In every community district along the proposed Nostrand Avenue bus rapid transit corridor, fewer Brooklynites are driving to work compared to the beginning of the last decade...

Brooklyn commuters — already some of the biggest transit riders in the country — are opting for transit at ever higher rates. New numbers from the Center for the Study of Brooklyn at Brooklyn College, first highlighted by City Limits’ Brooklyn Bureau, crunch Census data to reveal the evolving commuting patterns in the borough’s 18 community board districts. (To see the citywide breakdown of these numbers by state legislative district, check out Streetsblog’s prior coverage.)

Given the weight that community boards exert over street designs like new bus lanes or bike lanes, the figures are a valuable resource as Brooklyn neighborhoods consider projects to improve surface transit and street safety.

Take plans for Select Bus Service along Nostrand Avenue, set to launch this year. Though the improved bus service will speed up the commute for the B44′s 41,000 daily riders with dedicated bus lanes, off-board fare payment, and bus bulbs, at least one community board along the route has voted against the proposal. “Why would you even take the bus?” one Community Board 15 member asked.

At debates like those, marshaling facts about the district that the community board is supposed to represent can be valuable. Of all the community boards along Nostrand, CB 15 represents the fewest transit riders, the Brooklyn College data shows. But even there, more commuters take transit than drive, and the gap is growing. Between 2007 and 2009, 47.8 percent of CB 15 residents rode transit to work; during the same period, only 38.7 percent drove. In 2000, 46.1 percent took transit while 44.3 percent took their car.

The story is the same up and down Nostrand Avenue. In every community district, driving is down (below 17 percent of commuters in both Greenpoint/Williamsburg and Crown Heights). In all but one, transit is on the rise, and in every district, more commuters use transit than any other mode.

When the Nostrand SBS launches this summer, there’s sure to be a fresh round of griping about lost parking spaces and less space for private car travel. When that happens, this Census data should serve as a valuable reality check.

...while transit use is up everywhere except community district 9.

Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson reported a smooth ride to work.

Despite severe weekend flooding, city transit was for the most part up and running by the morning rush. Meanwhile, cyclists are tweeting on bike route conditions.

Did you make it to work today? How did you get there? We’d also like to hear commute stories from anyone who worked or volunteered during the storm.

Please, talk amongst yourselves.

Addendum: Central Park is the domain of pedestrians and cyclists until further notice (h/t @mikepstein).

Weather.com: Be afraid.

As it turned out, Tuesday’s earthquake didn’t have much of an impact on New York commuters. Washington, DC, however, was a different story. WAMU (via Transportation Nation) reported “some of the worst traffic jams since 9/11.” Meanwhile, dcist noted a surge in bike-share use:

Capital Bikeshare tweeted this morning that it recorded 5,847 rides yesterday, an increase of 1,090 from the day before. Of those rides, 1,246 came between 2 and 4 p.m., compared to the 812 during that same timeframe on Monday. If you think about it, Capital Bikeshare’s 1,121 bikes distributed at the 116 stations throughout the District and Arlington are now an integral part of any plan for mobility or evacuation in case of an emergency in the city.

Terry Bellamy, the director of the District’s Department of Transportation, admitted to the Washington Business Journal’s Mike Neibauer that, despite a lesser traffic nightmare than during winter snowstorms, the region just can’t handle the massive traffic exodus that invariably follows an emergency. If you’re in a car, you’re probably screwed.

Now comes Hurricane Irene. Though the storm could of course weaken or shift away from the city, Mayor Bloomberg announced this morning that agencies are “preparing for the worst.” Across the Hudson, Mayor Dawn Zimmer is urging Hoboken residents to leave town (or at least move their cars). The MTA, for its part, is reportedly battening down the hatches and bringing in extra personnel. Irene updates are lighting up the Streetsblog Twitter feed; evacuation maps and “go bag” chatter are the order of the day.

All of which means… what? How, if at all, are the week’s terrestrial and aerial turbulence affecting your mobility? Opinions on urbanity? Bottled water supplies? Let us know in the comments.

A Brookings report ranks the New York region 13th in transit accessibility. Can that be right?

Does the New York City region really rank only 13th in the nation in providing transit access to jobs? Has it truly been bested by a top five of Honolulu, San Jose, Salt Lake City, Tucson and Fresno? That’s what a new report from the Brookings Institution claims, but don’t worry New Yorkers, there are very good reasons to second-guess that conclusion.

The report, which Streetsblog Capitol Hill’s Tanya Snyder recapped earlier today, is an impressive piece of research. Brookings built the largest database in its long history and developed some pretty sophisticated tools to analyze it. Some of the data points that Tanya pulled out in her piece add tremendously to our understanding of the connection between transit and land use across the country. That said, when it comes to ranking the top cities, the findings are a little too counterintuitive to be true.

Notably, there appears to be a weak connection between the cities with the best transit access to jobs, as ranked by Brookings, and the cities where commuters actually use transit. New York City came in 13th in the first ranking despite being far and away the top in the latter.

According to Census data gathered by Brookings itself, 30.5 percent of New York region commuters take transit to work. Compare that to Honolulu, where only 7.5 percent of commuters ride transit, or the four runners-up at 3.1 percent, 3.0 percent, 2.5 percent and 1.3 percent. It’s not even close.

In other words, whatever Brookings is measuring in this report doesn’t seem to be particularly important for the men and women who actually decide whether to hop on a bus or in the car each morning. Whether it’s poor off-peak transit service, easy parking at home and at work, or even just transit-skeptical local cultures, something is making it so that access to jobs by transit doesn’t translate into actually making use of it.

Some of the reasons for New York’s unexpectedly low ranking may be technical. The report excludes commuters traveling between metro areas, as defined by the federal government. That seriously undercounts the number of jobs that residents of Fairfield County, for example, can access via transit, counting jobs in Bridgeport but not in New York City.

More fundamentally, however, at the top of the ranking the Brookings approach may give too much weight to transit that no one is likely to use. In the New York region, for example, they show that 89.6 percent of residents live within three-quarters of a mile of a transit stop, while 95.6 percent of San Jose residents do. Assuming transit agencies provide service in an at least somewhat rational fashion, however, those extra six percent of residents in San Jose must be among the people in the region least likely to ride transit. That extra coverage, likely off at the exurban fringe, is very low return, but counts fully in Brookings’ rankings.

That isn’t to say that coverage isn’t important. In certain areas, transit might only serve a small number of low-income and elderly riders while everyone else drives, but for those riders it’s absolutely essential.

Moreover, the Brookings report presents a worrying estimate of the upper bound of transit growth in the New York region. They estimate that only 36.6 percent of all jobs could be reached by a typical resident in 90 minutes or less. Considering that 30.5 percent of New York commuters already ride transit, this implies that the bulk of the transit-accessible jobs are already being accessed by transit.

That’s the legacy of decades of job sprawl in the region. “Even though we have the most extensive transit network in the country, the region outgrew this network in the post-war period,” said Regional Plan Association vice president for research Chris Jones. “Much of the job growth that occurred, especially during the 70s and 80s, occurred outside the reach of the subway and rail network.” Between 1970 and 2010, he said, New York City added 300,000 jobs while the rest of the region added 2,000,000. Unless job growth becomes far more concentrated in downtowns and near transit, transit commuting can only increase so much.

Fewer New Yorkers are driving to work than they did a decade ago, according to Census data Streetsblog reported on last December. But that same data shows that the citywide car ownership rate increased by 1.7 percentage points over the same period.

Among all NYC households, 46 percent own cars, according to Census data gathered between 2005 and 2009, compared to 44.3 percent in 2000. Factoring in Census data on the number of cars each household owns, that adds up to about 120,000 more cars in New York City.

We put together a spreadsheet (which you can download here) comparing new Census data on car ownership to information from the 2000 Census. (The main dataset in the spreadsheet is the percentage of car-free households in each legislative district, so negative changes are actually increases in the car ownership rate.)

The growth in car ownership was spread across the state, with increases in 126 out of 150 Assembly districts. Altogether, the statewide car ownership rate rose by about 1.4 percentage points, slightly less than in New York City.

The Bronx saw the most notable upticks in car ownership. Four of the five Assembly districts with the largest increases in car ownership rates were in that borough: AD 85 (Marcus Crespo, Soundview), AD 86 (Nelson Castro, Fordham), AD 77 (Vanessa Gibson, Morris Heights), and AD 84 (Carmen Arroyo, Mott Haven). All of those districts started from a relatively low baseline of car ownership. In AD 85, which saw the biggest jump, for instance, car ownership rose from 29.1 percent to 35.8 percent.

Of the few districts that saw their car ownership rate fall, the top five were AD 49 (Peter Abbate, Bensonhurst), AD 22 (Grace Meng, Flushing), AD 95 (Ellen Jaffee, Rockland County), AD 66 (Deborah Glick, Greenwich Village), and AD 67 (Linda Rosenthal, Upper West Side). The biggest change happened in AD 49, where the car ownership rate fell by 2.4 percentage points.

Interestingly, the only two New York City districts where our previous analysis found that the percentage of people driving to work increased since 2000, Glick’s and Richard Gottfried’s, both saw their car ownership rates go down.

It’s notable that the share of New Yorkers who own cars rose while the share of those who commuted by car fell. Given that higher car ownership should lead to more driving, all things being equal, this suggests that factors like traffic congestion or high gas prices made driving to work less attractive even for people who own cars.

Transportation analyst Charles Komanoff pointed to the fact that car ownership only increased in owner-occupied housing units, not rentals, and that more households owned their own homes in the recent Census. He hypothesized that something connected to the increase in home ownership, such as a larger affluent population, was propelling the increase in car ownership.

The higher car ownership rate also has important implications for parking policy. With the city’s population on the rise and the share who own cars also increasing, there are many more cars in need of storage than a decade ago. The increasingly desperate attempts to squeeze more on-street parking spaces out of the city’s fixed supply of curb space may make more sense in the light of those numbers, for example. The increased car ownership rate could also reflect the Bloomberg administration’s policy of enabling large amounts of off-street parking to be built throughout the city (though the Department of City Planning would probably cite rising car ownership to justify that same policy).

Map compiled by Frank Hebbert/OpenPlans.

Job growth has been concentrated outside Manhattan in recent years. Transit service hasn't kept pace.

Over the last decades, the economic geography of New York City has begun to shift. While Midtown and Lower Manhattan remain job centers without peer, more and more of the city’s jobs are located outside of the central business districts. As employment shifts into the other boroughs, however, the transit system hasn’t shifted with it. That means longer waits and worse service for many New Yorkers, especially for low- and middle-income workers, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future.

To connect people to jobs and expand economic opportunity in the city, the authors write, bus service must improve dramatically and transit must become a “kitchen table issue” for a broader range of New Yorkers.

Increasingly, New Yorkers’ commutes don’t take them into Manhattan. In the Bronx, for example, between 1990 and 2008 the number of commuters traveling to Manhattan grew by 12 percent. The number of commuters going to work inside the Bronx, in contrast, grew by 25 percent and the number traveling to neighboring Queens or Westchester increased by 38 percent. In fact, the Bronx was the only borough to add jobs during the great recession. The pattern, which repeats itself in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, is clear: commuting no longer means traveling into Manhattan.

With the subway system designed to funnel people in and out of Manhattan, New Yorkers rely on bus service to take them to these new jobs. Bus ridership is up 60 percent since 1990. But increased ridership and increased traffic congestion mean that bus trips are slower than ever. Last year’s service cuts, which hardest on bus riders, only exacerbated the situation. It’s no wonder, therefore, that New Yorkers’ commute lengths just keep increasing. The problem is particularly acute among low-income New Yorkers, whose homes and jobs are more likely to be in transit-poor neighborhoods and who can’t afford to drive.

The shoddy state of bus service to New York’s new jobs is a major obstacle to economic opportunity.

The Center for an Urban Future report quotes Sharon Valentin, the tenant association leader for Staten Island’s Castleton Houses: “We have a new Target on the other side of the island and the bus lets you off a half a mile away. I know a lot of people here who would like to work at that Target, but getting there every day is too hard.”

Employers, too, see inadequate transit service as an obstacle to growth. “Improved mass transit would allow our expanding business to draw from a larger labor pool, improve our ability to attract and retain new workers and make us a more competitive manufacturer,” said Steve Chen, the vice president the rapidly expanding Crystal Windows and Doors in College Point, Queens.

Queens commuters headed to Manhattan tend to take the subway, but those commuting inside the borough depend on the bus or their car.

To help connect New Yorkers with the new jobs, the Center for an Urban Future suggests a serious investment in bus rapid transit. While it praises the city DOT and the MTA for the successful projects on Fordham Road and First and Second Avenues, it concludes that “to have any real impact on commute times, particularly for the working poor living outside of Manhattan, an even more ambitious effort is needed.”

That means building out the city’s 19 identified candidates for a second phase of Select Bus Service but also adding to that plan in important ways. The report recommends adding elevated platforms to speed boarding and alighting and to provide bus service with some additional cultural cachet. More importantly, perhaps, it calls for adapting that plan to the realities of New York’s new job centers. Not one proposed SBS route travels from Queens to the Bronx or Brooklyn.

It’s also worth pointing out the importance of non-Manhattan commutes for sustainability goals as well. Only a tiny share of car commutes from any borough are to Manhattan; most are entirely within another borough or to an adjacent county. To reduce driving, those routes need good transit.

To make a robust, citywide BRT system a reality, however, the politics of transit need to change. As the report’s authors write, “the MTA and DOT don’t operate in a vacuum.” The MTA can’t take on any major new commitments until its budget is balanced, which will require new revenue (CUF recommends considering congestion pricing or bridge tolls). And BRT won’t be rolled out citywide if local leaders, like those who killed the Queens Merrick Boulevard SBS route, continue to fight against it.

The key, the report argues, is to make transportation more of a “kitchen-table issue.” Right now, they note, only seven percent of New Yorkers making below 200 percent of the federal poverty line identify transit as the biggest challenge facing New York, compared to 11 percent of higher-income residents.

An important part of putting transportation equity on the agenda will be convincing the most important advocates for workers to put it on theirs. “Transportation is a big problem for our lowest wage workers,” said Leah Gonzalez, the communications director for SEIU/1199, the powerful health care union which represents home health care workers who must crisscross the city for work. Gonzalez told CUF, however, that transportation wasn’t generally an issue her union advocated for.

The new protected bike lane on Columbus Avenue remained unplowed at around 9:30 this morning. Photo: Noah Kazis.

Mayor Bloomberg was determined not to be shown up by the second major snowstorm of the season, while Jay Walder advised against non-essential transit trips (the Times reports that all subways are running). It seemed the plows were out in force last night in Inwood, though there was six to eight inches on some sidewalks this morning.

Leave your commute stories in the comments.

With the recent release of this Census data, it’s finally possible to get fine-grained stats that can be compared to the 2000 Census. That means a wealth of new information about how people in different parts of New York get to work. Looking through the data, one thing jumps out: Transit-rich New York City is leading the way in a shift toward more sustainable transportation.

To crunch the numbers, we put together a spreadsheet, which you can download here (warning: the formatting is still a little rough around the edges), comparing the new data to information from the 2000 Census. It shows the change in commuting patterns in all the state’s legislative districts. One caveat: this data is from 2005 through 2009, so it includes boom times and the recession, and does not reflect any changes caused by this year’s transit cuts.

The percentage of commuters who drive to work decreased in 134 out of 150 Assembly districts, and 57 out of 62 State Senate districts. All of these districts saw shifts toward transit, walking, or working from home. Across the state, the share of commuters who drive to work fell from 65.5 percent in 2000 to 61.6 percent in 2009, a sizable shift. In New York City, the number fell from 32.9 percent to 29 percent.

The biggest shifts toward sustainable transportation occurred in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Here are the most significant changes in individual Assembly districts, which occurred in neighborhoods where relatively few people drove to work in the first place:

• In Fordham rep José Rivera’s district, driving mode share decreased from 29.3 percent to 21.9, a shift of 7.5 percentage points. Just under 700 fewer commuters drove to work, while around 7,500 more took transit, 850 more walked to work and 1,000 more worked from home.
• In 2000, 35 percent of Alec Brook-Krasny’s Bay Ridge and Brighton Beach constituents drove to work. Now less than 28 percent do.
• Driving mode share dropped from 29 percent to 21.7 percent in Michael Gianaris’s Astoria district.
• The districts of East New York reps Darryl Towns and Inez Barron took the next two spots. The percentage of commuters who drove to work dropped from 31 percent to 24.1 percent and from 34.3 percent to 27.5 percent, respectively.

In State Senate districts, these were the largest shifts:

• In Transportation Committee chair Martin Dilán’s Bushwick district, the percentage of commuters driving fell from 24.7 percent to 18.3, a shift of 6.4 percentage points. Though the total number of people driving to work actually increased by a few hundred people, that was swamped by a massive 29,000 new transit commuters.
• Driving mode share in Joseph Addabbo’s Southern Queens district dropped from 49.5 percent to 43.6 percent.
• The next largest drops took place in the former districts of bridge toll-killing amigos Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate. Driving fell from 28.3 percent to 22.5 percent of commutes in Espada’s former district (now represented by Gustavo Rivera), and from 28.7 percent to 23 percent in Monserrate’s old stomping grounds (now José Peralta’s). Relying on 2000 Census data, we knew that Espada and Monserrate were poorly representing their largely transit-riding constituents when they obstructed bridge tolls, but even fewer of their district’s residents drove to work than we realized.

There were a few districts where driving made up a larger share of trips than in 2000.

• In Dede Scozzafava’s North Country district, by the Canadian border, driving rose from 85.6 percent of trips to 90.8 percent of trips.
• Two Long Island districts, represented by Earlene Hooper and Ginny Fields, also saw increases in car commuting. Driving mode share rose from 71.5 percent to 73.7 percent in Hooper’s district, and from 90 percent to 90.9 in Fields’.

In Scozzafava’s district, the rise in driving came at the expense of trips made by walking to work. Perhaps with more compact development and complete streets that are safe for walking, that decline needn’t have happened over the decade.

The percentage of commuters driving to work increased in only two New York City districts, both on Manhattan’s West Side. In Deborah Glick and Richard Gottfried’s transit-rich districts, driving to work is relatively rare. The change in how their constituents get to work reflects that: There are more new commutes on transit than in cars. But the growth in commuting is weighted more toward driving than the transit/car split in 2000, meaning the districts are starting to become slightly more auto-oriented: Car commuting increased 0.5 percentage points in Glick’s district and 0.2 in Gottfried’s. Perhaps one culprit is the glut of new parking that continues to be approved in the area, despite often-disregarded Clean Air Act restrictions on parking south of 60th Street.

While the mode share numbers show transit gaining on driving, looking at absolute changes, the number of car commuters in the state has risen, and some New York City districts saw sizable jumps. For issues like traffic congestion, where the total volume of cars on the road is the relevant question, that’s bad news.

Senator Andrew Lanza’s Staten Island district saw 5,000 more people driving to work (and more new cars than that, as 2,700 fewer people were carpooling). Malcolm Smith’s Southeast Queens district saw 8,000 more commuters driving alone. The fastest growth in car commuting happened on the eastern tip of Long Island; Senator Kenneth Lavalle’s district saw around 17,500 new people driving to work.

In terms of total transit use, the map of major increases is very similar to the map of mode share jumps. The largest increases in transit commuting came in the districts of Senators Dilan, Bill Perkins (Harlem), José Serrano (South Bronx/East Harlem), Peralta, and Rubén Díaz (Longwood). The biggest decreases in transit ridership came along the southern coast of Suffolk County, in Senator Owen Johnson and Assembly Member Ginny Fields’ districts.

Only one New York City district saw an absolute decrease in the number of transit riders — Jonathan Bing’s on the Upper East Side — but that appears to be due to a decrease in the total number of commuters.

Let us know in comments what you find in the new Census data. Any patterns jump out at you? Any legislators who need to know their district is changing?

Regardless of age or riding ability, everyone should have the option of incorporating a safe, convenient, and healthy bike trip into their daily commute — especially in compact cities where the distance between people’s homes and workplaces tends to be short and bikeable.

In New York City, the DOT is making bike commuting a more attractive choice for a wider variety of people by installing a network of “next-generation” bike facilities. The city has moved past striped bike lanes and on to innovative configurations like two-way, parking-protected on-street bike paths that separate cyclists from traffic and keep lanes clear of obstructions.

Commutes that were unthinkable to most New Yorkers a few years ago are becoming attainable, and cycling into downtown Manhattan is on the rise. To keep up with the changes and find out where the best and safest routes are, one resource that helps is the NYC Cycling Map. You can use this freebie to not only link up with the best streets for biking in your neighborhood, but also to find alternatives and experiment with your riding. You’ll be amazed how easy — and safe — it can be.

So, to inspire and cajole you into trying out a two-wheeled trip to work, I decided to hop on my Batavus Dutch cruiser and show you my new commute from Jackson Heights, Queens all the way to the Streetfilms offices in lower Manhattan via the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a hardy 11 miles each way, and yet almost 90 percent of the journey is on some variety of marked bike route. Even better, about five miles is on completely separate car-free bicycling paths. It’s no wonder that many days I arrive at work in a zen-like state.

Each dot represents ten commuters going to work at JFK. The many red dots represent drivers, a majority of those going to the transit-poor airport. For a larger version, check out this PDF. Image: Pratt Center

Last week’s MTA fare hikes marked the latest setback in a string of bad news for New York City transit riders. But with the launch of Select Bus Service on the East Side of Manhattan this week, some advocates are looking ahead to further opportunities to enhance the city’s surface transit network. The Pratt Center for Community Development just released its Transportation Equity Atlas, a set of maps detailing the critical need for more transit options, particularly in New York City’s low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

Overall, Pratt shows that New York City’s transportation system doesn’t serve low-income residents nearly as well as it should. 750,000 New Yorkers have a commute longer than an hour each way, for example, and two-thirds of them earn less than $35,000 a year. Only six percent of those long commutes are made by those earning over $75,000 a year.

There’s a racial divide, too. Black New Yorkers, on average, have trips to work that take 25 percent longer than white New Yorkers. Hispanic New Yorkers’ commutes take 12 percent longer than white New Yorkers’ commutes.

“If you work in a service or a manual job, you’re more likely to work in a place that is also not well-served by transit,” explained Pratt’s Joan Byron. ”I think there hasn’t been much of a focus in transportation planning around blue collar and service job clusters in New York City.”

Pratt breaks down their information — drawn from the 2000 Census — to look at particular neighborhoods and job centers. In the Bronx, for example, most Soundview residents live outside walking distance of the subway. It’s no surprise, therefore, that even though only 39 percent of households own a car, 41 percent of households drive or carpool to work. Without a decent transit option, many residents in this low-income neighborhood are forced to take on the huge financial burden of car-ownership and suffer lengthy commutes:

Graphic: Pratt Center

JFK Airport is one of the region’s largest job centers, with 55,000 workers. But because of limited transit access to Southeast Queens, especially in the off-peak hours that many airport workers travel, most of those workers drive there. (The Airtrain, which opened after this data was collected, likely changed the numbers to some extent.) Better transit access to this economic engine could take thousands of cars off the road (especially the congested Van Wyck) and save working New Yorkers thousands of dollars a year.

Pratt has put together similar profiles for a total of 13 communities and 10 job centers and it’s well worth exploring all of them. Byron noted that connecting workers with a huge job cluster like Central Brooklyn’s hospital complex would be a top priority in a city like Cleveland, but that “because New York is such a huge job market, this isn’t even on the radar here.”

So how to fill in these major gaps in the transit system in a time of fiscal austerity? Pratt recommends building out a major new BRT network as the most cost-efficient way to bring transit to all New Yorkers quickly. They envision a network of 16 BRT routes, which would cross borough lines in a way that current Select Bus Service plans do not. Their map not only would connect lower-income neighborhoods to Manhattan but also to job centers in the other boroughs. One line, for example, would run from Washington Heights through Soundview to JFK.

Byron hopes that the data presented in the Transportation Equity Atlas inform the NYC DOT and MTA as they continue to plan the second phase of their BRT plan. ”If you’re going to do more than a pilot, you need to think about where are the people it could benefit the most, where are the difficult trips,” explained Byron. She said that approach already appears more in evidence in phase two than in the first Select Bus Service routes.

Recently, transportation advocates have been forced to mostly play defense. When it comes time to plan for better service again, however, advocates and officials alike will now be able to do it with the Transportation Equity Atlas open in front of them, reminding them that the transit system still doesn’t work for many New Yorkers.

An analysis by CEOs For Cities shows that contrary to previous reports, the longest commutes are in sprawling Southeastern cities. View a larger version of this infographic. Image: CEOs for Cities

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

An important new report from CEOs for Cities, though, has laid out major problems with the UMR. It shows how commuters in compact regions, whose daily trips look hellish based on the UMR, actually spend far less time in the car than residents of sprawling metro areas.

The misleading metrics in the UMR are a convenient bludgeon for the highway lobby. According to report author Joe Cortright, the UMR serves as “a drumbeat saying we need to spend a lot more on expanding capacity. It gets used in political speeches, it’s used in lobbying.”

The key flaw is a measurement called the Travel Time Index. That’s the ratio of average travel times at peak hours to the average time if roads were freely flowing. In other words, the TTI measures how fast a given trip goes; it doesn’t measure whether that trip is long or short to begin with.

Relying on the TTI suggests that more sprawl and more highways solve congestion, when in fact it just makes commutes longer. Instead, suggests CEOs for Cities, more compact development is often the more effective — and more affordable — solution.

Take the Chicago and Charlotte metro areas. Chicagoland has the second worst TTI in the country, after Los Angeles. Charlotte is about average. But in fact, Chicago-area drivers spend more than 15 minutes less traveling each day, because the average trip is 5.5 miles shorter than in Charlotte. Charlotte only looks better because on average, its drivers travel closer to the hypothetical free-flowing speed.

For Cortright, perhaps the biggest problem with the UMR is that it suggests traffic congestion is always getting worse. “One insight from our reanalysis is that in some places it’s getting better,” he said, “and it’s getting better because people are changing the pattern of the trips they’re taking.” In Portland, Oregon, for example, the TTI got much worse between 1982 and 2007. But in fact, by reducing average travel distances from 19.6 miles to 16.0 miles over that period, Portland shaved 11 minutes of peak travel off its average commute.

The CEOs for Cities report concludes that the UMR not only measures the wrong things, it also measures things the wrong way. For example, it doesn’t use observed speeds to calculate how much congestion slows down traffic during peak hours, but relies on a mechanistic model based on the total number of cars moving in a full 24-hour period. When showing the amount of gas that congestion wastes, it relies on an outdated study that incorrectly assumes faster speeds are always more fuel-efficient.

States where more people drive to work face an even worse obesity crisis. Graphic: Noah Kazis and Carly Clark

Transportation is a public health issue. As profiled in the recently released report from the Trust for America’s Health, "F as in Fat," obesity rates continue to rise across the nation, increasing the risk of serious health problems like diabetes and hypertension. To solve the obesity epidemic, the data suggest, we need to rethink our dependence on the automobile. 

"F as in Fat" breaks out obesity numbers state by state. After glancing at their map, it seemed like transit and pedestrian-friendly states were doing better than the national average. To get more precise, we decided to compare adult obesity rates, as gathered in the report, to commuting statistics in the U.S. Census. You can download our spreadsheet here. 

The result is the scatterplot shown above, which clearly shows that states where more people drive to work have higher obesity rates. Caveats abound — correlation isn’t causation and state-level data can obscure important patterns visible only through a closer microscope — but the result is provocative. The two outliers are D.C. and New York State; they imply that while a large shift away from driving can make a big difference, it can’t solve the obesity crisis on its own.

Although "F as in Fat" doesn’t analyze transportation behavior itself, the authors agree that moving away from a reliance on the automobile is a critical component in curbing obesity. Their recommendations include: passing legislation supporting non-motorized transportation, such as an expansion of the Safe Routes to School program or a national complete streets bill; building more safe pedestrian space and bike paths to encourage active transport; and supporting mixed-use, walkable, and transit-oriented development.

Streetfilms' Robin Urban Smith was up on the Grand Concourse this morning for one of New York's Bike to Work Day traditions -- the Bronx Borough President's ride from Poe Park down to Lou Gehrig Plaza. Watch and see all the different answers you get when you ask people, "Why do you bike to work?"

After the jump, more Bike to Work Day pics by photographer Andrew Hinderaker from today's pit stops and press events.

Fueling up at Transportation Alternatives' Queensboro Bridge pit stop.

At the Brooklyn Bridge, near the end of the ascent.

The Commish.

SELF Magazine editor Lucy Danziger at a Times Square press event with TA director Paul Steely White. Danziger asked her staff to bike to work today. Details at 6 and 11.

How was your ride to work today? Bike traffic on the Manhattan Bridge seemed heavier than usual. After I took a few pictures of the Sands Street bike path, I got onto the bridge approach with a platoon of about a dozen people on bikes. At the end of the bridge, an apple from the TA breakfast table really hit the spot. Later I overheard this snippet in the elevator: "It's like national ride-your-bike-to-work day."

If you've got pictures of bike traffic you want to share, tag them "streetsblog" on Flickr or tell us about them via Twitter -- @StreetsblogNYC.

Jimmy Van Bramer tries out his new ride. Photo: Transportation Alternatives.

After a ride around his district this afternoon with staffers and volunteers from Transportation Alternatives, he seemed pretty savvy about the local bicycle network. "I like what DOT has done in terms of bike lanes and I think that we can continue to work with them to make sure that there are sufficient connectors," he said, "because we have some terrific bike lanes in Sunnyside going down into Long Island City, but there are parts of the district where they sort of terminate and then pick up again."

The forecast for Bike to Work Day is clear skies and warm temperatures. If you happen across some nice bike traffic scenes tomorrow and have a camera handy, you can add your pictures to our Flickr pool. The tag to use is "streetsblog."

For all the pit stops, rides, and special event happening tomorrow, check the Bike Month calendar.

Noah Kazis contributed to this post.

From Infrastructurist by way of Buzzfeed comes this video of bike commuters in Utrecht. With a population of around 300,000, Utrecht is the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, and has a 33 percent bike mode share. According to the write-up accompanying the YouTube post, this intersection handles "no less than" 18,000 bicycles and 2,500 buses per day.

Entrancing as it is, we did manage to wonder what this scene would look like if all these people were driving. Probably something like this:

This morning, the hosts of the Today Show played this segment for their 5.4 million viewers. It's this year's edition of Transportation Alternatives' annual Great Commuter Race, where cyclist, transit rider, and motorist vie to see who gets to work first. TA's Wiley Norvell emailed us to explain how the race made the transition to national TV:

After the tenth-straight cyclist victory, there seemed to be some skepticism from the fourth estate about how legitimate the race really was. Well, we took it to some of the most trusted names in America to prove that biking really does come out on top.

A few observations:

• Matt Lauer really lays it on thick pretending not to know his way around the subway and the bus.
• The folks who run Commute by Bike should start polishing their TV pitches.
• Scoff all you want at the short route (72nd and Broadway to 30 Rock). But that means Meredith Vieira never had to drive through the insane traffic bottlenecks at NYC's free bridges, while Al Roker took the Broadway bike lane, probably the slowest riding in the city, and still finished first. 

The full quote appears after the helpful lede reporting that 10 times as many New Yorkers walk to work as take taxis:

A higher proportion -- nearly half -- of New Yorkers take mass transit, more than in any other city in the country. Nearly 37 percent use the subway and 11 percent commute by bus.

Not even half of us commute via mass transit? Not so, which the veteran reporter Sam Roberts, the paper’s resident NYC historian and demographics buff, could have seen by turning over the numbers he drew from a March report [PDF] by the city-financed Center for Economic Opportunity:

• Roberts failed to adjust the report's percentages (which appear on page 81) for the nearly half-a-million commutes whose mode was unidentified. Remove them from the denominator and the share of identified work trips made by subway or bus goes from 47.6 percent to 53.3 percent -- a majority.
• Trains (commuter rail) and ferries qualify as mass transit just as much as subways and buses. Add their shares to subway and bus, and mass transit’s percentage of NYC commuting rises by two points to 55.3 percent.
• Most transportation planners nowadays place walking, cycling and telecommuting together with transit under the rubric of "green modes" -- a term popularized by the British sustainable transport expert Rodney Tolley in his 2003 anthology, Sustainable Transport: Planning for Walking and Cycling in Urban Environments. Aggregating the green modes' shares in the CEO data, they account for 69.9 percent of New York City commuting.

See this simple spreadsheet for the various percentage breakdowns. The real finding is that between two-thirds and three-fourths of our work trips are made without an automobile. If you’re curious, the 30 percent non-green share breaks down thus: drive solo, 23.6 percent; carpool, 5.5 percent; taxi, 1.0 percent; motorcycle, 0.0 percent (actually, 0.048 percent). Bottom line: Non-car commuting outnumbers car commuting by more than two-to-one.

Also of interest are the CEO report’s data on commute costs. The $48.47 weekly mean cost to drive alone to work translates to a daily cost of around $10; subtract gas, applicable tolls and depreciation, and the implied cost to park may be less than $5 a day. This suggests one or both of two things: even in New York, where the astronomical cost of land is reflected in everything from rent to the price of food, parking continues to be the heavily subsidized exception; or the data in the CEO report don’t include parking, period, as one informed commenter has suggested.

Another angle absent from Roberts's story is the delay costs each commute trip imposes on other travelers by taking up street space and slowing down other traffic. Of course, these vary greatly depending on time of day and location. I’ve estimated that during the morning rush period, each mile driven by a single car slows other traffic to the extent that all road users in the Manhattan Central Business District (other drivers, truckers, and bus passengers) collectively lose time worth $16. (The delay cost per mile driven outside the CBD is $3.)

True, some aspects of green-mode commuting also impose time costs on others -- think of the delays caused by bus riders swiping MetroCards, subway passengers holding up the closing doors, or cyclists slowing down other traffic. Further quantification awaits, but these costs almost certainly average at least an order of magnitude less, per trip, than commuting by car.

Of all the ways to improve your bike commute, riding with a friend might be the simplest. Not only do you have someone to talk to at red lights, you also become more visible and therefore more safe. With that in mind, Transportation Alternatives is working on a new tech solution called Bike Buddy to help New Yorkers find someone to ride with.

The idea is to combine online mapping software with social networking -- Ride the City meets Facebook. You'd plug in your starting point and destination, and the software would show you the best route to take and recommend a partner to ride with. "Ride the City gives routes to cyclists and lets them choose a safer or a more direct route," said Caroline Samponaro, TA's bike director, but she wants to "beef it up and make it more exciting for people." Helping neighbors bike together could be that killer app. 

New York State currently runs a carpooling website, CommuterLink, that offers some bike-pooling assistance, said Samponaro. Bike Buddy would draw on TA and Ride the City's better understanding of bike culture. "Biking is so inherently social," said Samponaro, and Bike Buddy would build off that.

TA is still in the early stages of developing Bike Buddy. If the app goes live, Samponaro expects it to spread across the country. Cycling activists in cities across America have already expressed their interest, and TA says Bike Buddy can succeed as a national website.

Without congestion pricing, fare hikes will hit New York's many transit-using families hard. Image: Ed Yourdon via Flickr.

The choice for policymakers, Petro writes, should be clear: Congestion pricing could raise $420 million in new annual revenue, enough to close most of the MTA's current budget deficit and spare working New Yorkers the brunt of painful fare hikes and service cuts.

DMI is a progressive think-tank based in New York City with an explicit focus on middle class issues. Today's report puts the economic and equity impacts of congestion pricing front and center. If the MTA tries to balance its budget with only service cuts and fare hikes, Petro estimates that a transit-dependent family of four will be forced to spend an additional $2,300 a year to get around the city.

Fully 55 percent of New Yorkers commute to work via transit. In contrast, only five percent commute into the CBD by car, and they are disproportionately affluent [PDF]. "One of the most frustrating arguments against congestion pricing is that it would disproportionately hit the middle class," said Petro. "It's frustrating because it's so plainly untrue." The DMI report makes a strong case for why congestion pricing is exactly the kind of policy that supports New York's middle class.

What's more, Petro argues, congestion pricing would be the most fiscally and environmentally responsible way to fund the MTA. Congestion pricing wouldn't force the MTA to raid its capital budget just to keep buses and trains running and would also take 100,000 cars off the road, improving bus service for millions and reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and asthma-causing air pollution.

The MTA needs to balance its budget, one way or the other. Congestion pricing offers a fiscally sustainable and socially equitable revenue stream with major environmental benefits. That said, Petro's numbers show that the MTA's $783 million deficit -- caused principally by declining revenues and shrinking government funding -- can't be closed solely with the $420 million that Mayor Bloomberg's 2007 congestion pricing plan was projected to raise per year.

The details of the plan could be tweaked, however. "Some form of congestion pricing could be created to raise enough revenue to close the gap, if that's what the goal is," Petro said. If Albany gets its act together, could congestion pricing be passed quickly enough to avert the current crisis? Petro believes it's possible, although to get the money in time for this budget cycle, he says the MTA will have to take out an expensive short-term loan.

That's a small price to pay when the alternative is to collect $2,300 more in fares from every transit-riding family of four in New York City. "If another source of revenue is not found, that is what we're looking at," said Petro.