Streetsblog San Francisco

The city plans to paint bike lanes in 22 locations within the first year after the Bike Plan injunction is lifted, all of which would be reversible upon a court order, according to a filing [PDF] by the City's Attorney's office today.

At a hearing on lifting the three-year-old injunction on Monday, a judge instructed the City Attorney's office to produce a declaration of the city's plans for immediate bicycle network improvements once the injunction is lifted. Rob Anderson and Mary Miles have challenged the adequacy of the city's Bike Plan EIR, and Superior Court Judge Peter J. Busch is still pondering whether to let the city begin work on the bike network before a hearing sometime next spring. Based on Judge Busch's line of questioning Monday, reversibility could be key to his ruling on lifting the injunction before then.

Miles argued on Monday that the city would complete many of the planned bike improvements before then, and should be stopped from installing any bike lanes in the meantime. The document released today suggests that the city would complete only a third of the projects in the Bike Plan within the first year, and any of those projects would be reversible in the unlikely event that Busch finds the EIR inadequate.

Perhaps even more interesting for cyclists, however, are the details of the city's plans. According to the declaration, which is comprised of testimony from Bike Plan Acting Implementation Manager Damon Curtis, an MTA traffic engineer, the city can paint bike lanes on about one-and-a-half miles of street per month, on average. At most, the city could paint about 30 percent of the 20 miles of bike lanes approved by the MTA Board this summer before March 2010.

According to Curtis, the city can also paint approximately 20 sharrows per day, and can install about 5 bike racks per day. The city also plans to implement a bike sharing program and experiment with colored bicycle lanes and innovative design treatments once the injunction is lifted, the declaration said.

Any of these changes would be "completely reversible," Curtis wrote, which may make Judge Busch look more favorably on lifting the injunction before a 2010 hearing on the EIR.

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City planners have been on the hook for some of the last century's greatest metropolitan mishaps: urban freeways and "slum clearance," arbitrary minimum parking requirements, and land use laws that have left little room for the mingling of uses. Understandably, today's planners are a bit humbled. But when planning directors from some of North America's most progressive cities spoke at City Hall this week about the political challenges that face urban planners, several of them said the field needs to move beyond worrying about past mistakes.

"Because of the failure of the planning profession in the past, we've gotten quiet, we've gotten a little too meek," said Brent Toderian, Vancouver's planning director. "We serve at the will of politicians, and are often unwilling to speak truth to power loudly and persuasively and in public. I think that's really been an absolving of our leadership responsibilities in the profession."

SPUR and the San Francisco Planning Department hosted the discussion with planning heads from SF, New York, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Minneapolis and San Diego, who were all in town for the Urban Land Institute's annual expo.

While the directors didn't lack for bold visions, some lamented the planning field's fixation on avoiding undesirable consequences. "I'd have to say, especially in California, unfortunately, the field has evolved into focusing on preventing bad things from happening instead of making good things happen," said Bill Anderson, San Diego's planning head.

Minneapolis planning chief Barbara Sporlein echoed that concern. "So much of planning is making up for past mistakes," she said. "It just feels like every time something happens, [we say,] 'That can't happen again.'"

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Over the past two days at the Congress for the New Urbanism Project for Transportation Reform conference, attendees have called for transportation reform at local, regional, and national levels. In a panel debate about the future of transportation funding and the role of regional planning through MPOs, several speakers argued that the foundation of transportation and development funding had to be systematically overhauled.

Mike Krusee, former chairman of the Texas House of Representatives Transportation Committee, said that financial problems were more significant than environmental, though they should be tied together in the same discussion. "The reason there's not a new transportation bill is because there is no money. We've hit the wall of unsustainability on how we finance the transportation system," he said.

Krusee asserted it was urgent and necessary to understand the nature of this broken financial apparatus and to develop solutions to fix it. In Texas, he said that, on average, it cost the state 20-30 cents per person per mile to build and maintain a road to the suburbs, yet drivers only pay on average 2-3 cents per mile through the gas tax, vehicles fees, etc. "What we found was that no road that we built in Texas paid for itself," said Krusee. "None."

The expense to build roads and utilities further and further from the urban cores was not only driving costs to unsustainable levels, it created an imbalance in who paid for growth. Over the past 50 years, Krusee argued, the federal government was using tax money that came by and large from cities to subsidize roads to areas without access otherwise. "City dwellers have subsidized the land purchases and the development costs out in the suburbs," said Krusee. What's more, the gas tax, which city dwellers pay when driving on city roads, but which goes to freeways largely outside of urban cores, is "a huge transfer of wealth from the cities to the suburbs to build these rings."

Krusee said building the Interstate system was initially a good thing, because if facilitated interstate commerce and increased the productivity of cities.  Now however, because of congestion caused by ever longer commute patterns, system productivity is in peril. "What's happened is the federal government has basically reneged on the deal. By subsidizing highways out to the suburbs, it's no longer efficient for truck traffic, for goods and services and people to move between cities in the United States because those roads have been hijacked by all the commuters."

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With the U.S. unemployment rate hitting 10.2 percent today, its highest level in 26 years, a palpable shift is occurring on Capitol Hill.

For weeks, we've heard senior Democrats and the transit industry make the case for more transportation spending as a potent job creator, but the lack of funding for a full six-year bill has kept the conversation stalled.

But two things have happened in the week since Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) floated the idea of a "front-loaded" infrastructure plan that would concentrate investment in the first two years:

• The defeat of two Democratic candidates in Tuesday's off-year elections reinforced that job creation and economic worries are the No. 1 concerns for voters.
• Gross domestic product may be rebounding, but unemployment decidedly is not.

This adds up to renewed interest in fast-tracking a new transportation bill, perhaps with a two-year window. As House transport committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) told David Rogers of Politico, "The concrete is cracking."

But even if the White House is prepared to abandon its insistence on an 18-month extension of current law, how to pay for new transportation legislation remains a very open question. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), for his part, told Rogers that he likes the sound of Rep. Pete DeFazio's (D-OR) proposed tax on Wall Street oil speculators:

There are some painless ways to fund the highway bill. Transaction taxes, that’s a painless way ... Where are the shared contributions to all this? If you’re sitting there on Wall Street, if you’re Goldman Sachs, if you’re making all this money, if you got all this federal money [in a] bailout, and you are paying all these big bonuses to your folks, where is your contribution to this recovery? That’s why it’s painless.

Clyburn's reference to the "highway" bill brings up another lingering mystery about the type of transportation spending being envisioned by senior Democrats. If the White House does agree to support a new infrastructure bill after health care is finished, will it include policy changes or just new money?

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Today on the Streetsblog Network, a story about some kids in Los Angeles who did their research and came up with several good ideas about improving conditions for bicycle commuters. Then they ran up against the reality that the public forums on the city's bike plan weren't so public. But they didn't let that stop them.

Stephen Box at SoapBox LA reports:

These kids from the West Side of LA were determined to let the city know what they think about bike commuting.

The FIRSTteamWestside (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a group of kids who prepared a presentation that they intended to give at the Bike Plan (draft) workshops.

Their mission was to develop a plan to improve local transportation. They did the research and they prepared and they discovered that the public workshops were not the robust public arena they desired, so they adapted.

Their coach reports, "The kids were hoping to give a presentation at one of the "public forums" but were badly disappointed when they found out that members of the public would not be allowed to speak so they posted it on YouTube and submitted the link at labikeplan.org."

The kids give an amazingly articulate and informed statement, recommending additional bike cars for the region's commuter rail system. The future is coming.

More from the network: The Transport Politic looks at the importance of aligning transitways with walkable neighborhoods. On Transport discusses the concept of "lifestyle centers" and their aspirations to create a sense of community in a suburban mall setting. And Intersection 911 reports on the 38 percent bump in Philadelphia bike commuting during the SEPTA strike.

• Muni Station Agent Arrested for Allegedly Punching Teen Girl (SF Examiner)
• BART Driver Accused of Lewd Act on Train (NBC Bay Area)
• Santa Clara County to Pay $800,000 to Father of Cyclist Killed by Asleep-at-the-Wheel Cop (SFGate)
• NY Times Runs Nevius-Style Hit Piece on Bay Area Cyclists (NYT, Bay Area Blog)
• San Mateo County Experimenting with Red Bike Lanes (SF Examiner)
  
• BIKE NOPA Profiles Bicyclist who "Makes Other Cyclists Smile"
  
• New Street Across Caltrain Tracks Brings Mission Bay "Into the Maze of the City" (SF Biz Journal)
• More on "Operation Safe Muni" Sting (SF Examiner)
• "Many are Miffed by Mayor Gone Missing" (SFGate)
• Transportation Costs are Higher for Sonoma County Residents (Press Democrat)
• An Oregon County Struggles to Address Urban Issues in Unincorporated Areas (OR Live)
  
• More Transit Stimulus, Please: Recession Deals Setback to Denver's Ambitious FasTrax Plans (NYT)

The Congress for the New Urbanism's Project for Transportation Reform summit in Portland, Oregon, has brought together transportation engineers, city planners, and transportation reform advocates to share best practice policies for reforming transportation metrics, funding mechanisms, and regional practices that isolate transportation planning from land-use and growth targets.  The highlight of the first day of the program was Portland itself, as councilors from Portland Metro, one of the only elected municipal planning organizations (MPOs) in the country, elaborated on their multi-disciplinary mission, which seeks to limit development within an urban growth boundary and coordinate transportation, parks and recreation, and solid waste management to achieve a more sustainable city.

It's quite a mandate, one that Metro's own councilors and representatives reminded the audience was a work in progress. Despite Portland's reputation among new urbanists and livable cities advocates as a national leader in promoting pedestrian safety and multi-modal accessibility, the region's municipal stewards said they have a long way to go.  

Metro Councilor Robert Liberty said, "I know this is the image many of you have of our region," while displaying a slide of Dorothy and her cohorts skipping along the yellow-brick road to Oz (Portland's green bike lanes do beg at least a chromatic comparison to the Emerald City). In reality, said Liberty, moving onto a photo of one of Portland's many crisscrossing freeways, the city is still fighting off the influence of Robert Moses (who visited in the 1940s and convinced city leaders they should build bigger and faster roads). 

Since 1973, with the passage of Oregon's Senate Bill 100, which led to the original urban growth boundary around Portland, the region has incrementally chipped away at the Moses paradigm of freeway expansion, instead funding light rail, robust bus service, extensive neighborhood traffic calming, and ever more impressive bicycle infrastructure. So thoroughly have Portlanders embraced the bicycle, in fact, St. Stephen's Episcopal Church recently unveiled a new bicycle shrine in its efforts to reach out to cyclists.

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The first time I saw this ad I thought my eyes and ears were deceiving me. But no, there it is: a young woman holding a cellphone toward the camera as "nüvifone" maker Garmin beckons viewers to "communicate while navigating."

"With my nüvifone, I can take calls from my friends while I'm driving to them," she says as she's shown piloting an SUV with two passengers, one of whom accepts an incoming call on a phone mounted to the windshield. (Note to Garmin: Hands-free is not brain-free.)

Maybe the most egregious aspect is the "Do not drive while distracted" disclaimer -- which pops up as the young woman is depicted driving while distracted.

What the ad doesn't show: The driver plows her SUV through one of the pedestrian-populated shots that follow, and bystanders whip out their nüvifones to call 911, text their friends and photograph the carnage.

Our latest call for photos was inspired by the picture at right, taking by Streetsblog New York's own Ben Fried. It's an all too familiar scene -- transit riders crammed together, waiting for a bus (or train) that doesn't come when it's supposed to (if you missed the story that went with the picture, it's here).

Crowding is just one indignity transit users have to face. Others include inadequate bus shelters, nonexistent or vandalized seating, blocked entrances -- you know the stuff.

Send us your pictures of crummy transit service and infrastructure where you live and we'll put together a new slide show. You can e-mail JPEGs to me at sarah [at] streetsblog [dot] org, or tag them with "streetsblog" and "transitfail" in Flickr. Get your submissions in by next Thursday.

Our past slide shows have been on bike traffic, space hogs and work bikes. Check them out if you haven't already.

As fans of clean transportation and sustainable development join the push for a strong climate change bill to emerge from Congress, it's worth remembering that not all environmental groups support the approach congressional Democrats have chosen.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) joined Greenpeace in opposing the House climate bill as too weak and deferential to polluting industries, and FoE president Erich Pica has just issued a statement on today's passage of the Senate version that makes clear his view hasn't changed:

While the bill reported out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee today is in some ways better than the bill that passed the House in June ... it remains a woefully disproportionate response to the tremendous economic, security and public health threats posed by global warming.

The bill’s backbone is a poorly regulated carbon trading scheme that entrusts the Wall Street bankers who brought us the current economic crisis with the responsibility to solve global warming. The bill showers polluting corporations with billions of dollars, but doesn’t require them to reduce pollution fast enough to avoid devastating climate change impacts. And it contains massive carbon offset loopholes that would allow U.S. polluters to keep polluting by paying for often-non-existent pollution reductions overseas. Other loopholes, such as excluding pollution from bioenergy, also undermine the bill’s intent.

Plenty of folks in the green advocacy world are more open to working within the Senate's framework -- the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, to name a few. But the lack of a unified front from environmental advocates, which reared its head during the House climate debate over the summer, risks amplifying the lack of a unified front among the very same Democrats who must help bring the bill over the finish line.

The Senate is a singularly cautious place that often seems tousled by the slightest shift in the political winds; witness Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who hails from coal country and mused yesterday that he doesn't "think people in my state are going to stand up and start cheering about Copenhagen," where global pollution reduction talks will open next month.

Simply put, the more schisms begin to show in the Senate climate debate, the more lawmakers such as Rockefeller may push to de-emphasize the issue.