a building (Curbed). Our colleagues at Streetsblog NYC have demanded answers from the Department of Transportation, but have not gotten any.

How to Stop Giving Parking Developers A Free Ride

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 05:01:04 GMT

As Donald Shoup lays out in exhaustive detail in his 733-page masterpiece, The High Cost of Free Parking, the subsidies we provide for car storage have shredded the fabric of America’s urban areas. By giving over so much land to cars, we weaken and undermine the things that make cities work well: the opportunities for easy interaction.

And there’s evidence that the effects of parking are causal. From 1960 onward, an increase in parking provision from 0.1 to 0.5 parking space per person was associated with an increase in automobile mode share of roughly 30 percentage points according to a study of nine cities. We have too much parking for many reasons: because we’ve subsidized highway construction and suburban homes, because we’ve mandated parking for most new residential and commercial buildings, and because we’ve decimated transit systems. But a key contributor to overparking is the strong financial incentives built into tax systems.

How parking is subsidized by our current tax system

In effect, our system of local property taxation plays a key role in subsidizing parking and car use. In nearly all US cities, the property tax is assessed equally on the value of both land and improvements, so if one improves a piece of property (by constructing or enlarging a building), the owner’s property taxes go up. The contrary is also true, if a property is unimproved, or just covered in gravel or asphalt, the owner typically pays lower taxes based only on the value of the bare land. In cities with high vacancy rates, the property tax actually rewards landowners who demolish buildings. The perverse incentives created by raising taxes on those who improve their land with active uses like offices, stores and homes, led Henry George in the 19th Century to propose a “single” tax on land, what is now generally called the “land value tax” (LVT).

The Land Value Tax, in essence, fixes the anti-development incentives that are built in to the property tax. Constructing a new building on a piece of land doesn’t cause the owner’s taxes to rise, and those who own valuable property can’t avoid or minimize taxes by leaving it fallow. If a downtown block is zoned for office use, for example, it pays high taxes even if it’s a vacant lot.

But despite its appeal, there’s been little enthusiasm for land value taxes in the US. Only one large city, Pittsburgh has seriously flirted with the idea, for a time taxing property more heavily than improvements. But elsewhere, it’s been a non-starter.

Higher fees for parking as a “lite” land value tax

The City Council of Hartford Connecticut is considering an expanded fee on private commercial parking lots and structures that mimics some of the important features of a land value tax. Call it LVT-lite.

In Hartford, as in many US cities, much of the downtown area is given over to car parking, and surface parking lots pay lower rates than those lots with improvements. The low rate of taxation on parking lots lowers the holding costs for landowners, and makes parking a more profitable use than developing these lots for other more intensive uses. One way to change that dynamic is to raise taxes or fees on parking, which is exactly what the city’s proposed ordinance would do.

As University of Connecticut engineering professor Norman Garrick has shown, Hartford’s downtown has been hollowed out by the construction of parking. As Garrick explains:

Since 1960, the number of parking spaces in downtown Hartford increased by more that 300 percent — from 15,000 to 46,000 spaces. This change has had a profound and devastating effect on the structure and function of the city (see accompanying maps) as one historic building after another was demolished.

Not surprisingly, the proliferation of freeways and surface parking lots (shown in red) has coincided with a dramatic decline in the city’s population.

The Hartford ordinance would establish a sliding scale of fees for parking lots and structures based on the number of parking spaces. The fee would start in 2022, and be phased in over a period of years. When fully implemented, for large parking lots, the incremental fee works out to $125 per parking space per year, which is about 25 cents per working day per parking space.

Hartford’s proposed policy would effectively in place incentives to better use urban space, and to discourage excessive car travel. As the Parking Reform Network‘s Tony Jordan told us:

. . . parking stall fees are good policy because they would contribute simultaneously to several important policy objectives. Parking stall fees, particularly surface stalls, will encourage better uses of urban space, which I think is a big consideration in Hartford. Per stall fees internalize more of the costs of someone’s decision to drive and raise revenue that can and should be used to encourage and subsidize other modes. The environmental and traffic benefits from mode shift are obvious.

Is taxing parking fair?

Superficially, it might seem like raising fees on parking is somehow “picking on” cars and car ownership. There should be a rational basis for any tax, and when it comes to parking there are very good reasons to raise fees and taxes to offset for the car subsidies built into our current systems of public finance. It’s worth stepping back a bit and considering just how much subsidy is extended to parking, and to car travel in general — because some of the biggest subsidies are not on anyone’s radar.

Take, for example, the cost of dealing with stormwater. Hartford, like many US cities, has an antiquated system of combined storm and sanitary sewers, and when there’s a heavy rainfall, water from streets, roofs and — wait for it — parking lots all flows into storm sewers, overwhelming the sanitary sewer system, and producing combined discharges of untreated sewage and stormwater into, in Hartford’s case, the Connecticut River. The city is under a court order to fix the system, and is in the process of spending $2.5 billion to solve the problem. The solution includes building a four-mile long 18-foot diameter tunnel — essentially a subway for stormwater. (That’s not hyperbole; single-track subway tunnels, like San Francisco’s central subway are 20 feet in diameter).

We’ll bet you didn’t know that Hartford had a multi-billion dollar subway system.

Hartford’s 4-mile cross-town subway — for stormwater.

To pay for the project, Hartford and surrounding cities are charging their residents a “Clean Water Project Charge” on their water bills. Local residents actually pay more for the stormwater system, per gallon than they pay for their domestic water ($4.05 per hundred cubic feet for domestic water consumed, and are charged $4.10 per hundred feet of water used to pay for stormwater). But keep in mind that the stormwater doesn’t result from domestic water use — it results from runoff from roofs, roads and parking lots.

While some cities charge based on the amount of a user’s “impervious surfaces,” Hartford does not. As a result, neither cars, nor parking lots, pay anything toward the stormwater problems they cause.

And it is these impervious surfaces, like parking lots, that contribute enormously to the quantity and (bad) quality of stormwater. Since they are large and impervious, they create the huge peak flows that cause overflows. And it’s also the case that cars — via pollution from tires, leaking engine oil and gasoline, and brake linings — that produce some of the most toxic elements in stormwater runoff itself.

Charging residential water users, but not car users and parking lots is, in turn, an equity issue. A Hartford resident who may not even own a car (per the US Census, roughly 23 percent of Hartford residents live in households that don’t own a car) has to pay for this problem through their water bill. Meanwhile, a suburban commuter from outside the water district area would pay nothing toward Hartford’s stormwater system.

In short, there are good reasons of efficiency and fairness for asking parking lot owners to pay more toward dealing with the costs they impose.

For cities, imposing fees on parking makes fiscal and land use sense. For too long, we’ve subsidized the assault on urban living by cars, and nothing has been more detrimental to cities than dedicating scarce and valuable urban land to car storage. Many of these subsidies are buried — literally and figuratively — in the way we pay for urban infrastructure, like stormwater runoff. In Hartford, and many other cities, we have the perverse situation where car-free households are taxed to cleanup runoff from streets and parking lots, while road users pay nothing for the damages they cause.

Ultimately, a full-fledged land value tax would help correct the perverse incentives in the current property tax. But until then, charging a higher fees for parking lots is more efficient and fairer.

This article originally appeared on City Observatory and is republished with permission.

Four Unanswered Questions about Biden’s Transportation Relief Plan

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:22:51 GMT

Sustainable transportation advocates are applauding President-elect Biden’s COVID-19 relief plan, but wonder whether it will be enough to save the green modes that millions of Americans rely on — and which cities will get the biggest piece of the pie.

As part of his $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan, the noted rail enthusiast and incoming president has committed $20 billion in direct relief for U.S. transit agencies, in addition to less-specific commitments to school transportation and state governments that could potentially flow to highway authorities. The proposal was greeted with enthusiasm by transit officials who were disappointed by the diminutive size of earlier relief packages — but they also hinted that they would keep pushing for more.

“The American Rescue Plan is a strong start that will make significant investments in agencies hit hardest by COVID, such as the MTA,” Pat Foye, the CEO of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said in a statement. “It’s clear the new administration believes in transit and understands that these investments will jumpstart our economic recovery.”

Transit has gotten a total of $39 billion from the last two bills, but in many cases that's only been enough to salvage the rest of this fiscal year.

Some agencies still have massive budget deficits projected for fiscal 2022 (MTA's is over $3 billion)

— Sam Mintz (@samjmintz) January 14, 2021

Question 1: How long will the good times roll?

But exactly how long Biden’s “strong start” might sustain badly bruised transit networks remains an open question — especially given how severely the last administration shortchanged them throughout the pandemic.

The CARES Act allocated $10.5 billion to transit agencies in April — less than half of the $25 billion the industry requested in the immediate aftermath of the lockdowns that sent ridership crashing by 91 percent nationwide. The subsequent COVID-19 Emergency Relief Act of 2020, passed in December, allocated another $14 billion, but that was also less than half of the $32 billion that various agencies had started pushing for in September, citing enduring (if possibly unfounded) fears of virus transmission on transit that had suppressed ridership to less than 65 percent of 2019 levels.

Biden’s proposed lifeline would likely get a lot of agencies, but not all, over the hump.

“We’re deeply appreciative of President-elect Biden’s recognition of the importance of public transportation for the country, and how critical it is for our economic recovery,” said Paul Skoutelas, president and CEO of the American Public Transportation Association. “But the question now becomes: how long will this money keep our agencies afloat without having to resort to dramatic cuts? We’ve already sent out surveys to our membership and asked them that question, and we should know more in a couple of weeks. … This plan is good news, but we need to take a hard look and make sure our agencies are actually getting what they need.”

It is incumbent on Congress & the Administration to ensure this inequity of the last package is corrected in the "American Rescue Plan" and ensure the transit funding is provided equitably to all transit systems no matter their location or size.

— Oklahoma Transit Association (@OklahomaTransit) January 15, 2021

Question 2: Who benefits?

The second big question looming over Biden’s relief package is which transit agencies will benefit from it most — and which might not.

In a fact sheet, the Biden-Harris transition team noted that all $20 billion would be directed to “the hardest hit public transit agencies,” but didn’t clarify what “hardest hit” meant. That may be a signal that the proposal might limit how much relief smaller agencies could collect in a manner similar to the December relief act, which capped the amount that each urbanized area received at 75 percent of the entire region’s transit operating costs for fiscal year 2018, regardless of how many agencies might be splitting the pot. (There’s one time where the much-maligned MTA would possibly benefit, given its octopine reach into New York’s northern, Long Island and Connecticut suburbs and its operation within the city, too.

That controversial decision stood in contrast to how the first round of relief dollars were distributed: on the basis of pre-COVID Federal Transit Administration formulas, which some advocates argued unfairly privileged smaller agencies whose service is largely funded by federal and state grants (or things like gas taxes, which have also fallen during COVID) rather than fares. Other advocates, though, believe that grant-dependent transit networks need federal aid the most, precisely because their ridership has always been low and fareboxes were already light.

It is incumbent on Congress & the Administration to ensure this inequity of the last package is corrected in the "American Rescue Plan" and ensure the transit funding is provided equitably to all transit systems no matter their location or size.

— Oklahoma Transit Association (@OklahomaTransit) January 15, 2021

Question 3: Will roads get too much money?

A third crucial question that drew a little less advocate scrutiny was how much drivers would benefit from the new bill — and how much state highway agencies actually need the lifeline.

A whopping $350 billion, or about 18 percent of Biden’s proposed package, will go to “emergency funding for state, local, and territorial governments to ensure that they are in a position to keep front line public workers on the job and paid.” But it wasn’t made clear how much would specifically go to state departments of transportation, many of which have suspended road expansion projects — which some would argue is a good thing in our already-overbuilt autocentric road network — or have deferred road maintenance, which could be cause for safety concerns.

The Association for State Highway Transportation Officials initially called for $37 billion for “urgent” relief, though the group conceded months later that its members only really needed $16 billion to fully recover their 2020 shortfalls because gas taxes revenues rose more quickly than projected at the start of the pandemic. State DOTs eventually received $10 billion in the December relief package; if they get a slice of Biden’s plan, too, it could easily plug or exceed that gap, while still leaving transit agencies fighting for more.

Of course, the biggest payouts for both dirty and clean transportation providers will probably arrive in step two of Biden’s recovery plan: a massive, as-yet-unreleased infrastructure bill that Biden teased would likely be released in February.

Question 4: Will Congress screw it up (or fix it)?

But first, Congress will need to answer the fourth big question about Biden’s big plan: whether it can actually become law. And with Democrats holding the narrowest possible majority in the Senate (Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia already expressing skepticism about another part of Biden’s recovery plan), that could be an ugly fight.

Advocates are nervous.

“It’s critically important that this plan passes,” added Skoutelas. “Every voice that understand the importance of public transportation needs to speak up.”

Friday’s Headlines to Round it Out

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 05:30:06 GMT

The D.C. Metro is temporarily closing 13 stations near the Capitol due to threats of violence surrounding incoming President Biden’s inauguration. (Washington Post)
Urbanists have high hopes for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but the real test will be whether he pushes pedestrian safety issues like new car safety standards and regulations on autonomous vehicles. (Next City)
Jaywalking is a victimless crime, and it’s time to stop enforcing it. (Governing)
A new platform provides transit agencies with data on where people are going and how they get there. (Mass Transit Mag)
Uber and Lyft are passing the cost on to riders for driver benefits the ride-hailing companies promised in Prop 22. (The Verge)
Uber is appealing a $59-million California fine for not sharing information on sexual assault and harassment reports. (Yahoo)
The Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s share of new federal COVID relief funds is $252 million. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Whoa! Portland’s new transportation commissioner wants to create car-free streets downtown. (Bike Portland)
With diversity an issue in transportation, San Antonio hired Tomika Monterville to run its newly created transportation department, implement Complete Streets and update a micromobility plan. (SA Report)
Widening I-45 in Houston will displace homeless people and public housing residents. (Houston Press)
New Orleans preliminarily approved a new nonprofit bike-share called Blue Krewe, almost a year after losing its previous bike-share. (The Lens)
Utah is the latest state to look at replace gas taxes with a per-mile road usage fee. (Salt Lake Tribune)
Unlike in the U.S., transit officials in Canada, Asia, Europe and Australia remain confident their systems will be fully funded throughout the pandemic. (City Monitor)
Vancouver is leading the way in eliminating parking minimums that lead to excess driving. (The Tyee)

NHTSA Blames Everyone But Itself For Crash Spike

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 23:25:55 GMT

The Trump administration’s top roadway safety agency offered a final kiss-off to America by blaming drivers for killing each other so much last year — with zero acknowledgement of the administration’s own failures to implement life-saving policies that would have actually slowed them down or gotten them onto safer modes.

The National Highway Safety Administration’s (likely final) press release on Thursday alluded to a stunning 4.6-percent spike in car crash fatalities between the the first three quarters of 2019 and the same period in 2020 — then placed the blame squarely upon the bad judgment of individual drivers, rather than the systemic failures of agencies like NHTSA itself.

“Most fatal crashes are linked to risky behavior,” the agency wrote, citing a debunked myth that driver error is the only cause of most crashes. “If you fail to obey the speed limit, to wear your seat belt, and to drive sober, your risk for a crash, and a fatal one at that, goes up. … Please do not further burden [emergency medical responders] with your poor driving choices.”

The Administration is right, of course, that someone’s “poor driving choices” were at least one factor in virtually every car crash that claimed a human life in 2020. It just neglected to mention that those choices didn’t happen in a vacuum — they were made on roads that federal agencies have for decades engineered to privilege speedy driving at the expense of other, safer alternatives.

For instance, the agency did correctly cite speed as a key factor in the surge, noting that one report had found a horrifying “median 22-percent increase in speeds in select metropolitan areas” last year. But NHTSA made no mention of the role that our country’s most-common road designs — including straight, highway-style streets with ultra-wide lanes and few visual cues that might compel drivers to slow down or pay attention to their surroundings — are proven to encourage break-neck speeds, especially when roadways are not congested with traffic, as they were throughout most of last year.

“Speed kills, and we design our roadways primarily for speed,” said Beth Osborne, the director of Transportation for America, in a recent viral tweet. “When people follow the design, we blame them for the inevitable mistakes and crashes that result, calling for education and enforcement. … [It’s] better to build a road that makes it hard to speed than build one that tells people to speed and then educate and enforce them out of following the design cues.”

NHTSA still fails to understand how road design induces speed and fatal outcomes of crashes.

“Speed limits are in place for the safety of all road users.” Yikes. They truly have no clue. https://t.co/QFIHkxh4t6

— Don Kostelec (@KostelecPlan) January 14, 2021

To be fair, NHTSA’s core mission is to use “education, research, [motor vehicle] safety standards, and enforcement” to make our roads safer, rather than to build self-enforcing streets that most transportation experts agree hold the real key to ending our traffic violence epidemic.

But advocates were still disappointed to see leaders at the agency use their final days in power to do little more than finger-wag at the nation’s drivers — and in so doing, insinuate the dangerous myth that we can stop drivers from engaging in “risky behavior” just by asking them not to kill anyone.

Plus, NHTSA’s statement failed to hold accountable its partner agencies in the US DOT that are charged with the task of maintaining a safe road network, but nonetheless fund the construction of streets and highways upon which roughly 40,000 people die every year. The Federal Highway Administration, for instance, has funded significant research into the power of self-enforcing streets, but issued no advisories and funded no grants to promote emergency traffic calming measures during the pandemic, even as the death toll began to rise.

This is an important issue to raise, but the letter should be directed to road owners/managers as much as, if not more than, drivers. We have speeding and dangerous behavior in large part because our roads are designed for it. We must take responsibility for doing better. https://t.co/aHORPUHEvV

— Sandy Johnston (@sandypsj) January 14, 2021

One area for which NHTSA may deserve even more censure than it received from advocates is in the realm of impaired driving prevention. In its letter, the agency chastised the public for an apparent surge in crashes involving drunk motorists, noting that “65 percent of drivers in trauma centers after a serious crash tested positive for drugs or alcohol” in 2020 — but neglected to mention that the Administration’s own New Car Assessment Program has failed to explore the requirement of basic impairment detection systems on all new vehicles, as European regulators are quickly moving to do.

NHTSA did issue a request for information on end-stage drunk driving prevention technology in November, but advocates say it’s still too little, too late.

“The agency should be taking major leaps … to require impairment detection systems in all new vehicles,” said Cathy Chase, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “With every passing day, lives are needlessly hanging in the balance.”

Of course, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is far from the first branch of the Trump administration to fail to perform its most basic duties to the safety of the American public, and then blame everyone but themselves for the deadly consequences that followed (heck, the president does that all the time). The only question is whether the next leaders of NHTSA will take their responsibilities to keep road users safe more seriously — and how they will accept accountability and work to do better when they fail.

NHTSA has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Talking Headways Podcast: ‘Intro to the City’

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 20:23:30 GMT

This week, we’re joined by Professor Sean Benesh to talk about his new book, “Intro to the City: 150 Observations to Understand the City” (Intrepid). In a broad conversation that touches on pre-Colombian cities and how being an ordained pastor connects to his urban thinking, we mostly learn about how unwelcoming our public spaces are to non-White people in this country. Benesh is on Twitter at @seanbenesh.

An edited transcript is below the player (in case you like to read not listen), but a full transcript (with some typos!) is available by clicking here.

Here’s the short excerpt:

Jeff Wood: You know, you live in Hollywood. And I imagine that when you say that to people outside of Portland, you might get an eyebrow. I’m wondering if you could explain this relatively unknown neighborhood.

Sean Benesh: It’s called the Hollywood district. It’s in kind of inner Northeast Portland. And it’s just a weird neighborhood, in a good way. It’s an anomaly and a lot of ways. What drew us here after we moved from Vancouver was its walkability. We had lived in Vancouver, as a family of five, without a car, so we had grown accustomed to walkability, transit, and all that. And so when we landed in Portland, we wanted to find a similar kind of a neighborhood.

And that’s how we landed in Hollywood, which is definitely a neighborhood of contrast. So you have, you know, very expensive single-family, detached homes across the street from, you know, multi-story residential housing apartments, where a lot of the units are affordable. And so you have Whole Foods across the street from a Dollar Tree. It’s just a weird contrast. And it continues to be infill with new apartments. So, yeah, it’s just a fun and eclectic (though not in your typical Portland eclectic way).

Jeff Wood: I also enjoyed your case for McDonald’s.

Sean Benesh: Why?

Jeff Wood: You cover this in the book to a certain extent, but kind of the standoffishness of some of the places that you mentioned, the Whole Foods and things like that, the ability of people to go in and create a third place, basically from a McDonald’s, where they can go and get a cup of coffee for a dollar and hang out and, you know, just be. And I think that’s really a good thing to remember that there’s places where everybody can go to.

Sean Benesh: Yes, to me, that’s a theme that comes up a lot when I think about the accessibility of a neighborhood. Like, if it’s all Whole Foods, then really to whom is that accessible? Or who’s that for? I mean, what about having spaces in the city that, you know, that are for everyone doesn’t matter what your socioeconomics are?

Jeff Wood: Yeah. And, like I said, that piece about the students walking into the Whole Foods with you and not feeling welcome. Is that something that happens a fair amount when you go places with your students?

Sean Benesh: Yeah, very much so. Roughly 60 percent, or maybe upwards of 70 percent, of our students are minorities. So when we go out and do walking tours, I really learn from them, particularly learning how students of color see and interact and experience the city. So when I go into a Whole Foods with four young Hispanic women, about 10 feet in, they kind of just stop. And they’re like, “Ah, this is kind of weird. Like there’s no one like us.”

Or when I take my group on the coffee tour and we walk into a very well-known beloved Portland roaster, and, you know, my students are kind of squirming. After, they say, “Everyone’s looking at us like we’re out of place. There’s no one like us.” So again, it just gets me thinking about like how to see the city from other people’s perspectives and how much that I’ve missed as well as kind of that conversation about a McDonald’s is like, some places are more welcoming, not just welcoming in terms of socioeconomic, but even in ethnicity as well.

Drivers Are Still Top Polluters, Even During Quarantine

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 12:24:55 GMT

Not even months of quarantine orders that confined millions of Americans to their homes were enough to unseat passenger vehicle trips as the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, a new study finds.

According to preliminary estimates from analysts at the Rhodium Group, transportation-related emissions were still the United States’ single biggest driver of climate change in 2020, despite historic drops in vehicle miles travelled and a relatively large drop in tailpipe smog compared to prior years.

Planes, trains and automobiles (and presumably to a lesser extent, boats) accounted for an estimated 31 percent of total net emissions in 2020, and the transportation industry experienced the largest drop in total emissions of any sector — though not enough to dethrone it as the nation’s top polluter. And if the Rhodium estimates hold, the industry’s slice of the climate change pie will actually be larger than it’s been in years past; it was just 28 percent in 2018, the most recent year for which the Environmental Protection Agency has provided final data.

Graphic: Rhodium Group

And a closer look at the data reveals that not all modes contributed equally to the transportation sector’s historic emission declines — because decreases in driving were considerably lower than decreases in flying.

Demand for jet fuel fell to as low as 32 percent of 2019 levels at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and barely achieved 65 percent of those levels even when travel demand rose in around the December holidays. Gasoline demand, by contrast, had already rebounded to about 90 percent of its pre-pandemic levels by the last month of the year, and diesel demand was roughly the same as it was in December 2019 — a surge which the Rhodium analyst says was “likely spurred by holiday deliveries.”

National vehicle miles travelled, meanwhile, were only down about 15 percent in 2020 compared to the 2019 annual total — and that’s even accounting for a historically unprecedented 40 percent VMT drop-off in April, when more states and cities had implemented shelter-in-place orders than at any other point in the pandemic.

Graphic: Rhodium Group

The Rhodium analysts say our national patchwork of quarantine mandates probably explain most of the transportation sector’s emissions seeming “wins.” (Before you ask: no, this was far from banner year for fuel emissions standards, electric vehicle adoption, or even the sale of plain-old fuel-efficient vehicles.) But some advocates are wondering why 2020’s driving-related emissions weren’t even lower — and if a global pandemic couldn’t do it, it what it might take to finally get Americans out of their cars at large scale.

Simply put, experts don’t yet have a thorough answer to the question of exactly where Americans were going when they climbed behind the wheel last year. According to a recent Gallup poll, roughly 33 percent of U.S. workers said they had shifted to working completely from home by October — which was down from a stunning 51 percent in April, but still means a huge chunk of erstwhile commuters stayed away from U.S. roadways through most of the calendar year. High levels of unemployment cancelled the commutes of another giant segment of the U.S. workforce altogether, and shopping trips likely took a huge hit, as shuttered businesses and public health precautions caused more Americans than ever before to rely on online retail and food delivery over personal, single-occupancy trips to the store.

The U.S. Travel Association did note that trips to “national parks and beaches” picked up, according to some surveys, and some experts have pointed to research that suggests that some telecommuters may actually drive more throughout the day. (Though it should be noted that those studies date from an pre-COVID era when a remote worker might have been a little more tempted to run unnecessary errands or camp out indoors at a coffee shop during her workday.) But we likely won’t have a complete picture of where Americans drove last year until the National Household Travel Survey releases its data for 2020 — and that won’t happen for at least another three years.

What we do know is that even during a pandemic, Americans still drove way too much in 2020 — and without real policy change, they’ll probably drive even more once they’re vaccinated.

“The fact that transportation is still the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions despite the decreased travel shows just how big the problem is,” said Matt Casale, environment campaigns director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “And we’re already seeing driving pick back up, so if we don’t continue to make progress, this year will just be a blip….In the short term, we have to make sure our transit agencies make it through COVID intact. We’re glad the most recent federal relief bill included additional emergency funding for transit agencies, but it wasn’t as much as they need, and we’re hoping to see additional emergency funding soon.”

And in the long term, experts believe cutting transportation emissions will take a historic effort to shift Americans away from driving — and there’s no better time to start than now.

“We have a real opportunity to make long-term progress on shifting toward a cleaner transportation system through a potential federal infrastructure package and the reauthorization of the long-term transportation spending bill,” Casale adds. “The COVID-19 health crisis, although devastating, has shown what drastically reducing pollution from the transportation sector can look like. But to make lasting change, supporting active, non-polluting transit options is critical to transforming America’s post-pandemic transportation system and normalizing new, healthier transportation behavior.”

Trump Was Impeached, but Thursday’s Headlines Are Unimpeachable

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 05:01:13 GMT

Coronavirus lockdowns caused traffic congestion to fall worldwide for the first time in at least a decade. (Reuters)
Cars are not only physically killing us — they’re killing our bank accounts, too. The average cost of a new car now tops $40,000. (CNET)
Senate Democrats introduced a bill that includes $10 billion to tear down urban freeways. (Streetsblog USA)
Uber and Lyft drivers filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Prop 22, the California referendum that made them independent contractors instead of employees eligible for benefits. (ABC News)
Uber expanded a feature allowing users to request an electric vehicle to 1,400 cities. It also added transit to its app in Mexico City and London, joining Sydney and Chicago. (The Verge)
Cooperation between operators and regulators, flat topography and integration with transit are the keys to a successful bike-share system. (BBC)
One of Elaine Chao’s last actions as transportation secretary was to release regulations laying the groundwork for self-driving cars. (Planetizen)
Main Streets are hurting during the pandemic, and better transportation planning can help bring them back. (Public Square)
The Twin Cities are tacking $70 million onto the cost of the bus rapid transit Gold Line to pay for (ugh) more parking. (Star Tribune)
Demand for transit is growing in outlying parts of Harris County, Texas. (Houston Public Media)
A spike in COVID-19 cases has left Austin’s Cap Metro with a shortage of bus drivers. (KXAN)
The Birmingham suburb of Homewood is considering a Complete Streets plan for Green Springs Highway, one of the area’s busiest roads. (Bham Now)
You’ve heard of the “15-minute city,” where every necessity is within a short walk or bike ride. How about Sweden’s plans for 1-minute cities? (Fast Company)

Could Augmented Reality Windshields End Distracted Driving?

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 06:24:33 GMT

Countless drivers have gotten away with murder by telling a cop the magic words, “I just didn’t see [that pedestrian/cyclist/wheelchair user] coming.” But if a new augmented reality windshield technology works as designed, such people might not have that excuse for much longer.

At last week’s 2021 Consumer Electronics Show, technology giant Panasonic unveiled its new and improved “head-up display” that senses whether the driver is speeding, swerving, or approaching a “roadway hazard” like a human being on a bike. But this display also senses whether the driver is aware that he or she is endangering others — and if not, projects an unmissable visual warning directly onto the windshield, accompanied by a vibration or auditory alert.

Panasonic says the system’s ultra-advanced 3-D radar cameras see more of the roadway than the average head-up display and can even sense things that human drivers either can’t see or frequently miss, such as a person walking across a road without streetlights, or a kid darting into one of an SUV’s massive blind spots. And most notably, those same cameras are also watching the driver herself, and dynamically adjusting the car’s alerts based on her eye position.

Put another way: if a driver is checking himself out in the rear view mirror and a kid chases a soccer ball into the street in front his car, the alert system will bleat extra loud and flash a warning directly into the motorist’s field of vision to give him an alert to stop. But if a driver is doing the right thing and giving the roadway his full and undivided attention, the system will give him a gentler warning — a shift that the designers of the system say could convince drivers to actually use such advanced features, as well as keeping them from getting quickly desensitized to life-saving safety alerts.

“My wife and I have a back-up camera on our car, and it screams at us every time we try to get out of the garage,” said Andrew Poliak, chief technology officer for Panasonic Automotive. “A lot of drivers are so inundated with all these non-contextual warnings from their ‘smart’ vehicles — all these bells and chimes and beeps — that they don’t always really hear them. …We need to make sure we build systems that people do not turn off. ”

The idea of overlaying a windshield with detailed safety information and noisy alerts isn’t new: auto manufacturers have been experimenting with the idea since 1988, and superheroes like Tony Stark have been doing it far longer. But U.S. automakers have struggled with how to market technologies like head-up displays, which are usually sold as expensive, add-on safety features available only on the most expensive cars on the road. Poliak says costs on the systems are quickly coming down, but that doesn’t address there’s the tricky psychological question of how to compel drivers to keep their safety features activated, never mind staying alert to their warnings once all those beeps and bops starts to become familiar background noise.

Europe, of course, has taken the most simple route: automakers there will be required to include camera monitoring and some form of driver alert systems on all new cars by 2022 — and automatic speed limiters that will prevent a driver from traveling above the legal limit to boot. But until that happens stateside, our own car giants have few incentives to push for the potentially life-saving technology.

Panasonic’s approach to that challenge might seem a little odd to sustainable transportation advocates at first. The company has essentially created a head-up display that’s designed to minimize safety warnings to drivers, while offering them more straightforward luxury features like a turn-by-turn navigation system that can digitally draw a blue line on the windshield to show drivers exactly where to go without needing to rely on aural cues. But that same fancy navigation system could also help a driver better judge whether he or she is actually giving a cyclist at least five feet of passing space — and it could provide optimized safety alerts to which drivers will actually pay attention.

In a perfect world, of course, flawless automated driving technology with flawless roadway detection systems and speed governors on all cars would make head-up displays obsolete. But as it stands, even the most advanced AV tech commercially available not only isn’t safe enough to trust with human lives, but may actually induce dangerous driving behaviors in the human beings that “smart” vehicles still rely upon when road conditions are unpredictable.

For all their many flaws, experts believe that human drivers are still generally better than an AV at making nuanced decisions about how to most safely pilot a vehicle in bad weather, in chaotic urban environments, or when something truly weird happens on the roadway that a computer can’t possible be programmed to predict. By essentially giving drivers the super-advanced sensing power of an automated car, a head-up machine could potentially make drivers a little safer — or at least definitively dispatch with the excuse that they didn’t “see” a cyclist or pedestrian in time to prevent a tragedy.

“Personally, I find the safety features of my head-up display really useful,” said Poliak. “I love that it tells me my speed right now, that it gives me a little red alert when I’m going above the speed limit so I don’t get a ticket. … I think a lot of people are already finding that head-up displays can be a selling feature. Once you have one, you don’t really wanna go back to driving a car without one.”

Wednesday’s Headlines as the House Readies a Second Impeachment

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 06:15:36 GMT

The Federal Transit Administration has released the $14 billion in transit funds from the most recent coronavirus relief bill passed in December. (RT&S)
Drivers generally disregard painted lines telling them where to stop at intersections, according to a Minnesota study. (Route Fifty)
Having trouble falling asleep? The Eno Center for Transportation examines how the federal government can finance infrastructure construction.
Even though riding transit isn’t any more dangerous than going to the store, Philadelphia transit officials are worried that COVID-19 will depress ridership for years to come. (Inquirer)
The FTA approved a $766-million grant to replace a 110-year-old train bridge in New Jersey. (Railway Age)
Baltimore officials say the city’s transit system is unreliable and are seeking an additional $750 million in state funding. (Maryland Matters)
Some Oregon lawmakers want to prohibit tolling on I-205 unless the money goes toward widening the freeway. Currently revenue could go toward transit, walking or biking projects. (Bike Portland)
As in many cities, more people died on Austin roads last year despite fewer cars. Drivers killed 94 people in 2020, the most since 2015. (Monitor)
The South Shore double-tracking project recently funded by the FTA will help Michigan residents get to Chicago faster. (MLive)
Santa Clara Valley Transit is increasing frequency on seven bus routes because riders are being left behind due to social distancing requirements. (San Jose Spotlight)
An audit of Honolulu’s bike-share program that emphasized missed parking revenue failed to consider the benefits, like fewer car trips, cleaner air and better health. (Civil Beat)
Amazon is turning 39 London parking spaces into a logistics hub for e-cargo-bike delivery riders. (Supply Chain)

Poll: Too Many Are Skeptical of Vision Zero

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 05:01:01 GMT

More than half of New Yorkers know little or nothing about Vision Zero, and only slightly more than two-thirds support the seven-year-old initiative, even though a whopping 70 percent know someone who has been injured or killed in a vehicle crash, and 79 percent consider such crashes a serious problem in this city. Those are some conclusions of a new Siena College Research Institute poll taken late last year on behalf of Transportation Alternatives. The survey found, unsurprisingly, that the city’s working classes and communities of color were more likely to suffer from traffic violence: Overall, 30 percent of polled New Yorkers said they had personally been injured in a crash, a number that starts drifting up among low-income residents (33 percent) and Black residents (35 percent) — the latest indication that road violence affects the most vulnerable New Yorkers more than the wealthy or those historically empowered. The poll also found that Staten Island — the most car-centric of the five boroughs — registered the most carnage, with 88 percent of respondents knowing someone who was killed or injured in a traffic crash, and 48 percent having been injured in such a crash themselves. Think about that survey conclusion for a second: Roughly half of everyone on Staten Island has been injured in a traffic crash. The survey results shed a harsh light on Mayor de Blasio’s seven-year-old Vision Zero strategy, which proposed to eliminate traffic fatalities in the city by 2024, but has failed to get road deaths under 200 per year. According to Department of Transportation statistics, after hitting a trough of 202 traffic deaths citywide in 2018, fatalities rose to 221 in 2019 and again to 243 in 2020. In good years and in bad, there are roughly 220,000 reported car crashes every year in New York City, with roughly 35,000 of them — roughly 95 per day — causing injuries.

NEW poll shows 30% of New Yorkers have been injured in a traffic crash. 70% know someone who’s been injured or killed.
2021 candidates: This violence impacts communities across the 5 boroughs. It cannot be ignored. Read below for data & takeaways:https://t.co/IySBGnInTt — Transportation Alternatives (@TransAlt) January 12, 2021

A Streetsblog analysis of city crash statistics, which last year compared the first and second three-year periods of Vision Zero, discovered a basically flat number of fatality-producing crashes and a rising number of injury-producing ones during the first six years of de Blasio’s tenure (2014 through 2019, inclusive). The analysis showed that the growing civilian use of larger vehicles, such as SUVs and light trucks, accounted for the steady or waxing carnage — which the Department of Transportation has acknowledged while doing little to curb the problem. In the most recent three years of the analysis, the number of fatal crashes dropped only 3 percent. The number of injury-producing crashes, meanwhile, actually rose almost 12 percent, to 187,916 from 168,074. Fewer pedestrians died in the second three-year portion of Mayor de Blasio’s tenure — 383 versus 426. More cyclists and even more motorists died. Injuries rose for all road users. The analysis did not venture into 2020 on account of the traffic anomalies produced by the pandemic. More than 1,000 vulnerable road users — pedestrians and cyclists — have been killed by drivers during the mayor’s two terms, by TransAlt’s count. The poll found little recognition of Vision Zero among respondents: Only 48 percent said that they knew “some” or “a lot” about it, as opposed to the 51 percent who knew ”little” or ”nothing.” This murky record evidently produces skepticism in a sizable faction of New Yorkers. Looking more closely at who does or does not support Vision Zero, the survey found that 17 percent of respondents declared themselves somewhat or strongly opposed to the policy. No shocker, there were gender differences, with 20 percent of men opposed to the policy, while only 15 percent of women were.

A cyclist is assisted by emergency workers after being struck by a motorist in Manhattan. File photo: Gersh Kuntzman

So, clearly too many New Yorkers don’t believe that the benefit of zero road deaths outweighs whatever inconvenience or cost they see associated with achieving that goal. Moreover, because the policy plainly hasn’t produced zero road deaths, many residents may think it’s just so much cant. Even safe-streets activists, the broadest constituency for the policy, sometimes lampoon it as “Zero Vision.” The mayor has defended Vision Zero time and again, although recently he has acknowledged that the pandemic has taken a toll on its execution. “It’s been a very tough year on so many levels, and it has been a tough year for lives we’ve lost, including the lives we’ve lost on our streets,” he said on Dec. 29, during his daily press briefing. “We know there’s been way too much speeding. We know we have to crack down on that in 2021. We also know that the more life starts to get back to something like normal. The better ability we’ll have to do that, but it’s also, to me, a call to arms that Vision Zero needs to keep expanding rapidly on every front, whether it’s protected bike lanes or, or any type of bike lane, whether it’s enforcement, whether it’s the speed cameras, and obviously we’re going to fight in Albany to get that expansion of the timing of the speed cameras. … So, we have a very aggressive Vision Zero agenda for 2021.” A mayoral spokesman, Mitch Schwartz, declined to speculate on why some people don’t approve of Vision Zero, given that its goal is to make roadways safe. As for the relative lack of awareness about Vision Zero, he said that perhaps people aren’t aware of the branding, but people certainly do “notice that there are more speed cameras in your community than there used to be. Or bike lanes. Or bus lanes. Or that the speed limit dropped, etc.” Families for Safe Streets said the survey’s top line — that 30 percent of New Yorkers have been personally injured in a crash and that 70 percent of New Yorkers have been directly touched by road violence — demands a tripling-down on Vision Zero. “Behind each traffic crash statistic is a devastated parent, child, friend, and community. Today’s poll results prove that far too many New Yorkers have been impacted, and irrevocably damaged, by unsafe streets,” Amy Cohen, the group’s co-founder, said in a statement. “Mothers like me, who lost a child on an unsafe street, are members of a club that nobody should have to join, and we urge our current mayor and those running to succeed him to implement plans that once and for all put an end to the preventable plague of traffic violence.” Danny Harris, Transportation Alternatives executive director, said the poll should be “yet another wakeup call” for de Blasio “to step up, save lives, and achieve his Vision Zero goals.” TransAlt and Families for Safe Streets will host Vision Zero Cities “Spring Pop-Up” conference on March 4-5 in part to respond to the rising number of traffic deaths.

Data: Road Violence Affects Black Neighborhoods More

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 18:14:42 GMT

Of the 210 fatal car crashes in Massachusetts where a driver killed a bike rider or pedestrian between 2018 and 2020, a quarter of those killings occurred in neighborhoods where the Black population makes up a higher-than-average proportion of the neighborhood population, according to a Streetsblog analysis of MassDOT fatal crash records. According to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the population of Massachusetts as a whole includes 5.3 million people who identify as white alone (78 percent of the population) and 522,000 people who identify as Black or African-American (8 percent of the population). But Black households tend to be segregated in fewer neighborhoods: more than two-thirds of the Commonwealth’s Black residents live in Census tracts where 10 percent or more of the population identifies as Black. These neighborhoods include places like Roxbury and Dorchester in Boston, the McKnight neighborhood of Springfield, and in gateway cities like Brockton and Lynn. According to location data from the MassDOT’s crash database, 52 of the state’s 210 fatal crashes involving a bike rider or pedestrian between 2018 and 2020 occurred in those neighborhoods. By contrast, only 18 fatal crashes involving bikes or pedestrians occurred in whiter-than-average Census tracts, where at least 95 percent of residents identify as white.* Maps of MassDOT’s crash data overlaid on Census demographic information reveal the patterns in cities like Brockton (above) and in regions like the Pioneer Valley, where fatal crashes are highly concentrated in the Black neighborhoods of Springfield:

A plot of fatal crashes that involved a bike rider or pedestrian between 2018 and 2020 in the Pioneer Valley. Neighborhoods where Black residents make up 10 percent or more of the total neighborhood population are shaded in blue. View an interactive version of this map at https://observablehq.com/@vigorousnorth/bike-ped-fatalities-and-race-in-massachusetts

The victims of these crashes aren’t merely dots on a map. They include people like Antonio Tavares, a 61 year-old Cape Verdean immigrant who died when a police officer struck him with his cruiser on Brockton’s Main Street in August 2019. Or Brenda Lee Keller, 57, who was known for sharing food from her own refrigerator with her neighbors in need before she was killed by a hit-and-run driver near her home in Mattapan in May 2019. In her new book “Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America,” former StreetsblogUSA editor Angie Schmitt writes about how safety on public streets (or lack thereof) is intricately tied up with legacies of systemic racism, segregation, and traffic engineers’ implicit biases. A quotation in the book from transportation consultant Tamika Butler deftly describes these maps of fatal crashes in Massachusetts: “When you take data of race and socio-economic status and overlay it with where there are the most traffic incidents, and the most traffic deaths and serious injuries, communities of color and low-income communities light up those maps,” says Butler.

Our Next Book Club Event Discusses ‘Right of Way’ with Angie Schmitt

*Differences in total population could account for part, but not all, of this discrepancy: 14 percent of the state’s population lives in those whiter neighborhoods where at least 95 percent of the population identifies as white, while 19 percent of the state’s population lives in neighborhoods where at least 10 percent of residents are Black.

Tuesday’s Headlines on the Eve of Impeachment

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 05:05:10 GMT

City Lab follows Streetsblog’s story on how Democrats’ victories in Georgia and their new Senate majority will help President-elect Joe Biden pass a green transportation bill. Here are some similar stories on how the runoff results are good for Biden’s infrastructure (RT&S) and climate-change (Washington Post, EcoWatch) agendas.
Biden will take the train from Delaware to his inauguration, proving that he is who we thought he was: Amtrak Joe! (CNN)
Tesla stock inexplicably rose 700 percent in 2020, making founder Elon Musk the richest man in the world. He’s also one of the world’s stingiest billionaires when it comes to giving to charity. (Vox)
Roughly $610 million in federal coronavirus aid will help the D.C. Metro avoid service cuts through June. (Washington Post)
The deaths of five cyclists at the hands of a driver who fell asleep at the wheel while allegedly on meth has galvanized Nevada residents to call for public officials to do something about the carnage. (New York Times)
Not even protected bike lanes can protect cyclists from San Diego’s speeding drivers. (Union-Tribune)
The Federal Transit Administration finalized a $174-million grant for Kansas City’s streetcar extension. (Associated Press)
Massachusetts is tacking new fees onto Uber and Lyft rides in Boston and 13 other cities to fund public transit. (Patch)
The Oregon DOT’s new strategic plan promises “transformative change” on environmental and equity issues. (Bike Portland)
Hey, all you New Yorkers who just bought a car and are complaining about parking: Guess what? Owning a car in the city should suck. (Vice)

Champs-Élysées Makeover Inspires U.S. Advocates To Push for Better City Arterials

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 05:01:17 GMT

As Parisians celebrate a new plan to pedestrianize the Champs-Élysées and cut car traffic in half, Americans street safety advocates are demanding redesigns for their own cities’ even more dangerous downtown arterials.

Following a three-year campaign by local advocates, Paris Mayor and sustainable transportation visionary Anne Hidalgo announced on Sunday that the city would undertake a human-centered redesign of the famous eight-lane avenue, which connects the Arc de Triomphe with the Place de la Concorde (the largest plaza in Paris) and has been a mainstay of tourist itineraries for generations.

The plans for the new Champs are already being hailed by urban designers as a perfect marriage of the roadway’s historic past a royal garden promenade and its future as gathering space for Parisiens and visitors alike.

The new design was the result of a public engagement effort involving more than 10,000 residents, and will comprehensively reimagine the 1.2-mile road, including transforming four of eight driving lanes into space for pedestrians, cafes, playgrounds, gardens, and generous bike lanes. It will also replace most aging cobblestones with patterned pavers that will smooth the ride for cyclists, and add “tunnels of trees” to provide shade for pedestrians and improve the surrounding air quality.

The Champs-Élysées Committee praised the overhaul “one of the flagship urban projects of this decade.” It is scheduled to begin construction after the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Pedestrians huddle to take selfies on an unprotected median along the Champs-Élysées. Image: Salem Mostefaoui via PCA-STREAM.

Tourists will have ample space to safely admire the Arc De Triomphe after the road is redesigned as above. Image: PCA-STREAM

The existing 70 foot-wide sidewalks and a double row of traffic-buffering street trees already made a stroll along the Champs-Élysées pretty comfortable by American standards — and the monthly Open Streets events didn’t hurt either — but forward-thinking Parisians have long questioned the impact of car culture on the famous thoroughfare. In an interview with the Guardian, one of the architects behind the redesign, Philippe Chiambaretta, criticized the avenue as the embodiment of the worst aspects of the City of Light, which he summed up with distinctly French directness as “pollution, the place of the car, tourism and consumerism.”

The Champs-Élysées is travelled by an average of 3,000 drivers per hour and 100,000 pedestrians per day, and has one of the highest levels of automobile emissions in Paris.

Reclaiming car space will allow for the construction of new streetside gardens like this one. Image: PCA-STREAM

The proposed transformation of an already great street into an even greater one was met with a mixture of jealousy and curiosity by U.S. advocates, who wondered whether America’s not-so-people-friendly arterials would ever get their own makeovers.

Many American arterials strive for the grandeur of Champs-Élysées — think New York City’s Broadway between Columbus Circle and Union Square, or arguably, Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway — but most are more likely to be flanked by strip malls and dicey asphalt shoulders than chic fashion boutiques and 70-foot sidewalks. That’s because much of the Unite States’ primary arterial network was bbuilt in tandem with the suburbs and designed specifically to center the needs of drivers from day one, rather than retrofitted to prioritize high-speed travel when cars took over older cities and towns.

In 2013, Minnesota-based advocacy group Strong Towns coined the term “stroad” — a portmanteau of the words “street” and “road” — to describe the kind of multi-lane, high-speed thoroughfares adorned with nominal, narrow sidewalks and dangerously infrequent crosswalks that are common to U.S. cities and suburbs alike. Unlike Paris’s celebrated promenade, such stroads are often built and maintained by state transportation agencies rather than local officials, which can make successfully requesting even the most basic traffic-calming measures a profound challenge for advocates.

“Each ‘larger’ scale of government seems to involve a re-setting of the scope along which priorities are balanced,” wrote urban geographer Bill Lindeke in an essay on the difficulties of making U.S. arterials safer for road users. “Because the basic road diet trade-off is one that improves local safety (for people living or walking along these streets) but comes at the expense of more regionally-focused travel speeds (for drivers passing through a neighborhood from freeways or surrounding suburbs), it makes it particularly hard for county- or state-level decision makers to reconcile. If history is any guide, county- and state-level governments always prioritize through travel over local safety.”

We have a Boulevard meant specifically to copy the Champs-Elysees. We should copy this too. https://t.co/5QfTOOC8ZN

— Dan (@Danpearson266) January 10, 2021

But some U.S. advocates believe that America’s arterials could get their own version of the Champs-Élysées treatment — even if right now, they look more like super-sized highway rest stops than iconic urbanist landmarks.

“We built the suburbs and the inner suburbs around a network of arterials to enhance the car,” said Peter Calthorpe in a keynote address at the 2020 Rail~Volution conference. “We lined it with commercial that is dying now because of Amazon and online retail. We have these ribbons of decay everywhere, [but they] can become the places that we infill redevelop and create opportunities for transit. I call it Grand Boulevards. … You can have good sidewalk environments, bikeways, you can have dedicated lanes for transit.”

But even if the path to real arterial reform isn’t always easy, U.S. advocates were hopeful that their state and local leaders would be inspired by the Champs-Élysées makeover to think big about how they might redesign even their most deeply car-dominated streets. Because no matter how “historic” a road might be, making it safer for people who walk and roll is always a step in the right direction.

If the Champs-Élysées isn't historically significant enough to preserve in a way that prevents walkability improvements, then neither is Central Avenue in NE Minneapolis.

— Zachary Wefel (@zacharywefel) January 11, 2021

State Senator Pushing ‘Idaho Stop’ Legalization Bill

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:42:41 GMT

Call it the Idaho start. An upstate State Senator has introduced a bill that would allow cyclists to slow-roll through stop signs and go through red lights after a quick full stop — a safety solution to the problem of cyclists losing forward momentum even if the coast is clear. The so-called “Idaho stop” earned its name because the state with the famous potatoes was the first to pass a rule allowing cyclists to keep going and stay ahead of car traffic. “I have biked to work for years, and I’m always interested in making it safer and more sensible,” said Sen. Rachel May (D-Syracuse), the chief sponsor of the bill, S920. May said the Idaho stop improves safety because it puts cyclists out in front of cars at intersections — the very place where most crashes occur (studies confirm that it makes roadways safer). And it would reduce “meaningless tickets” from police officers, who treat drivers of 4,000-pound cars the same as cyclists with far less destructive power and trail of wreckage. In New York City, a red light ticket costs $190 — the same for bikes and cars. Eliminating that false equivalency was one of the motivating factors behind City Council Member Antonio Reynoso’s own local “Idaho Stop” bill, which he introduced in 2015, but did not get a full vetting because the Council was also considering allowing cyclists to get a head start by legally going on the “walk” sign at intersections with leading pedestrian intervals. That bill became law in 2019. “The key thing about the Idaho stop is that it begins the process of separating the idea that the bike and the car are the same thing,” said Reynoso, who supports the state bill. “A bike is closer to a pedestrian than a vehicle, and separating the car from the bike in the public mind is critical to make progress when it comes to progressive transportation policy.” Specifically, such a law could remove the NYPD’s frequent crackdowns and stings on cyclists. “The NYPD has been a protector and enforcer of car culture,” Reynoso said. “They are antagonistic to cyclists. So legalizing the Idaho stop is about changing culture. That’s my mission at the end of the day.” May’s mission was a bit less political. “If you make the stop sign the equivalent of a yield sign, it steers cyclists towards roads with stop signs instead of stop lights, which tend to be major roads,” she said. “And not having to stop is a very big deal for a cyclist, given the energy it takes to get started again. I think this will encourage cycling by making it safer and easier.” Advocates for cyclists and for cycling have long supported the Idaho stop, which is legal in one form or another in five states and several Colorado counties. Arkansas legalized it in 2019. Washington State’s version went into effect late last year. “The time is right for this sensible bill that simply legalizes the de facto and largely responsible practice of most cyclists, who treat red lights as stop or yield signs,” said Steve Vaccaro, a lawyer who serves bicyclist clients. “Especially downstate, we need this law to correct punitive policing of perfectly safe cycling behavior, such as ‘four-blocks-in-a-row’ gotcha ticketing and issuance of more red light tickets to cyclists than to motorists.” May’s bill has not been scheduled for a hearing yet, but one is likely given that the legislature will want to hear from law enforcement officials, who will likely oppose it. (The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.) May urged advocates and supporters of the bill to call the Senate’s Transportation Committee Chairman Tim Kennedy (D-Buffalo) and Assembly Transportation Committee Chairman William Magnarelli (D-Syracuse) to push the bill. Assembly Member Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) is carrying the bill in that chamber. “I’ve heard from an increasing number of people who are interested,” May said. “If people start writing letters of support to their state senators or to the majority leader [Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins], that increases the chances.” To contact Tim Kennedy, email him at kennedy@nysenate.gov or call (716) 826-2683 (he is also on Twitter as @senkennedy). To contact William Magnarelli, email him at MagnarW@nyassembly.gov or call (315) 428-9651 (he is also on Twitter as @billmagnarelli). To contact Assembly Member Patricia Fahy, email her at FahyP@nyassembly.gov or call her at (518) 455-4178 (she is also on Twitter as @PatriciaFahy109). To contact Senator Rachel May, email her at may@nysenate.gov or call her at (315) 478-8745 (she is also on Twitter as @rachelmayny). The Senate Majority Leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, can be emailed at scousins@nysenate.gov or called at (914) 423-4031 (she is also on Twitter as @AndreaSCousins).

Monday’s Headlines to Get You Going

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 05:02:23 GMT

The election of Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate in Georgia opens the door to pass ambitious transportation reforms. (Streetsblog USA)
Fare-free transit would boost ridership and make systems more equitable. (The Appeal)
College campuses can serve as a model for human-scale cities. (Strong Towns)
The Federal Transit Administration approved a $530-million grant for Phoenix’s South Central light rail extension (KTAR) and $173 million for the South Shore double-tracking project in northern Indiana (Chicago Tribune).
Cost estimates for West Seattle’s Ballard light rail line have nearly doubled to over $12 billion. (Seattle Times)
After the failure of a transportation referendum last year, Portland should try again with a slate of projects focused solely on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. (City Observatory)
Houston needs to slow down drivers to save pedestrian lives, but it will take physical changes. Lowering speed limits isn’t enough. (Kinder Rice)
Gainesville should re-engineer streets to slow down drivers to improve pedestrian safety, rather than crack down on jaywalkers, says the Sun‘s editorial board.
The University of Michigan and Federal Transit Administration are building 20 “smart intersections” in Ann Arbor that will alert drivers to dangers. (WXYZ)
Trips made by bike or on foot rose significantly in London during the pandemic and stayed up even as the lockdown eased. (Eltis)
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has done it again, this time announcing that she’s turning the Champs-Elysees into an “extraordinary garden,” reducing vehicle space by half. (The Guardian)

Senate Considering $10B for Highway Removal

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 05:01:06 GMT

Cities might soon get federal money to tear down inner-city highways that federal dollars built in the first place — and use that money to reinvest in communities of color that those highways destroyed.

Shortly before the holiday recess, then-Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and a coalition of 25 Democratic senators introduced a $435 billion economic justice bill called S5065 that included a $10-billion pilot program aimed at helping communities tear down urban highways, and rebuild the surrounding neighborhoods with the needs of underserved communities in mind. The Restoring Neighborhoods and Strengthening Communities Program — known among advocates as the “Highways to Boulevards” initiative — would only be available for projects located in regions with a high concentration of low income residents or residents of color.

Perhaps most critically, the initiative would make significant funds available specifically for the “community engagement and capacity building” necessary to identify what underserved residents actually want to do with all the valuable land freed up when freeways are torn down. Such funds are rarely the focus of federal transportation grants, which typically prioritize hard construction costs over the dignity of the surrounding community.

“There’s already funding available for highway deconstruction in various other pots of money at the Department of Transportation, especially as so many of our highways reach the end of their life,” said Lynn Richards, president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which collaborated on the writing of the bill. “And of course, there always seems to be money for highway construction. What there’s almost no money for are for the feasibility studies, the capacity building, and the coalition building with the people who are actually impacted by highway projects — or by highway removal projects. That’s what’s really special about this bill.”

A side-by-side of a completed Highways to Boulevards project in San Francisco. Source: Congress for the New Urbanism

Unlike the Federal Highway Act of 1956, which essentially handed communities 90 percent of the money they needed to build freeways wherever they wanted — even when (or perhaps because) they destroyed Black neighborhoods with that money — the new program will strive to ensure that Highways to Boulevards projects are undertaken at a community’s discretion. Funds from the pilot can be used for bike lanes, sidewalks, transit improvements, and basically any transportation project that “doesn’t increase net capacity for vehicular travel.”

Critically, it can also be used to establish community land trusts, which can generate money for anti-displacement measures that ensure long-term residents can remain and reap the economic benefits of having their neighborhoods transformed into human-centered places. (Other advocacy groups, like Transportation for America, have heralded community land trusts as an essential companion to tear-down grants.)

“If you just provide money for highway removal, you’re just repeating the mistakes of the past,” Richards emphasizes. “The last thing you want is a bunch of outsiders coming and saying, ‘We’re going to do this, and we don’t care what the neighbors want.'”

The concept of removing downtown highways isn’t new, even if such projects have struggled to secure federal dollars. At least 18 American cities have done it, and advocates are fighting for their state and local leaders to consider their own teardowns as an alternative to replacing the countless crumbling roads and bridges that groups like the American Society of Civil Engineers say are a looming threat to public safety.

“We’ve kind of put a Band-Aid on a lot of these highways, and a lot of them are well past their 50-year lifespan,” said Ben Crowther, program manager for CNU’s Highways to Boulevards effort. “And a lot of communities just don’t want to keep repairing them. … I can’t think of a single time it has cost more for a community to remove an aging highway than to rebuild it.”

And the benefits of rebuilding are negligible at best. Countless studies have confirmed that adding or maintaining urban highway capacity has only a negligible impact on commute times, and those few saved minutes often come at steep costs for communities of color.

“A downtown highway is barely an asset, and virtually all its benefits come at someone else’s expense,” Crowther stresses. “This isn’t even about removing an entire highway. We’re looking at a one- or two-mile section of the highway — the ones that run through these dense urban areas, where they tend to burden minority communities with pollution, noise and crashes. And they aren’t even key nodes. They’re spur highways, stub highways — highways that lead into cities into urban downtowns, and don’t always even move a lot of people. ”

The incoming Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg seems eager to push highway teardowns. In a statement on Twitter just two days before the Highways to Boulevard program was introduced, he pledged to make “righting these wrongs” wrought by the last century’s racist transportation planning “an imperative” of his stewardship of U.S. DOT. His office would be directly responsible for administering the new discretionary grants.

Black and brown neighborhoods have been disproportionately divided by highway projects or left isolated by the lack of adequate transit and transportation resources.

In the Biden-Harris administration, we will make righting these wrongs an imperative.

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) December 20, 2020

Before that happens, the larger bill that contains the Highways to Boulevards program will need to pass the Senate Committee on Finance, as well as the Senate at large. But with the leading sponsor of the bill poised to become the Senate majority leader — and especially if it receives robust advocate support — Richards is optimistic about the future.

“I’m doing a little bit of a happy dance,” she said. “I really think it could happen.”

Friday’s Headlines to End a Long Week

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 05:01:15 GMT

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced her resignation Thursday, citing the “traumatic” riot by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. But some said she should stay on and help use the Cabinet’s power under the 25th Amendment to remove the president (Politico). Meanwhile, Streetsblog said good riddance.
The Biden Administration should help cities like New Orleans tear down urban freeways that are a legacy of racist planning. (Fast Company)
When cities moved quickly to implement slow streets during the pandemic, it often created resentment among underrepresented groups that planners didn’t consult. (City Lab)
People aren’t ditching their cars when Uber and Lyft come to town — in fact, registrations actually rise nearly 1 percent. (Green Car Congress)
New York desperately needs more bike parking due to an uptick in cycling during the pandemic. The city has one spot for every 16 bikes but 1.5 free spaces for every car (City Limits, Streetsblog NYC). The problem isn’t limited to New York, either (Next City).
Drivers killed 54 people in Portland last year, the highest number since 1996 (The Oregonian)
In Pittsburgh, where transit ridership has dropped 70 percent during the pandemic, the Port Authority is pushing to let low-income people ride for free. Advocates also want to reroute buses and trolleys from wealthier neighborhoods to poorer ones. (Public Source)
A second round of layoffs at Denver’s Regional Transportation District brings the total cuts to nearly 400 jobs. (CBS 4)
A Phoenix neighborhood group wants to take over public sidewalks so it can stop homeless people from sleeping there. (New Times)
Madison will require electric vehicle chargers in new parking lots. (Wisconsin State Journal)
Vancouver is creating “green zones” where hybrid buses will shut off their diesel engines to cut emissions. (The Reflector)
China opened 20 new light-rail lines in a week. (International Railway Journal)

Study: E-Taxis Increase Private Car Ownership in Many Cities

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 05:01:10 GMT

“Ride-hailing” apps that claim they can help end private car ownership are actually increasing it in many U.S. cities, a new study finds.

In a review of vehicle registration records in more than 200 metro areas, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that per-capita car purchases increased 0.7 precent on average in the years after Uber, Lyft and other e-taxi giants deployed their fleets, compared to projected registration rates prior to the entry to of the companies.

That might not sound like much, but for perspective, Americans registered 14.8 million cars last year, 0.7 percent of which would mean more than 100,000 additional vehicles on our roadways. (And yes, that was on a slow year due to the pandemic.)

And in cities that were already car-dependent before the app giants came to town, the increases were even steeper. Metros that had higher-than-average rates of private vehicle ownership to start out experienced, on average, an additional 1 percent increase in vehicle registration over the course of the study period when compared to peer cities — which could suggest it’s finally time to quash the idea that so-called “transportation network providers” are helping users get to inconveniently placed train stations, and thus helping them give up their cars.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers speculate that it’s more likely that app-taxi riders are becoming app-taxi drivers themselves — or that people who already drove are buying another car specifically to enter the gig economy.

“A transportation network centered on car-sharing services certainly could displace private car ownership in the future, but it’s not doing it now,” said Jeremy Michalek, a Carnegie Mellon professor of engineering and public policy who co-authored the study. “That was a surprise, and we don’t quite know why it’s happening. Drivers may be buying more vehicles in order to drive for Uber and Lyft; I’ve certainly talked to people who buy a separate vehicle for their ride-hail driving, and they don’t put their family in that vehicle. … And it’s also possible there may be people who are getting interested in private vehicle ownership for the first time because they try these services.”

Image courtesy Cell Press

Transit-rich cities didn’t experience quite as large a spike in vehicle ownership after gig-taxis joined their fleets, but that doesn’t mean the mode’s impact on our major metros is entirely benign. In places with high proportions of high-income households without children — think Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle — the researchers found that the rise of ride-hailing apps was associated with a larger fall-off in transit use than average.

Put another way: if you’re a rich person in a big city, a preponderance of artificially cheap e-taxis isn’t likely to compel you to buy a car so you can drive one yourself, but it might compel you to call a cab so you can skip taking the bus. That’s a big problem for fare-dependent transit agencies forced to compete with privately-backed tech companies who are perfectly happy to operate at a loss — especially if those companies continue to win legal battles that allow them to legally avoid paying fair wages or benefits for their drivers, and potentially slash fares even more.

“The biggest policy takeaway has to do with displacement of transit,” said Michalek. “This pattern makes sense, because travelers with more income and fewer car seats are the travelers that will pay a little more for a convenient mode of transportation. Leaders in those cities who want to keep transit strong might want to pay more attention to that.”

Some already are. Leaders in Seattle, Wash. won a major victory this fall when they passed a new law securing minimum wages for e-taxi drivers, a move that Uber warned could increase costs to customers by as much as 50 percent. To other ears, though, that warning sounded more like a reassurance — that users of the single least sustainable mode of transportation around were finally being charged a rational fare.

“Economists tend to agree that, ideally, what we’d like to do is tax the unpriced externalities of driving, like emissions and congestions,” Michalek said. “If we’re thoughtful about that, maybe we can provide the right incentives and create a transportation network that’s as good as possible for society.”