Streetsblog New York City

Think of this Streetfacts chapter as a PSA about how, in just a few generations, we have tightly restricted American kids’ freedom to roam, play, and become self-sufficient.

The percentage of children walking and bicycling to school has plummeted from almost 50 percent in 1969 to about 13 percent today. Although distance from school is often cited as the main barrier to walking and bicycling, many families still drive when schools are close to home. According to the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, driving accounts for about half of school trips between 1/4- and 1/2-mile long — which in most cases shouldn’t take kids much more than 10 minutes to walk.

There are plenty of factors at work here: Lack of sidewalks and safe walking and biking routes. The fallacy of “stranger danger.” School districts banning walking and biking outright. But all of these problems lead back to the original and biggest blunder: We continue to design our cities and towns for cars instead of for children, families, and human beings.

Look for more Streetfilms on this issue in the next year.

Without its Ecopass bus program CU-Boulder would have to build an estimated 2,700 parking spaces. Photo: Colorado Daily

This is the third installment in Streetsblog’s series on transportation demand management at American colleges and universities. Part one gave an overview of TDM techniques that schools employ, part two profiled Stanford, and part three looked at MIT.

Sustainability is part of the ethos in Boulder, where there’s a joke that there are more bikes than people. And the University of Colorado at Boulder has really taken that ideal to heart – especially for a big state university.

Almost a third of students — and almost a quarter of faculty and staff — who commute to the CU-Boulder campus do so by bus. Nearly 12 percent of faculty and student commuters arrive by bicycle. And almost a quarter of student commuters and 6 percent of staff get to campus by walking.

Nearly 12 percent of the students, staff, and faculty who commute to the University of Colorado's campus do so by bike. Image: Daily Camera

These non-automotive commute rates didn’t happen by accident. Beginning in 1990, CU-Boulder embraced transportation demand management, setting up a university think tank to come up with new programs to reduce driving. The school’s first action, in 1991, was to negotiate a discount student bus pass with the local transit system. Within three years, the program tripled ridership by students to 900,000 trips per year. By 2001, ridership had ballooned to 1.85 million annual trips. A study found that 65 percent of those trips would have otherwise been made by car, according to authors Will Toor and Spenser Havlick in Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities.

The university extended the program to all faculty and full-time staff in 1998 and helped encourage the local transit system to secure federal funds to start new lines serving the campus. CU-Boulder now boasts of being in the top 9 percent of American colleges in transit usage and having “one of the lowest SOV modal shares” of any major university in the country.

That is all the more impressive, says Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation consultant with the firm Nelson/Nygaard, because Boulder “is mostly a city of single-family homes.”

“Boulder is this extreme outlier,” said Tumlin, who years ago did TDM consulting for the university, “how they have made transit work for them in a very low density community.”

The school calls the transit program “Ecopass.” It assesses a $71 fee on all students each semester — about 75 percent less than the cost of buying regular monthly transit passes — and in return all students can ride local buses at no charge. Without Ecopass, the university would have had to provide 2,700 additional parking spaces at a cost of at least $5.6 million annually.

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This is the third installment in Streetsblog’s series on transportation demand management at American colleges and universities. Part one gave an overview of TDM techniques that schools employ, and part two profiled Stanford’s TDM programs.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a long track record of trying to minimize traffic. The Institute has run a formal transportation demand management (TDM) program for more than 10 years. But even as far back as the 1950s, MIT was encouraging employees to carpool, says Larry Brutti, operations manager with MIT’s facilities department.

A bike lane on MIT's campus. Image: Studio-s on Flickr

There are solid financial reasons for that. At MIT, land is so valuable, adding a single parking space costs the university about $100,000, said Brutti. Over the last five years, as the university has expanded its facilities, MIT has actually cut the total number of parking spaces it owns from 5,000 to 4,200. And it looks like those spaces aren’t coming back.

“We’re trying to not replace it,” Brutti said. “The Institute doesn’t mind putting some money into TDM if they can defer parking.”

MIT isn’t just trying to conserve funds or act as a good environmental steward. The city of Cambridge requires its major institutions to develop TDM programs to limit traffic on city streets. Since 1999, Cambridge has maintained a nationally recognized transportation demand management policy. If non-residential property owners want to add parking, the law requires them to develop a plan around promoting transportation modes other than driving. The parking lot owner must monitor its users’ single-occupancy commuting rates and bike and car parking space occupancy rates and report that annually to the city.

MIT’s strategy, Brutti said, basically comes down to holding out carrots for good behavior, almost exclusively to faculty and staff. “We subsidize most any other way to get to work,” Brutti said.

In total, only about 20 percent of all the people who enter MIT’s campus every day do so alone in a car.

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This is the second installment in Streetsblog’s series on transportation demand management at American colleges and universities. Part one gave an overview of TDM techniques that schools employ. This post looks at how Stanford University has used TDM to reduce driving and realize huge savings in the process.

Stanford graduate engineering student Matthew Haith made the switch to bike commuting after his wife had a baby, and the family needed to tighten their belts. For Andrea Corney, a faculty member in the school of business, it was parking shortages caused by construction that convinced her to try transit.

Stanford's shuttle system, the Marguerite, serves 160 stops on 13 routes. Image: Stanford

At Stanford, encouraging people to switch from solo driving to biking, transit, and carpooling is a science the university has been perfecting for more than a decade. Transportation demand management at Stanford is a multi-pronged effort that includes everything from free bus passes to actual cash payments for ditching the single-occupancy vehicle commute.

The program is paying off, both financially and in less tangible ways — not the least of which is employee and student health and satisfaction, school officials say. The university’s “Commute Club” even keeps a record of stories, like Haith’s and Corney’s, explaining how non-automotive commuting has improved the lives of students and employees.

“It made financial sense to save money on gas, car insurance, and maintenance for me to bike the 16-mile round trip to campus,” said Haith. “Plus, it’s nearly a $600 net gain to avoid the parking fee, and I receive incentives from being in the Commute Club.”

“I bike on beautiful residential streets and across campus, rather than sitting in traffic on El Camino,” Corney said, referring to the car-choked transportation artery of Santa Clara County. “It clears my head on the ride home. I’ve lost weight. I can go days without driving my car. I save money on gas and parking and get Clean Air Cash.”

Stanford began its TDM programs with a push Santa Clara County in 2000, when the county offered the university a general use permit to expand the campus significantly — but only if the school could keep rush-hour car commuting rates at the current levels. The county also gave Stanford the option to pay for redesigns to some 15 nearby intersections instead.

Stanford chose to get a handle on driving. The university started out by researching what kept people from taking transit or riding a bike to campus. Then, the university designed its programs around the responses.

“We tried to put together a program that dealt with as many of the barriers as possible,” said says Brodie Hamilton, the school’s director of parking and transportation services. “What were the excuses out there? The reasons people have: ‘I would use alternative transportation but …’”

Since then, Stanford has made great strides, reducing the share of its faculty and staff that car commute alone from 72 percent to 47 percent. (Since almost all undergraduates live on campus, along with 60 percent of grad students, most of the programs are focused on the staff and faculty.)

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Jeffrey Tumlin was managing transportation programs at Stanford in the mid-1990s, when he made an important finding: It was cheaper for the university to pay people not to drive than to build new parking structures.

Offering employees just $90 a year not to drive to campus was enough to entice many of them to use transit, carpools, or bicycles. Meanwhile, the annualized cost of each parking space can range from about $650 for surface spots in suburban locations to over $4,000 for structured spaces in cities, according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute [PDF].

Biking means big savings at Stanford. Image: FHWA

Stanford offered further incentive by raising parking prices 15 percent. Then, it invested $4 million in bicycle facilities, including turning a main road through campus into a bike and transit mall. This $4 million enticed 900 people out of their cars and onto bicycles, according to a case study in Transportation & Sustainable Campus Communities, by Will Toor and Spenser Havlick. Building parking facilities to accommodate those 900 people would have cost $18 million.

What Stanford had discovered was “transportation demand management,” or strategies to minimize transportation costs by reducing driving. Today almost every college and university in the country employs some form of TDM, whether it’s providing discounted transit passes for students or offering special parking rates to carpoolers.

Colleges and universities — by nature of their fixed locations and limited resources — are excellent laboratories for transportation innovation, says Tumlin, who now works for the firm Nelson\Nygaard.

“Even the well-funded institutions have to make a choice about putting money into parking or putting money in a classroom,” said Tumlin.

Many schools are now well ahead of even the most progressive cities and state DOTs when it comes to saving money and improving public health by reducing car trips.

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The Wall Street Journal yesterday published the results of a study on how sensitive kids and adults are to the sounds of oncoming vehicles. The findings should be a wake-up call to parents of young children in NYC, where speeding in the vicinity of schools is rampant.

Marty Golden doesn't want speed cameras near NYC schools, where motorists are putting kids' lives at risk.

Using headphones to listen to the sounds of a car approaching at 5, 12, and 25 miles per hour, participants pressed a computer key when they heard the vehicle, when they identified its direction, and when they thought it had arrived at their location. From the Journal:

Adults detected the car significantly earlier than children, though 8- and 9-year-olds heard the car before 6- and 7-year-olds. Adults detected the vehicle traveling at 5 miles per hour at a distance of about 48 feet, compared with 35 feet for younger children and 41 feet for older children. On average, the vehicle was significantly closer to children than adults when it was detected.

Researchers found that the car was detected earlier at 25 mph, when the noises were loudest, but noted that pedestrians have less time to react to faster-moving vehicles, which are more likely to cause serious injury and death. The study said that the detection abilities of kids age 10 and older tend to resemble those of adults. “Older children were better than younger children at determining when a vehicle had arrived at their location,” the Journal said.

The Journal points out that the study did not include environmental sounds that pedestrians usually are exposed to, in addition to car noise.

The study was published by Accident Analysis & Prevention, and was funded in part by Nissan.

More than 13,000 children ages five to nine are struck by motorists while crossing the street in the U.S. every year, according to figures cited by the Journal. According to crash data compiled by Streetsblog, at least six kids under the age of nine have been killed by NYC motorists since March 2012. Speeding was the leading factor in fatal NYC crashes last year.

Streetsblog has an message in with Golden’s office concerning his reported campaign to keep speed cameras out of NYC.

(h/t to krstrois)

Traffic injuries to school-age kids are down by a third in areas of New York city that received safety improvements like crosswalks and curb extensions as part of DOT’s Safe Routes to School program, according to new research, while kids walking in areas without the enhancements did not see such pronounced safety gains.

The numbers are in: NYC's Safe Routes to School Program has led to dramatic gains in street safety near schools. Photo: Susan NYC/Flickr

The study, conducted by Columbia University public health researchers and published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, provides solid empirical footing for continued expansion of pedestrian safety initiatives.

“The pedestrian injury rate is a major public health issue for children,” said Dr. Guohua Li, who co-authored the study. By focusing the bulk of its effort on fixing pedestrian safety hotspots, New York City’s SRTS program “has achieved something that other interventions tried but could not achieve for many, many decades,” he said. “I think that’s really remarkable.”

“The New York City Department of Transportation has somewhat of a unique arrangement,” explained Margo Pedroso, deputy director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. Because the state agreed to give the city more control over its SRTS program, she said, ”they were really able to target focused on safety.”

Youth pedestrian injury rates are falling citywide, Li noted, but by drilling down to the times and places where students can benefit from SRTS interventions, the researchers were able to cut through the noise to see if the program has had an impact.

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Mike Dowd is a social studies teacher at Brooklyn’s Midwood High School.

Students from Midwood High School are so interested in biking that they quickly overwhelmed the institutional capacity to teach cycling skills.

Last fall, at the high school where I teach, I was approached by some 12th-grade boys looking to start a cycling club. As a long-time bike activist, I was thrilled to help. But after our first few meetings, problems arose. At our school, seniors finish the day much earlier than I do, and a new semester brought scheduling difficulties. Interest started to drop and the club appeared ready to fold.

I hated to see this happen, so I decided to try to recruit from the younger grades. My hopes weren’t high, as I had never noticed much interest in cycling among our students. But I was quite mistaken. Not only has the club continued to exist, but the enthusiasm it has generated has changed my thinking about how to create a more bike-friendly city. I now believe that promoting youth cycling is a crucial missing component in the movement for livable streets.

Despite my modest recruiting efforts, more than 30 new students attended our club’s next meeting. To my surprise, the vast majority were girls, few were regular cyclists, and many didn’t own a bike or had never learned to ride. But for whatever reason, they seemed interested in the club.

The problem was, I had no idea what to do with these kids and no guidance from the Department of Education as to what was permitted. Over the next few weeks, as I searched for ideas and advice on how to get them on bikes, new students kept coming to our meetings.

Fortunately, I found Bike New York, whose free after-school riding classes in Brooklyn Bridge Park perfectly matched our needs. They offered group riding skills for those who knew how to ride and basic lessons for non-riders.  Even though they were located far away and their classes conflicted with many of our members’ other commitments, we had more than enough students to fill a class.

As I watched nervously the first day, things appeared to be going well. Though the initial drills were fairly simple, the kids seemed excited just to be on bikes. In fact, one girl offered some very high teenage praise, when she whispered to me during a break, “This isn’t as boring as I thought it would be.” Later, as the group returned from a short ride, another girl said, “I’m so glad I joined this club. I haven’t felt this happy in years!” I was bowled over.

As the school year ended, the classes continued with great enthusiasm. I was very proud of our group, especially those who had learned to ride for the first time. Yet the scope of our success was limited. The kids were enthusiastic about riding but couldn’t pursue their interest over the summer. Though they were eager to continue with supervised rides, they weren’t ready to hit the streets on their own, nor did they necessarily own bikes.

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The New York City Department of Transportation, which began its Bike to School initiative in 2010, is looking for a new crop of schools to begin the three-year program. All NYC middle and high schools — public or private — are encouraged to apply before the December 12 deadline.

In 2010, Streetfilms came along for the first Bike to School Day ride to M.S. 51 in Brooklyn to talk with students, parents and DOT staff. Schools that are selected for the program get assistance from DOT with route planning, bike rack installation, helmet fittings and bike safety lessons.

If your school might be a good candidate, make sure you meet the requirements listed on the DOT website and apply before December 12.

Why do traffic delays jump in September? Obviously, fewer people are on vacation. But it’s not just commuters back to the grind getting to and from work. It’s parents dropping their kids off at school, often with even less forgiving start times than an adult workday.

Region Forward, a DC-based livability partnership, shows that the delay is getting worse year after year.

Source: Region Forward

According to the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, up to 20 or 30 percent of morning traffic can be generated by parents driving their children to school. Today, about three-quarters of school-aged kids in America get to and from school by car. In 1969, half of all schoolkids walked or biked to school, but that rate has fallen to 13 percent, according to the SRTS Partnership.

This creates a dangerous mess of cars pulling over and merging back into traffic in front of schools — with small children walking around. The result: child injuries and deaths, especially on high-traffic streets with on-street parking. A 2007 Department of Justice report [PDF] found that, to make matters worse, delayed drivers often speed when congestion eases, in order to “make up time” and out of a perverse sense of road rage.

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