Streetsblog New York City

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

I think Al Roker's Brompton ride to victory last week pretty much sealed the deal: Bike to Work Day has never been bigger. In San Francisco, where they observed the occasion last week, bikes accounted for 75 percent of morning rush hour traffic on Market Street, and most of the legislative and executive branches of local government rode to work. Tomorrow in the nation's capital, Rep. Earl Blumenauer and several high-level federal officials will ring in Bike to Work Day at Freedom Plaza.

Here in New York, one of the local politicos getting re-acquainted with cycling is freshman Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, who bought a new bike today from Spokesman Cycles, a shop in his western Queens district. Van Bramer told us it's been a while since he owned his own bike, and he's into the fenders on the new Jamis. "It's a hybrid and has really cool rims on the front and back," he said, "which I know it really helpful in terms of water and bad weather, but I kind of like it because of its retro look and feel."

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:

Read more...

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. 

Everyone knows that public transit, not auto travel, is New York City’s transportation workhorse. Thus it was a little unsettling to get halfway through the ostensibly transit-friendly story in today’s Times, "Take a Taxicab to Work? More New Yorkers Walk," and read that mass transit doesn’t even account for half of the city’s commuting.

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.

Read more...

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 bold action from legislators to fund transit, middle-class New York families will have to spend $2,300 more per year to get around the city even as the quality of the service they're paying for declines, according to a new analysis released today by John Petro of the Drum Major Institute.

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.

Read more...