Streetsblog New York City

Graphic: Planetizen

Walkable development pays — that’s the conclusion of a study recently outlined in Planetizen. For cities and towns facing tight budgets — just about everywhere in the United States right now — the smart way to boost tax revenue is to encourage mixed-use, walkable development, as the above graphic amply illustrates.

The for-profit development company Public Interest Projects (PIP) reports that urbanism produces much more tax revenue for localities than sprawl. Analyzing tax data around Asheville, North Carolina, the research team found that downtowns — places with the most places to shop per acre — often subsidize the more suburban parts of the community. In places like Asheville, mixed-use developments offered up to eight times the tax revenue per acre of a Super Walmart.

Former PIP employee Joseph Minicozzi, now a principal with for-profit development firm Urban3, tells Planetizen readers that many cities are approaching development from the wrong frame of mind (emphasis added):

Our mistake has been looking at the overall value of a development project rather than its per unit productivity. Especially relevant in these times of limited public means, every city should be thinking long and hard about encouraging, and not accidentally discouraging, the property tax bonus that comes with mixed-use urbanism. Put simply, density gets far more bang for its buck.

He concludes that public policies that encourage low-density development urgently need to be reformed:

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One day before President Obama’s State of the Union Address, the Alliance for Biking and Walking has released its 2012 Benchmarking Report. Once again, the report indicates, nonmotorized transportation is getting shortchanged by federal funders, while pedestrians and cyclists make up a disproportionately large share of all traffic fatalities.

Pedestrians and cyclists make up a disproportionate number of traffic deaths in America, while federal funds to make walking and biking safer are disproportionately low. Image: Alliance for Biking & Walking

The Alliance looks at all 50 states, and 51 of the nation’s largest cities, in its biannual benchmarking process. The report assesses bike-ped travel, traffic safety, and federal funding, as well as planning and policy initiatives like statewide bicycle plans and pedestrian advisory committees.

The bottom line is a mix of encouraging trends tempered by enduring inequalities. The share of all trips made by walking or biking has actually increased, from 9.6 percent to 12 percent, since the publication of the previous benchmarks in 2010. Even the share of federal funding for bike and pedestrian projects has inched upwards by half a percentage point. However, that federal funding share is still disproportionately low (only 1.6 percent), and equates to just $2.17 per capita nationwide.

Furthermore, the bike-ped share of traffic fatalities has actually increased, from 13 percent to 14, over the past two years. This echoes the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data recently published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NHTSA announced last month that fatality rates are decreasing among motor vehicle occupants, and even among cyclists, but increased for pedestrians in 2010. Whatever new safety benefits are currently benefiting people behind the wheel, they haven’t extended to pedestrians.

The Alliance’s report arrives at a time when Congress is still in the midst of crafting a new surface transportation law. SAFETEA-LU, the current law that’s already been extended eight times, is set to expire again in 69 days, and will either have to be replaced or re-extended by then. (Interestingly enough, the 2010 report was published shortly after SAFETEA-LU expired for the first time.) Programs like Transportation Enhancements, the source for many of those precious few bike-ped dollars, have already proven to be a sticking point in negotiations.

While Congress draws out the reauthorization process, the Alliance report offers insights into what states and cities have accomplished in the meantime. The state leaders in bike-ped policy are unchanged from 2010, with one exception: Virginia has been supplanted by its neighbor to the north, Maryland, as the state with the lowest per-capita bike-ped funding. You can see more leaders and laggards after the jump, or read the full report here.

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The city's older painted bike lanes, like the Fort Washington Avenue lane shown here, lead more people to ride bikes, not to more crashes. Photo: Department of City Planning

New York City’s tabloid media simply can’t stop seeing the city’s bike boom as a mortal threat to pedestrians. Even research showing a decline in the number of bike-ped crashes was somehow spun to say the opposite, that more cyclists were hitting pedestrians than ever. Now, new peer-reviewed research confirms once again that bike lanes don’t endanger pedestrians and don’t cause more crashes. If anything, researchers say, they make streets safer.

Even though they attract more cyclists onto the street, New York City’s painted bike lanes don’t lead to any increase in the number of traffic crashes, according to a new study in the American Journal of Public Health. The study’s authors expect that if they could adequately control for increased bike traffic, the numbers would show that crash rates went down due to the installation of bike lanes.

The researchers attempted to mimic the structure of a true experiment by pairing each street with a bike lane to a street without a bike lane that was otherwise as similar as possible. They attempted to control not only for design features like the number and direction of the lanes and the presence of stop signs or traffic signals, but also contextual factors like population and retail density. That enabled them to factor out the significant increase in traffic safety that has taken place across all of New York City.

“The difference between the treatment group and the comparison group in terms of a reduction is just not significant,” author Cynthia Chen, a transportation engineer at the University of Washington, told Streetsblog. The change in the number of crashes was statistically insignificant not only for total crashes, but for vehicle crashes, bike crashes, pedestrian crashes, and crashes that caused death or serious injury.

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Follow the tabloid media, and you’d think that New York City has been swept by “bike bedlam,” a tide of scofflaw cyclists striking fear into the hearts of pedestrians everywhere. Sift through actual pedestrian safety data, and the actual risk posed by cyclists pales in comparison to that posed by motor vehicles: while over the last five years, 766 city pedestrians have been killed by drivers, only three were killed by cyclists. Even so, it’s generally been difficult to measure exactly how many — or how few — pedestrians are injured by cyclists every year.

New research from two Hunter College professors provides a precise count of pedestrian injuries caused by bikes in New York state. Using a comprehensive statewide database, sociologist Peter Tuckel and urban planner William Milczarski found that each year, an average of roughly 1,000 pedestrians received medical treatment after crashes with cyclists. A little over half of those injuries, 55 percent, took place in New York City.

Tuckel and Milczarski’s statistics show a larger number of pedestrians injured by cyclists than previous estimates; earlier research found that about 1,200 pedestrians nationwide are treated in emergency rooms each year as a result of bike crashes. But the new data also suggest that the injuries tend not to be severe. Statewide, an average about 85 pedestrians are admitted to hospitals as in-patients as a result of these crashes each year; the rest had injuries that could be treated on an out-patient basis.

For comparison’s sake, statewide, 15,321 pedestrians are injured by motor vehicles every year, according to the state DMV, with more than 10,000 of them in New York City. More than 300 pedestrians are killed by drivers every year statewide, while the number of pedestrian fatalities caused by cyclists averages less than one per year.

Given the quality of past reporting on bike-on-ped crashes, many reporters will undoubtedly try to imply some sort of connection between the number of pedestrian injuries and the city’s bike policy. But the stats show no such link. Pedestrian injuries caused by cyclists are declining even as the popularity of cycling continues to rise. In 2007 and 2008, Tuckel and Milczarski counted 1,097 and 1,112 pedestrian injuries caused by crashes with bikes. The following two years, those numbers dropped to 985 and then 927. With only four years of data, it’s too early to tell whether a trend is at work, but there’s no evidence that the city’s effort to build better bike infrastructure has led to an increase in bike-caused injuries. (There is solid evidence that bike lanes reduce the incidence of motor vehicle crashes that kill pedestrians: The New York City Department of Transportation has found that controlling for other factors, bike lanes made streets 40 percent less deadly for people on foot.)

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Source: Brookings Institution analysis of transit agency, Nielsen Pop-Facts 2010, and Nielsen Business Facts data.

If you’re a middle-income person living in the Philadelphia metro area, there’s an 85 percent chance you live within three-quarters of a mile of a transit stop, and you probably have to wait about 12 minutes for a bus or train. But if you’re looking for work, beware: only 20 percent of the jobs in the region are accessible to you via transit in a reasonable amount of time.

Older transit agencies like Philadelphia’s SEPTA are getting left behind by job sprawl, according to the Brookings Institution’s exhaustive new study on transit access to jobs. SEPTA is a hub-and-spoke system, concentrating transit access in the center city, while more and more job centers are located in the suburbs. Surprisingly, Brookings concludes that some sprawling western cities have better transit connectivity than more compact cities, since their transit networks are designed to fit their spread-out metro areas. Most importantly, they connect suburbs to suburbs better than many traditional systems, where all transit lines meet in the city center.

Brookings scholars will tell you, mapping transit access to jobs in 100 metro areas, with data from 371 different transit providers (some of which sent their data on paper) is no easy feat — “an act of academic masochism,” in the words of Bruce Katz, director of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Project. What they came up with is the largest database ever collected in the history of Brookings. The resulting report, “Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America,” could spur a shift in the way metropolitan areas plan transit service.

After all, there’s a difference between having a subway station or bus stop near you and having a transit system that gets you to the places you need to be. And the most important destination is the workplace. Transit is most valuable when it can take people from where they live to where the jobs are. But most regions are poorly equipped to provide that connectivity, especially for the people who would benefit the most: Low-income residents who need access to low-skill jobs.

Brookings found:

• Nearly 70 percent of residents in large metropolitan areas live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind. Transit coverage is highest in Western metro areas. Overall, it’s far better in cities and low-income communities than suburbs and high-income communities.
• But the typical metropolitan resident can reach only about 30 percent of jobs in their region via transit in 90 minutes. Even in Washington and New York, only 37 percent of jobs are accessible to the typical commuter.

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Many intersections with red light cameras are marked, but that's not enough to appease drivers intent on breaking the law and getting away with it. Photo: Tampa Tribune

A new study shows that, despite their supposed reputation as government revenue collectors, red light cameras are saving lives.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that red light cameras prevented 159 deaths between 2004 and 2008 in 14 of the largest cities in the U.S., and that 815 deaths would have been prevented had cameras been operating in all U.S. cities with a population of over 200,000.

Says the IIHS:

The researchers found that in the 14 cities that had cameras during 2004-08, the combined per capita rate of fatal red light running crashes fell 35 percent, compared with 1992-96. The rate also fell in the 48 cities without camera programs in either period, but only by 14 percent.

Based on that comparison, the researchers concluded that the rate of fatal red light running crashes in cities with cameras in 2004-08 was 24 percent lower than it would have been without cameras. That adds up to 74 fewer fatal red light running crashes or, given the average number of fatalities per red light running crash, approximately 83 lives saved.

The study also found that crashes in cities with red light cams declined even at signalized intersections where no cameras were present — leading to a projected total of 159 lives saved — while collisions in cities that used no cameras showed a slight increase.

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Many transportation reformers were disappointed last week when the Pew Center on Global Climate Change released a report indicating that only clean car technology had a shot at significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The report dismissed smart growth development strategies and transit as trivial contributors to a lower-carbon economy.

Cleaner fuels might reduce the smog but you're still left with this traffic jam. Image: Boxoid

Pew has a well-earned reputation for integrity, commitment to hard-hitting research, and impact on policy debates. And the report, “Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from U.S. Transportation,” does an excellent job of analyzing the potential of various vehicle technologies to reduce emissions. But when it comes to Pew’s conclusions on transit and smart growth, the report is skewed by major omissions and dubious assumptions.

I asked Pew project manager Nick Nigro why the acknowledgments specifically state, “This report is not a publication of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, or The National Academies.” It turns out the report was funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, a program of the Transportation Research Board that works in close collaboration with AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

“They provided the funding,” Nigro told Streetsblog, “but it’s a Pew report. They were just a source of funding.”

The authors Pew enlisted, David Greene and Steven Plotkin, have unassailable credentials in fuel economy research and alternative fuels. But how much do they know about transit and smart growth? Their resumés are thin in those areas. So whom did they pull in to offer further depth of understanding? A longtime official from the Federal Highway Administration.

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Since 1947, American highways have run up a deficit bigger than $600 billion, in 2005 dollars. Source: U.S. PIRG

You’ve heard it a thousand times from the highway lobby: Roads pay for themselves through “user fees” — a.k.a. gas taxes and tolls — whereas transit is a drain on the taxpayer. They use this argument to push for new roads, instead of transit, as fiscally prudent investments.

The myth of the self-financed road meets its match today in the form of a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group: “Do Roads Pay For Themselves?” The answer is a resounding “no.” All told, the authors calculate that road construction has sucked $600 billion out of America’s public purse since the dawn of the interstate system.

The Myth of the User Fee

First, let’s dispense with the idea that the gas tax – the primary source of financing for federal transportation projects – is a user fee.

“If you go to a state park and pay the fee to get in there, that’s a user fee,” report author Dan Smith, U.S. PIRG’s transportation associate, told Streetsblog. “If you’re driving down the road and you have to pay the toll for driving on that specific road, that’s a user fee.”

But people also pay gas taxes to fill up their lawnmowers. And those lawnmowers don’t usually end up on the highway. Just because you fill your tank doesn’t mean you ever drive on the roads funded by the gas tax you pay.

The Catch-22

Then there’s the huge contradiction underpinning the core arguments for highway expansion. Do new roads cut congestion, or do they “pay for themselves”? Highway lobbyists try to have it both ways, but the truth is that neither of these propositions hold water.

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So longtime chair James Oberstar is gone from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and the Republicans in charge now are unlikely to take up a transportation bill as expansive as the one he proposed last year. That doesn’t mean transportation advocates should take the next two years off. In “Moving Past Gridlock: A Proposal for a Two-Year Transportation Law” [PDF], Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program argues that there’s a lot to do even in the absence of a long-term reform bill.

With incoming Transportation Chair John Mica refusing a gas tax increase, reformers can still make progress in the next two years. Image: Orlando Sentinel

The House recently approved a sixth extension of the current transportation law, this one lasting for nine months. Incoming Chair John Mica (R-FL) says he wants to work on a new six-year reauthorization, but there’s no reason to believe it’ll proceed smoothly without a robust financing mechanism in place. For now, lawmakers can’t agree on a way to stabilize the highway trust fund and adequately finance transportation.

If a long-term reauthorization proves impossible, Puentes argues for a deficit-neutral, short-term reauthorization rather than continue with endless extensions. He calls it SAFETEA-TWO.

Why a two-year bill? For one thing, it’s hard for construction projects to move forward with certainty under these short-term, temporary extensions. Contractors and states are timid about undertaking ambitious projects when the future of federal funding isn’t firm.

Another reason boils down to timing. Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) introduced his reauthorization bill to great fanfare in June 2009, but there was no agreement on a funding mechanism, as lawmakers refused to get behind a gas tax increase. They haven’t made any progress on that yet. Puentes hopes that in two years, with the 2012 presidential campaign season behind us and, one hopes, a stronger economy, a gas tax increase might gain traction.

So what can transportation advocates do in the next two years? And what can a SAFETEA-TWO accomplish? Here’s what Puentes recommends:

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Motor vehicle crashes caused 28 percent of all deaths among people 24 and under in the United States in 2006. In 2009, nearly 34,000 people died on America’s roads, and that was considered a big improvement over previous years. More and more, it seems, Americans are wondering why our country is so far behind on creating safe transportation systems.

Better management and enforcement aren't the only ways to reduce traffic deaths. Image: Car Insurance Tips

According to a new report, Achieving Traffic Safety Goals in the United States: Lessons from Other Nations, by the nongovernmental National Research Council:

Nearly every high-income country is reducing annual traffic fatalities and fatality rates faster than is the United States, and several countries where fatality rates per kilometer of travel were substantially higher than in the United States 15 years ago are now below the U.S. rate.

The report authors acknowledge that high-achieving countries attribute their own progress, in part, to road design, but that doesn’t make it into their own set of recommendations, which focus on management reforms, enforcement, and the building of political and public support for those changes.

Barbara McCann, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, says that’s not enough. With current road design, she said, “the priority is put on speed and volume of travel, and that results in more deaths than if there were a higher priority put on safety in the actual road design.”

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