Streetsblog New York City

Yesterday, the Department of City Planning asked experts from around the country how to make a more sustainable zoning code. Their response? Scrap parking minimums.

The recommendation came during a major conference held yesterday by DCP and Harvard University. Top urban thinkers from around the country gathered to discuss how the zoning code can make the city more globally competitive, socially equitable, architecturally significant and environmentally sustainable (for a good recap of the conference, check out the Architect’s Newspaper live blog).

When the conversation turned to suggestions for building a sustainable city, both panelists raised the issue of parking minimums.

“Parking is one of the biggest things,” said Harriet Tregoning, the director of D.C.’s Office of Planning, as she articulated how zoning can make cities greener. “[Washington has] removed our minimums for most buildings in the downtown and near transit.”

That policy puts D.C. significantly ahead of New York City. While the Manhattan core — admittedly a more populated area than all of Washington — has parking maximums in place, most of the city is still governed by parking minimums, even areas right on top of subway stations.

DCP is considering reducing parking minimums in the “inner ring” of neighborhoods around the Manhattan core, but not eliminating them. So building space for car storage will still be mandatory even in highly walkable and transit-rich neighborhoods like Harlem, while dense, transit-rich areas just a little further removed from downtown, like Washington Heights, may not see any reforms at all.

Tregoning said that D.C. opted to eliminate parking minimums entirely in response to “hard experience.” Having cut parking requirements in half, she explained, “we still had only half the parking used.”

D.C. is also replacing parking minimums with maximums in many places. The city received significant pushback from the public and developers, Tregoning admitted, so they developed a compromise. “You can build more than the maximums, but the first floor of that building has to be level and convertible so that if we’re right and you’re wrong, it can be something useful.”

Tregoning went so far as to offer herself as a resource to New York City should it decide to pursue parking reform. “We should think of ourselves as a band of brothers,” she said. “Why don’t we emulate success?”

Read more…

Rail~Volution 2011 marks the first time since 2002 that this conference for all things transit and smart growth has taken place in the nation’s capital. When it comes to livability, Washington and neighboring Arlington County have some great stories to share with the rest of the country.

At the heart of the region’s success is, of course, the Washington Metro, which has shaped development for more than three decades. In fact, so much of the land near Metro stations has been developed that ridership is projected to reach the design capacity of the current system within the next 20 years. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is currently mapping out how to respond.

At a panel this morning, Nat Bottigheimer, an assistant general manager at WMATA, shared some results from an internal study the agency conducted as part of this process. The core question he investigated: “What is it you’re actually getting from a transit investment?”

The agency’s research and modeling produced some intriguing numbers demonstrating how the creation of Metro — its 86 stations and 106 miles of track — has benefited the region:

• Since the system was created, $212 billion in real estate value has been added within a half-mile of Metro stations.
• Land value near Metro stations generates $2.8 billion annually in property tax revenues. $195 million of that is directly attributable to transit.
• Households in the region reap the equivalent of $705 million per year in time savings thanks to Metro.
• Households save $305 million per year on costs related to owning and driving cars.
• Every day Metro riders walk 33,000 miles.

On the other side of the coin, there’s everything that Metro has prevented from happening. Without Metro…

• Commuters would have to put up with commutes that take 25 percent longer. This would effectively curtail people’s access to jobs and employers’ access to the workforce.
• The region would see more than a million additional auto trips per day.
• This traffic would require 1,000 additional lane miles to accommodate, the equivalent of two Capital Beltways’ worth of asphalt.
• Four to six more traffic lanes across the Potomac would be necessary.
• The downtown core would be eviscerated by parking. To store all the extra cars would take 200,000 parking spots, the equivalent of 170 blocks filled with five-story parking structures.
• All that car infrastructure would cost nearly $11 billion to build, and impose huge maintenance costs every year.

Read more…

Last year, the D.C. region ran away with the dubious honor of Most Congested Metro Area. D.C. area drivers wasted 74 hours and 37 gallons of fuel sitting in traffic last year, which would have cost about $100 over the course of the year. But the gasoline cost is just the tip of the iceberg.

According to the 2011 Urban Mobility Report, released today by the Texas Transportation Institute, this delay cost the average D.C. driver $1,495 once you factor in lost productivity and increased trucking times. In Chicago, it’s $1,568. L.A., $1,334.

Every year, TTI puts out their Urban Mobility Report, and every year we criticize it for its autocentrism. After all, its sole measure is how fast a vehicle can speed down a given mile of roadway. Maybe your city is dense and friendly to pedestrians and bikes, so that it’s easy to glide past the automobile gridlock on your short commute to work. Or maybe transit provides an excellent and affordable alternative to traffic jams. None of that matters to TTI. If someone, somewhere, is sitting in traffic, that’s all that matters. All other measures and modes of urban mobility are ignored.

TTI doesn’t bother to figure out how much time is saved if one avoids that congestion by taking transit, but they do examine how much time transit riders save drivers by taking vehicles off the road.

Read more…

Nearly three years ago Streetfilms took a day trip to Washington, D.C. to see their new bike-share system, Smart Bike DC, in action. We found the trial system a fun ride with great potential, but with only 120 bikes there wasn’t widespread use.

Flash forward to 2011. With more than 1,100 bicycles and 110 stations, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare is testament to the imperative to “go big or go home” when deploying bike-share programs. Currently the largest bike-share system in the United States, the District’s second stab gives users much more flexibility and options to accomplish short errands and commute to work.

In fact, the next phase of expansion has just been announced, with 18 more stations and 265 more bikes coming this fall.

The handsome red bikes are easy to ride. With one swipe of a keycard you’re off and biking. During the morning and evening commutes (and lunch hours) you’ll see the bikes in very heavy rotation.  But what left Streetfilms most impressed was how many people were riding them in full business attire in the hot and humid summers around the capital. If that isn’t a sign of success, what is?

Streetfilms would like to thank the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) for partnering with us on this project.

People riding shared public bicycles appear to be involved in fewer traffic crashes and receive fewer injuries than people riding their personal bicycles. In cities from Paris and London to Washington, D.C. and Mexico City, something about riding a shared bicycle appears to make cycling safer.

Paris’s Vélib’ is perhaps the most iconic bike-sharing system in the world. Launched in 2007 with 20,000 bikes, its widespread popularity not only transformed how Parisians traveled across their city but set off an explosion of new bike-sharing systems worldwide. With a few years of practice at this point, the Parisian experience is particularly telling.

“The accident rate is lower on a Vélib’ than on ‘normal’ bikes,” a spokesperson for the office of Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë told Streetsblog. In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, Vélib’ riders were responsible for one-third of all bike trips in Paris but were involved in only one-fourth of all traffic crashes involving a bicycle.

The numbers are if anything more striking in London, where the Barclays Cycle Hire system — or “Boris Bikes,” to borrow the phrase locals have adopted in honor of their mayor, Boris Johnson — opened at the end of last July. Though the London government didn’t track the relevant safety stats of bike-share users compared to other cyclists, they provided us with the data to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

So far, after 4.5 million trips, no bike-sharing user in London has been seriously injured or killed in a traffic crash, according to Transport for London. Only 10 bike-sharing users were injured at all in the first 1.6 million trips on the system, a statistic that was compiled earlier. A spokesperson also told Streetsblog that they estimate that half a million bike trips take place across London each day, 20,000 of which are on Boris Bikes. Finally, during 2010, 10 people were killed, 457 seriously injured and 3,540 non-seriously injured while cycling in London.

Crunching those numbers, no people were seriously injured or killed on the first 4.5 million trips on Boris Bikes, while about 12 people are injured for every 4.5 million trips on personal bikes. And over 1.6 million trips, ten bike-sharing users received non-serious injuries, compared to an average of 35 such injuries for the same number of trips on personal bikes.

Stateside, transportation officials are seeing the same effect.

Read more…

In Washington for the National Bike Summit, Clarence Eckerson snapped a shot of this ad for the capital’s NBC affiliate and its reporter Joe Krebs (described in his bio as “an avid swimmer and cyclist”).

In January, Dave Alpert at Greater Greater Washington noted the astounding difference between livable streets coverage in his city, where reporters are apt to pick apart a shoddy hit piece, and in New York, where, “It’s not clear how much of [the bike lane] ‘revolt’ is widespread negative public sentiment versus the objections of relatively few amplified by hostile press outlets.”

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that a prominent DC newser happens to ride a bike. Or maybe it’s further evidence that in order to do justice to the urban transportation beat, it helps to have a press corps that doesn’t see every urban transportation story through the prism of a windshield.

For New York’s distracted-driving, hatchet-wielding journos, that would be a different angle for sure.

The city of Philadelphia recently released a draft of its new comprehensive plan, Philadelphia2035 [PDF]. The plan’s release makes New York the last city in the four largest Northeastern metro areas that hasn’t so much as stated a commitment to cutting back on off-street parking.

Philadelphia2035 calls for controlling congestion by adding parking maximums into the zoning code and pricing on-street parking high enough so that 15 percent of spaces are always free. Here in New York, we still pretend that adding off-street parking reduces traffic congestion.

At the same time, Philadelphia is moving forward with a brand new zoning code. According to an article by PlanPhilly’s Nick Gilewitz, the new code will eliminate parking minimums downtown and in the city’s many rowhouse neighborhoods. While Gilewitz notes that parking minimums will still require significant amounts of new parking in some relatively dense neighborhoods, he concludes that the end to many parking minimums “is a huge step forward in recognizing that Philadelphia has incredible public transit resources that can, and perhaps should, shape development.”

New York’s other Northeastern competitors, too, are trying to halt the overproduction of off-street parking and the subsidization of on-street parking. Boston’s equivalent of PlaNYC, for example, calls for raising meter rates and eliminating most free on-street parking by putting a price on residential parking permits. It also calls for expanding the area where new off-street parking is banned and cracking down on exemptions to the ban where it’s already in place.

In practice, as the city rezones, Boston is switching parking minimums in many neighborhoods to parking maximums, according to the editor of CommonWealth Magazine [PDF]. When directly involved in the development of large projects, Boston is pushing developers to turn entire floors of parking into housing.

Read more…

“If we want to give meaning to multi-modal transportation … and if we want a vibrant city, then we must encourage safety for people who walk and bicycle.”

That was Phil Mendelson, the city council member in Washington, DC, who chaired a hearing on pedestrian and cyclist safety earlier this month (as quoted by TBD). Contrast his opening remarks with the intro to a hearing last December by New York’s own James Vacca, the transportation committee chair who considers sound bike policy a “tradeoff” between safer streets and more parking.

The DC hearing was marked by emotional testimony from victims and family members of DC residents lost in collisions with drivers. Several spoke of mistreatment at the hands of police. Among them was Ruth Rowan, the mother of Alice Swanson. In July of 2008, 22-year-old Swanson, riding in a bike lane on her way to work near Dupont Circle, was killed by the driver of a garbage truck. According to Rowan, shown in this video from David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington, the investigation into her daughter’s crash was stalled by a detective who went to great lengths to blame Swanson for her own death, despite a mountain of contradictory evidence.

What is clear is that, whether in DC or New York, pedestrians and cyclists are routinely held to a model of care and responsibility not expected of their counterparts sheathed in glass and steel. Vacca has shown substantial interest in pedestrian safety, slowing down speeders, and opening up crash data, so maybe he would consider convening a council hearing that shines a spotlight on the vital issue of NYPD crash investigations, which all too often seem to reach conclusions before all the facts are in.

Given the current topsy-turvy climate, where cyclists and pedestrians are singled out for scorn and scolding while their killers are spared comparable scrutiny (at least two pedestrians dead in the last two days), it would be nothing short of revelatory to hear Vacca and other prominent council mems echo Mendelson, who — while issuing the obligatory call for enforcement “against pedestrians and cyclists as well” — at least acknowledged that, “If someone is driving a 2,000 or 4,000 pound machine, they need to be held to a higher standard.”

Here comes Wal-Mart.

The retail giant, the nation’s largest employer, has been eyeing the untapped New York City market for years. So far, opposition to Wal-Mart’s notorious labor record has kept the chain outside city limits, but a new push to establish a beachhead in the five boroughs is now underway.

The likeliest site for the city’s first Wal-Mart, according to Crain’s columnist Greg David, is at the Gateway Center in East New York. The shopping center’s website brags that it’s “one of the largest suburban-style retail developments” and touts its sea of free surface parking. In other words, a Wal-Mart on that site would stick to the most traditional big-box design, straight out of Bentonville.

Bringing Wal-Mart to New York City doesn’t have to be that way, though. A similar lobbying blitz is underway in Washington, D.C., where Wal-Mart is attempting to open four stores. Unlike in New York, however, Wal-Mart is attempting to win support by adapting its stores to the urban environment. For one of the stores, they propose a five-story building with smaller retail along one side of the block and apartments above the stores. “It may be the most well-executed new urban big box department store in America,” said Greater Greater Washington.

The executives in charge of expanding Wal-Mart into D.C. clearly believe that good design is the key to winning the support of that city’s decision-makers. Here in New York, though, no such pitch is underway.

Then again, would you expect there to be? It’s hard to imagine that when the City Council holds its first hearing on Wal-Mart on February 3, they’ll be concerned with its car-centric, traffic-inducing design. After all, this is the same City Council that responded to merchant opposition to the Flushing Commons development by throwing in $3 million to offer free and discounted parking at that project’s 1,600-space garage.

Of course, a D.C.-style design wouldn’t change the economic arguments against Wal-Mart.

Read more…

Washington D.C. is making the biggest splash (policy-wise) on Bike to Work Day this year, with officials announcing a major expansion of the city's bike-sharing system. According to Greater Greater Washington, the new system will have around 1,100 bikes at 114 stations across the entire District and in neighboring Arlington County. If the expansion goes into effect, bike-sharing in the capital could be transformed from a niche service into an essential piece of the transportation system.

D.C. was the first American city to institute a bike-sharing program, known as SmartBike. That program was hampered by its small size -- only 120 bikes at ten locations, and by a business model that catered too much to advertising giant Clear Channel at the expense of bike-share users. The next iteration of bike-sharing would drop Clear Channel, GGW reports, switching to an operator whose incentives call for expanding the system and who would be willing to work across multiple jurisdictions. Yearly memberships would cost $80, with every ride free for the first half-hour. 

Looking ahead, 1,100 bikes might be just the beginning for D.C. The region is applying for federal funding to more than double the size of the program announced today, and Arlington, at least, has already announced its intention to add more bikes and stations down the line. 

Today's announcement adds to the wave of bike-sharing breakthroughs in American cities. Denver launched its 500-bike program, currently the largest in the country, on Earth Day, and both Minneapolis and Boston are scheduled to open 1,000-bike systems later this year. In New York, the most recent government action on bike-sharing occurred last April, when the Department of City Planning released an extensive study of how a system could work here.