Streetsblog New York City

John Mica, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, officially unveiled his committee’s transportation bill, the “American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act,” at a press conference outside the House wing of the Capitol this afternoon. (We will post the full bill text here as soon as we can.)

Streetsblog wrote about some of the bill’s low points last week: no more dedicated bike/ped funding; no more TIGER or other discretionary transit programs; more money for highways, less accountability for state DOTs. To top it off, Speaker John Boehner has made it a priority to attach the Keystone XL pipeline to the transportation bill somehow.

The truth is that there are a lot of things that a lot of sensible people find objectionable about this bill, and they’re having their say while they can — the bill will be marked up on Thursday.

Regarding the changes to bike/ped policy, Darren Flusche, policy analyst at the League of American Bicyclists, told Streetsblog:

You can bet that the performance measures that states would be required to meet will not be geared towards the myriad transportation benefits of bicycling and walking projects, making the “eligibility” for bicycling and walking projects an illusion. In this way, the bill would actually take away flexibility from the states instead of provide it, as claimed.

Provisions that would raise weight and length limits on trucks drew ire from the Association of American Railroads:

“Americans don’t want 97,000 pound trucks or huge multi-trailers up to 120 feet long on our nation’s highways,” said AAR President and CEO Ed Hamberger. “Nor is it fair that even more of the public’s tax dollars will be used to pay for the road and bridge damage inflicted by massive trucks.”

John Cross, federal transportation advocate with Environment America, had this to say about the bill’s environmental implications:

The bill introduced by Representative Mica today in the House of Representatives drives us down to the dead end of too many oil spills, too much air pollution, and destroying the places we love. It reads like a wish list for Big Oil.

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It took a lawsuit from the family of Mathieu Lefevre to pry information from NYPD regarding the hit-and-run crash that took his life. Now they have reason to believe the police are still withholding vital evidence.

Last week, Streetsblog reported that NYPD had released a detailed description of how the crash unfolded, supposedly based on security video from a business located at 157 Morgan Avenue. But the footage NYPD gave the Lefevre family does not convey the same details as the descriptions of video in the police investigative file.

Here is the description of a security video from 157 Morgan submitted by Detective Gerard Sheehan. It delves into specific detail about the crash:

Here are two videos captured from 157 Morgan that NYPD gave to the Lefevres and their attorney, Steve Vaccaro, showing footage at the intersection immediately before Leonardo Degianni, who fatally struck Lefevre and then left the scene, turned on to Meserole Street. In the first clip, the crane truck operated by Degianni enters the frame at about the 4:50 mark, and a cyclist is briefly visible at about the 5:02 mark. In the second clip, the truck enters the frame slightly after the 6:50 mark. In neither video is the moment Degianni struck Lefevre plainly visible.

(Streetsblog transferred these videos from AVI files NYPD provided to the Lefevres and Vaccaro. The original files supplied by NYPD displayed the videos upside down — you can see how they appeared at the end of this post.)

Adding to the discrepancies, a second police description of security video does not match Sheehan’s description or the videos in the investigative file. The description from Detective Sheehan says that Lefevre was initially struck by the “passenger right side” of Degianni’s truck, which threw him “into the roadway” before Degianni struck him again. A second description, from officer Armand Tasca, says Lefevre “rode directly into the side of the truck as it made the right turn” (note that both Sheehan and Tasca wrote that Degianni and Lefevre were traveling north on Morgan, when they were in fact traveling south — see crash diagram at the end of this post):

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All eyes are on the House side of Capitol Hill today in anticipation of the Republicans’ grand unveiling of their American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act at 3:00 p.m. But last night, some enduring questions about the Senate’s transportation bill finally got some answers. Senators Tim Johnson and Richard Shelby, respectively the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, released a summary of the Federal Public Transportation Act of 2012, providing a preliminary guide to how the Senate will treat transit [PDF].

Johnson and Shelby’s bill will serve as the transit component of the Senate’s two-year reauthorization bill, MAP-21, which passed the Environment and Public Works Committee with bipartisan support last month.

In one significant policy shift, the bill would enable transit authorities to use federal funds to pay for some of their operating expenses during “periods of high unemployment.” Generally, use of federal transit funds is restricted exclusively to system expansion and maintenance, but transit agencies across the country are slashing service, raising fares and laying off workers due to the effects of the economic downturn. This bill would offer them some much-needed relief.

The bill reauthorizes close to $21 billion in transit funding over two years, protecting many popular programs and expanding new ones. The reception so far has been generally positive. Jesse Prentice-Dunn of the Sierra Club told Streetsblog that he is “encouraged” and that “the Banking Committee title appears to be a step forward for transit.”

Among the more encouraging points listed in the summary, the new bill:

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In the wake of the death of Dashane Santana, the 12-year-old girl killed by a minivan driver while she was crossing Delancey Street earlier this month, Lower East Side leaders are demanding safety improvements for the many pedestrians who cross this approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Borough President Scott Stringer, State Senator Dan Squadron and City Council Member Margaret Chin have each called on DOT to take action to prevent one more life from being taken by Delancey Street traffic.

A report from DNAinfo this morning lays out just how hostile the design of Delancey is to pedestrians. To cross Delancey at Clinton Street, where Santana was killed, pedestrians must traverse ten lanes of moving traffic in just 22 seconds.

That’s far less crossing time than pedestrians have at some of the city’s most notoriously dangerous intersections, which DNAinfo went out and measured. Reports DNAinfo’s Julie Shapiro:

For example, pedestrians crossing the eight-lane Queens Boulevard at Union Turnpike have a full 30 seconds to make it to the other side.

People traversing the six-lane Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at 145th Street have 40 seconds, nearly double the crossing time on Delancey Street.

Other busy intersections with longer crossing times than Delancey Street include West Street at Albany Street, where pedestrians have 31 seconds to cross eight lanes; Houston Street at Essex Street, where pedestrians have 30 seconds to cross eight lanes; 12th Avenue at 23rd Street, where pedestrians have 34 seconds to cross six lanes; Ocean Parkway at Church Avenue in Brooklyn, where pedestrians have 45 seconds to cross 10 lanes; and Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in Brooklyn, where pedestrians have 60 seconds to cross four lanes.

DNAinfo’s report also includes the above video, which includes an interview with one of Santana’s schoolmates.

The area’s elected officials are primarily calling for pedestrian crossing times to be extended, a move that would surely make it easier to cross. Shrinking Delancey down from ten lanes should also be on the table; no matter how long the light is, that’s a wide street to ever cross safely.

DOT will present its plan for improving Delancey Street next Wednesday.

Remember how NRDC’s Deron Lovaas said the new transportation bill proposed by House Republicans is “a march of horribles“? Well, he wasn’t exaggerating.

This bill, which attempts to make up for the country’s stagnant gas tax by squeezing revenue from domestic oil drilling, takes the concept of sustainability (environmental, fiscal and otherwise) and strives to achieve the opposite. Not only would it eliminate bike and pedestrian funding, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has said he plans to saddle the bill with a measure permitting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, recently quashed by the president.

Some Republicans are even coming out against aspects of this proposal, says Stephen Lee Davis at Transportation for America:

In the Senate, Republican Sen. Inhofe has already said that expecting new oil drilling revenues to pay for an immediate multi-year transportation bill isn’t a realistic funding solution.

“While Speaker Boehner’s idea may be a long-term revenue source for transportation infrastructure,” said Sen. Inhofe back in November, “we need to focus on the immediate problem of how we will fund a multi-year highway bill. …If this is how the House is able to move the bill forward then I applaud them. But we need money now for transportation; we can’t afford to wait.”

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative/libertarian think tank, held a session today on Capitol Hill with a title that leaves little mystery about their position: “Don’t Drill And Drive: Weakening The “User-Pays” Highway Funding Principle Would Endanger Our Nation’s Transportation Infrastructure.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Exit 133 reports there is a grassroots campaign to “depave Tacoma” by removing unnecessary parking lots. Renew Lehigh Valley says smart growth isn’t partisan politics, it’s common sense. And PubliCola announces that a Washington state legislative committee has passed a bill that would allow communities to lower their speed limits down to as little as 20 mph without conducting any expensive studies.

Brooklyn commuters — already some of the biggest transit riders in the country — are opting for transit at ever higher rates. New numbers from the Center for the Study of Brooklyn at Brooklyn College, first highlighted by City Limits’ Brooklyn Bureau, crunch Census data to reveal the evolving commuting patterns in the borough’s 18 community board districts. (To see the citywide breakdown of these numbers by state legislative district, check out Streetsblog’s prior coverage.)

Given the weight that community boards exert over street designs like new bus lanes or bike lanes, the figures are a valuable resource as Brooklyn neighborhoods consider projects to improve surface transit and street safety.

Take plans for Select Bus Service along Nostrand Avenue, set to launch this year. Though the improved bus service will speed up the commute for the B44′s 41,000 daily riders with dedicated bus lanes, off-board fare payment, and bus bulbs, at least one community board along the route has voted against the proposal. “Why would you even take the bus?” one Community Board 15 member asked.

At debates like those, marshaling facts about the district that the community board is supposed to represent can be valuable. Of all the community boards along Nostrand, CB 15 represents the fewest transit riders, the Brooklyn College data shows. But even there, more commuters take transit than drive, and the gap is growing. Between 2007 and 2009, 47.8 percent of CB 15 residents rode transit to work; during the same period, only 38.7 percent drove. In 2000, 46.1 percent took transit while 44.3 percent took their car.

The story is the same up and down Nostrand Avenue. In every community district, driving is down (below 17 percent of commuters in both Greenpoint/Williamsburg and Crown Heights). In all but one, transit is on the rise, and in every district, more commuters use transit than any other mode.

When the Nostrand SBS launches this summer, there’s sure to be a fresh round of griping about lost parking spaces and less space for private car travel. When that happens, this Census data should serve as a valuable reality check.

For the 112th Congress, the path to passing a new transportation bill has been full of starts and stops, partisan politics and low expectations. While Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently said he doesn’t expect a multi-year bill to pass this Congress, livable streets advocates should still be on alert in the weeks ahead. Momentum is building behind bills in the House and Senate, and there are strong indications that the bills could advance quickly in the coming days.

For one thing, the highway lobby is mobilizing right now to push a transportation bill through Congress. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sent an open letter to the Senate, the House, and the White House, with more than a thousand signatures — mostly construction firms, a few transit authorities, and not a single bike/ped advocate. The letter urges lawmakers to pass legislation heavy on highway and bridge projects. The Chamber has backed up the letter with a $500,000 publicity campaign, and it’s unlikely it would commit to such an investment if this legislative push was doomed from the outset.

Here’s a look at what’s in store for the rest of the week:

Tuesday, January 31

The full text of the House transportation bill — rumored at 1,000 pages, give or take — will be unveiled. So far, indications are that it will represent a return to 1950s-era transportation policy in many ways, funneling money to highways and giving broad powers to state DOTs when it comes to spending that money. An outline unveiled last week indicates that House Republicans have set their sights on eliminating dedicated bicycle/pedestrian funding as well as successful discretionary transit programs like TIGER.

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This Twitter photo of LeBron James biking to American Airlines Arena before facing off against Derrick Rose and the Chicago Bulls last night has gone viral on sports news sites all over America.

There are some interesting sociological currents swirling around LeBron James, bike commuter. While the photographer labeled James a “manchild” for taking to Miami’s none-too-friendly streets on a bike, the prevailing sentiment in the ESPN comments section seems to be that the sight of LeBron riding to work will help rehab his public image.

After the Heat edged the Bulls, James told reporters in the locker room that bike commuting is pretty routine for him. In fact, he seems to enjoy talking about the bike ride more than the basketball game:

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The big activity on the livable streets calendar this week — and perhaps for weeks to come — is bike-share station selection. The first local workshop, hosted by Manhattan Community Board 4 and West Side elected officials, will begin to determine where stations will be located in Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea. One of the major questions to work out is whether bike-share stations will be placed on the sidewalk or in what are now parking spaces. Encompassing both Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal as well as the hard-to-reach Hudson River waterfront, CB 4 should have some very popular bike-share sites.

• Tuesday: People who live and work on Manhattan’s West Side can help choose where bike-share stations will go in Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea at a workshop hosted by Community Board 4. 6:00 p.m.
• Wednesday: Second Avenues Sagas author Ben Kabak interviews former MTA open data expert Sarah Kaufman about how technology is reshaping public transportation, part of a series at the New York Transit Museum. 6:30 p.m.

Keep an eye on the calendar for updated listings. Got an event we should know about? Drop us a line.