According to the 2011 Urban Mobility Report, released today by the Texas Transportation Institute, this delay cost the average D.C. driver $1,495 once you factor in lost productivity and increased trucking times. In Chicago, it’s $1,568. L.A., $1,334.

Every year, TTI puts out their Urban Mobility Report, and every year we criticize it for its autocentrism. After all, its sole measure is how fast a vehicle can speed down a given mile of roadway. Maybe your city is dense and friendly to pedestrians and bikes, so that it’s easy to glide past the automobile gridlock on your short commute to work. Or maybe transit provides an excellent and affordable alternative to traffic jams. None of that matters to TTI. If someone, somewhere, is sitting in traffic, that’s all that matters. All other measures and modes of urban mobility are ignored.

TTI doesn’t bother to figure out how much time is saved if one avoids that congestion by taking transit, but they do examine how much time transit riders save drivers by taking vehicles off the road.

How public transportation reduces delays for drivers, 2010. Source: 2011 Urban Mobility Report, via APTA.

If there were no transit, the country’s drivers would be facing an additional 796 million hours of traffic delay. (Take that, drivers who grumble when their gas tax “user fee” funds mass transit!)

“Operational treatments” like ramp metering, traffic light timing, and removing crashed vehicles from the road have become much more effective in the last 20 years but still don’t come close to the savings provided by transit, saving about 40 percent as much as transit in terms of hours of delays, fuel, and costs.

Still, in TTI’s examination of congestion relief strategies, public transportation is barely alluded to and never mentioned outright, while operational treatments get significant attention. There is a shout-out to smart growth, or “denser developments with a mix of jobs, shops and homes, so that more people can walk, bike or take transit to more, and closer, destinations.” They also suggest telework and, of course, adding capacity.

TTI warns that congestion is only as bad as it is because the economy is still sluggish. We can expect a rapid worsening of the situation when the economy rebounds – 3 more hours of delay by 2015 and 7 hours by 2020, per commuter, with costs rising from $101 billion to $133 billion, more than $900 for every commuter, and enough wasted fuel to fill more than 275,000 gasoline tanker trucks.

I guess it’s time to really get to work on expanding and improving transit service then; right, TTI?

Steven Rattner (Photo: WSJ)

This
was like declaring in an airport terminal one’s hope that man may
someday enjoy heavier-than-air powered flight, but most of the heads in
the audience nodded in agreement.

Rattner was there to speak on the topic of the administration’s
automobile bailout and rehabilitation strategy. He was hopeful but
realistic; he recognized that General Motors and Chrysler face an
uphill battle, but he believes that the government was able to do
enough to give the firms a shot at returning to profitability.

Why
that should be a concern of the government is another question
altogether, and it’s not one with which Rattner really engaged.
Understandably, I think, the administration agreed that GM and Chrysler
really shouldn’t be allowed to fail in the depths of recession.

And
then I believe they determined that if they were going to keep propping
up the companies, they ought to at least shepherd them through a
balance sheet-clearing bankruptcy and reorganization, in the hopes that
the companies might eventually make money.

But what Rattner
was careful not to address was this: Saving the car companies will not
protect American automakers’ market share, will not save the city of
Detroit, and will not really save that many jobs.

The line I
quote in the first paragraph was made in the context of an argument
about annual auto sales, and why sales totals are likely to return to
levels typically observed before the recession. Sales of light vehicles
grew to a peak of 17 million in 2005 before declining and then
plummeting to their current level, in the neighborhood of 9 million
(save for the month of August, thanks to "cash for "clunkers).

According
to Rattner, GM will break even at a level around 16.5 million car
sales. Maybe we’ll get there. Population continues to grow.

On
the other hand, households may find themselves holding on to
automobiles longer (particularly since household debts may remain a
problem for the next decade). They may also find themselves buying
fewer cars. America is aging, and households with retirees may not want
a car for each commuter. More families might opt for one vehicle, and
use car-sharing services when another vehicle is necessary.

But
now we find ourselves in a world in which GM shareholders — among
which number you and me and every other taxpayer — need sales to move
above 16.5 million to get the company back to profitability. That’s a
strange place for us to want to be.

If, given the
option to buy as many automobiles as they want, Americans choose to buy
fewer than they did before, we should cheer. Cars are expensive and
largely used as production goods rather than consumption goods –
people buy them because they need them to do other things, like work
and buy food. If they then find that they don’t need them as much, a
lot of revenue is freed which can be used on debt service, health care,
better food and homes, education, and entertainment goods.

A
world in which Americans are as happy with one car or no cars as they
are with two or three is a better one, just as a world in which
companies can produce more goods with less energy or machinery is a
better one.

The transition is a difficult one for workers in
the automobile industry who find themselves needing a new line of work,
but nothing in the reconstitution of GM and Chrysler will change that.
Manufacturing processes continue to become less labor-intensive. That’s
a technological trend that the government is powerless to reverse. The
question, then, is how best to facilitate transitions into new fields.

And here, the bailout looks somewhat counterproductive. Today a shuttered car plant in Delaware will be converted
for use by a producer of electric vehicles. The decline of GM opens up
production possibilities for other enterprises, and the impeding of
that decline frustrates them.

It also prevents policymakers from seeing beyond the automobile. As David Alpert wrote yesterday (and Sarah Goodyear noted today):

I’ve been meeting with elected officials in the region about
transportation and development issues. One representative from
Montgomery County recently expressed a general sentiment among area
leaders that "we have to do something" to accommodate increased traffic
between the American Legion Bridge and I-270. After all, Virginia is
building HOT lanes that will bring more cars onto the Beltway, and
Maryland is pushing for more lanes on 270 north of Rockville.
Logically, this person said, the state and the county will probably
have to connect the two with additional HOT lanes through Potomac and
Bethesda.

Later in the conversation, when discussing Gaithersburg West, I
noted the potential for biotech development at White Oak. That location
is already a life sciences hub. It’s closer to both DC and Baltimore,
reducing the likely commutes for people working there versus
Gaithersburg West. It’s also in a part of Montgomery County with far
fewer jobs than people, unlike the 270 corridor.

What it lacks, like Gaithersburg West, is good transit. There
is an inactive proposal to build a Purple Line spur up New Hampshire or
Route 29 to the area. Why not revive the idea? When I brought it up,
the representative jokingly said something like, "I’d like some of what
you’re smoking." And in fact, with many transit projects including the
Purple Line, Baltimore Red Line, and Corridor Cities Transitway already
vying for funds, it would be very difficult to add a Purple Line spur
to White Oak.

That’s the conventional wisdom among most elected officials. We
"have to do something" to add road capacity. But transit projects are
so difficult as to be nearly laughable. Yet freeway projects are not
cheap. As we saw from ACT’s alternative plan
for the I-270 corridor, you can build a lot of transit for the price of
some freeway lanes. It’s just that leaders are too accustomed to
viewing road capacity as a necessity and transit as a luxury.

There
is a terrible chicken-and-egg problem to transportation planning, in
which planners express regret that there is so little transit demand
and so much traffic before building new roads. They have to accommodate
the demand they’ve got! But you can’t have transit demand if you don’t
have transit, and if you don’t recognize that, then you’re doomed to
keep building roads forever. No one in the mind of the planners has yet invented a substitute for the automobile.

But
of course, that’s not true. There are many substitutes for the personal
auto. And now that households seem to be warming to them, the
government finds itself looking at the shift as a problem to be solved,
rather than a welcome trend to be encouraged.

It’s fine to
try and alleviate the pain of a major economic transition, but if
officials don’t understand that the transition is just that, and not a
temporary slump, they may attempt to turn the palliative into a barrier
to change. If you think there’s no substitute for the automobile, then
the decline of the auto industry looks like running headlong off a
cliff.

But in reality, there is something just fine on the
other side of the transition: a world in which people drive less and
don’t mind it. Maybe officials blind to that possibility will
eventually stumble into it nonetheless. It would be much better for all
concerned — including those dependent on the auto industry for their
welfare — if the government managed to see it and chart a course for
it.

BART, New York's LIRR, and Washington D.C.'s Metro plan to install the Maximo software, a program that anticipates and schedules preventive maintenance on rail cars, tracks, buses, and other equipment.

"There are thousands of people and parts responsible for making sure that our trains arrive on time and deliver our passengers safely to their destinations,” Randall Franklin, BART Program Director for Business Advancement, said in a statement. "Because we are managing an aging fleet while planning for the future, the efficiency of BART requires visibility across all of our assets to provide safe and uninterrupted railway services to our customers."

Ballston Metro station, Arlington Co. Photo: Point Images/Flickr

The future looked as though it belonged to Fairfax County, and Arlington's decision to target development around its new Metro stations seemed quixotic and anachronistic.

But now, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, Arlington seems to have been extraordinarily foresighted in its decision to grow around Metro. From 2000 to 2008, Arlington's population grew by 10 percent -- all of it infill development, and a remarkable achievement for an inner suburb.

Even more remarkably, this growth has led to a negligible impact on local traffic. Daniel Malouff, author of the BeyondDC blog, reported this week on a meeting with Arlington's Department of Transportation, at which officials recounted some numbers that had emerged from research on the effects of county development choices.

Among the remarkable statistics:

1. Auto traffic counts in the Pentagon City area are level today compared with counts from 1975. Despite all the development that has occurred there in that time frame, including construction of one of the region's largest and busiest shopping malls, there has been no measurable increase in traffic congestion.

2. [One thousand] units of urban-format TOD housing generates fewer auto trips per day than a single suburban-format McDonalds or 7-11. You can build 1,000,000 square feet of residential TOD and generate less congestion than 2,000 square feet of auto-oriented retail.

Arlington has very nearly maximized the development potential of available land around Metro stations, but it's looking to create new transit access for its communities by building a streetcar line along one of the county's busier thoroughfares (and running along its busiest bus routes). Already, denser, walkable, and mixed-used developments are replacing older strip malls on the planned line.

And of course, Fairfax County has been busily working to reverse its approach to transit and development, its streets and highways having bogged down under the weight of constant congestion.

Back when Metro was originally built, Fairfax did not attempt to lobby for routing through population centers, opting instead for a cheaper alignment along the median of I-66 (for the Orange Line), and along existing rail right of way (for the Blue Line). Stations were almost exclusively surrounding by parking; riders would nearly all arrive by car.

These decisions have proven difficult to reverse engineer, but Fairfax County has been trying. Along the I-66 corridor, the county is encouraging such transit-oriented development as can be accommodated. In Springfield (on the Blue Line), a large, walkable redevelopment plan has been slowly making its way forward despite the difficult economic situation.

But the biggest shift is occuring elsewhere. Fairfax County and the state of Virginia recently won federal funding for a new extension of the Metrorail system, to be run through the densest portion of the county at Tysons Corner.

The Silver Line will be used as a framework around which to completely remake Tysons into a dense, walkable downtown. The area may ultimately be home to over 100,000 people, and an employment center to rival downtown Washington.

The rest of the country will be watching. Tysons represents one of the most ambitious attempts to reengineer a suburban employment and retail center into a pedestrian friendly mini-city, fit for residents as well as workers.

Of course, the opportunities to make these kinds of changes are extremely limited. Very few heavy rail systems have been built in the past half century. Commuter rail and light rail systems are increasingly common in growing cities, but federal funding has simply not been made available for new lines on the necessary scale, and the federal government has not made transit-oriented development a priority in choosing where and how to allocate transportation dollars.

This is an inexcusable missed opportunity given transit-oriented development's record of accommodating population growth without contributing to new congestion. Hopefully it is one Congress will address when it gets around to crafting a new transportation bill.

Participants in the Low-Car Diet at Justin Hermann Plaza. One participant in a random drawing won a Swiss Bike donated by Montague Bikes. Photos: Matthew Roth

In San Francisco, Zipcar provided each participant with weekly Muni passes and BART tickets as needed. Should participants need to drive at some point throughout the month, they can use a Zipcar.

Michael Uribe, General Manager for San Francisco Zipcar, stressed the economic benefit of not owning a car, saying that 19 percent of household income is spent on auto-related expenses. According to Uribe, Zipcar users spend only six percent of their household income on cars. He also said car-sharing in general is meant to chip away at the idea that owning a car is necessary, or that a family needs two cars when one is rarely used.

"Growing up, owning a car is really a rite in America," said Uribe. "This reverses that paradigm and frees up money to go back into the local economy. Also, for every one Zipcar on the road, we're replacing 15 to 20 vehicles."

Uribe himself is a recent convert to carlessness. "It took me a while to learn to live without a car," he said.  When asked how he finds the lifestyle, he smiled and said it was stress-free. "I don't think I'd ever own a car again. I don't have to pay for parking, I find myself exploring the city more, various neighborhoods. I find I eat better because I'm exploring different neighborhoods and buying locally grown organic foods."

"I eat a lot more," he added, but said he hasn't put on any weight given how much additional walking he is doing.

Zipcar San Francisco GM Michael Uribe takes personal car keys from participants.

Zipcar held events in cities around the country, including New York and Washington DC, and as far away as London, England. In the Bay Area, more than thirty participants are taking the challenge, most from San Francisco, though some reside in the East Bay and Dublin.

Many of the staff of the musical Wicked are participating, as is the entire staff of Virgance, a start-up social venture company that "seeks to promote world-changing activism campaigns using market-based methods."

Vice President for Business Development and Marketing at Virgance, Rahul Prakash, said, "For us to be part of the Low-Car Diet, it seemed the perfect place for us to actually practice the values that we preach on a professional level and transfer that into our personal lives."

Other local business partners include Montague Bikes (which gave away a free Swiss Bike), EveryDayHealth.com, HealthCentral.com, ClubOne, Green Citizen, and Cartridge World.

Wade Crowfoot, Mayor Gavin Newsom's Director of Climate Initiatives, spoke in support of the Low-Car Diet, saying that the city was in the process of replacing some of its official vehicles with car-share subscriptions, which he expected to number around twenty initially and start by the end of the year.

"We want to encourage people to participate in car-share because it reduces the amount of greenhouse gases that come from transportation--transportation related emissions are about 54 percent of our carbon-related footprint."

Crowfoot said the city wanted to give initiatives like this more attention because many people didn't know about car-sharing.

"There's still a lot of work that the city can being doing in encouraging car sharing. We've told both [Zipcar and City-Car Share] that we want to support whatever creative ideas they have."

The scene of the June 22 Washington D.C. Metro crash. Photo: AP

The proceedings got off to an appropriately somber start, as California Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) used his opening statement to explain that this spring's stimulus package contained billions for a Mag-Lev rail line from Orange County to Las Vegas.

This, of course, is completely false, and the quip was entirely unrelated to the rest of his remarks. I'm sure Issa's constituents will be glad to know that he's taking transportation issues seriously.

Testimony was heard from a number of experts, and from Patrick Tuite, a rider on one of the trains in the collision, who provided a riveting account of the accident. But not much in the way of new information emerged.

The facts of the incident remain as previously understood. A recently replaced portion of track circuitry intended to detect the presence of trains on the tracks and facilitate the automatic train control system malfunctioned intermittently after installation, including around the time of the accident. The operator of the striking train attempted to engage the brakes before impact, but to no avail.

The National Transportation Safety Board continues to investigate the matter and may not have a final report on it for some time. In the meantime, trains on the Metro system continue to operate in manual mode, and on reduced speeds and a single track at the site of the accident (creating major headaches for riders on the system, which is a critical piece of metropolitan infrastructure).

Three broad themes emerged in testimony. The first concerned funding problems, at Metro specifically and for transit generally. Former congressman Tom Davis spoke at length about the funding difficulties at Metro, which have contributed to a $6 billion capital needs shortfall (in his estimation; Metro's John Catoe noted that identified needs run to over $11 billion at this time).

Metro's idiosyncrasies greatly complicate its funding. Unlike any other transit system in the country, there is no dedicated revenue source; all appropriations are ad hoc. This is particularly problematic as the system stretches across two states and the District of Columbia.

To make matters worse, Metro is overseen by the subcommittee on the District of Columbia rather than through the transportation committee. Federal appropriations for the system must travel a different route than money directed toward every other system in the country.

In an effort to overcome some of these difficulties, Congress has passed a law matching $1.5 billion in revenue from newly established local dedicated funding streams, to the tune of $150 million a year for 10 years. That's an improvement, but it obviously only begins to close the system's capital needs gap.

And so other testifying experts, most notably American Public Transportation Association president William Millar, argued forcefully for passage of a new transportation funding act, which would include adequate resources for the nation's transit systems. Unfortunately, Mr Millar may have to wait until 2011.

The second broad theme was the safety record of Metro specifically and transit generally relative to competing modes of transportation. Millar noted that a transit journey is roughly 20 times safer than an equivalent automobile trip.

Passenger fatalities in the June 22 accident were the system's first in over 20 years. Transit accidents make news because they're large and rare, but annual deaths in automobiles are several orders of magnitude higher than in rail systems.

And finally, there was extensive discussion of rail safety procedures generally. Oversight of safety systems was a hot topic, as was replacement of equipment -- particularly relevant in this case given the track failure, but also the age and poor crash performance of the forward car in the striking train.

An interesting note on this score came from Brian Bilbray (R-CA) who argued that the move toward increased automation of train systems might be counterproductive.

In particular, he suggested that using automatic train controls with manual back-up was unhelpful, as operators tend to tune out while trains are in automatic mode. Rather, a system of manual operation with automated back-up might improve safety.

Amusingly, he compared the operating procedures in transit vehicles to those in the B-2 bomber. Of course, if transit systems had the budget per vehicle of the B-2 program, the issue of aging capital equipment might not have arisen in the first place.

In all, it seems the Metro crash will lead to some valuable changes in operating procedures, and it has already resulted in the speedy direction of promised funds to the system. But the accident mainly provides an opportunity to reflect on how safe transit systems actually are, and how the nation's inability to fund those systems adequately -- and build new ones -- is an unfortunate and significant policy failure.

Meet Gabe Klein, who was appointed to direct Washington D.C.'s Department of Transportation (DDOT) in December 2008. With a background including four years working for Zipcar, Klein was brought in to look at the city's mobility problems from a fresh perspective. As he says:

Cars are a part of our daily life here in D.C., but what we want to do is try to equalize the playing field. Encourage people to walk, to bike, to bike share; or instead of owning a car -- car share.

D.C. already has one of the lowest household car-ownership rates of any major U.S. city, so actively promoting these modes is essential -- as Klein points out -- to helping people move about with freedom.

BRT bus in Las Vegas looks a lot like light rail

The World Resources Institute (WRI) recently presented a report comparing BRT and LRT in the “medium investment” range for the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) on the Purple Line, which would connect suburbs around Washington DC with the city center.   WRI’s analysis confirms that BRT is the option that would work locally to fight global warming, with a medium-investment system cutting carbon dioxide emissions by almost 9,000 metric tons per year, equivalent to taking about 1,600 cars off the road (PDF).

In an interview with Worldchanging, the report's authors, Dario Hidalgo and Greg Fuhs, address the CO2 numbers: "While this could change in the future with a major and permanent shift to low-carbon energy sources, for the foreseeable future we would likely continue to see higher CO2 emissions from light rail in this case," said Fuhs.

The report finds that BRT would be more cost-effective and lower-risk, particularly with the current economic situation.  With tight state and federal transit budgets, and the recent hullabaloo over the stimulus package, it will be difficult to get substantially more funding for transit.

In San Francisco, Central Subway aside, policy makers appear unwilling to build more fixed-rail systems in the near term, preferring instead to go with BRT.  The SFCTA and MTA are moving forward with the Van Ness and Geary BRT lines, which still need to clear environmental analysis, but could be online by the MTA's Centennial in 2012.

"Other cities are building light rail very cheaply and operating it well," said Livable City's Tom Radulovich.  "The big problem with San Francisco is that we build incredibly expensive light rail, like the Townsend 3rd, and we run rail like a bus.  We're not being smart about our investments."

All right Choo Choo Heads and BRT-ophiles, we know you're reading, tell us what the future of San Francisco's surface transit should look like.

Flickr photo: NeiTech