Streetsblog San Francisco

Whether you're a transportation geek or just curious about the psychology and behavior of drivers, Tom Vanderbilt's "Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)" is one of the most fascinating books you can pick up.

Tom sat down recently for an hour conversation with OpenPlans founder Mark Gorton about his vast research into the world of car and driver. The chat - which we think we've edited down to an entertaining ten minutes -  covered topics as diverse as an Invisible Gorilla to intense DriveCam footage of automobile crashes to H.W. Heinrich's Industrial Accident Pyramid. From texting-while-driving to noise-canceling technology, Tom gives us the skinny on everything traffic.

Tom also writes the very popular blog How We Drive.

The 2009 Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) Annual Report paints a sobering picture of funding crises at nearly every Bay Area Transit operator -- crises we've covered extensively on Streetsblog -- and sums up the situation bluntly: "There is no way to sugarcoat it: These are difficult, daunting days for public transit in the Bay Area."

The report rightly points to endemic land-use and auto-centric development problems in the Bay Area that make transit less attractive for many than driving: "The Bay Area's transit system operates under the difficult combination of unpredictable revenue sources and unsustainable cost structure on the one hand, and underpriced auto alternatives and insufficiently transit-supportive land uses on the other."

One of the more troubling aspects of the report, as KALW's Nathanael Johnson wrote on the Bay Area Transit blog, is that the picture is only going to get worse without a significant change in course. Operators have already cut service and raised fares, but new capital costs will add additional burden and farebox recovery rates aren't going up.

"The MTC added up the projected budgets of the agencies and found that operating costs would exceed revenues by $8 billion over the next 25 years, while planned improvements (like new buses and the Warm Springs BART station) will require someone to dig up an additional $17 billion in spare change from under the couch," wrote Johnson.

The report also contends that transit operators have fallen short in performance. Since 1997, after adjusting for inflation, transit costs in the Bay Area have increased by 52 percent, while revenue hours of service increased by only 16 percent and ridership increased by only 7 percent.

"That is a terrible return on our regions' transit investment and it should cause us to think long and hard before committing future funds to such a low-yield strategy," the report concludes.

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Between 2001 and 2009, the share of trips that Americans made in cars dropped by more than four percent, with walking, bicycling and transit use picking up the slack, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Last year, 11.9 percent of all trips were on foot or by bike, while 4.2 percent of trips were on transit. Both figures signify major increases.

The National Household Travel Survey, the source of the new stats, is the gold-standard for transportation data. As Mobilizing the Region reported, while the Census only tracks how people get to work, the NHTS gathers data on all trips taken. It also distinguishes between, say, driving to a park-and-ride bus area and walking to the local bus stop.

The downside to the NHTS is how infrequently the survey is conducted, which makes it difficult to determine how much the 2009 data reflects a larger trend, and how much may be due to temporary changes brought on by fluctuating gas prices and the recession.

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:

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Transit and bike commuters in many cities are able to rush home
quickly if an emergency strikes — but for commuters looking to give up
their cars in less dense areas, an emergency often means a pricey cab
ride. One California county that falls in the latter camp, Santa Cruz,
has come up with a unique solution: "ride insurance."

Ecology Action, a local non-profit, has begun offering
a program that guarantees taxi transport for non-car-owning commuters
who experience a family emergency, a personal crisis, or the premature
departure of an office carpool.

The service costs $24 per
year and has a cap of four rides annually, or $100. Ecology Action,
which also helps local businesses collaborate on shared ride insurance
for transit- or bike-riding commuters, sees potential in the new
product. From today’s San Jose Mercury News:

Coordinators
expect the insurance program to resonate with those who fear leaving
the car behind in the event they need to pick up a child unexpectedly
or deal with an unforeseen emergency.

"It’s a little more incentive not to drive," Bustos said. …

"This is a new
concept, absolutely," said Tegan Speiser, a senior transportation
planner for the Regional Transportation Commission, a partner in the
RideSurance program.

Speiser said such individual ride insurance
plans could come to play an equally viable role in commuting life as
roadside assistance plans, like AAA.

The program is now funded by grant money from the area’s air pollution control district, though its goals would make it a good match for green transportation benefits under consideration for inclusion in the Senate climate change bill.

Standing in front of union headquarters in downtown Oakland this afternoon, leadership for BART's Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555 announced that their rank and file would walk off the job after the last trains finish their run this Sunday night, effectively shutting down BART across the Bay Area.  ATU 1555 represents train operators and station agents and is the second largest union working for BART, representing roughly 900 employees.

ATU 1555 President Jesse Hunt said that after four months of negotiating, his members turned down a contract proposal and took the members concerns to BART's negotiating team, thinking the negotiations were fruitful, so he was upset and surprised by the unanimous vote by BART's Board of Directors to impose a one-year contract on them after an executive session this morning.

"The contract that the BART Board has decided to impose is far worse than the contract that was in front of our members this week.  It's a regressive proposal that will net a seven percent pay cut as well as eliminate what is our social security to members. Regrettably, they have taken action to end negotiations."

BART Directors announced they would force the work rules on the ATU's members after an executive session this morning. 

“This was not an action we wanted to take,” BART Board of Directors President Thomas M. Blalock said. “We worked tirelessly to reach a settlement through the negotiation process but after four very long months of talks we have reached an impasse. As a result, ATU has left this Board with no other choice but to implement terms and conditions of employment. This is a regrettable but necessary step that we must take in order to immediately begin the urgent process of addressing BART’s rapidly deteriorating financial situation.”

Hunt said the other BART unions would honor the picket line and that ATU was being asked to shoulder too much burden. "The BART Board's imposition of this contract calls for cuts, only from the members of ATU,. in ways that have not been discussed at the negotiating table."

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The Government Computer News magazine, part of the U.S. General Services Administration, called the 511 Transit website maintained by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) "a heroic act of interagency coordination" when naming it to it's list of the "10 great government websites nationwide for 2009."

I'm not trying to downplay the utility and convenience of 511 Transit, but I think that's the first time I've heard "interagency cooperation" and "heroic" in the same sentence, at least for transit. Of course, it's also the first time I've heard of Government Computer News magazine.

But the site is a great utility for those of us who have regular commutes and you can find a whole lot of information for transit operators you might not be familiar with when making those non-routine trips around the Bay Area.

Tom Spiekerman, 511 Transit project manager for the MTC, said the site's recent redesign makes it “faster, smarter... and easier to use. Even the quality of the information is improved, thanks to new data collection and aggregation processes — and a lot of valuable customer feedback from website visitors. As a result the online trip planner is now among the best of its kind anywhere.”

According to the MTC, the 511 Transit page registered nearly 1.7 million individual user sessions in July 2009, a 47 percent increase over the monthly average in 2008. And the online trip planner at the 511 Transit page generated more than 1.5 million itineraries last month, compared to a monthly average of about 1.1 million in 2008.

What do you think, dear readers? How useful is 511 Transit for you and do you use the site often or prefer other outlets?

In New York, the standard icon of corporate prestige is a gleaming tower downtown bearing a company's name. Here in the Bay Area, one of the preferred symbols is a sprawling, parking lot-ringed "corporate campus" off US-101 (Google, Yahoo) or I-280 (Apple,) 30 miles or more from the region's densest city. Ironically, though these campuses were designed for convenience, many Silicon Valley employees prefer to reside in San Francisco. As a result, companies have discovered the recruiting value of something transportation planners have long touted: high-quality, car-free transportation.

This fall, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA) will release a Strategic Analysis Report outlining the impacts of these shuttles, which Supervisor Bevan Dufty has called "a whole other world of transportation" outside of Muni. Margaret Cortes, a senior transportation planner with the TA, said the companies have been very cooperative during the study, which she says will be ready in September.

In the past, news coverage of the shuttles has focused on their luxuriousness, their impact on real estate values, their contributions to gentrification, and their occasional noisiness. Less dissected has been their impact on livable streets issues and sustainability. Suburban corporate campuses may be inherently unsustainable, but are heavily-used shuttles at least mitigating the problem?

According to Google spokesperson Sunny Gettinger, Google's shuttle service has allowed at least some employees to live car-free. "We definitely have people who've gone car-free, or people who never bought a car," said Gettinger. "I know folks who leave their cars down here, if they have cars, and live in the city car-free more or less, and people who've moved here from other places and not gotten cars because of the shuttle."

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While the dispute between the MTA and NextBus Information Services (NBIS) over how real-time bus data on NextMuni (a separate company from NBIS) is used and licensed continues behind closed doors in downtown San Francisco, across the Bay, BART has flung its proverbial doors wide open to third-party developers to use its real-time data in as many and as interesting ways as they can conceive. In fact, BART is a national leader in data transparency among transit operators, and was second only to Tri-Met in Portland to release its real-time arrival feeds to the public.

Not only does BART provide the data readily to the public, it encourages competition among third-party software developers to improve the applications they develop by listing all the applications that have been devoloped on bart.gov/apps.

"We've put BART in front of customers in so many places that we wouldn't be able to do on our own," said BART Website Manager Timothy Moore. "We basically can't envision every beneficial use for this public data and frankly transit agencies in general don't have the vision. We don't have the time, we don't have the resources."

"There are people out there that have better ideas than we do," he added. "That's really why we opened it up."

Comparing BART to the MTA or other systems is not completely fair because BART's system is relatively small and simple, with only 43 stations across its lines, and each of its trains is equipped with automatic vehicle location (AVL) technology so they can be monitored anywhere in the system. MTA and other transit operators, whose buses, trolleys, and light rail vehicles don't necessarily come with GPS or AVL technology, must contract with a vendor to install AVL technology and obtain the data.

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When three agencies in President Obama's Cabinet -- DOT, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency -- banded together to promote "sustainable communities," the initiative sounded promising but somewhat lacking in concrete ideas.

Enter a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), who successfully attached their green housing legislation to the climate bill that recently cleared the House. Perlmutter and his co-sponsors took a victory lap of sorts today at the Library of Congress as a Senate counterpart to their plan was officially unveiled by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

The green housing measure aims to promote sustainable development through several channels. Transit-oriented development gets a substantial nod via location-efficient mortgages (LEMs), a brainchild of Fannie Mae that offers to count transportation savings as part of a homeowner's income when approving a loan. LEMs, therefore, help make transit access easier for first-time, urban, and lower-income buyers.

People who take out LEMs have a lower-than-average risk of default, Perlmutter said today, "because they have better control over costs."

His legislation would ask the Federal Housing Administration to insure 50,000 LEMs and energy-efficient mortgages, or EEMs, (in which energy savings can help offset homeowners' income) by 2012. The bill also requires Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to work on underwriting standards that would help make LEMs and EEMs more commonplace.

"Too many Americans are forced to drive until they qualify, to buy homes further and further from their jobs -- the result is more congestion, more emissions from cars, and more sprawl," said American Institute of Architects CEO Christine McEntee, a longtime backer of the bill.

Other provisions in the legislation reflect an ethos of empowering renters and homeowners alike to avoid over-consumption.

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