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Governor David Paterson announced Tuesday that he had signed Assembly Member Sam Hoyt’s Smart Growth Infrastructure Public Policy Act, making it the law of the land that all state infrastructure spending must comply with a set of smart growth principles, including fostering compact, mixed-use development and reducing dependence on the automobile.

Paterson’s approval has been expected since the bill passed the legislature in June. The next six months will help determine how big a difference the governor’s signature will make.

Important precedents will be set in the waning days of the Paterson administration, said Peter Fleischer, who directs Empire State Future, a statewide smart growth coalition. The administration needs to take an active role in developing smart growth implementation policies at the highest levels, he said.

“We want Paterson’s economic people there, his environmental people there, and we want Paul Beyer of the Smart Growth Cabinet there,” said Fleischer. The governor’s Smart Growth Cabinet, which Beyer manages, brings together state officials to coordinate policy across departments.

Fleischer identified the departments where the smart growth law should have the biggest effect, singling out Empire State Development; the Department of Transportation; the Environmental Facilities Corporation, which helps build water and sewer infrastructure across the state; the Dormitory Authority and the Power Authority (in charge of financing and constructing colleges, courts and health care facilities, and providing low cost electricity from the state’s hydro, gas, and oil power plants, respectively). The departments that matter are “any of the big agencies with money who have discretion over where they spend it,” he explained.

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Rowena learned about the true cost of cars the hard way. Raised by her mom, a Filipina immigrant, in a happy if carless home in northern California, Rowena marveled upon graduating from college and getting a steady job that she could afford to lease her very own car. For a small down payment and $199 a month, she was in a beautiful new Honda.

Three years later, lease up, the dealer convinced her to buy a somewhat nicer car, one with “just $299” in monthly payments. When the car was repossessed a year later because she couldn’t make the payments, she figured she had handed her dealer and loan company over $15,000. Sitting down to do the math, she estimated that insurance, gas, parking, tickets, tolls, taxes, and fees had vacuumed an additional $12,000 out of her accounts.

So four years and $27,000 later, Rowena had no vehicle, no savings, and a credit rating in ruins.

Like most Americans, Rowena had no idea of the true total and ongoing financial cost of car ownership, and, like most Americans, she found her dealer in no rush to warn her about them. While rent or mortgage remains the largest budget item for the average household, transportation now comes in a close second, and in some zip codes it even exceeds housing.

Transportation swallows one out of every five dollars earned by the average American family, double the bite it took in 1960. This increase alone could account for much of the plummet, over that fifty-year period, in the household savings rate, which by the aughts had skidded close to zero.

We know how things got this bad. Back in 1960, developers had not yet fully sprawled out our housing stock; government had not yet spent billions on road building, letting transit atrophy; automakers had not yet piled on horsepower, luxury, and cargo space; lenders had not yet become so likely to set unsustainable and predatory car credit terms; and drivers had yet to consider short trips unwalkable and bus trips social suicide.

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Davidson, North Carolina, population 7,100, isn’t the kind of global metropolis that is normally looked to as a cutting-edge example of sustainable transportation planning.

But a new series from Transportation for America holds up tiny Davidson as a national model for the country’s smaller cities. T4America is highlighting Davidson’s success as part of a series on livability and smart growth in 12 rural areas and small towns.

Davidson has seen a sharp hike in population since 2000, but by increasing transportation options and revitalizing Main Street, the town was able to preserve its character and community. Davidson was the 2004 recipient of a National Award for Smart Growth Achievement from the U.S. EPA.

The key to Davidson’s success, according to Town Planner Kris Krider, was connecting each new housing or commercial development with travel options and broadening the definition of how people move. “Sitting in traffic is not one of the themes of livability that we think is valuable,” Krider said. “It could be a walking path. It could be bike paths. Connectivity is not just streets, it’s connecting
people.”

T4America is running the series, in part, in support of the Livable Communities Act, as a response to senators who say the bill won’t help rural areas. So far they’ve also highlighted smart growth leaders in Laconia, New Hampshire; Cache Valley, Utah; Menominee Indian Reservation, Wisconsin and Huron, South Dakota, with more to come.

Elsewhere on the Network, Walk Bike New Jersey is helping the League of American Bicyclists build a campaign on behalf of the Active Community Transportation Act; Charleston Moves examines the city of Cincinnati’s decision to reopen a number of one-way streets to two-way traffic; and SFBart’s Blog highlights the expiration of federal funds to promote public transportation in San Francisco on days when ozone pollution is most hazardous.

UPDATE: Strike the original post (formerly titled: “Challenger Nunes Reportedly Backs Out of Transportation Debate”). Lynn Nunes did answer questions at tonight’s District 10 transportation debate, while longtime incumbent Shirley Huntley did not attend. We’ll have details from the event tomorrow.

Lynn Nunes, the challenger going up against Shirley Huntley in the State Senate’s 10th District, has backed out of tonight’s debate on transportation issues, reports Celeste Katz at the Daily Politics. I’m about to head over to the debate site in Richmond Hill, Queens and haven’t been able to confirm the abrupt cancellation with the Nunes campaign.

Voters who show up expecting to learn about candidates’ transportation positions may have to settle for an evening of letter writing, asking why their prospective representatives think it’s acceptable to avoid answering their questions.

Reader Holly Hudson sends this picture of the north side of Union Square earlier today. Orange construction barrels are lined up here and around the corner on Broadway, as crews get ready to add new pedestrian spaces and extend Broadway’s protected bike lane, which will run against the flow of traffic on this particular block.

These public space improvements and safety upgrades received a 24-1-1 community board vote in favor from Manhattan Community Board 5 in July. Union Square is the fourth major public space along the Broadway diagonal — along with Madison Square, Times Square, and Herald Square — where NYCDOT has reclaimed space from traffic and devoted it to pedestrians and cyclists.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer released his recommendations for the Riverside Center megaproject yesterday afternoon. Like Community Board 7, he doesn't approve of Extell Development's request to build more than 1,800 underground parking spaces and an automobile showroom and repair shop. He does believe, however, that 1,100 parking spots would be appropriate.

The Borough President's recommendations, which you can read in full in this West Side Spirit report, are advisory; the project now moves to the City Planning Commission and then the City Council, which will have the final say.

Compared to the developer's proposal, Stringer's request would help make the project more walkable in a few other ways. For instance, following the community board's example, Stringer has asked for the project to be built at street level, rather than on an elevated platform, so that it is integrated with the neighborhood's sidewalks and street life.

But the parking levels will have the greatest effect on traffic and how people choose to get to and from Riverside Center. At the community board meeting on this project held in July, no one spoke in favor of the developer's eye-popping proposal of 1,800 parking spaces, but debate raged over whether the board would request 700, 1,000, or 1,200 spaces. The board ultimately recommended 1,000.

Stringer is calling for the slightly larger number of 1,100 spaces, which equals the capacity of the first of two floors of parking that Extell is seeking to build. According to the recommendations put out by Stringer's office, the 1,100 parking spot figure came from adjusting the calculations in the developer's environmental impact statement to match the car ownership rate found in a study of the nearby Hudson Yards area. 

By many counts, the number of parking spaces at Riverside Center ought to be far smaller.

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We're reprinting this reply [PDF] from UCLA professor Donald Shoup, author of the High Cost of Free Parking, to Randal O'Toole, the libertarian Cato Institute senior fellow who refuses to acknowledge the role of massive government intervention in the market for parking, and the effect this has had on America's car dependence. It's an excellent guide to the misdirection, mistakes, logical fallacies, and falsehoods that form the foundation of O'Toole's arguments.

Dear Randal,

I would like to comment on your August 16 post on the Cato@Liberty blog about “Free Markets for Free Parking.”

You were responding to Tyler Cowen’s article in the New York Times, “Free Parking Comes at a Price,” in which Tyler explained some of the ideas in my book, The High Cost of Free Parking.

In commenting on Tyler’s article, you made several mistakes in describing my ideas and proposals. I will explain these mistakes, and if you agree with the explanations I hope you will post corrections on Cato@Liberty.

Before I examine your misunderstanding of what I have written, I will first summarize the three basic parking reforms I recommend in The High Cost of Free Parking: (1) remove off-street parking requirements, (2) charge market prices for on-street parking to achieve about an 85-percent occupancy rate for curb spaces, and (3) return the resulting revenue to pay for public improvements in the metered neighborhoods.

I will quote ten extracts from your post, and comment on each of them.

1.

"Shoup’s work is biased by his residency in Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban area. One way L.A. copes with that density is by requiring builders of offices, shopping malls, and multi-family residences to provide parking. Shoup assumes that every municipality in the country has such parking requirements, even though many do not."

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city?

Even Houston, which does not have zoning, has minimum parking requirements, and they resemble the parking requirements in almost every other city in the United States. Houston requires 1.25 parking spaces for each efficiency apartment in an apartment house, for example, and 1.333 parking spaces for each one-bedroom apartment. Here is the link to the minimum parking requirements in Houston’s municipal code.

Does the Antiplanner, who is “dedicated to the sunset of government planning,” really believe that government planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for every economic activity at every site in every city, no matter how much the required parking spaces may cost and no matter how little drivers may be willing to pay to use them? Does the Antiplanner really support Houston’s minimum parking requirement of 1.333 spaces for each one-bedroom apartment because he believes that Houston’s government planners can accurately predict the “need” for parking at every apartment to one-thousandth of a parking space?

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There's an old line among opponents of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. It says road construction funds shouldn't be used to build bike lanes and sidewalks because cyclists and pedestrians don't contribute to the gasoline taxes that fund road construction.

Josh Cohen at Network blog Publicola is refuting that argument by examining the transportation budget in Seattle, where local gas taxes play only a small role in the overall picture.

The Seattle Department of Transportation’s 2009 annual report breaks down the agency’s $340.8 million budget by funding source. The gas tax accounts for $13.4 million, or 4 percent of that total.  The full budget breakdown (in millions):

Grants & Other: $96.9 (29 percent)
Debt: $77.4 (23 percent)
Bridging the Gap (a property-tax levy passed by voters in 2007): $60.9 (18 percent)
General Fund: $42.3 (12 percent)
Reimbursables: $42 (12 percent)
Gas Tax: $13.4 (4 percent)
Cumulative Reserve Fund: $7.6 (2 percent)

The majority of those funds are paid for by taxes and fees levied on the general public, whether or not they own a car. It's a far cry from a system where drivers are carrying the full costs of roads.

Elsewhere on the Network, Bike Portland admires Boulder, Colorado's "Driven to Drive Less" program, encouraging the public to go carless one day per week; Seattle Transit Blog looks at the success of Tacoma, Washington's "Not on Our Bus" campaign, which seeks to make public transportation more pleasant by cracking down on unlawful or disruptive conduct on buses; and Car Free Baltimore explains why rush hour parking restrictions are bad for pedestrians.

Westchester Democrat Richard Brodsky is running for Attorney General this fall, leaving the seat of congestion pricing's leading opponent open. Will his successor take up Brodsky's anti-transit mantle or prove to better represent the environmental values on which Brodsky is now running for AG? We spoke with the three candidates vying to replace Brodsky in the Assembly, Democrats Tom Abinanti and Anna Sterne and Republican Tom Bock, to find out.

The 92nd district, which includes the towns of Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant along the western edge of Westchester County, is an interesting one for transportation advocates. The district covers very affluent suburbs -- including the well-off car commuting constituency that Brodsky represented so well -- but also has significant transit ridership: 15 percent of the district uses transit to get to the Manhattan central business district and a smaller group takes transit to other destinations [PDF].

One of the big issues in the district is the future of the Tappan Zee Bridge, which crosses the Hudson into the 92nd. Battered by traffic volumes it was never designed to carry, the Tappan Zee needs fixing. Debates have raged for years over whether the project should include bus rapid transit, light rail, and/or commuter rail and whether the bridge should be repaired or replaced. 

Then there's the central fact of this campaign: the opposition of all the candidates to the MTA payroll tax enacted by the state legislature and Governor Paterson last spring. The payroll tax provides over a billion dollars a year to the MTA, even despite lower-than-expected revenues. When it comes to transit funding, other options could complement the payroll tax to fill in the big budget gaps that remain, but not replace it. The 2008 congestion pricing proposal was expected to raise about $420 million per year while the Ravitch Plan's bridge tolls would have netted around $600 million per year. Brodsky ultimately gave muted support for the Ravitch Plan, including the payroll tax.

That shared opposition shouldn't obscure the important differences between the candidates, though. So we offer this preview of our election coverage with a look at the race for the 92nd. (We'll have more election profiles following the release of candidate survey responses from Transportation Alternatives and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign). In addition to transit and the Tappan Zee, we asked the candidates about automated traffic enforcement, traffic justice laws, and pedestrian and cyclist safety. Here are their positions, presented with the primary opponents first in alphabetical order:

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A tipster sends this photo of Houston Street near the corner of Mott, early yesterday morning at around 5:00 a.m. Our source says he was awakened when an SUV speeding east on Houston plowed into an electronic construction sign, hit the median and flipped over end to end, coming to a stop on its side in the middle of the opposite side of the street.

He saw the SUV driver crawl out from the wreck looking basically uninjured, after which the police took him into custody. The NYPD couldn't provide us with any further information.

That the driver escaped serious injury illustrates why legislators and law enforcement should take steps to protect people outside of cars through better enforcement and tools like Hayley and Diego's Law and Elle's Law. With seat belts, air bags, and ever-safer metal frames, today's cars protect drivers from their own recklessness better than ever. If this SUV had followed a different trajectory after the motorist lost control, however, any pedestrian or cyclist in the way would have been crushed.

This November, New York voters will elect the occupants of every seat in the State Senate and Assembly, as well as their next governor, attorney general, and comptroller. For many races in heavily Democratic New York City, the deciding moment will come a lot sooner -- on primary day. That's just two weeks away on Tuesday, September 14.

In the next few days we should get to see the responses to candidate surveys sent out by Transportation Alternatives and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which went to everyone running in the five boroughs and the seven other counties served by the MTA.

We've also got three live debates coming up this week and next, starting tomorrow with the contenders for the 10th Senate District in southeast Queens, incumbent Shirley Huntley and challenger Lynn Nunes. The next day, Pedro Espada's opponents in the 33rd District will face off (a debate that Espada has backed out of), and next Thursday, the candidates running to succeed AG hopeful Eric Schneiderman in the 31st District will discuss where they stand on transportation issues.

Here's the full debate schedule from TA, which is organizing the events with local partners:

10th SENATE DISTRICT DEBATE (Richmond Hill)
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010, 7:00-9:00pm
Fairfield Pavilion, 131-10 101st Avenue, Richmond Hill, Queens
Partner organization: Richmond Hill EDC
Moderator: Clare Trapasso (New York Daily News)

33rd SENATE DISTRICT DEBATE (Fordham, Kingsbridge)
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010, 7:00-9:00pm
Fordham Evangelical Lutheran Church, 2430 Walton Ave., The Bronx
Partner organization: Picture the Homeless
Moderator: Alex Kratz (Bronx News Network)

31st SENATE DISTRICT DEBATE (Washington Heights, Inwood, West Harlem)
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010, 7:00-9:00pm
The Armory Foundation, 216 Fort Washington Ave (between 168th & 169th Streets), Manhattan
Partner organizations: WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Upper West Side Renaissance
Moderators: Dan Rivoli (West Side Spirit), David King (Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation)

In the state of Texas, local authorities continue to chip away the legal rights of bicyclists.

Two weeks ago we featured the story of Reed "ChipSeal" Bates, who was convicted of "reckless driving" for exercising his legal right to ride in a travel lane in Ennis, Texas. Now, the town of Bartonville has passed a law requiring groups of ten or more cyclists to obtain a permit under city race and rally requirements.

According to Network blog Austin on Two Wheels, the Bartonville story highlights the frustrating pace of progress for cyclists in Texas, despite a number of victories in Austin.

Imagine you and eight of your friends are riding to Barton Springs for a swim or downtown for some music and you run into another friend on the way. Your little social trip (potentially taking 10 cars off the road by the way) would quickly turn into an act of civil disobedience in Bartonville.

I’m all for non-violent protest, but a Saturday morning training ride or a ride to the swimming hole shouldn’t be a crime. I realize most people think of speech when they think of the 1st Amendment, but free assembly is part of these rights as well. The Founders said nothing about the right to free assembly being limited to the drivers of automobiles.

Austin on Two Wheels points readers to Bike Texas, which is collecting signatures to stop bike bans across the state.

Also on the Network, the Tulsa Transportation Examiner looks at a similar story in Santa Clara, California, where the city has moved to require a permit for groups of 50 or more using county roadways; M-Bike advocates for roll-on bike service on the state’s trains; and Broken Sidewalk looks at a St. Louis program using repurposed parking meters to collect money for the homeless.