Introducing the newest member of the Streetsblog family… Luna Blue Evans-Snyder was born the afternoon of January 13. She weighed in at 6 pounds, 12 ounces.
As you might imagine, Tanya’s byline is going to be a little scarce over the next several weeks. If you’d like to send her well-wishes and recommendations for a good balance bike, you can reach her at tanya.c.snyder@gmail.com.
More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill
One day before President Obama’s State of the Union Address, the Alliance for Biking and Walking has released its 2012 Benchmarking Report. Once again, the report indicates, nonmotorized transportation is getting shortchanged by federal funders, while pedestrians and cyclists make up a disproportionately large share of all traffic fatalities.
Pedestrians and cyclists make up a disproportionate number of traffic deaths in America, while federal funds to make walking and biking safer are disproportionately low. Image: Alliance for Biking & Walking
The Alliance looks at all 50 states, and 51 of the nation’s largest cities, in its biannual benchmarking process. The report assesses bike-ped travel, traffic safety, and federal funding, as well as planning and policy initiatives like statewide bicycle plans and pedestrian advisory committees.
The bottom line is a mix of encouraging trends tempered by enduring inequalities. The share of all trips made by walking or biking has actually increased, from 9.6 percent to 12 percent, since the publication of the previous benchmarks in 2010. Even the share of federal funding for bike and pedestrian projects has inched upwards by half a percentage point. However, that federal funding share is still disproportionately low (only 1.6 percent), and equates to just $2.17 per capita nationwide.
Furthermore, the bike-ped share of traffic fatalities has actually increased, from 13 percent to 14, over the past two years. This echoes the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data recently published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NHTSA announced last month that fatality rates are decreasing among motor vehicle occupants, and even among cyclists, but increased for pedestrians in 2010. Whatever new safety benefits are currently benefiting people behind the wheel, they haven’t extended to pedestrians.
The Alliance’s report arrives at a time when Congress is still in the midst of crafting a new surface transportation law. SAFETEA-LU, the current law that’s already been extended eight times, is set to expire again in 69 days, and will either have to be replaced or re-extended by then. (Interestingly enough, the 2010 report was published shortly after SAFETEA-LU expired for the first time.) Programs like Transportation Enhancements, the source for many of those precious few bike-ped dollars, have already proven to be a sticking point in negotiations.
While Congress draws out the reauthorization process, the Alliance report offers insights into what states and cities have accomplished in the meantime. The state leaders in bike-ped policy are unchanged from 2010, with one exception: Virginia has been supplanted by its neighbor to the north, Maryland, as the state with the lowest per-capita bike-ped funding. You can see more leaders and laggards after the jump, or read the full report here.
MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said the agency needs new tax revenue, despite his generally anti-tax politics. Image: Stephen Nessen/WNYC
The MTA needs new revenues, announced chairman Joe Lhota during a broad-ranging panel discussion at Fordham University this morning. “There’s going to be the need for broad-based tax revenue somewhere within the system over the next couple of years,” Lhota said, noting that he’s generally the kind of conservative person loath to call for tax increases.
In calling for new revenues, the new transit chief gave notice that the system can’t succeed by cutting costs alone. While Lhota said little about specific revenue sources, bridge tolls or congestion pricing don’t seem to be high on his list.
Both Lhota and his co-panelist, Port Authority Executive Director Pat Foye, spoke at length about the need to expand the transit system in the New York region. “Brooklyn is the new Hicksville. Queens is the new Stony Brook,” said Foye, referring to Long Island suburbs whose population boom is past. Arguing that the new urban residents would likely be “even greater consumers of mass transit,” he called for greater investment in the public transportation system.
“We have the need for funding for the ongoing needs, we also have the need for funding for the growth that’s going on,” agreed Lhota. To pay for that growth, Lhota repeatedly said that some form of new tax revenue would be necessary. “The money coming from Albany, coming from the feds is reducing, and the pressure on tolls is increasing,” he said.
Though he declined to discuss specific revenue streams, Lhota said that “an expansion of the sales tax, the small proportion that’s received, would be very very helpful, would go a long way.” The existing 0.375 percent regional MTA sales tax netted the transit authority as much as $803 million in 2009, according to the Independent Budget Office.
Lhota and Foye both expressed skepticism about using toll increases to fund transit and other important infrastructure investments. Lhota said that biennial toll increases were part of the MTA’s long-term budget moving forward, but worried the levels were already too high. “I’m concerned about the level that we have on the bridges right now,” he said, “because they are extremely high and are reducing economic growth and economic development in the region.” Foye seemed supportive of the Port Authority toll hikes passed under his predecessor, Chris Ward, but worried about “upper limits on tolling authorities in this country’s ability to pass tolls along.”
Police retrieved a video recording of the moment Leonardo Degianni struck Mathieu Lefevre with his truck only after the Lefevre family held a demonstration in front of NYPD headquarters and sent a letter protesting the department's handling of the case.
The hit-and-run truck driver who killed cyclist Mathieu Lefevre last October struck the victim with his front driver’s side tire, according to a description in NYPD’s investigative file shared by Lefevre’s family. The description, based largely on video evidence police obtained in December, raises serious questions about the driver’s claim that he was not aware he had struck Lefevre when he left the scene of the fatal collision.
Police released the investigative file on Friday, three weeks after Lefevre’s family filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Law to obtain materials related to the investigation.
In a statement released today [PDF], Erika Lefevre, the victim’s mother, revealed that NYPD has now issued traffic summonses to the crane truck driver, Leonardo Degianni, for failure to exercise due care and failing to signal, but no criminal charges. The statement criticizes NYPD for not charging Degianni with fleeing the scene and criminal negligence, given evidence that Degianni’s front bumper and driver’s side front wheel struck Mathieu Lefevre. The Lefevres are appealing to Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes to review the case.
The Lefevre case has shed light on an aspect of policing that NYPD is loath to conduct transparently. Police and press accounts of traffic fatalities tend to be riddled with gaps, and witness accounts from crash scenes often depict police failing to pursue potential lines of inquiry. Thanks to the Lefevres’ determined pursuit of the truth, the public not only has a better sense of what caused Mathieu Lefevre’s death, but how NYPD conducts crash investigations.
Evidence in the Lefevre file summarized by their attorney, Steve Vaccaro, directly contradicts at least one NYPD account of the crash, in which a police source said the victim ran a red light. The NYPD file indicates that Lefevre and Degianni were passing through the intersection of Meserole Street and Morgan Avenue simultaneously, with a green light, when Degianni turned across Lefevre’s path, without signaling, as the cyclist continued straight.
The new evidence is only coming to light after the victim’s family relentlessly pressed the NYPD to disclose information related to the crash.
Last April, the federal government announced a $3.5 million grant to a consortium of New York and Connecticut governments to promote transit-oriented development. In New York City, planning is focused on commuter rail stations in the Bronx and East New York. Tonight, HUD Regional Director Adolfo Carrión hosts a town hall meeting to gather public input on how to shape growth in the Bronx. Later in the week, Governor Cuomo hosts what is sure to be a fascinating presentation on public-private partnerships — but it will be closed to the press.
Keep an eye on the calendar for updated listings. Got an event we should know about? Drop us a line.
For the uninitiated, the economics of curbside parking can be a tough subject to wrap your head around. Putting a price on parking runs counter to the orthodoxy that has prevailed in many American cities for the better part of a century: more or less, that free or artificially low-priced parking is a good thing.
San Francisco's new dynamic parking system adjusts prices to reflect demand in certain locations. Photo: Parking in Motion
A recent piece in the Boston Globe explored the concept of reforming curbside parking policy by aligning prices with demand. Globe writer Leon Neyfakh argued that higher parking prices (as much as $6 per hour) raised the question of equity. “The result, ultimately,” he wrote, “would be a city where the rich have access to whatever spots they want, while everybody else has to settle for what’s affordable.”
Paul Barter at Network blog Reinventing Parking says wait a second:
How does having the ‘legal right’ to park have anything to do with how parking should be priced? I have a ‘legal right’ to rent an apartment in the most prestigious street in my city. The fact that I, like most people, can’t afford to do so has nothing to do with whether apartments should be market-priced. Of course, if significant numbers of people can’t afford any decent shelter we must look for solutions. In market economies, those solutions are (usually) targeted and don’t abolish market pricing for real estate generally. In any case, surely parking in busy urban streets is much less of a basic need than housing.
This brings me to ‘compulsory car’ thinking, which is a culprit in many of these equity objections. Many people seem to assume that driving is the only (tolerable) way to move around or that most drivers have little or no choice. They assume that if you can’t afford to park in an area, then you can’t afford to go there. Many people seem to be thinking of parking and driving as a basic necessity, like water. The politics of pricing for basic needs is always tricky. Highly automobile dependent societies, like the USA, are naturally especially prone to compulsory car thinking. However, the places where parking is scarce enough for performance prices to be high by today’s standards also tend to be the kind of dense urban places that are richest in mobility alternatives. Cars are one option among many and are clearly not a basic need in order to reach such places, even when such a place is located within a generally auto-dependent metropolitan area.
Poor people, especially those who are car-free, may be the group that has suffered most from public subsidies to auto travel. Those who are truly concerned about equity issues should be enthusiastic supporters of dynamic parking.
Elsewhere on the Network today: M-Bike.org reports that in addition to hosting an auto show this year, Detroit is planning a a bicycle show and swap meet. Biking in LA says that despite the City of Angels’ reputation for being not as bike friendly, cycling fatality figures show that increasing cycling activity seems to have produced a safety-in-numbers effect. And Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space uses the Portland region to demonstrate that urban growth boundaries aren’t necessarily enough to prevent sprawl.
More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill
Transportation analyst and Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff is out with a piece in Reuters today that examines the traffic impacts of adding 2,000 new yellow taxis to Manhattan streets, and it’s not pretty.
As part of the grand bargain struck between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo that will create a new class of hail-able livery cabs, NYC will auction off 2,000 new yellow taxi medallions. The city is expected to haul in a billion dollars from the auction, but Komanoff calculates that in the bargain, central Manhattan streets will be overrun with even more traffic:
No one mentioned traffic when the taxi deal was rolled out last month at City Hall and in Albany. After all, with 800,000 motor vehicles already entering the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) each weekday, what difference could a mere 2,000 additional yellow cabs possibly make?
Plenty, it turns out. Yellow cabs spend three-fourths of each shift, around seven hours, plying CBD streets and avenues. (And of course some are active for two shifts a day.) Most private cars driven in Manhattan don’t do so for long. Even at the CBD’s notoriously labored traffic pace — now averaging 9.5 mph, up from 8 mph before the recession — the two to three miles per day logged by the average car below 60th Street occupy 15 to 20 minutes.
Adding one new medallion is thus equivalent to adding 40 private cars. Adding 2,000 of them — as the City now intends to do during the next three years — would be the traffic equivalent of adding 80,000 cars, a 10% increase in volume.
Some form of congestion pricing would be just about the only way to mitigate the impact of all this additional traffic, Komanoff writes. You can see the analysis underlying his conclusions in this PDF.
The Weekly Carnage is a Friday round-up of motor vehicle violence across the five boroughs and beyond. For more on the origins and purpose of this column, please read About the Weekly Carnage.
12-Year-Old Dashane Santana was fatally struck by a van driver while she was crossing Delancey Street at Clinton Street. The driver remained at the scene and is not expected to face charges. Photo:DNAinfo
A driver was seriously injured after he crashed his SUV in Queens. Photo:Post
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
