Streetsblog New York City

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more…

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

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:

Read more…

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

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.”

Read more…

We see it over and over again in our cities. Migration out of central cities hollows out neighborhoods and leaves the people who remain struggling with the consequences of disinvestment. But when development returns to urban areas, the arrival of new residents can impose burdens on people who never left. Often, as amenities come into an area and crime goes down, property values rise and poorer residents can no longer afford to live there.

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?

Read more…

When Minneapolis' I-35 bridge collapsed in 2007, lawmakers from both parties vowed to focus on shoring up the nation's aging infrastructure. But when the public spotlight faded from the issue of infrastructure repair, Congress showed little appetite for setting aside maintenance aid that did not hold the promise of ribbon-cutting ceremonies or campaign donations.

Meanwhile, existing federal transportation formulas dole out bridge repair money based on the size of each state's maintenance backlog. But up to half of that repair funding can be redirected to other purposes, such as building new roads, with the assurance of continued largess -- as long as local bridges remain unfixed.

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:

Read more...

The evidence keeps mounting that smart parking policy is an essential tool in the fight to curb traffic. A new study of two German neighborhoods indicates that managing the supply of parking can make streets more livable, even in places that already have great infrastructure for transit, walking, and biking. Eliminating mandatory parking minimums, the data shows, plays an essential role in reducing driving. 

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.

Read more...

Streets in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island continue to be among the most dangerous in the region for pedestrians, says a new report from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

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.