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:

Communities across the United States are going broke, and we can rightly look to our municipal finance systems and our failure to fully appreciate the payoff for density as a big part of the cause. Let’s all do the math so we can make some positive changes in the system because, in the end, downtown pays.

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.

• Share of commuters who walk: Alaska at No. 1, Alabama at No. 50
• Share of commuters who bike: Oregon at No. 1, Alabama at No. 50
• Bike-ped fatality rates: Vermont has the lowest, Florida has the highest
• Per-capita bike-ped funding: Maryland has the lowest, Alaska has the highest

In terms of cities, the report assessed the nation’s 50 largest cities, plus New Orleans (which is not the 51st largest city, but was included for the sake of continuity with the 2007 and 2010 benchmarking reports).

• Share of commuters who walk: Boston at No. 1, Fort Worth at No. 51
• Share of commuters who bike: Portland, OR at No. 1, San Antonio at No. 51
• Bike-ped fatality rates: Boston has the lowest, Forth Worth has the highest
• Per-capita bike-ped funding: New York City has the lowest, Washington, DC has the highest

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.

The study only looked at painted bike lanes installed in New York City between 1996 and 2006. Protected bike lanes, all of which were installed after that period, have had impressive safety results. A protected lane installed on Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue, for example, reduced injuries for all street users by 35 percent, according to DOT.

DOT’s landmark pedestrian safety study, which similarly attempted to control for confounding factors, also found that on streets with bike lanes, serious crashes were 40 percent less likely to kill victims.

Chen argued that her team would likely have found significant results if they had better data about bicycle volumes, which they believe increase after bike lanes are installed. “We think that if we were able to control the increase in bicycle volume, we would probably have found a significant reduction in crashes for the treatment group.” In other words, bike lanes might improve safety per person even if the total number of crashes holds steady.

The researchers also saw far greater numbers of bicycle crashes at intersections than on straight road segments. To improve safety, they recommended extending bike markings across intersections and installing more bike boxes.

The study, set to be released in an upcoming issue of the peer-reviewed journal, was conducted by a team of five academics and one city DOT official. DOT also funded the study.

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.)

“No death or serious injury is acceptable on our streets,” said Transportation Alternatives spokesperson Michael Murphy in response to the new data. “There is strong evidence that bike behavior is improving as bicycling is becoming more mainstream. According to the study, bike on pedestrian injuries declined 15% from 2007 to 2010. During this same four year period, cycling in New York City increased over 50 percent.”

Added Murphy, “Let’s also remember to put this in context. Motor vehicles are responsible for over 70,000 injuries every year in New York City, and hundreds of annual deaths. We can ignore that number and bash bikes, or we can get serious about safety and work to stop all traffic casualties.”

Nancy Gruskin, who initiated the study as part of her efforts to promote attentive cycling in the wake of her husband’s death in a collision with a cyclist, said the pedestrian injury stats should inform the city’s bike-share plans. “Considering the alarming statistics in the Hunter study, I am concerned that safety precautions are not front and center as the Bike Sharing program is unveiled,” she said in a press release accompanying the report. “Putting 10,000 more bikes on city streets without an enforceable plan for safety could be cause for concern. But if a good safety plan is put in place, bike sharing could be a great addition to New York City.” (Meanwhile, study co-author Milczarski told Transportation Nation’s Andrea Bernstein that he supports the city’s planned bike-share program.)

Research shows that pedestrians are safer in places with greater numbers of cyclists on the street, however. A study released early this year by civil engineering professors Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick, for instance, highlighted these indirect pedestrian safety effects. They found that of 24 California cities, those with high cycling rates had lower risk of fatal or severe traffic crashes for all road users. In other words, cities with more people on bikes are safer for pedestrians. Marshall and Garrick don’t presume to have a definitive answer about what causes this effect, but they offer these potential explanations in their conclusion:

The fact that this pattern is consistent for all classes of road users strongly suggests crashes in these high-biking cities are at lower speeds. Such differences seem to be partly due to street network design but also due to other design elements that may well attract larger numbers of bicyclists. While the bicycle infrastructure itself might help in traffic calming, it may be that the actual presence of a large numbers of bicyclists can change the dynamics of the street enough to lower vehicle speeds.

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.
• And it gets worse if you’re trying to get to a low- or middle-skill job. About one-quarter of these jobs are accessible via transit within 90 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter, compared to one-third of jobs in high-skill industries, which are more concentrated in cities.
• Western cities rank high. Fifteen of the 20 metro areas that did the best linking people to jobs via transit are in the West. Conversely, 15 of the 20 metro areas that rank lowest are in the South.

Brookings hopes transportation leaders will “make access to jobs an explicit priority in their spending and service decisions, especially given the budget pressures they face.”

Of course, the problem isn’t just that transit hasn’t kept up with job sprawl: It’s the job sprawl itself. “The cost of putting housing and jobs in the wrong place, relative to transportation, is huge,” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan told an audience at Brookings yesterday. “Not just in environmental costs, not just out of people’s pocketbooks in terms of what they’re spending on their commutes. But economic growth costs over the long term.”

Transit finds itself “running up a down escalator,” in the words of Brookings report co-author Alan Berube, constantly trying to keep up with development patterns that don’t lend themselves to transit connectivity. In Detroit, he said, only about eight percent of jobs are within three miles of the central business district. More than 70 percent are more than 10 miles away.

Case study: Greenville, SC ranks 93rd out of 100 metro areas for transit access. Source: Brookings Institution

Brookings scholars say we are living in a “transit moment,” and it’s hard not to agree. Transit ridership is going up for the first time in decades. High gas prices are driving people out of their cars, and bus and light rail networks are sprouting up everywhere just in time. But the report findings indicate we’re not ready for this public transit moment.

“Nationally, we face a transit paradox between transit coverage and job access,” said report co-author Robert Puentes of Brookings. “While some form of transit serves a large share of metropolitan America, that same service really does fall short in connecting residents to employment, especially when those jobs are outside of the urban core.”

Already, some metro areas, with forward-looking help from the federal government, are beginning to address the job access problem. PolicyLink, a research group focusing on social and economic equity, noted that in Kansas City, where low-income residents can only access 23 percent of the region’s jobs via transit, the region is using a Sustainable Communities Planning grant to better connect people to work, generate reinvestment and new jobs along specific corridors, and attract residents to urban centers that have been losing population.

And in the Twin Cities region, where low-income residents can access about 39 percent of jobs via transit, a Sustainable Communities Regional Planning grant is helping integrate commuter rail, two light rail lines, and a bus rapid transit system to connect residents to newly created and currently existing job centers around each transit corridor.

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.

The IIHS says criticism of the cameras is overblown and ignores the human toll of traffic collisions. A Washington Post story on the IIHS report notes a AAA survey that found just eight percent of D.C. drivers in opposition to red light cameras. Yet the merits of lifesaving traffic tech tend to be drowned out by the vocal minority. “Somehow, the people who get tickets because they have broken the law have been cast as the victims,” says Adrian Lund, president of IIHS. “We rarely hear about the real victims — the people who are killed or injured by these lawbreakers.”

Most of those victims are not the drivers who cause the collisions. Nearly two-thirds of those killed by red light runners in 2009 were occupants of other vehicles, passengers in the red light runners’ vehicles, pedestrians or cyclists.

As if to prove Lund’s point, the Post reports that two Virginia lawmakers have proposed legislation restricting cities’ use of red light cameras in their state. In contrast to AAA’s New York branch, which recently panned efforts to step up automated speed enforcement, AAA Mid-Atlantic supports red light cameras, and has denounced the Virginia bills.

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.

“The study would have been better and more balanced if, for example, Reid Ewing had been a third co-author,” said Deron Lovaas, transportation policy analyst for NRDC. “I wish that Pew had structured this differently. They structured it so that it’s very strong and aggressive in its vehicles and fuels focus and it’s lacking in its focus on other measures that affect travel activity and travel efficiency.”

The report finds that transit makes up such a low proportion of passenger-miles in this country that even doubling transit usage would represent a small improvement in emissions. It also asserts that transit is usually “only modestly more energy-efficient than personal vehicles.”

“Yeah it’s a very low percentage of current passenger miles,” Lovaas told Streetsblog. “That’s true. But hybrid electric vehicle sales also account for about that percentage of total vehicle sales, currently. Let’s be fair, this is a long slope to climb either for breakthrough technologies such as hybrid electric vehicle technology, or for transit systems that attract higher ridership.”

Indeed, the Pew study envisions a world where people are making vastly different vehicle choices than they are today (even in the age of the three-dollar-gallon) but rejects a future where transit is a more viable travel option. Even more strangely, the authors dismiss smart growth the same way, saying local control of land use regulation is an insurmountable barrier to instituting compact models of development.

Compact development means fewer vehicle miles traveled - a recipe for lower emissions. Image: NY Dept. of Environmental Conservation

“Homeowners living in low-density communities may be opposed to higher density zoning in or near their neighborhoods,” the authors write, and “the [National Research Council] notes that state and citywide policies for promoting compact development are quite limited, and they speculate that strong political resistance explains the scarcity of such efforts.”

The real estate market is telling a different story. “The Pew study is basically saying that people want to continue to drive – and drive and drive – and we can make them drive without having the emissions problem but they’re still going to want to drive. And that’s not necessarily what’s happening anymore,” said Chuck Kooshian, transportation policy analyst for the Center for Clean Air Policy. “How much more driving do you want to do?”

The question, as summed up by Steve Winkelman, who also specializes in transportation with CCAP, boils down to this: “Why is Brooklyn so expensive?”

“People are moving in to communities where they have accessibility, where you can get your dry cleaning and coffee on your way to work, instead of being in traffic,” Winkelman said. “People are voting with their feet.”

Indeed, in the fallout from the housing crash, real estate held far more of its value in walkable cities than in the drivable suburbs. Study after study shows that public preferences are shifting toward smart growth-inspired, walkable communities, and you can tell by the housing prices in many places that that kind of development is far undersupplied.

So why the skepticism on Pew’s part that smart growth could be a key to a lower-carbon future? The report states, “The primary GHG benefit [from compact development] comes from reduced VMT rather than actual mode shifts.” Isn’t a reduction in travel a better solution than finding marginally cleaner ways to log the same number of miles? Especially given the other costs of driving that cleaner fuels don’t address – safety, land conservation, community cohesion – it makes more sense to look beyond the automobile.

Note: the Center for Clean Air Policy released their report yesterday on how smart growth can mitigate climate change and boost the economy. It’s a useful counterpoint to the Pew study. We’ll say more about the CCAP story in a bit. In the meantime, you can check it out for yourself.

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.

Highway expansions are often justified as projects that relieve traffic and, believe it or not, reduce pollution. So if a highway widening achieved its stated aims, it would cut congestion and fuel consumption, which would mean fewer gas tax dollars and roads that don’t pay for even a fraction of their construction costs. However, we know that new highway capacity doesn’t actually reduce driving – it induces more driving.

The additional traffic created by expanding highways does generate more gas tax revenue, but still not enough to come close to covering the costs of new roads.

U.S. PIRG cites the Pew Charitable Trusts’ SubsidyScope project, which found that “user fees paid for only 51 percent of highway costs, down 10 percent over the course of a single decade.”

Even if gas taxes were the direct user payment they’re made out to be, no one seems to have much appetite for making sure they actually pay for the infrastructure needs in this country. Gas taxes haven’t risen to accommodate more fuel efficient cars or even for plain old inflation. Nor have they compensated for the fact that driving is declining, meaning less gas consumption (but, puzzlingly, not less road-building).

The federal gas tax hasn’t gone up since 1993.

The Highway Funding System as a Subsidy for Driving

The argument that drivers pay for roads might be somewhat more credible if they weren’t taking money away from other public funding streams. Gasoline is exempt from sales taxes in 37 states and the District of Columbia. So rather than paying into the general revenues for the state, motorists are paying into an already narrowly prescribed pot of funding, which highway advocates want to see prescribed even more narrowly to exclude transit and bike/pedestrian projects.

In New Jersey, the savings on the sales tax exceeds the gas tax drivers have to pay. In that way, the government actually provides a financial incentive to purchase gas and drive. And since gas taxes are fixed and sales taxes are percentages of the purchase price, more and more states could end up with this perverse subsidy as gas prices rise.

Photo: Sound Eco Adventures

What About Tolls?

Tolls are, indeed, an honest-to-goodness user fee, charging drivers directly for the road they’re driving on. But the overwhelming majority of roads are not funded by tolls. Local streets don’t have tolls. Rural highways don’t often have them. And tolls don’t come close to covering the costs of roads. According to U.S. PIRG, “In the 1950s, experts estimated that no more than 9,000 miles of highway (compared with the more than 3 million miles of highway in existence at that time) could support themselves with tolls.”

Founding Fathers

The report goes into ancient history (the Hoover administration), investigating the original intent of the gas tax at both the state and federal levels, and debunking the myth that they were always intended to pay only for highways. Indeed, federal gas taxes originated in the 1930s and were dedicated exclusively for highways only for a 17-year period, starting in 1956, covering the construction of the interstate highway system. Since 1973, the gas tax has been used for a variety of transportation programs and has even been used, on occasion, to pay down the deficit.

External Costs

And now the obvious: You can’t measure all the costs of driving with the price of asphalt. The U.S. PIRG report gives a laundry list of external costs associated with driving, including:

Photo:ret0dd/Flickr

• Changes in the risk of accidents, including injuries to non-drivers and damages to property.
• Environmental and public health impacts, including smog, greenhouse gases, water pollution from highway runoff, and the impacts on wildlife and outdoor enthusiasts.
• National security and economic implications of protecting access to foreign oil.
• Increased pressure on those without cars.
• Quality of life and the impact of roads on active transportation, such as walking and biking.
• Car-centric development patterns, sprawl, and the resulting infrastructure costs for the expansion of water, sewer, and other services.

The report cites one study that finds that, just to pay for roads, user fees need to be 20 to 70 cents higher, and another study that finds that, to pay for external costs like these, we’d have to add another $2.10 a gallon.

The Cost of the Myths

“Road advocates use these myths about the gas tax being this user fee and that highways pay for themselves to get preferential treatment, and to get a larger chunk of the dedicated fund,” says Smith of U.S. PIRG. “Advocates of any type of policy would like a dedicated fund, because it is a stable source of funding.”

The myths associated with road financing put all other forms of transportation at a disadvantage, said Smith. “Conservatives say all other transit is social policy and should come from the general fund.”

With a Republican majority in the House, the myth that roads pay for themselves will be again be enlisted to prioritize highways over transit, as the GOP begins shaping a transportation agenda around “getting back to basics” and cutting spending, especially for transit.

“We want to make sure that those falsehoods are not a part of this debate,” said Smith. “People will think twice before saying roads pay for themselves when the numbers say they don’t.”

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:

• Model a new evaluation system for project proposals on TIGER, basing awards on merit and performance metrics. Add more transparency and specificity to the process. Make TIGER and the High Speed Rail program permanent.
• Start transitioning from the gas tax to a more direct user fee system, like a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) fee. Support “aggressive research” and development, especially to address concerns about privacy and administering a mileage fee. These issues will take time to iron out, and the next two years are a perfect time to do that work.
• Invest in a strategic framework for multimodal freight movement.
• Establish a national policy for road pricing, including “standard tolling, variable pricing, high occupancy toll lanes, cordon and area-wide schemes.” Remove “archaic” restrictions on interstate tolling and utilitze state-of-the-art toll collection technologies.
• “Help those that help themselves.” Offer federal incentives to encourage local self-financing, as we’ve seen where taxpayers have voted to pay higher taxes to pay for transit improvements.
• Strengthen coordination among financing tools like TIFIA and private activity bonds to ease the process for applicants and embrace more complex and ambitious projects. A unified infrastructure financing system could also set the stage for the transition to a National Infrastructure Bank.
• Expand the use of Public-Private Partnerships with a governmental office designed, not to make decisions about PPP projects, but to provide quality control and technical advice.
• Work on reducing construction delays by instituting rewards for on-time project delivery and forgoing unnecessary environmental reviews (but keeping the necessary ones).
• Allow greater use of federal funds for rail maintenance to address concerns like those expressed by anti-rail politicians in Ohio and Wisconsin about state financial burdens.
• Cut some “legacy” programs, like the half-billion-dollar Appalachian Development Highway System Program, that are redundant with other federal agencies.

Puentes says these interim reforms could pave the way for an ambitious, six-year reauthorization when the political and economic stars are in better alignment than they are now. It’s a roadmap for action at a time when many reformers are throwing up their hands in despair, wondering what can possibly be achieved in the current climate.

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.”

Safe road design, she says, includes “complete streets types of treatments that slow down traffic, which reduces deaths; they provide a place for people on foot and bicycles, which reduces deaths; and they reduce conflict points, which reduces deaths.”

McCann says it’s ironic that the report focuses so much on Europe but gives so little attention to the complete streets innovations that the Europeans themselves are paying so much attention to.

For example, the Dutch have turned away from building wide, flat streets that increase speeds in favor of roadways that prioritize the safety of cyclists and pedestrians. They call them “self-explaining streets.” Meanwhile, the United States kept on building wide, straight “forgiving highways.” The differences today are dramatic. In 1975, the Dutch traffic fatality rate was 20 percent higher than America’s. Today, the U.S. fatality rate is two and half times higher than in the Netherlands.

Nor does the report mention traffic reduction as a way to increase safety, even though, as Ken Archer at Greater Greater Washington has described, cutting down on driving saves lives.

The NRC report does recommend automated speed checks (proven to be more effective at reducing speeds than random speed checks) [PDF] as well as greater enforcement for sobriety, helmet use, and seat belts.

But it asserts “the most critical area for improvement in the United States today may be in management and planning.” Report authors suggest that the USDOT and states work together to improve safety management, even possibly “an independent traffic safety evaluation and policy research organization to provide technical support and policy advice to government safety agencies and to reinforce accountability through performance evaluations.”

Stepped up speeding enforcement, sobriety checks, and improving traffic safety management will all help save lives. But to really attack our annual toll of 34,000 motor vehicle fatalities, the U.S. needs to design safer streets and reduce motor vehicle use.

The addition of light rail has been linked to higher rates of car ownership, as compared to the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as a whole, but that doesn't mean we should stop building light rail. Image: Dukakis Center (PDF)

Even when the new development is built around transit, which can lower transportation costs for low-income residents, unintended consequences can ensue.

Researchers with the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy have recently reached some provocative conclusions from their study of gentrification and transit-oriented development. Without proper planning, they found, TODs can lead to stratified neighborhoods and higher rates of car ownership. They also offered some solutions to ensure that transit-oriented development achieves its intended goals, such as preserving affordable housing and restricting parking in new developments.

Historically, the authors note, transit-rich neighborhoods tend to be diverse. The low-income people and people of color who live there often don’t have cars and they depend on public transportation. They also usually rent their homes — and since rental housing turns over faster than owner-occupied homes, this speeds along the process of gentrification when new transit options come to a neighborhood.

Rents go up as transit arrives (often along with new shops and restaurants) and more affluent people move in. And guess what? Those wealthier people tend to have more cars. That’s the fundamental paradox: the people who are attracted to transit-rich neighborhoods – and have the money to pay more to live there – don’t use transit as much as less affluent people who can get priced out.

The authors stop short of calling this pattern “displacement” – they point to “normal processes of housing turnover and succession.” But what’s clear is that the people moving in are from a different income demographic than those moving out (though the researchers say the racial makeup tends to stay the same).

Income-based housing stratification and more cars are not the outcomes planners want from transit or transit-oriented development. The challenge is to keep development around transit from becoming too exclusive and too car-oriented. How can communities do this?

The report comes with an entire policy toolkit for communities planning new transit (especially light rail, which, according to the research, brings about even more profound change than other forms of transportation.)

In San Leandro, California, they’ve implemented a comprehensive strategy to preserve existing affordable housing and add more. In Minneapolis, the Longfellow neighborhood negotiated benefits that the city then incorporated into the development approvals — making the deal binding. In all cases, ensuring broad public participation in the process was essential.

But having your say is one thing — actually being able to afford your own home next year and the year after — that’s what counts. In Denver, Charlotte, and the Bay Area, communities used transit=oriented development acquisition funds to buy or preserve affordable housing before transit projects came in and drove up land prices and property values.

Some other tools in the equitable TOD toolbox:

• Housing trust funds, which are dedicated sources of public funding for affordable housing
• Low-income tax credits, allocated by state housing agencies to developers to provide money for affordable housing
• Tax increment financing districts, which use the revenue from the higher property taxes in the surrounding area to help finance the building and preservation of affordable housing
• Inclusionary zoning ordinances requiring some proportion of new units to be affordable (usually 10-25 percent, but sometimes more)
• Housing incentive programs that fund transportation-related livability infrastructure in affordable housing projects, which reward local communities for the creation of affordable housing near transit

These are ways to maintain affordability and to keep the existing residents from having to leave. But you also have to incentivize transit use among the new residents, who have the means to drive a lot if they choose. Stephanie Pollack, the lead study author, says it’s just as important to have “transit-oriented neighbors” as to have “transit-oriented development.” One of the most important levers, it turns out, is parking policy.

Here’s what she told an audience at Rail~volution about one transportation package she negotiated in Boston.

This is what the package looked like: it was designed to get at the issue of creating transit-oriented neighbors who would use the transit. One parking space per unit, priced separately from the condo… shared parking spaces in the same garage so people would make their second car a shared car; and a free annual transit pass for your first year after purchase, provided by the developer, who by the way will spend way more on a second sub-surface parking spot for each unit than that annual transit pass will cost them. You have to think about the market housing in transit-oriented neighborhoods. We’re so focused on ‘we need affordable housing’ – because we do – but we still want the people living in the non-affordable housing to be good transit neighbors.

“Unbundling” parking from the price of the unit is key. People don’t notice the cost of car ownership when it’s folded into the cost of their housing, and car-free residents effectively end up sharing the cost of providing parking for car owners — they don’t get the full financial pay-off of eschewing a car. But when faced with the prospect of paying $100 a month for parking in your own building, the benefits of going car-free – especially in a neighborhood newly equipped with good public transportation – suddenly sound like a good deal compared to the costs of owning a car.

The state of repair for America's urban roads, according to federal maintenance data. In rural areas, 61 percent are rated "good." (Chart: U.S. PIRG)

That little-known provision is one of many "perverse incentives" highlighted in a report on road and bridge maintenance released yesterday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups' (PIRG) education fund.

The rules governing federal aid for interstate maintenance, according to the U.S. PIRG, are equally skewed to ensure older roads keep crumbling. Take the cases of New York, where 567 miles of road were rated in less than "good" condition by the U.S. DOT (see categories in the above pie chart), and Florida, where 13 miles were in the same aging state.

One might think that New York would receive more maintenance money from Washington. But as the report points out:

[B]ecause of New York and Florida’s similar number of Interstate lane miles, both states received about the same amount of Interstate Maintenance Program funding over the last five years — $182 million for New York and $193 million for Florida, annually.

Transportation policymakers tend to be inundated by reports, but the U.S. PIRG hopes to aim its research beyond a simple call for extra repair funding in the next long-term federal infrastructure bill.

"We're hoping the report will be a call to look hard at the actual politics behind these problems," U.S. PIRG senior analyst Phineas Baxandall, one of the document's three primary co-authors, said in an interview. "This is not simply a problem [solved by] pouring more money into the system."

Baxandall and his colleagues also attempted to tally the real-world costs of inattention to road and bridge repair needs. Their report notes that car maintenance bills incurred by travelers on older roads is significantly higher in major cities: Drivers in Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco all pay more than $700 extra per year, according to the most recent data released by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO).

And given that the political climate suggests Congress will be hard-pressed to pass a new six-year infrastructure bill before 2011 -- depriving pro-repair advocates of their principal vehicle for broad "fix-it-first" reform -- the U.S. PIRG report also maps the route to progress on the state level in the meantime.

The report's authors highlight laws on the books in Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland that "requir[e] state DOTs to focus on the rehabilitation of existing facilities before building new highways."

Baxandall said he was particularly heartened by Maryland officials' move to set up clear metrics for determining their progress on bringing the local built environment into a state of good repair. "If it can happen in the states," he said, "it will [happen on] the federal level."

In Vauban, a German neighborhood built for walking and biking, the lack of parking requirements has helped reduce driving. Image: adeupa de Brest via Flickr.

The new research comes from Freiburg, the city at the center of Germany's environmental movement and the national leader in energy efficiency, water conservation, and green industry. Freiburg has built 160 km of separated bike routes, banned cars from the city center, and attained an automobile mode-share about half the national average. So when the city started booming in the 1990s, planners made sure to channel its growth as sustainably as possible. The result was two "eco-suburbs" -- the neighborhoods of Rieselfeld and Vauban, which are the subject of a study published this month by Andrea Broaddus, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley's urban planning department.

Both Rieselfeld and Vauban consist entirely of walkable, mixed-use development. Each benefit from rail and bus transit, significant investments in bike paths and bike parking, 30 kph speed limits, and a road network that limits space for cars. Although Rieselfeld and Vauban are small, with about 10,000 and 5,000 residents, respectively, they have absorbed a generation's worth of growth in Freiburg, according to Broaddus.

There's just one big difference between the two neighborhoods: parking.

In Rieselfeld, underground parking lots were built to comply with a German national law, on the books since 1939, that requires the construction of one off-street parking space for each new residential unit. Housing became more expensive because prices absorbed the costs of parking. On-street parking remained free.

Over in Vauban, committed local activists fought to reduce the amount of parking, over the objections of a skeptical city and risk-averse banks. The eventual compromise required all residents to pay for the land that their parking space would occupy, but gave car-free households the option of giving it to a land bank instead of using it for parking. The households who opted out of parking now use that land for barbecues and soccer games. They also didn't have to pay for parking construction, saving 13,300 Euros on the price of their houses. In addition, on-street parking in Vauban is scarce and metered.

The divergence in parking policy has made quite a difference. While Rieselfeld has one of the lowest rates of car-ownership in Germany, with 0.29 cars per person, Vauban has even fewer autos, with 0.17 cars per person. That translates into more cycling and less driving in Vauban, where automobile mode-share is five percent smaller than in Rieselfeld.

Broaddus's findings and methodology echo the conclusions of "Guaranteed Parking -- Guaranteed Driving" -- the 2008 report from Transportation Alternatives that demonstrated how the availability of parking spaces at home leads more Jackson Heights residents to drive compared to Park Slope residents.

The fact that most New Yorkers have access to good transit options and walkable street grids should be all the more reason to pursue a coherent parking strategy. Even in places that have seemingly adopted livable streets principles across the board, parking policy is still a powerful lever to make transportation safer and more sustainable.

Nine pedestrians were killed on Third Ave. in Manhattan between 2006 and 2008.

According to a TSTC analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data from 2006 to 2008, Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and Manhattan's Third Avenue saw nine fatalities each, with Broadway close behind at eight. Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, Kings Highway in Brooklyn and Staten Island's Hylan Boulevard all had seven deaths during the three year period.

Kings Highway is a new addition to the list; the rest were singled out in TSTC's 2008 report, which encompassed 2005-2007 data.

"The most dangerous roads for walking are either major suburban roadways dotted with retail destinations but designed exclusively for fast-moving car traffic or extremely busy urban roads," said author Michelle Ernst. Topping the list again were Hempstead Turnpike in Nassau County and Sunrise Highway in Suffolk County, with 13 and 11 fatalities, respectively.

TSTC and other advocates called for the New York State DOT to increase investments in pedestrian safety and, while lauding NYCDOT for its efforts, agreed that more can and should be done. "The design of these streets encourages dangerous driving behavior like speeding and failure to yield," said Transportation Alternatives' Paul Steely White. "In a region where many families don’t own cars, that so many streets should be hostile to walking is appalling."

Marking the release of the report, volunteers from AARP today assessed conditions on Third Ave. using a walkability survey developed by the AARP Public Policy Institute. Results will be shared with city officials. Seniors across the metro region suffer a disproportionate number of deaths at the hands of drivers. 

The full report, along with county fact sheets and links to interactive Google Maps, is available here.

Photo: Penn State.

But there's not as much in the way of hard studies of the effects of land use as we might like -- mainly because it's been a non-issue, so far as most of the country is concerned, for much of recent history.

Aiming to address this (and acting under a congressional mandate), the Transportation Research Board recently completed a study that has now resulted in a very large report: "Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO Emissions."

The report is actually five mini-papers, and at nearly 200 pages long it makes for a lot of reading. But the findings reported in the introduction give an idea of what it's all about.

The authors conclude that compact development is likely to reduce VMT: "The effects of compact, mixed-use development on VMT are likely to be enhanced when this strategy is combined with other policy measures that make alternatives to driving relatively more convenient and affordable." No surprises there.

Finding No. 2 is: "The literature suggests that doubling residential density across a metropolitan area might lower household VMT by about 5 to 12 percent, and perhaps by as much as 25 percent, if coupled with higher employment concentrations, significant public transit improvements, mixed uses, and other supportive demand management measures."

They note that were you to move the residents of Atlanta to an area built like Boston, you'd lower the Atlantans' VMT per household by perhaps 25 percent.

Better land use results in reductions in energy use and carbon emissions, the authors report, from both direct and indirect causes. (Direct causes would be a reduction in VMT; indirect include things like longer vehicle lifetimes from reduced use and the greater efficiency of smaller or multi-family housing units.)

But one of the crucial pieces of data included in the report is this:

As many as 57 million new housing units are projected to accommodate population growth and replacement housing needs by 2030, growing to between 62 and 105 million units by 2050 - a substantial net addition to the housing stock of 105.2 million in 2000.

Critics of smart growth efforts or rail and transit investments often wave off the potential gains from building differently by noting that so much of the current housing stock is of the sprawling, single-family home, auto-oriented sort. Convincing the people who currently live in such places to give that up for something different, they say, is sure to be an extremely difficult sell.

But that's not the issue. No one is suggesting we rip down all of suburbia. Rather we, or at least I, am pointing out that between now and mid-century, the country will very nearly have to build itself all over again to accommodate population growth. In addition to the 100 million homes now in America, somewhere between 62 and 105 million more will be built.

The critical question is what the balance of that new construction will look like. The TRB report suggests that if 75 percent of this new construction is of a more compact variety, that emissions could be reduced 10 percent or more from the baseline scenario (and that is not taking into consideration the deployment of cleaner electricity generation and other potential sources of savings).

Ed Glaeser argued -- and this is kind of hard to believe -- that land use shifts from building high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston would not provide much in the way of benefits, since, he guessed, only 100,000 or so people in each city would move from the suburbs to the central city. But this entirely misses the point.

Houston and Dallas may each double their current housing stock between now and 2050. Where are those homes going to go, with what climate impacts? That's the critical question.

Demographic shifts and changes in energy prices are sure to encourage some households that are currently living at low densities to move to more compact developments, and that's a good thing. But that's not the main reason to begin focusing on the significant available savings from smarter land use decisions.

The main reason is the growth that America will continue to face. It's difficult to imagine that the nation can double its housing stock while building in a sprawling fashion without facing major environmental costs and economic difficulties. Land use patterns will need to change. And as this report documents, there will be considerable advantages to facilitating that change.

Transportation Alternatives documented failure-to-yield violations at the rate of 24 per hour, per intersection. Photo: TA

Transportation Alternatives is out with a new report today, "Chaos to Compliance" [PDF], documenting the sky-high rate of moving violations on city streets, and the NYPD is sticking to its script. Here's the police response to TA's report, which appeared in the Post:

"Contrary to the report, the NYPD posts traffic enforcement resources where they are needed most," said Inspector Edward Mullen. "Traffic related fatalities in New York City are down 15.5% so far this year, and down by more than 35% since the Bloomberg administration took office in 2002."

"We expect to end the year with fewer than 260 traffic-related fatalities compared to 393 in 2001, and 1,360 in 1929, when highest number of traffic-related fatalities was recorded," he added.

But there's not much evidence to support the implication that NYPD has caused the decline in traffic deaths (going eighty years back, no less), as opposed to changes in street engineering or advances in emergency care. "The fact is, NYPD doesn't know the violation rates for the most dangerous driving behaviors," said TA's Wiley Norvell. "They don't know how many drivers are speeding, running red lights, or failing to yield. Because they don't, it's impossible to attribute New York City's decline in traffic fatalities to enforcement."

To get an accurate sense of whether enforcement is deterring dangerous driving, police first need to measure the rate of compliance with traffic laws. How do you do that? Chaos to Compliance suggests it's not that complicated.

TA stationed observers at four intersections during the morning and evening rush. At each intersection, two people stood at fixed points and catalogued the number and type of violations that occurred at pre-determined locations.

Here's what they tallied at 96th Street and Broadway:

• An average of 117 violations an hour
  
• Drivers disregarding traffic signals 44 times an hour -- a total of 350 incidents
  
• Drivers disregarding traffic signs 23 times an hour -- a total of 180 incidents
  
• Drivers disregarding roadway markings 16 times an hour -- a total of 127 incidents
  
• Drivers failing to yield to pedestrians 14 times an hour -- a total of 113 incidents
  

Equipped with information samples like this, NYPD could deploy its traffic enforcement resources more effectively and bring the same level of rigorous analysis to traffic violations that the agency has used to reduce violent crime the past two decades.

NYPD's TrafficStat program, which is presumably what Inspector Mullen was referring to when he said that police deploy "traffic enforcement resources where they are needed most," identifies problem areas where crashes tend to occur but doesn't capture any data on actual violations. Meanwhile, as TA reported in Executive Order, NYPD has abandoned the practice of accident-prone location deployment, a metrics-based enforcement strategy the agency could quickly re-adopt. NYPD's public information office has not returned Streetsblog's inquiry as to whether police intend to bring the practice back.

While the candidates for Manhattan DA pledge to reduce vehicular crime and increase pedestrian safety, the NYPD's commitment to those goals is still an open question. All we can say is that they won't acknowledge the lawlessness on city streets, and they don't appear interested in measuring the type of behavior that causes 260 traffic deaths every year. "It’s frustrating that we’re not using data in an informed way to bring those deaths down to zero," said Norvell.

A new report on the costs of aging roads [PDF] has gotten a lot of attention over the past week, with both Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and the Washington Post touting its conclusion on the danger of "deficient roadways."

On its face, the report sounds like an argument for prioritizing road repair and modernization over new construction, which is certain to be a flashpoint as Congress works on a new federal transportation bill. But some of the upgrades that the authors suggest rely on outmoded assumptions about driver safety -- not to mention pedestrian safety, a concept never mentioned in the report.

Here's an excerpt:

Numerous solutions -- some simple, some complex -- could help make the roadway environment safer for users. These improvements include structural changes such as adding or widening shoulders, improving roadway alignment, replacing or widening narrow bridges, reducing pavement edges or drop-offs, and providing more clear space in the area adjacent to roadways.

Adding or widening shoulders for bike lanes or pedestrian paths is one thing, but the notion that driving can be made safer by widening and straightening roads (or "improving roadway alignment," as the report puts it) has been debunked by "Traffic" author Tom Vanderbilt, transportation planner Eric Dumbaugh, and others. In fact, making roads more complex and curvy can often serve as a deterrent to unsafe driving practices, particularly on urban streets.

But the report, commissioned by the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC), seems to have concluded that urban areas don't need to be considered separately from interstates.

"Although this study did not break out costs by class of roads, interstate highways are built to higher safety standards than other roads," the authors state -- as if a new four-lane freeway through Chicago or Brooklyn would be a reasonable safety-enhancement move.

Roger Henderson, an engineer at Henderson Consulting in North Carolina, said the report made a solid attempt to link transportation and public health but made "a critical mistake" in treating all roads in the same way.

The report seems to argue, Henderson said in an interview, that "federal money should be spent to cut down trees and move poles away from the roadway. I agree completely when it comes to interstates, but this is the wrong study to make conclusions in any urban setting."

The report's sponsorship may have had an effect on its conclusions, Henderson added. Indeed, the TCC is an alliance of unions and trade groups that -- as as the Post succinctly put it -- "has a vested interest in funding for road construction."

Taking its origins and questionable assumptions into account, however, two maps in the report tell an interesting tale of the regional toll exacted by traffic.

The map above depicts road-related crash costs for every million vehicle miles traveled on state roads, and the map below depicts road-related crash costs for every existing mile of roadway.

The southeastern states of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee rank in the top 10 on both maps, earning them the status of "worst road-related crash problems," according to the TCC study.

By contrast, California and most of the northeast corridor rank high in crash costs per roadway mile (see below) and much lower in costs per million VMT (see above). The study's authors, who hail from the Pacific Institute of Research and Evaluation, attribute the trend to "traffic density" -- making a powerful argument for giving special attention to expanding transit options, including high-speed rail, in California and the northeast.

Still, without an alternative to driving in highly developed areas, simply repairing roads isn't enough.

The DCP study follows DOT's release last summer of a Request for Expressions of Interest to gauge the potential of a public bike system. City officials characterized the new report as a research document akin to a feasibility study, not an indication that bike-share implementation is imminent.

With New York's streets crammed to capacity at peak hours and subways and buses handling historically high levels of ridership, now is an opportune moment for bike-share, which can be implemented quickly and at modest expense. A network of public bike stations as dense as Paris's Vélib would make existing transit options more attractive and relieve crowding on packed trains and buses. Consider these examples from DCP's report:

Over 14,000 northwest Brooklyn residents (Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, etc) work in northwest Queens (Long Island City, Astoria, Sunnyside). While the distance between these areas is short, insufficient transit means that 42% of these commuters drive to work each day. In addition, for some households, the introduction of a bike-share program may help them avoid or postpone the purchase of a car, as trips to transit or other short trips could then be made by public bicycle.

A subway commuter living on the Upper East Side and working in lower Manhattan or Midtown currently walks to the Lexington Avenue subway (4/5/6), one of the most congested subway lines in the city. With a bike-share program in place, that commuter might bicycle to an express stop or choose to bypass the 4/5/6 all together and bicycle to 63rd or 59th Streets where transfers are available for the F and N/R/W trains. Similarly a bike-share system would allow a Morrisania or Mott Haven resident working at Columbia-Presbyterian, City College or Columbia University, to bicycle to the D train instead of taking a bus or the crowded 2, 5 or 6 train into Manhattan and turning around to go back uptown into work.

The report proposes a phased roll-out, starting where demand would be most intense and expanding to cover all of Manhattan and significant portions of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. The map comes after the jump.

TA recommends longer crossing times than DOT's Safe Streets for Seniors program currently employs.

With New York's 65-and-older population projected to nearly double to 1.35 million by 2030, last year DOT launched its Safe Streets for Seniors program to tackle the worst problem areas for the city's elderly. Targeting 25 zones with high rates of senior pedestrian fatalities, the DOT pilot is the first of its size for a city transportation agency in the U.S. But is it doing enough?

In a report released yesterday, Transportation Alternatives pushed for an expanded program that better reflects where seniors actually walk. The main thrust of "Walk the Walk" [PDF] is that the safety zones should cover areas with big senior populations in addition to areas where fatal crashes have occurred. Its recommendations lay out a strategy to boost not just the safety of older New Yorkers, but their access to common destinations like grocery stores, parks, and houses of worship. 

TA highlighted these key findings in its press release:

• The fatality rate of senior pedestrians is 40 times greater than that of child pedestrians in Manhattan.
• Of 10 high-density senior census block groups in the Lower East Side, only one was included in a Safe Streets district.
• Safe Streets for Seniors pedestrian improvement areas do not clearly provide safe connections from high senior density housing to the destinations seniors like to visit the most, such as stores with fresh produce.

DOT is considering expanding its program beyond the current 25 pilot areas, and may weigh additional criteria when selecting the next round of target zones. “We are constantly looking for ways to improve the safety of children and seniors on our streets, which is why we launched the Safe Routes to Schools and Streets for Seniors programs," said DOT's Seth Solomonow in response to the report. "These initiatives, which increase crossing time at intersections, improve crosswalks and expand pedestrian space, are the largest traffic-calming initiative of their kind anywhere in the nation.”

Average commute times, in minutes, according to the US Census Bureau

The study, from the Manhattan-based Center for an Urban Future, examines a number of factors that are driving away the city's middle class. Many New Yorkers, for example, endure commutes that are among the longest in the US. Like commuters from St. Albans, Queens, who spend 51.7 minutes during an average trip to work -- nearly twice the national average of 25.5 minutes. (See page 28 of this PDF.)

Meanwhile, more and more "outer borough" New Yorkers are relying on the bus.

Between 1998 and 2006, 81 percent of the increase in bus ridership across the city occurred outside of Manhattan. The number of people in Manhattan riding city buses rose by 11 percent, but this was far less than the increase in Queens (24 percent), Staten Island (23 percent), Brooklyn (22 percent) and the Bronx (18 percent).

This should be a wake-up call to electeds, including mayoral aspirant Bill Thompson, who continue to dismiss viable transit-funding proposals like congestion pricing and bridge tolls, which will also clear traffic and speed commutes. While pandering to the motoring minority makes for sure-fire headlines, the Ravitch plan, now set to be voted up or down by state lawmakers in the coming weeks, would boost bus service even before proposed tolls on East and Harlem River bridges take effect. This is exactly what working class New Yorkers need.