Disney's Magic Highway USA is one of the more extraordinary examples of the myopic devotion to automobility and its infrastructure I've ever seen. It's probably also required viewing at the Reason Foundation and among Senator James Inhofe's staff in Washington DC.

"As in the past, the highway will continue to play a vital role in the progress of civilization," the narrator tells us. "It will be our magic carpet to new hopes, new dreams, and a better way of life for the future."

If you don't have nine minutes to watch, I can tell you it proffers some choice gender-role limitations characteristic of the era and it predicts some of the more deleterious development patterns that would result from the completion of the Interstate Highway system, which had begun only two years before the film aired in 1958. Rather than the Le Corbusier-inspired decentralized urban centers depicted lovingly in the film, we've got Atlanta and Phoenix.

Magic Highway USA also predicts that highways of the future will automatically light up the roads at night and radiant heat in the asphalt will keep the surfaces dry through ice and snow. "When visibility is poor, our windshields become a radar screen," says the narrator. "Fog may be eliminated by 'dispelling devises' along the right-of-way."

And how about "preserving the beauty and candor of mountain travel" with the cantilevered roadways stapled to the side of Monument Valley sandstone monoliths?

The only mention of walking in this unfortunately familiar dystopia is a snide joke, when the narrator quips: "From his private parking space, Father will probably have to walk to his desk."

The animated film was directed by Ward Kimble, the Academy-Award Winning Disney animator who gave us Jiminy Cricket and many of the characters in Peter Pan and who worked on numerous Disney classics.  Ironically, Kimble was a collector of train ephemera and owned a 3-acre train track circuit on his property in San Gabriel, California, nicknamed the Grizzly Flats Railroad. He is even credited for inspiring the Disneyland Railroad at Disneyland.

Of course, with no walking or any other unnecessary physical activity, the characters in the film turn out to be far too hale and trim. The people of this future should probably look more like those from this recent Disney animated film:

H/T Matt Baume

With everyone under the sun boasting their carbon reduction initiatives, including laughable entries by oil giants like Chevron and ExxonMobile, it's nice to see an event that walks the walk, or pedals the pedals, as it were.

The Bicycle Music Festival is an all-day musical event tomorrow that runs entirely on human power. The sound system is powered by several people riding bicycles connected to a generator. As long as there are pedalers, there's a party.

Event organizer Paul Freedman, a.k.a Fossil Fool of Rock the Bike, emphasized that the bicycle is really only a tool in project; the primary goal is having fun with one's community.

"It's about the power of music to inspire people to make change. It emphasizes the positive message and not the guilt trip. The main message, though, is to get to know your neighbors. There is a community movement in this country that is bigger than the bicycle movement but includes biking. It's one amazing tool to tap into community, but it's only one tool."

Over the course of the day, Freedman expect upwards of 2000 people to take part, either dancing at the stationary locations in Golden Gate Park in the morning and Dolores Park in the afternoon, or riding along the two one-hour mobile concerts.  For the mobile events, Freedman and Rock the Bike have built a bicycle towed stage.

The morning event starts at at 9:30 am at Marx Meadow in Golden Gate Park near the 25th Avenue and Fulton entrance. The Dolores Park concert kicks off at 2:30 pm, with a roving show in between the two park events. Get more route and band lineup information here.

See more photos and watch a video of last year's event after the jump.

A video of Bicycle Music Festival 2008, produced by the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

All bicycle powered Ginger Ninjas frontman Kipchoge rockin' the tall long-tail bike. Photo alwaysupndown

Photo: ppl.

The new hub attachment translates into less power loss from the bicycle wheel to the generator than the previous power set-up. Courtesy, Bicycle Music Festival.

Front Seat, a civic software company based in Seattle, developed Walk Score to help people identify neighborhoods that range from totally car-dependent to walkers' paradises.  Not content to rest on the substantial press accolades they received on their launch, the company has been coupling their tools with real estate websites to pair a home with a walk score so that prospective home buyers can see how walkable a neighborhood is at the point of sale.  When the real estate site Zillow added Walk Scores to every house listing three days ago, 7.5 million monthly visitors got a clearer vision of the quality of their prospective neighborhoods.

Matt Learner, Front Seat's head of technology, said that their goal was to encourage a potential home buyer to consider neighborhoods that are mixed-use, transit oriented, and dense.  "We're trying to get it in front of people when they're looking for a place to live and give them tools to help them choose more walkable neighborhoods."

Building on the walkability concept, the next generation of Walk Score software will seek to provide more sophisticated tools for analyzing neighborhoods.  "What's exciting is the convergence of transit data and software geeks," said Lerner.  "At Front Seat we're trying to make the interface much easier for people who aren't transit geeks like us."

What if, he mused, you are moving to a new city, or moving from one neighborhood to another in a city, and you not only want to see a map of how walkable each neighborhood is but how close you are by transit to important destinations, or how far you could live from your work and still get there by bus in under 30 minutes?

A thirty minute transit shed from Civic Center

Numerous transit operators in cities around the country have made their schedules available in GTFS format, including Muni, Caltrain, and BART.  When Martin-Anderson got word of Muni's recent release of schedules in GTFS last week, he worked up the template website seen above.  Together with Martin-Anderson, Front Seat aims to produce an open-source transit trip planner that will be competitive with existing platforms, such as 511.org.

"As we're looking at climate change, rising gas prices, increasing sprawl and VMT," said Lerner, "We want to increase the massive investment we hope to see made in transit in this country.  We know software like this can be important for doing that."

Citing AAA's data that owning a car costs more than $8,000 annually, the second largest household expense behind a home itself, Lerner suggested their tools could lead to car-free living.  "If you translate that into a mortgage, that's a $125,000 mortgage.  I have tons of friends here in Seattle who tell me they can almost afford a small condo, but what they don't realize is that if they got rid of their car they could."

Transit Tree Image: Brandon Martin-Anderson via Flickr

What I like about OPR's wording is that it maintains the traffic section that everyone expects to see, but gives a very different analysis.  With vehicle trips rather than congestion as the potential impact, one would not ever be able to widen a road to reduce the impact.  Widening the road would increase the impact by inducing more vehicle trips!  To reduce the impact, one needs to reduce the number of vehicle trips at the source.

The amendment to the CEQA guidelines by the OPR was part of a larger effort to conform California's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to the requirements legislated in Assembly Bill 32, which requires 1990 levels by 2020.

Accordingly, the OPR has until July 1st to complete its analysis of the CEQA changes, at which point it would go to the California Natural Resources Agency, which has until January 1, 2010 to enact the regulations.  

Terry Roberts, Director of the State Clearinghouse at the OPR, believes they will complete OPR's mandate much sooner.

Once we get those comments we will take the time necessary to go through them all carefully and then to consider whether we should revise our proposed language, and that may take a few weeks, but we want to do it as soon as possible.  We understand the need for the Resources Agency to have more than 6 months to complete the regulatory rule making process.

OPR had been receiving suggestions months and months ago from various parties, some from local governments, others were environmental organizations, and they all seemed to be saying the same thing to OPR and that is the over-emphasis on Level of Service in the CEQA analysis of a project was creating obstacles to better planning and smart growth.

It is unclear what the result will be later this year, and Roberts was quick to maintain that there isn't widespread agreement in public comments that LOS should be removed from CEQA.  "There could be a legal reason to shoot down any of what we've proposed.  I can't predict how successful this change will be in going through the rule-making process."

Mayor Newsom's administration is thrilled with the developments and will push at the state level for the transportation changes to become law.  Michael Yarne of the Mayor's Office of Economic Development said that all the agencies involved in LOS reform will submit a joint letter of support or similar letters of support from each agency to the OPR by next week. 

Yarne called the transportation amendment "revolutionary" and said "the idea that the speed and free-flow of cars is the proxy that is being used across the state of California to measure whether a project is [environmentally] impactful is in the long run undermining the very quality of life [we] are working to protect."

Paradise LOSt (Part I): How Long Will the City Keep Us Stuck in Our Cars?

Paradise LOSt (Part II): Turning Automobility on Its Head

Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

The Transit First policy of the City Charter recognizes that some short-term auto congestion is a predictable and unavoidable consequence of implementing Transit First policies, since mode shift will occur gradually as the transit, bicycle and pedestrian networks are improved. A measure of auto delay – auto LOS – is inconsistent with the Transit First policy for this reason. A measure of auto trips generated, in contrast, recognizes that adding additional automobile trips to San Francisco streets is environmentally undesirable, while allowing for automobile congestion impacts that may result from improving the city’s networks for transit, walking, and cycling.

The genius of ATG is that transit, bicycling and pedestrian improvements by definition will not add auto trips to traffic.  Similarly, projects that remove space for cars and give them to buses, bikes, or people would no longer be considered to have a significant environmental impact under LOS analysis and would not be rejected outright because of inconvenience to drivers.  

ATG flips the politics of mobility on its head and says the onus is on automobility to prove that it doesn’t disrupt the convenience of transit and non-polluting modes, nor that it decreases the livability of neighborhoods.

Though ATG has generally been accepted by the agencies involved in the working group, the devil is still in the details, especially on how to develop the transit impact mitigation fees.  Ideally, the fees assessed for each ATG in a project would go directly to transit, bicycling, and pedestrian improvements, though determining the fee for each ATG will surely be a difficult debate, one that will hopefully not occur in a back room somewhere.  

In December 2008, the MTA released a request for proposals (RFP) for a nexus study (PDF) to determine the specifics of the mitigation fees; the deadline for selecting a consultant is February 6th and the study is expected to be completed in one year.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) is not happy to wait that long and thinks the solution is much simpler (PDF), that San Francisco can walk away from considering LOS as an environmental impact under CEQA.  CEQA directs local agencies to set objectives, criteria, and procedures for determining environmental significance at the local level and there is already disparity in how cities in the Bay Area treat LOS.  

San Jose, for example, has determined that LOS will fail in a large swath of their downtown development area but that the value of adding dense housing and commercial space near transit trumps the inconvenience to motorists of waiting in traffic.

Likewise, the SFBC points to a precedent for a departure from the CEQA administrative guidelines that occurred in 2002.  In the Transportation and Traffic section, the guidelines ask “Would the project result in inadequate parking capacity?” and the assumption is that if so it would be a significant environmental impact and need to be mitigated.  But in the “Emporium” case (San Franciscans Upholding the Downtown Plan v. City and County of SF) a judge ruled that:

Parking shortfalls relative to demand are not considered significant environmental impacts in the urban context of San Francisco.  Parking deficits are an inconvenience to drivers, but not a significant physical impact on the environment.  

The SFBC argues that intersection backup should be considered a social inconvenience and not an environmental threshold of significance.  It concedes that the secondary effect of congestion at intersections, like pollution, can be analyzed with air quality analysis under CEQA and that LOS is redundant for this purpose.  Given that San Francisco doesn’t suffer from carbon monoxide hotspots and adverse pollution due to improved vehicle technology and a good deal of wind, the true environmental impact of traffic will be rare.

Paradise LOSt (Part I): How Long Will the City Keep Us Stuck in Our Cars?

Paradise LOSt (Part III): California's Revolutionary Plan to Overhaul Transportation Analysis

Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

Traffic engineers are reluctant to give exclusive lanes to buses (or bikes) for fear of the impact on cars

The Pseudo-Science of LOS

There's a dirty little secret you should know about San Francisco: It's engineered first and foremost for automobility and will never be able to shed this bias if the traffic engineers are in the driver's seat wielding their traffic analysis tools like bibles. As long as the city continues prioritizing the use of transportation analysis known as Level of Service (LOS), you might as well burn our Transit First policy for warmth.

On the one hand, LOS is a very simple and blunt metric for understanding the speed that vehicles can move about the city. LOS measures the amount of vehicular delay at an intersection, with A through F grades assigned to increased delay. This measurement is taken during the peak 15 minutes of evening rush hour and if an intersection slips from LOS D to LOS E, traffic managers will try to mitigate the impact, which usually means widening the road, shrinking the sidewalks, removing crosswalks, softening turning angles, and adjusting signal timing to speed the movement of vehicles.

LOS delay from Highway Capacity Manual

Yet the result of relying on this poor methodology to shape the growth of cities has a profound affect on the politics of human mobility, privileging the movement of vehicles before the movement of anything else. Quite simply, LOS analysis has given us Phoenix and Atlanta, congestion and ever-longer commutes, and a whole host of ills that accompany reliance on the inefficient use of street space for our cars.

"I've been doing transit analyses in California for 20 years," said Jeffrey Tumlin, principal of Nelson Nygaard, a transportation and land use consulting firm. "In my practice the single greatest promoter of sprawl and the single greatest obstacle to transit oriented development (TOD) and infill development is the transportation analysis conventions under CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, LOS."

LOS has been used since the middle of the 20th century and has the weight of convention so thoroughly backing it up that it is one of the Traffic Ten Commandments, somewhere near the top. When the U.S. prioritized the expansion of roads everywhere and cities were seen merely as job centers to be driven to and from, LOS was the lubricant to facilitate the growth of suburban and exurban rings.

As San Franciscans began to see their city as a collection of neighborhoods, where livability and public space were more important that vehicle speeds on the streets, the political support for unfettered automobility declined and LOS became a target for reform.

"How can LOS have such a tremendous impact or power over shaping San Francisco and shaping cities when so much of LOS is anathema to cities?" asked Henderson.

The Clamor For Change

In the early 1990s, San Francisco bicycle advocates found out the hard way that any attempt to take space away from cars to give back to bikes (or transit and pedestrians) would be shut down by the engineers who asserted that such constriction of vehicular access violated the sacrosanct LOS rules, which, they were informed, were required under CEQA.

The advocates soon discovered that while CEQA requires that a project be analyzed for its significant environmental impacts the LOS "rule" was written after the fact by the state Office of Planning and Research (OPR).  It was an administrative guideline and didn't carry the force of CEQA law.

"The words 'traffic' or 'congestion' or 'parking' appear nowhere in the CEQA legislation of the 1970s," said Tumlin.  "The problem lies in the CEQA guidelines, issued administratively by the state OPR.  There are three lines in Appendix G, the environmental checklist...[that] were later adopted administratively by the executive branch of government."

Further, CEQA specifically delegates planning decisions to the local level. The adherence to LOS was a convention adopted by San Francisco and most other municipalities around the state to evaluate transportation impacts under CEQA, and over the course of nearly three decades its use had been upheld numerous times in court, but just as it had been adopted as a convention, advocates believed, so could it be overturned.

Subsequently, advocates spent years lobbying the Board of Supervisors to make changes to the rule, though with mixed results.  After the board finally called for a study of the impacts of LOS analysis, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA) issued a significant report (PDF) at the end of 2003, which asserted that "existing LOS measures and standards ostensibly favor preserving auto level of service at the expense of improving transit, bicycle, and pedestrian conditions" and argued that new measures of analysis besides LOS should be developed.

Within a couple years the Board of Supervisors was convinced that LOS analysis contravened San Francisco's Transit First policy and issued a resolution (PDF) stating that "automobile analysis alone is not an appropriate metric for assessing environmental impacts and for analyzing projects that may improve overall environmental quality in conformance with [the Transit First policy]."

Not long after the resolution was adopted in early 2006, advocates saw firsthand how low the interpretation of LOS could stoop, when Rob Anderson and his Coalition for Adequate Review (CAR, a suitable acronym) sued the city to prevent the Bicycle Plan from being implemented without the full environmental review process, banking his argument on the possible negative LOS implications of removing vehicle lanes to add bicycle lanes.

Though it might have seemed ludicrous to the lay observer that adding bike lanes would have a negative environmental impact, the rules of LOS dictated that it was so and the onus was on the city and the bicycle community to show in excruciating--and expensive--detail that promoting non-polluting transportation might significantly effect the environment.  But that's exactly what the injunction mandated and why San Francisco hasn't added even a brush stroke of paint to its roads to build out its bicycle plan for nearly three years.

Paradise LOSt (Part II): Turning Automobility on Its Head

Paradise LOSt (Part III): California's Revolutionary Plan to Overhaul Transportation Analysis

Flickr photo: cbcastro