Political reality says few if any state legislatures will enact statewide taxes to finance metro transit systems. But they can give the green light to their metro regions to tax themselves. Then it's up to regional business and civic leaders, in this increasingly metropolitan nation, to make a sufficiently compelling case to city and suburban voters alike. With long commutes increasingly unaffordable, and with city-suburb antagonisms much milder than in past times, selling well-conceived regional transit plans should be achievable.

Peirce notes that cities like Denver, Charlotte, Seattle, and even Houston are taking the initiative to fund transit expansions on their own.

Streetsbloggers may recall that the question of how much capital spending should come from local revenue streams and how much should come from the feds cropped up repeatedly during the congestion pricing debate. Opponents argued that more local money for the MTA would tempt Washington to decrease its contribution (while the historical record shows a constant flow from the feds as city and state funds fluctuate).

New York may be far ahead of the cities Peirce names when it comes to existing transit services, but in terms of planning for the future, are we keeping pace?

First the trends: oil costs are surpassing $100 a barrel, global warming alarm calls are mounting, polluting autos and trucks increasingly clog city streets, and health concerns about a sedentary and fattening society are mounting.

And now the developments: Handy bike-for-hire stations are proving instant hits in Paris and other European cities and seem poised to invade urban America. Moves to add painted bike lanes along city roadways are being eclipsed by proposals for entire networks of "bike boulevards" -- roadways altered radically to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. And a companion "Complete Streets" movement -- making roadway space for cyclists and pedestrians, not just cars and trucks -- is gaining traction nationwide.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), founder of the Congressional Bike caucus (now 160-bipartisan members strong), claims a new pro-bike politics is forming, that it can mobilize a 1-million-plus national constituency and force clear recognition of the role of bicycles in the next (2009) federal transportation bill. He and the Bike Summit will be pushing a sense of Congress resolution recognizing the potential of bikes to undergird a greener, healthier and more efficient national future.

Cycling, nationwide, still counts for tiny portions of commuting and shopping trips. But Portland's experience shows the potential, Blumenauer insists: since that city's bike program began in the 1990s, the "modal split" for bikes has quadrupled and a $100 million bike industry of bike shops, bike sales, a start of manufacturing and bike tourism, accounting for 1,000 jobs, has emerged.

Paris' "velib" bike rental program -- the name combines "velo" (bicycle) and "liberte (freedom) -- opened last July and registered an astounding 2 million trips in its first 40 days. Almost identical systems are sprouting up across Europe -- in Lyons, Rennes, Barcelona, Oslo, Stockholm, Seville, Brussels, Vienna. Many others are soon to come including London and Rome. There's also reported interest in Moscow and Beijing.

This April the first serious U.S. fast bike-rental system is due to open in Washington, D.C., followed shortly by San Francisco. Considering the idea or in active negotiations are Houston, Tucson, San Antonio, Portland, Cambridge and Boulder. Among possible U.S. cities is Chicago -- Mayor Richard Daley tested a Velib bike in Paris last summer and came back a fan. 

The beginning of 2008 has seen a flurry of debate -- at least in wonkish circles -- over federal transportation spending. In January, the bi-partisan Surface Transportation Commission released a report two years in the making, "Transportation for Tomorrow," which was promptly badmouthed by U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters for a gas tax hike proposal and partially redacted by the Bush administration to remove a section advocating for public transportation. Just last week the White House proposed paying federal highway obligations by "borrowing" from a fund set aside for transit. With the federal highway bill up for re-authorization next year, huge sums of money are on the line, not to mention the direction of US transportation policy.

One of the new phrases getting tossed around in these discussions is "mode-neutral" funding, which entails allocating money based on pre-determined criteria and cost-benefit analysis, instead of earmarks for roads or transit. Here is FTA Administrator James Simpson (a Bush appointee and former MTA board member), addressing the American Public Transit Association last October:

“Don’t think mode, think people.”  That’s become our motto.

I believe that such mode-neutral thinking is central to a new paradigm in transportation.  I believe that we must stop thinking in terms of mode--no more highways versus transit or bus versus rail. Instead, we MUST think in terms of people and focus on our customers.

And here is syndicated columnist Neal Peirce, endorsing the transportation commission's report:

...the commission faced the necessity of a dramatic rise in the federal gas tax, to 40 cents a gallon, indexed to inflation. And it sought accountability by combining today’s 108 federal transportation funding lines (for transit, highways, railroads, etc.) into 10 goal-oriented programs such as “Congestion Relief,” “Energy Security” and “Saving Lives.” The system would be performance-driven, outcome-based, mode-neutral -- a far call from today’s morass of earmarked transportation projects and billions flowing to states for still more highways.

So would mode-neutral transportation funding benefit a livable streets agenda? The short answer: "It depends."

The long answer goes back to the end of 2006, when mode-neutral funding first gained currency. It was a guiding principle of the Eddington Report, an exhaustive study of the UK transportation network released that December. The report got attention for proposing a national road pricing mechanism, but several core recommendations were less audacious, calling for maintenance and incremental improvements instead of big capital projects.

"'Fix it first' comes out first," said transportation expert David Burwell, who answered my questions about mode-neutral funding in a phone interview last week.

That means expensive projects like Moynihan Station would probably have fewer federal dollars to count on, but less capital-intensive projects, like Bus Rapid Transit, may stand to gain. And a mode-neutral approach bodes poorly, as Peirce suggests, for costly road-widening projects that have no long-term impact on congestion.

In the end, much depends on the criteria used to evaluate performance. Hypothetically, a mode-neutral transportation agenda could set goals of reducing VMT and emissions, then dispense money to the most cost-effective means of achieving those outcomes.

For now, says Burwell, all the talk of mode-neutral funding in the US is moot, because "no one cares about performance; they care about earmarks."

"We don't collect the data that would allow us to have an effective cost-benefit analysis," he added. "The only performance measure that US DOT asks state DOTs is, 'Did you spend the money?'"

Photo: Marionzetta / Flickr

“This is the golden age of safety, the safest period, in the safest mode, in the history of the world.”

That's Marion C. Blakey, former administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, speaking last month just before the end of her five year term. As today's New York Times reports, Blakey presided over the FAA during the last half of a 10 year period in which fatal airplane crashes in the United States dropped by 65 percent, to one fatal incident per roughly 4.5 million departures. 

There have been no fatal airliner crashes involving scheduled flights this year in the United States and just one fatal accident: a mechanic who was trying to close the cabin door of a chartered Boeing 737 on the ground in Tunica, Miss., fell to the pavement during a rainstorm.

Airline safety improvements over the past decade can be credited in large part to a government directive issued after two 1996 crashes -- TWA 800 off Long Island and ValuJet 592 in the Florida Everglades -- killed a combined 375 people. Yet there is no such action demanded to address the ~42,000 auto-related deaths that occur on domestic streets, roads and highways every year.

Mark Rosenberg, founder and former director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wants to change that. A proponent of the Swedish-born "VIsion Zero" (as in zero roadway deaths) movement, he has evidence to prove it can be done, writes Washington Post columnist Neal Peirce.

Traffic deaths, Rosenberg insists, constitute an epidemic we can prevent. Sweden has succeeded, driving its yearly toll down to 440, lowest since World War II. Annual traffic-related deaths of children, once 118, sank to 11 at last count.

How did the Swedes do it? Tough seat belt and helmet laws, to be sure. But they've also begun to remake their roadways. Red lights at intersections (which encourage drivers to accelerate dangerously to "beat the light") are being replaced with traffic circles. Four-foot high barriers of lightweight but tough Mylar are being installed down the center of roadways to prevent head-on collisions. On local streets, narrowed roadways and speed bumps, plus raised pedestrian crosswalks, limit speeds to a generally non-lethal 20 miles an hour.

Britain, New Zealand and the Netherlands are also registering major success with safety redesign and tough roadway rules. New Zealand cut its death rate by 50 percent in 10 years. But in the United States, we're "stuck," notes Rosenberg, at 42,000 to 43,000 deaths a year, adding:

"If those 42,000 deaths came from air accidents, air traffic would come to a screaming halt, all airports closed until we fixed the problem. But because our staggering numbers of road deaths come in ones and twos, they don't get attention. Fatalism is our biggest enemy."

Photo: ATIS547/Flickr

The problem is that the global population base has increased so radically that even seemingly modest birthrates can have momentous consequences. Joel Cohen (head of the Laboratory of Populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University) calculates that if we do add 2.5 billion people by 2050, and virtually all the increase, as expected, goes into poor countries' cities, then the world will have to build one city of one million people every week for the next 43 years. "Is this," he asks, "feasible -- physically, environmentally, financially, socially?"

One sort of shudders at the answer. But there is a first step: get a handle on growth of the world's cities. Without that, how can city leaders estimate the peripheral areas they'll have to urbanize, or, alternatively how much they'll have to "infill" their current territory with higher density development?

The bottom line is clear: the developing world's cities -- and the developed world's cities still expanding significantly -- must plan early, much more carefully, or expect to be overwhelmed by a virtual growth tsunami.

Good planning, for example, can recycle underused urban land, or schedule better use of expansion areas, to achieve much greater people-carrying capacity. Good planning can avoid some of the worst modern traffic jams, put public transit first, make walking and biking convenient, and preserve pockets of "green" critical to humans' physical and emotional health.