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Research has shown that women are more comfortable biking on protected bike lanes, but the male-dominated engineering profession has discouraged this type of street design. Photo copyright Dmitry Gudkov

A study published in this month’s American Journal of Public Health finds that highly influential transportation engineers relied on shoddy research to defend policies that discourage the development of protected bike lanes in the U.S. In their paper, the researchers point out that male-dominated engineering panels have repeatedly torpedoed street designs that have greater appeal to female cyclists.

The research team, led by Harvard public health researcher Anne Lusk, examines four engineering guides published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials between 1974 and 1999. All of these guides, treated like gospel by engineers across the country, either discourage or offer no advice about protected bike lanes, despite the fact that research has shown that women, in particular, are much more likely to bike given facilities that provide some separation from vehicle traffic.

Lusk found that many of AASHTO’s official claims regarding the purported safety problems of protected bike lanes were offered without supporting evidence. AASHTO refused the consider data demonstrating the proven safety record of protected bike lanes outside of the United States. And since there have been almost no protected bike lanes in the U.S. until quite recently, AASHTO based its position against protected bikeways on domestic street designs like sidewalk bikeways, not real bike lanes designed specifically to integrate physically protected bicycling into the roadway.

The researchers came to this rather damning conclusion: “State-adopted recommendations against cycle tracks, primarily the recommendations of AASHTO, are not explicitly based on rigorous and up-to-date research.”

Lusk and her team carried out a safety study of their own, examining crash reports on protected bike lanes in 19 U.S. cities. They found that protected bike lanes had a collision rate of about 2.3 per million kilometers biked — lower than the crash rates other researchers have observed on streets without any bike lanes. (Those rates vary from 3.75 to 54 crashes per million kilometers.)

Lusk’s research also suggests the lack of gender balance in the engineering profession may have contributed to the resistance to protected bike infrastructure. Researchers found that in 1991 and 1999, AASHTO’s Bikeway Planning Criteria and Guidelines were written by a committee made up of 91 and 97 percent men, respectively.

“The AASHTO recommendations may have been influenced by the predominantly male composition (more than 90%) of the report’s authors,” Lusk writes.

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All government forecasts predict far more driving than even the most conservative scenario envisioned by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group. Image: A New Direction

The driving boom is over.

After decades of steady growth, U.S. driving rates have stagnated and even fallen. Per capita driving is as low as it was in 1996. And yet, federal and state government estimates continue to predict inexorable growth, relentlessly building expensive new highways for drivers who might not materialize.

A groundbreaking new study from U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group shows that any of three likely scenarios for future U.S. driving trends show far lower vehicle miles traveled than any of the principal current government estimates. That creates a disconnect between the kinds of transportation Americans are choosing with their feet and the kinds of transportation the system is designing for them.

Transit ridership is rising steadily – Americans took 10 percent more transit trips in 2011 than in 2005 – yet more than half of U.S. transit systems have been forced by budget constraints to either raise fares or cut service – or both – since the beginning of 2010. Meanwhile, although Americans are showing a flagging interest in automobile travel, states are breaking the bank to build shiny new roads.

Here are the three possible future scenarios for driving behavior that authors Phineas Baxandall of U.S. PIRG and Tony Dutzik of the Frontier Group laid out:

Back to the Future: This scenario assumes that the decline in driving is a temporary “blip,” largely due to the economic recession, and not a lasting trend. It assumes driving rates will soon pick right up where they left off. In this scenario, driving rates by age cohort and sex return to 2004 levels by 2020 and continue marching upward.

Enduring Shift: Under this scenario, the last decade’s shift in driving behaviors is real and lasting, with people continuing to embrace different forms of transportation and more compact communities. Gas prices stay high, the economy bounces back without leading to a huge jump in VMT, and the digitally-connected world continues to reduce the need for travel. This assumes each age and sex cohort keeps driving at lower rates than the same cohort did in previous generations. “For example, if 20 year-old males in 2009 drove 20 percent less than 20 year-old males did in 2001, it is assumed that eleven years later in 2020 they will similarly drive 20 percent less than 31-year-old males did in 2001,” Baxandall and Dutzik write.

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A study out of Nashville by Smart Growth America provides more evidence that building walkable development in existing communities is best for a city’s bottom line.

Nashville's "The Gulch" -- a mixed-use development downtown -- generates a much greater public return than more suburban developments in the same city. Image: Cumberland Region Tomorrow

SGA recently examined three different developments in the Music City. One was a large-lot, traditional suburban-style development called Bradford Hills built on a greenfield site. Another was a “new urban”-style, mixed-use, walkable development also built on a greenfield, called Lennox Village. The third — known as The Gulch — was a mixed-use, compact housing and office development with retail and dining, built on a brownfield between Nashville’s Music Row and downtown.

The study compared the costs of local services to each new development with the revenues returned. Overall, the urban, infill development was far and away the best value for municipalities.

The Gulch — a 76-acre project, including 4,500 housing units and 6 million square feet of office space — yielded the highest returns in the form of “property taxes, sales taxes, and other recurring revenues,” according to SGA. Per unit, the development produced a total of $3,370 in public revenue annually, while costing the local government about $1,400 per year in infrastructure maintenance, policing, fire response, and other general fund obligations. In comparison, the traditional suburban development Bradford Hills generated only half the revenue — $1,620 per year — and cost more to service — $1,600 — making it basically a wash for local taxpayers.

Per unit, the performance of new-urbanist Lennox Village barely beat out the large-lot suburban development, generating $1,340 for the municipality annually while costing about $1,300.

When you factor in density, the differences between the three models really crystallize. The Gulch, filled with condo towers, generated $115,720 in net revenue per acre annually. That’s an astounding 1,150 times greater than Bradford Hills, which generated a total of just $100 per acre. The downtown development also performed 148 times better for the local government’s bottom line than new urbanist development Lennox Village, which yielded $780 per acre.

Developers often shy away from urban brownfield sites, fearing the cost of cleaning them up. Given the incredible benefits to the city of that kind of development, there should be better incentives for developers to look to infill, rather than greenfields, for their next project.

How should we grade America’s transportation systems?

Measures of accessibility -- like the number of jobs in metro Minneapolis within a 20-minute morning drive -- can assess transportation systems without leading to the conclusion that highways and sprawl are the answer. Image: University of Minnesota

The big, headline-grabbing transportation metric right now is the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report, which holds up the lack of congestion as the ultimate sign of a well-functioning transportation system. By that measure, cities like Kansas City, Phoenix, and Detroit — where car commutes can be free-flowing but tend to cover long distances — come out looking great, while large metros that do a better job of providing non-automotive transportation options — like Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York — look like failures.

But TTI’s narrow focus on congestion has come under increasingly intense scrutiny in recent years, with critics pointing out that it is used to justify road-widening projects that purport to reduce congestion but mainly serve to encourage sprawl and lengthen commutes.

A study recently released by the University of Minnesota presents an interesting alternative to the TTI’s metrics. UMN Transportation Engineering Professor David Levinson recently analyzed metropolitan commuting according to a very different criterion: accessibility, or “the ease of reaching desired destinations.”

Levinson attempted to improve on the TTI report by tracking the time it takes for people in the 51 largest U.S. metro areas to reach jobs. His findings stand in stark contrast to the TTI’s report. Large metros like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Chicago offered the greatest number of jobs within a 10-minute car commute, Levinson found.

While TTI’s methodology penalizes cities for locating homes and businesses close together, because that increases congestion, in Levinson’s analysis, higher concentrations of destinations are rewarded for helping to reduce travel times.

“There are two ways for cities to improve accessibility—by making transportation faster and more direct or increasing the density of activities, such as locating jobs closer together and closer to workers,” Levinson writes.

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Oregon State University’s Driving Simulator, which provides 220 degrees of projection, was used to study drivers' attention to pedestrians while making left turns. Image: OTREC

Drivers turning left are a leading cause of pedestrian crashes in urban areas. Where drivers can only turn left with a green left-turn arrow, pedestrians are more protected. But when drivers are watching oncoming traffic for a chance to make their turn, they tend not to be as vigilant as they should to watch for pedestrians. In fact, 5 to 11 percent of drivers don’t look for pedestrians in the crosswalk at all.

Two Oregon researchers observed people’s behavior and eye movements as they operated a driving simulator to see if they noticed pedestrians. David Hurwitz from Oregon State University and Christopher Monsere from Portland State University found that danger increased with more cars and fewer people walking. There is safety in numbers: The more pedestrians there are, the more drivers pay attention. But if there are more cars, they take up more of the drivers’ attention.

It’s no surprise that drivers’ attention is compromised when they have to watch oncoming traffic for a chance to turn. One solution is to prohibit left turns except with a green arrow — a “protected” left — instead of letting drivers pick their own moment with a “permissive” left turn signal — a circular green or flashing yellow, for example.

Michael Ronkin, a former Oregon DOT bike/ped coordinator who now lives in Europe, said “permissive [non-dedicated] left-turns are extremely rare in urban environments” there, with far better pedestrian safety as a result. “[The] clear message in the U.S. [is that] moving cars is more important than protecting people not in cars,” he said.

Pedestrian advocates also favor a signal phase exclusively for people on foot, such as a Barnes dance, where pedestrians can cross in all directions, even diagonally, and all traffic is stopped.

But are dedicated signals the solution?

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There’s a lot to like in this morning’s New York Times front-pager summarizing a new study of injuries to pedestrians and cyclists in Manhattan and western Brooklyn. There’s the pull-no-punches headline, “Crosswalks in New York Are Not Haven, Study Finds.” Amen to that. And to the accompanying photo in which a bus, two cabs, and a pedestrian hang out in the bike lane, forcing a cyclist to detour within a whisker of a truck’s protruding mirror.

The study itself, by a team of trauma surgeons, ER physicians and researchers at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, is featured in the April issue of the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. According to the abstract (the full 8-page article is behind a pay wall):

Road safety constitutes an international crisis. In 2010, 11,000 pedestrians and 3,500 bicyclists were injured by motor vehicles in New York City… [Yet] studying fatality or [hospital] admissions data [alone] fail to capture the extent of the epidemic.

The researchers aimed instead “to identify the demographics, behaviors, injuries, and outcomes of vulnerable roadway users struck by motor vehicles in New York City’s congested central business district and surrounding periphery.” They therefore teamed with the Bellevue Hospital regional trauma center, which treated more than 1,400 pedestrians and cyclists injured in the Manhattan Central Business District and western Brooklyn from December 2008 to June 2011.

That database is a potential gold mine. Alas, the Times’ story sheds little new light on patterns of endangerment to pedestrians and cyclists, and may end up perpetuating stereotypes about who causes traffic crashes. The problem doesn’t appear to be a windshield perspective; Times reporter Matt Flegenheimer has evinced refreshingly little of the Times’ habitual pro-driver bias since taking over the transportation beat last year. Rather, it’s the age-old pitfall in reporting epidemiological results: the case of the missing denominator.

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Adults aged 18–64 who said they had talked on their cell phone while driving in the past 30 days, by country. Image: CDC

If you’ve been on a U.S. street anytime in the past few years, it comes as no surprise to hear that way too many Americans are yammering away on their cell phones — or worse, OMG’ing and LOL’ing with their friends on text and email — while driving. A new report from the CDC — from their ”Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” — shows just how bad the American habit is.

Nine-year-old Erica Forney was killed by a distracted driver while riding her bike in 2008. Photo: Distraction.gov

The CDC looked at 2011 data on distracted driving rates in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States and found that people in the U.S. are by far the worst offenders. Of all the Europeans surveyed, the Portuguese most closely mirrored our dangerous ways.

More than two-thirds (68.7 percent) of U.S. adult drivers (aged 18–64) admitted in surveys to talking on their cell phones while driving at least once in the past 30 days. Almost a third (31.2 percent) admitted to reading or sending texts or e-mails while driving at least once during that time.

Our Portuguese counterparts had the highest rates in Europe for both of these behaviors – 59.4 percent said they’d talked on the phone and 31.3 percent had texted or emailed while driving in the past 30 days. But from there, the rates in Europe plummet. In the UK, just 20.5 percent admitted to talking while driving, and only 15.1 percent of Spaniards say they text and drive.

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Civic pride, attachment to community — what does that have to do with how you get around? According to a recent study commissioned by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, possibly quite a bit.

People who use MARTA to get around Atlanta report feeling a stronger connection to the region. Image: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A survey of more than 800 residents from the 10-county Atlanta area found those who use MARTA reported a stronger connection to their community. A total of 51 percent of MARTA riders reported they felt a strong connection to the Atlanta region, compared with just 23 percent of those who do not use the transit service. In addition, 72 percent of MARTA riders said they had a strong connection to their neighborhood, compared to 65 percent of drivers.

It’s easy to imagine how daily strolls to the transit station and riding around the city in the shared space of a train car could inspire feelings of community — even in a town like Atlanta, which isn’t known as a transit haven.

Many of the newspaper’s interviewees testified to that effect:

Some MARTA riders say riding the buses and trains exposes them to more people and places, as opposed to the isolated transport of riding in a car.

“I meet people from everywhere — Ethiopia, Jamaica, Canada, Michigan,” said Angel Lemond, 23, who commutes from Riverdale to classes at Georgia Perimeter College. “I talk probably every day with somebody just to pass the time on the train.”

But the paper said there was still a question of cause and effect. Does MARTA make people more civic-minded or do more civic-oriented people gravitate toward MARTA?

Either way, the AJC said strengthening the “social fabric” might be one more benefit transit provides to the region. Unfortunately, MARTA customers are now facing a third fare increase in just four years.

States do a poor job safeguarding against corruption, according to a recent report from the Center for Public Integrity. The list above ranks state ethical protections in descending order. The green states received "B" grades; yellow ones got "C"s; orange ones earned a "D"s and the red ones failed. Image: Center for Public Integrity

Last week we looked at three state DOTs which are currently led by former lobbyists for the asphalt or energy industries. The “Revolving Door” series highlighted how billions in federal funding for transportation get funneled, with no oversight, to states where money and politics corrupt policy and lead to shocking amounts of waste.

While it’s outrageous that a state DOT chief can flit back and forth between lobbying gigs and the public sector, or dole out enormous contracts designed to benefit the governor’s political benefactors, such antics aren’t limited to the three states we profiled. For a good survey of the lax ethics rules that prevail in most American statehouses (affecting not just transportation but all aspects of state policy), check out the Center for Public Integrity’s State Integrity Investigation.

CPI’s recent analysis found that loose state ethics rules and oversight are the norm, not the exception, in state capitals around the country. The group graded all 50 states, and not a single one scored an A. Only five states managed Bs. The rest were all mediocre-to-abysmal.

The three states Streetsblog examined — Ohio, Texas, and Oklahoma — received Ds for overall ethics oversight and transparency.

The report found that, across the country, state-level ethics protections are weak, and where they do exist, they often lack teeth.

Tennessee, for example, started a state ethics commission six years ago, but has yet to issue a single citation.

Notably, in CPI’s investigation, Ohio, Texas and Oklahoma all rated below 50 percent — a failing grade — on “regulating conflicts of interest by the executive branch” — the rules and oversight that would apply to state DOT directors.

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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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