I asked the Cap’n what his questions would be. The reply:

Meanwhile, reader Ryan Richter sent in his revised list of questions too. They’re a little more specific, so I’ll start with Ryan’s. With any luck, the answers to Cap’n Transit’s questions will be woven into the answers below.

Thanks to both of you for keeping me focused on what really matters in this whole political hullabaloo.

Ryan’s first question:

1. How will public transportation fare after being practically decapitated in the last round?

Public transit came out a winner when members of the House GOP mounted their full-frontal assault against it. “The uprising was so immediate and so bipartisan [the Republicans] backed off,” said Deron Lovaas of NRDC. Democrats and some urban and suburban Republicans blew up at the idea that transit would no longer be eligible for its 20 percent of Highway Trust Fund dollars, which it’s gotten since the Fund’s Mass Transit Account was created under Ronald Reagan in 1983. Surviving an attempt against it makes transit that much stronger now – its opponents know that defunding transit is a losing issue for them.

Chicago's transportation "action plan" calls for increased camera-based traffic enforcement. Image: Chicago DOT

Published last week, the “Chicago Forward Action Agenda” [PDF] places a very strong emphasis on safety, in addition to setting admirable cycling ridership targets and goals for transit investment.

Highlights include:

• A target of zero traffic fatalities annually in 10 years. (The city has been averaging about 50 a year.)
• 20 mph zones in all the city’s residential areas.
• A five percent bike mode share on trips less than five miles. (Currently 1.3 percent of Chicagoans travel by bike, but in the central city the figure is as high as two percent.)
• An emphasis on street maintenance, or “fix it first.”

In his introduction, Emanuel makes it clear that it’s a new day at Chicago DOT: “Where we once built expressways that divided our communities, we are now reconnecting neighborhoods with new bus lanes and extensive and expanding bicycle facilities that offer safe, green, and fit ways to travel for all ages.”

To achieve the safety targets, the plan makes a commitment to address problem intersections, calling for the city to “analyze all fatal crashes involving pedestrian and cyclists” and improve the city’s top 10 traffic collision locations annually. The city’s ability to install speed enforcement cameras — recently granted by the state legislature and City Council — also figures prominently in achieving the safety targets.

The document reinforces the city’s promise to invest in new infrastructure to improve bicycling and transit, including the already-stated goals of building out protected bikeways and high-quality rapid busways. Among other projects, the plan calls for the installation of 500 new bike racks per year and 100 transit-priority traffic signals.

The “Action Agenda” appears to be modeled after New York’s sustainable streets strategic plan, laying out a roadmap for Chicago DOT over the “next 24 months.” The safety benchmarks are especially ambitious. No other major American city has set a goal of zero traffic deaths, a target first pursued by Scandinavian governments through a set of wide-ranging policies guided by the principle known as “Vision Zero.”

Image: AmericaBikes

At a press conference outside the Capitol this morning, where gusty winds nearly carried off the visual aids (if it weren’t for a few diligent supporters), bicycle advocates joined members of Congress to unveil the results of a new survey about federal funding for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. The telephone poll of 1,003 Americans, commissioned by the advocacy group America Bikes and conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, was unequivocal: 83 percent said that federal bike-ped funding should increase, or at the very least be maintained.

“Even we were surprised,” said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. “From this day forward, we can say with total confidence that this issue has bipartisan support and is in the national interest.”

The poll is timely, coming the day after the first official meeting of the House-Senate conference committee charged with hammering out a compromise transportation bill before policy expires on June 30. The Senate bill includes some protections for bike-ped programs and devolves certain funding decisions to cities and local governments, while early drafts of the House bill eliminated those programs altogether.

Even more notable than the overwhelming support for current funding levels (and “increasing” had the edge over “maintaining,” 47 percent to 36) was the constant level of support across geographic, demographic, economic, and — perhaps most surprisingly — political boundaries. Among self-identified Republicans, 80 percent still favored maintaining or increasing bike-ped funding, compared to 88 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Independents.

“Every way you cut the numbers, it makes it all the more perverse that a few members of Congress would be opposed to this,” Clarke told Streetsblog.

Mount Bikemore: Reps. Petri and Blumenauer, Sens. Cardin and Durbin. Photo: Ben Goldman

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Congressmen Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Tom Petri (R-WI) were on hand to tout the survey’s results and defend the importance of bicycle and pedestrian programs.

“Some people fight crime, some people fight terrorism,” said Durbin, enumerating just a few reasons to enter public service. “The Tea Party came to fight bikes.” Durbin, who sits on the transportation bill conference committee, said that even his suburban and rural constituents are incredibly proud of their bicycle infrastructure and want to see continued federal support.

It’s unusual for conferences to meet in public, and leaders have indicated that this won’t be the only meeting they have in front of television cameras. Still, the sausage-making always happens behind closed doors. Here’s what we’re looking for today:

Could the transportation bill be Rep. John Mica's downfall? Photo: Roll Call

Will anything come of it? “The first day will tell you exactly nothing,” Scott Slesinger, NRDC’s director of legislative affairs, told reporters last week. “You’ll walk out of there convinced that there’s no way they’re going to do a bill.”

In fact, the conventional wisdom right now is that this whole process will end in yet another extension, probably until the lame-duck session after the November election. But this conference committee could lay the groundwork for that bill. Both parties want to get a bill done, but Republican leaders are worried that their base will revolt at the sight of them negotiating with Democrats. So, in public they’ll be all hard-line rhetoric and uncompromising conservatism, and when the cameras are off they’ll horse-trade.

How strong is the Senate’s hand? The House has pretty limited leverage in this process because they didn’t pass a real transportation bill. The Senate is bringing to conference a bill that got a remarkable vote of confidence from senators across the political spectrum, and “the House sent over beach ball,” according to NRDC’s David Goldston.

“The House can’t figure out how to get even its own members together so they send these partial things over to the Senate to cause trouble,” said Goldston, “while the Senate has a bill that’s been passed by about three-quarters of the members of the Senate and was written by [Senators Barbara] Boxer and [James] Inhofe. The fact that Boxer and Inhofe were able to write a bill together is one of the least-appreciated stories of this Congress. So, peace breaks out but people say, ‘We’d rather continue to have war.’ That’s unfortunate.”

Former Transportation Secretaries Mary Peters, James Burnley, Rodney Slater, Samuel Skinner, and Norman Mineta participated in the conference that produced a report and communications strategy. Photo from Miller Center.

If 80 percent of the American people agree that federal infrastructure investment will create jobs, and two-thirds say better infrastructure is important, why is the call for a robust transportation bill being made in whispers? And why is Congress already two and a half years late in producing one?

There are many political reasons — from the earmark ban to wariness of “Bridge to Nowhere” projects to the anti-spending frenzy that’s taken over the House — that it’s been a tough time to pass a transportation bill. But five former U.S. Secretaries of Transportation have said that the voice for change has to be louder. They released a report yesterday, with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, calling for a new communications strategy. (See “Is Transpo Funding Fundamentally a PR Problem? Five Ex-DOT Chiefs Discuss,” Dec. 2, 2011, for more on the conference the report is based on.)

The communications strategy is both visionary and tactical. Its more nuts-and-bolts elements include social networking campaigns and election-year news hooks to bring attention to the issue and make candidates talk about infrastructure.

The strategy is aimed at both leaders and the public. After all, both say they want better transportation infrastructure (and the jobs that will be created to build it), but no one wants to pay for it. The American people haven’t woken up to that contradiction. “Seventy-one percent of voters oppose an increase in the federal gas tax,” the Miller Center report says, “with majorities likewise opposing a tax on foreign oil, the replacement of the gas tax with a per-mile-traveled fee, and the imposition of new tolls to increase federal transportation funding.”

That’s a pretty comprehensive list of funding mechanisms, and the public has rejected them all. Part of a communications strategy, therefore, has to explain to the American people – not just about transportation but about all government services – that you can’t get something for nothing.

Image: PRLOG

In the latest Pew poll, the public responded more positively toward the bailout than ever before, with 56 percent of Americans agreeing that it was “mostly good for the economy.”

It has taken hard numbers to soften up taxpayers — numbers like the 1.4 million new cars sold in March that made it the best month for car sales in five years. Looking to capitalize on this momentum, a key auto industry association, the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), has published a report that credits the industry with contributing $135 billion in tax revenues to the feds and the states.

(The irony must here be noted that CAR receives 43 percent of its funding from federal, state, and local sources. Yes, this research about how the auto sector partly funds the government was partly funded by the government.)

Sales taxes; fuel taxes; property taxes; licenses and fees; income taxes paid by industry employees; and corporate taxes paid by automakers, suppliers, and dealers were tallied by the group. On the face of it, these numbers are impressive, representing on average 13 percent of state revenues. States in which automakers have significant operations can see much higher percentages; in Tennessee, for example, industry-related dollars approach 20 percent of revenues. For these states, being dependent on an auto industry on the upswing seems like a very good thing.

That is, until they start adding up the year-in, year-out costs imposed by the industry and borne by the public. A truly comprehensive accounting of the economic costs of car dependency might include everything from highway litter pickup (Missouri alone paid $5 million for this in 2011) to the price of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, estimated at $3.2-4 trillion overall.

But this is hardly necessary. To blow the industry’s $135 billion boon out of the water, just a few line items will do, such as:

Source: William Frey, Brookings Institution

Last week, the New York Times and USA Today reported that Census numbers had confirmed the death of the outer ring suburbs, or exurbs. The latest numbers, capturing the year (actually 15 months, April 2010 to July 2011) since the last Census, showed a major shift away from the settlement patterns from 2000 to 2010.

That’s not exactly how it happened. The shift didn’t suddenly happen in 2010. The 2000-2010 numbers encompass a decade whose first two-thirds were the heyday of an economic boom that buoyed greenfield development. The real break was in 2007, when the housing bubble burst and the artificially inflated value of the outer suburbs crashed. After all, those houses weren’t near any employment centers or amenities, and the price of gas was creeping terrifyingly upward, forcing exurbanites to pay top dollar to get to work, if they still had a job to go to.

The whole last third of the decade showed a populace flinching back from what was quickly proving itself to be a toxic development pattern. Last year’s numbers are a continuation of what’s been happening since 2007, not a sudden year-over-year change.

What has emerged from the analysis of this year’s Census data, though, is a complicated picture of stalled-out growth in distant suburbs that had developed at a breakneck pace during the housing boom, fueled by overzealous marketing and easy mortgages. Cities have re-absorbed some of those people, but the biggest metros chalked up only modest population increases. And the cities that grew the most were relatively sprawling southern and western cities, like Dallas and Miami, that defy the urbanism of old eastern cities like Boston or Philadelphia.

Fleeing the Exurbs

The Census Bureau itself didn’t actually say anything about exurbs. It focused on the dramatic shift in development patterns over the last decade, highlighting in its press release that the fastest growing areas between 2000 and 2010 were not the same ones that grew the fastest from 2010 to 2011.

So where are the Times and USA Today getting this “exurbs are dying” thing? They’re getting it from William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. He’s been talking about the flagging energy for exurban growth for years, most recently in a report released two weeks ago on the population shift away from outer suburbs and toward metros with diversified, knowledge-based economies.

A foreclosed home in Kendall County, Illinois, a poster child of exurban growth. Photo: Foreclosure Resource Place

Frey’s own analysis looked past which metro areas won or lost in the last year to the finer-grained county data. The Census noted, “The three fastest-growing counties from 2000 to 2010 were Kendall, Ill.; Pinal, Ariz.; and Flagler, Fla. Between 2010 and 2011, they ranked 236th, 171st and 207th, respectively.” And Frey’s analysis showed that it wasn’t just those flagship exurban communities that were losing favor.

Frey found that population in the country’s outer suburbs grew at just 0.4 percent in the year that ended last July, down from 1 percent in the previous year and a 2006 peak of more than 2 percent.

Rural counties last year grew at one-quarter of their rate of growth between 2000 and 2010, but some grew by leaps and bounds. North Dakota, one of the most rural states in the nation, experienced some of the greatest growth in the last year due to major oil and gas development.

Forty-seven micro areas now have populations of 100,000 or more, with the most populous, Seaford, Delaware, now housing 200,000 residents. Considering that a micropolitan area is defined by having no more than 50,000 people in its largest city, a micro area that big is inherently sprawling.

What About the Major Metros?

After the newspapers had already run headlines using his findings, Frey released his own analysis on the Brookings blog. He noted that it’s not as simple as saying that big cities grew while exurbs flailed. Many cities, like Las Vegas and Orlando, experienced a major crash in population and housing values as well. And some of last year’s fastest growers, by percent population gain, were hardly the country’s most booming urban centers: Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, Washington and Hinesville-Fort Stewart, Georgia, for example.

A diversified, knowledge-based economy is one key element of the cities that have fared well, Frey said. Houston, New York and D.C. gained more than 100,000 people each.

Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic drew out some of the finer points in his story yesterday, focusing on growth in the core counties of some of the most important metro areas. “Whereas just 3.8 percent of the Washington region’s population growth between 2000 and 2010 occurred in the District of Columbia itself, 13.4 percent of the same region’s growth between 2010 and 2010 occurred in the central city,” wrote Freemark. “Most extreme, perhaps, was the situation in Cook County (the central county for the Chicago region), which took in 51.3 percent of the region’s population growth between 2010 and 2011, while the county had declined significantly in population between 2000 and 2010.”

Freemark added that the core of the core – the downtowns – were already experiencing a renaissance in the 2000s, and this new data shows that that growth is spreading to other neighborhoods within the most urban county. Of course, in some cases, county boundaries match up precisely with city limits (New York City or New Orleans, for example), and in others (Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland) the city population is a small percentage of the population of the entire county. And he was careful to note that growth in the core county only outpaced growth in surrounding areas about half the time.

Delayed Reaction

Another factor complicating this demographic data is the fact that people move less during periods of economic uncertainty. And if they move, it might not be to their ideal location. We can’t assume that the migration patterns we’re seeing in the latest Census data reflect people’s preferences.

“The reason you see so much clustering of people in these close-in suburbs and urban areas is that a lot of these are young people – you might call them windfall stayers,” Frey told Streetsblog in an interview. “They would have moved out if they could, but for the meantime they’re staying where they are, with parents or friends. In Washington, D.C., for example, you see somewhat higher growth than normal in Arlington, Alexandria and the close-in suburbs than earlier in the decade, when people were moving out to the exurbs more.”

He said that young people who seek out outer suburbs for the lower housing prices, especially those starting families, are “biding their time while they’re waiting to make the move.” So when the economy bounces back a little more, there might be a lot of latent demand for those exurbs.

But, Frey said, when these people do find the means to make their move, they might think twice about going back to subdivisions that are still struggling with massive waves of foreclosures. “The exurbs may be a little toxic for a while,” Frey said, “both for people who want to move there, people who want to provide loans for people who want to move there, and people who want to develop there.”

A bus driver from Bethlehem is being lauded as folk hero in the cycling community after his quick work to prevent a would-be hit-and-run driver from fleeing the scene.

LANTA bus driver Richard Gubish, Jr. was watching in his rear view mirror when a 17-year-old driver rear-ended a local cyclist. When the driver attempted to flee the scene, Gublish acted fast to prevent escape, even inspiring other motorists to cooperate in the arrest, according to the police account of the situation:

Mr. Gubish took immediate and decisive action and positioned his bus across the lanes of the bridge, effectively blocking the path of the getaway driver. Another witness to the crash, Judson Smull, stopped to render aid to the injured Pavlick, who implored Smull to go after the offending driver to get the license plate. Smull also took immediate action, and following the lead of Mr. Gubish, positioned his car directly behind the offending vehicle, further blocking any attempt to escape.

The next person to cross the bridge was a local police officer. He apprehended the juvenile driver and charged him with violating the state’s brand new four-foot passing law, passed earlier that morning.

Here’s another interesting twist: the blogosphere credited Bethlehem’s Coalition for Appropriate Transportation for helping educate the local police force about the law. The victim, Frank Pavlick, works for the organization, helping manage the Bethlehem Bicycle cooperative. He was not badly injured.

Secretary LaHood and Rep. Blumenauer, prior to addressing the National Bike Summit. Photo: Ben Goldman

Clarke set the stage for the speakers by pointing out that on the cover of the House transportation bill — “If you can bring yourself to look at it,” he said — there are four photos of different transportation modes, and not a single human being in sight. The advocates in the audience, Clarke said, will be tasked with putting people back in the picture.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, the Oregon Democrat whose zeal for bicycles is perhaps matched only by his zeal for bow ties, was first to speak. “My goal in working with you, these last 12 years in particular, is to make cycling a political movement,” Blumenauer said to a loud round of applause.

Blumenauer was optimistic about the demise of the House bill, which would have returned national transportation policy to the mid-20th century. “The House bill wasn’t just attacking cycling, it was backed by arguably the most powerful person on Capitol Hill — the speaker. You were a part of a coalition that stopped it dead in its tracks,” he said.

Highlights from the other speakers’ remarks are after the jump.

It's been more than 100 years since Susan B. Anthony said the bicycle "has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world." So why aren't there more of us riding them? Image: Colorado Historical Society

I’ve never thought of myself as a female cyclist. For the last 13 years, I’ve been a bike commuter in DC, and I figured my needs were the same needs as any cyclist. But for the last six months, I’m a biker that doesn’t bike, and that has everything to do with the fact that I’m a woman. So the Women’s Cycling Forum, which kicked off the National Bike Summit yesterday, hit home for me.

After all, I had taken the metro. To the Bike Summit.

Why wasn’t I riding? I just had a baby. So did my partner, but somehow he never had to stop cycling. But then, he didn’t find himself gaining 28 pounds in nine months. Or pushing a baby out his bike-seat anatomy. And since he’s not nursing every three hours, he leaves the house without Luna more often than I do, so he has more cause to bike. At two months, she’s too young for a bike trailer.

At least, I think she is. I have to admit I’m not sure when babies can start riding along. No one at the hospital made sure I had a child bike seat properly installed before I went home. None of the parenting websites and blogs I read list “old enough for a bike trailer” as a milestone. There are other cyclists in my mom’s group, but somehow no one talks about getting back in the saddle the way we talk about the challenges of going back to work or getting babies on a sleep schedule.

Now that I’m beginning to take short forays out of the house with Luna, I’m missing my bike. Bypassing the bus would make those short forays shorter, and more enjoyable.

Photo: Rally for Roads

The House of Representatives is back in town, and its members still don’t have a transportation bill. In fact, they probably won’t have one for weeks. But two groups holding conferences in Washington this week would be more than happy to help them out in the meantime.

First, the League of American Bicyclists kicks off its annual National Bike Summit tomorrow. Wednesday’s program will feature a welcome speech delivered by secretary of transportation and noted bicycle commuter Ray LaHood. (Streetsblog will be covering the Bike Summit all week long.)

In a twist that probably can’t be considered purely coincidental, tomorrow will also see the highway construction industry hold its second annual Rally for Roads on the National Mall.

The Hill reports that the Rally for Roads will be attended by a litany of House transportation committee members, including Chairman John Mica, ranking member Nick Rahall, and highway subcommittee chair John Duncan. A few congressmen will make appearances at both events, including Reps. Peter DeFazio and Tom Petri, both of whom have voiced their support for bike-ped and transit programs in the House.

With the fate of the House transportation bill still undecided, both groups are hoping to win key battles over federal funding. Bike advocates will be looking to protect the programs that keep streets safe for cyclists and pedestrians, which would be eliminated under the most recent House propsal. The road builders will be looking for looser regulations on labor and environmental review, but they will also be seeking more money — money they stand to gain if bike-ped and transit programs are de-funded.

Highway builders have long been an imposing lobbying force in Washington. But rather than using their influence to promote sustainable development or multimodalism, their chief objective is usually to get the government to spend as much money as possible on highway ingredients — steel, asphalt, cement, and so on. Though they certainly don’t reflect all of America’s transportation needs, especially for cities, highway builders’ voices are often the loudest to be heard — and just as often the only ones to whom Congress listens.

However, as we saw when the House threatened to cut off dedicated funding for transit, the highway builders are not the only voice in the debate anymore.

The bill, which would support $109 billion worth of federal transportation programs over two years if enacted — a much shorter time-frame than the usual five or six years — contains few sweeping changes to existing policy. Measures that initially weakened federal support for bicycle and pedestrian projects were mitigated by the Cardin-Cochran amendment, which was incorporated into the bill without a vote. The bill also gives transit agencies more flexibility to spend federal funding to maintain service during economic downturns, and equalizes the commuter tax benefits for transit riders and drivers. (We’ll have more policy details later today.)

“Some really good reforms have taken place here,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) from the floor immediately following the vote. He expressed his hope that the vote will lay the foundation for a “much longer, better, more robust highway authorization bill, but the first thing is to get into conference with the House and see what we can accomplish.”

“It was a great vote,” added Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). “If Senator Lautenberg were here, it would be 75.” Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey was one of only four Senators, and the only Democrat, not to vote.

Boxer and Inhofe, respectively the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, received a great deal of praise from their colleagues for assembling so much bipartisan support. “That’s hard work, and that’s the way the Senate should work,” Mary Landrieu of Louisiana said of their efforts. “I hope the House will take this bill, and I know they have their own opinions of how things should be, but it’s important to get this $110 billion out to America.”

What happens next is still a mystery.

The clock is ticking for Congress to approve a new transportation bill, or extend the old one. Smart money says "extension." Image: Ananse Productions

Here’s where we stand: The current extension of the law authorizing federal transportation funding expires on March 31, which means the worst case scenario is a shutdown of federal transportation programs on April 1. The Senate is close, or closer, anyway, to passing a completely new two-year, $109 billion bill. The House is currently without a proposal of its own, and House Republicans haven’t been keen on the Senate bill — though that might be changing.

If Washington has to stop writing checks to states, then construction projects all over the country would grind to a halt in a matter of weeks, or even days. Senator Barbara Boxer has often pointed out — including at a press conference this morning — that 1.8 million jobs are at stake if that happens.

It’s likely that a shutdown will be avoided. A similar reauthorization fight over aviation resulted in a partial shutdown last year, and memories of the fallout should be fresh enough that Congress would do everything necessary to avoid a repeat.

However, the consensus among the transportation experts, activists, and lobbyists I’ve spoken to over the last few days is that no new transportation bill will be signed into law before March 31, and probably not even before the November election. Opinions seem to differ only on whether there will be just one big stopgap extension, or two smaller ones.

Here’s one likely course of events according to my anonymous conversational partners:

Caution: Parking lots can be harmful to your lungs. Photo: UCTC.net

As we often discuss on Streetsblog, parking encourages people to drive rather than ride transit, bike, or walk. And all that asphalt also taxes sewer systems by making vast swaths of urban and suburban land impermeable.

But an overlooked cost is that building and maintaining each parking space belches out poisonous emissions at a prodigious rate — in some ways rivaling emissions from driving. That’s the big news from a study by the University of California Transportation Center.

UCTC researchers analyzed the environmental impact of U.S. parking infrastructure as a whole. Their research compiled the total noxious emissions produced in the process of building and maintaining parking lots — from materials mining to asphalt production, transport and, finally, construction and repair.

Their “life-cycle” analysis showed that each parking space in the United States comes at an annual cost of $6-$23 in health and environmental damages to society caused by air pollution alone. Nationwide, that adds up to between $4 billion and $20 billion annually.

The wide range is due to the difficulty of estimating the total amount of parking in the United States. Researchers examined multiple scenarios — the low-end estimate being 722 million parking spaces, the high-end more than 2 billion — based on available data.

For certain pollutants — such as sulfur dioxide and coarse particle pollution — the emissions caused by parking spaces were actually greater or equal to the amounts produced by driving.

Yet another reason why reforming policies like mandatory parking minimums will result in better public health and wellbeing.

“We hope that our life-cycle assessment will help planners and public officials understand the full cost of parking,” the research team told UCTC’s ACCESS magazine (edited by UCLA professor Donald Shoup). “Underpriced parking not only increases automobile dependence but is also environmentally damaging to construct and maintain.”

When two companion pieces of legislation pass their respective chambers, they are combined by a conference committee. The committee is made up of members of both the House and the Senate, and it is their job to resolve differences between the two bills. (Most recently, a conference committee forged a compromise on extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance.)

Committee members are limited in that for each provision, they must choose either one chamber’s version or the other’s — they generally do not have the power to come up with something new on the spot. Furthermore, if the two bills agree on something, that provision can’t be altered by the conference committee.

There are already good chunks of the House and Senate bill that are the same — eliminating dedicated bike-ped funding, for instance. The House bill admittedly goes much further than the Senate’s, but if the two bills were to be conferenced right now, Safe Routes to School, Transportation Enhancements and Recreational Trails would all be history. The committee would then have to choose how to weaken those programs: eliminate them altogether, like the House bill, or keep them eligible under Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program but let states opt out of them. Another critical choice: fund CMAQ from the Highway Trust Fund, as in the Senate bill, or fund it from the the smoke-and-mirrors “alternative transportation account” envisioned in the House bill.

Ford's Sync system allows integration of many potentially distracting devices into the dashboard console. Image: U.S. DOT

The new guidelines would seem to be of special comfort to pedestrians, cyclists, and even motorcyclists who have long observed the trend of cars getting safer for their occupants but more dangerous for everyone else. “When automakers employ ‘Infotainment Systems Engineers,’ like Ford does,” says BikePortland’s Jonathan Maus, “that should raise a red flag.”

Automakers are scrambling to find newer and fancier ways for drivers to stay connected behind the wheel, ostensibly to meet consumer demand. At the most recent Consumer Electronics Expo, Mercedes-Benz debuted their in-dash system that supports some Facebook functions even while the car is in motion, in what Maus calls a “disturbing trend”:

Automakers, scared that their vehicles can’t compete with consumers’ growing adoration of smartphones and other devices, now offer all sorts of phone-like conveniences on-board. The result? More distraction, more crashes, more deaths and injuries.

The National Transportation Safety Board had already recommended a set of anti-distracted driving measures, including outlawing the use of any electronic device — hands-on or hands-free — while driving. But the new guidelines, which are voluntary and unenforceable, represent only a cautious next step in making it harder to drive distracted. Gone is the ban on hands-free devices, for example, and the new rules would only apply to built-in electronics, leading some to expect that drivers would find after-market ways to stay connected.

New Orleans' Claibourne Overpass is this year's Congress for New Urbanism choice for "Freeway without a Future." Photo: CNU.org

Latest week the Congress for New Urbanism released its updated list of “Freeways Without Futures” — 12 transportation anachronisms that are increasingly likely to meet the wrecking ball.

This year’s top finisher was New Orleans’ Claiboure Overpass — a 1960s-era eyesore that replaced a thriving, tree-lined commercial street at the center of the city’s oldest, most culturally vibrant black neighborhood. The teardown for this highway has some real traction; a master plan to remove the elevated portion is expected to be endorsed by City Council shortly, according to CNU.

The Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx is runner up, the same position it held in CNU’s 2008 Freeways Without Futures list. This riverfront disaster was bestowed by the master highway builder himself, Robert Moses. Residents of the Bronx have successfully fought off two separate proposals to expand the Sheridan, which runs right along the Bronx River. A coalition of community groups and advocates called the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance has led the charge to replace the freeway with housing and parks, and a group of cities agencies are now examining teardown scenarios with the help of a federal TIGER grant.

The third-place finisher is New Haven’s Route 34 (the Oak Street Connector), which is slated for demolition. New Haven received TIGER funds to convert the road into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard and local officials are currently haggling over the design details — there’s a chance they’ll opt to replace a highway with a road that feels like a highway.

Mercedes' mbrace2 system allows drivers to update their Facebook status while driving. Photo: PCWorld

Mbrace2 will be the latest entry in a growing list of built-in communications interfaces currently offered by major automakers. Ford, GM, BMW, and Kia all feature systems that allow drivers to “read” and “write” emails or text messages using voice commands, which distracted driving prevention group Focus Driven says doesn’t cut it as a safe alternative to hand-held devices. (Mercedes’ new system is operated by knob, not by voice.)

The move was almost inevitable, Facebook’s VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing Dan Rose told Reuters:

“Now that cars have screens that are intelligent, you would expect that more and more car manufacturers will want to make those screens capable of allowing people to connect with their friends and take advantage of the social context that comes along with that,” Rose said in an interview.

“One of the core things that people do on their screens in the car is GPS navigation and the ability to see which of your friends are nearby is something we think will be really interesting for people.”

So where is the line between “really interesting” and “dangerous distraction”? After all, the announcement comes at a time when the National Transportation Safety Board has recommended a ban on the use of all portable electronic devices, GPS devices excepted, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Additionally, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood has made the anti-distracted driving campaign something of a cornerstone issue for his department. So how will Mercedes’ new feature fare in the face of multiple public awareness campaigns and regulatory efforts aimed at combating distracted driving?

Stephen Harrod, Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton, quoted in a recent APTA report. Image: APTA

“Most Americans don’t use railroads, they use cars.”

“There’s no better example of excessive government spending than the $53 billion President Obama allocated for high-speed rail in his 2012 budget.”

“Would you pay $1,000 so that someone — probably not you — can ride high-speed trains 58 miles a year?”

“High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher, but without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system.”

Critics of federal initiatives to promote high-speed rail have launched these attacks with great frequency over the past few years. Their targets have been projects in Florida, Wisconsin, California, or even federal regulators and Secretary Ray LaHood. But their primary intended audience was the American people, and, according to the American Public Transportation Association, there has been a “well-oiled campaign” (pun probably intended) to make sure their message was repeated, and loudly.

APTA is trying to unplug that propaganda machine with its new “Inventory of the Criticisms of High-Speed Rail With Suggested Responses and Counterpoints” [PDF]. It methodically lists no fewer than 37 specific objections to pursuing high-speed rail (grouped thematically into eight chapters) and exposes them for “lack of veracity and vision.” The four critiques quoted above (the first two from Diana Furchtgott-Roth in the Washington Examiner, the third from CATO’s Randall O’Toole and the last from Thomas Sowell in The Albany Herald), barely scratch the surface of the anti-HSR literature addressed by the report.

The aim of the report is to give HSR supporters a way to return fire when detractors say things like:

• High-speed rail is too expensive and will never be profitable. APTA says the question of profit is “dangerously misleading and irrelevant” since “the economic value generated by passenger transportation historically is captured by the businesses served by the transportation network, not by the carriers.”
• It doesn’t have broad enough support. On the contrary, says APTA: Even the Congressional leaders who have been the most critical of the Obama administration’s allocation of rail funds “have set about finding creative ways of financing the initiative in the hope of encouraging greater private-sector support and leadership.”
• HSR might work elsewhere, but it won’t work in the U.S. Oh really? Sure, intercity passenger rail currently serves “the smallest share of riders among all modes of passenger transportation,” says APTA. But that’s changing. “In the Northeast Corridor, intercity trains enjoy a market share almost equal to the airlines, and nationally, ridership on Amtrak is at an all-time high.”

Many of the debunked criticisms point to some combination of unrecoverable cost and only marginal benefits, with the assumption that taxpayers will be on the hook for costs and that benefits will be confined to a select few. Not so: APTA cites ample evidence that high-speed passenger rail could be capable of operating profits and wide-ranging benefits.

Mitt Romney won Iowa by 8 votes a day after making a weak argument against federal funding of Amtrak. Photo: Getty Images

In a landslide (er, eight-vote) victory over former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucus last night, Mitt Romney solidified his lead over the rag-tag field of GOP nominees. He also took an opportunity, the day before the caucus, to make a tired old argument against public support of passenger rail service.

I gotta cap federal spending, and then I’ve got to balance the budget. Now how do you go about doing that?

[Brief heckling interlude]

My view is this: What you do to get our budget in line is you say this. You take all the programs the federal government has, and you say, “Which of these programs is so critical that we gotta have it?” And those things we keep.

But those programs that don’t pass the following test we gotta get rid of, and this is my test: Is this program so critical it’s worth borrowing money from China to pay for it? And on that basis we’ll get rid of some programs, even some we like.

[Takes an easy shot at "Obamacare".]

And there’s some other things — look, Amtrak ought to stand on its own feet or its own wheels or whatever you’d say. And I like the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities but I’m not willing to borrow money from China to pay for it.

(Hat tip to Transportation Nation for breaking the story and providing the audio.)

In this brief moment, Romney staked out several positions that distinguish him from the rest of the pack. First, he acknowledged the existence of federal programs worth keeping — not something many Republicans want to do in these slash-and-burn days. And second, he actually mentioned transportation, which most of the field has completely ignored.

But Romney did echo the mainstream GOP attack on public rail subsidies, which help maintain money-losing lines (through conservative, Republican-voting, rural country) that the government mandates it to run as a public service. In so doing, Romney ignores Amtrak’s record ridership and the enormous success of its Northeast Corridor service, which reduces air pollution and traffic congestion along the country’s most heavily-traveled corridor. Meanwhile, we’re still waiting to hear any Republican candidate say roads ought to pay for themselves too. (Incentive: The first one who does gets a late Streetsie award for uncommon bravery.)

Though Romney’s win last night was anemic and potentially embarrassing, considering the fact that he nearly lost against someone who until very recently was destined for also-ran status, he’s positioned to clean up next week in New Hampshire and run a more consistent nationwide campaign than any of his opponents.

If this speech illustrates Romney’s true view on public transportation — that it has to pay for itself — advocates have a lot of work to do in educating him before he goes head-to-head with Obama for the White House.