It's working in San Francisco. Now USDOT can help expand dynamic pricing to other cities around the country. Image: SFMTA.

Well now, that’s an understatement.

Between the uncertainty of the supercommittee and the bicameral bickering over the size and length of a bill, the only thing we can be sure of is that we’re heading toward yet another extension of SAFETEA-LU when it expires at the end of next month – if the two parties can agree to even that. Negotiations broke down over a whole lot less recently, when Congress let the FAA shut down over a measly couple million bucks.

But even if it’s a while before we see legislation passed that enacts new policies, there’s a lot the USDOT can do with existing authority to make smarter transportation investments that reduce congestion and carbon emissions. NRDC has documented them in a new report, “Federal Actions to Reduce Energy Use in Transportation” [PDF].

• Dynamic pricing. Fifteen states are participating in the DOTs Value Pilot Pricing Program, which allows states more flexibility in levying tolls and other pricing measures. San Francisco’s innovative new parking pricing system is a fruit of this program. Other variable pricing measures, like congestion pricing, could also help reduce fuel use and pollution, says Lovaas.
• Realism. USDOT should enforce the fiscal constraints of regional long-range transportation plans, being upfront about realistic costs. Lovaas says this will address a “pet peeve” of his and force states to reconsider “costly highway projects that have been on the books forever.”
• Transit benefits. Without further authority, USDOT could expand and promote the transit benefit program, which allows companies to give employees $240 per month in tax-free transit and vanpool benefits. Lovaas says the program is currently run by the IRS without any DOT involvement, and is vastly undersubscribed.

• Reclassify fuel. States and metros can generally only use federal funds for capital expenses, not operating costs. That leads to major maintenance backlogs, even while states invest in shiny new projects (which will then need to be maintained, and won’t be). One solution? Consider fuel a capital cost.
• Energy-efficient modes of transportation. Even without a new bill, USDOT could invest more in public transportation, pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and telecommuting. For starters, it could simplify the New Starts process for transit expansion, streamlining environmental review requirements and encouraging public-private partnerships. It could also take on more of the cost-escalation risk of new projects so that the risk doesn’t scare states away from taking on bold new projects, the way New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie used cost escalation as justification for killing the ARC tunnel project.
• Land use. Though NRDC admits that “federal influence here is indirect,” it says the FTA should consider land use among its evaluation criteria when selecting New Starts projects.

Those are just a few of NRDC’s ideas. It’s enough to give transportation reformers a glimmer of hope that, even if an innovative new bill may be a long way off, innovation can keep on going.

Photo: ejbSF

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of occasional stories on the “2011 Road Repaving and Street Safety Bond.”

A $248 million streets bond measure being pushed by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other electeds is on its way to the November ballot after being approved this week in a 9-2 vote by the Board of Supervisors. The “2011 Road Repaving and Street Safety Bond” would provide funds over three years to repave the city’s crumbling streets and fix cracked and buckling sidewalks. Streets with high volumes of transit, bicycle and pedestrian traffic would be prioritized.

“With more than half of our 850 miles of roadways deteriorating, we must confront the crisis in the condition of our streets now or we will face even greater costs and threats to public health and safety later,” Lee said in a statement released yesterday.

The San Francisco Department of Public Works (SFDPW) recently posted maps online that give a citywide breakdown of which streets stand to benefit from the bond money. The final list of streets would be “geographically equitable” and the SFDPW would “ensure that projects are evenly distributed to all parts of the city” without raising property taxes.

The agency’s outgoing director, Ed Reiskin, recently appointed to head the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said funding sources to improve street conditions have gradually declined over the years, and the measure is urgently needed to rebuild a growing backlog of streets in poor condition.

“We have a huge need. That backlog is maybe three quarters of a billion dollars, and there’s just no way that we can dig out of that hole using the operating dollars that are funding police and firefighters and library services and health and human services,” Reiskin told Streetsblog in a recent interview.

General fund money has historically not been used for street resurfacing, according to city officials, and state and federal funding sources have been "volatile and subject to policymaker cuts." Image: San Francisco Capital Plan

The bond measure, which requires a two-thirds vote, would gear $148 million to street repaving and construction (a total of 1,389 street segments), $7.3 million to repair street structures such as bridges, retaining walls and stairways, $22 million for sidewalk repairs (including ADA-compliant curb ramps and repairing up to 75,000 square feet of damaged sidewalks), $50 million for pedestrian, bicycle and streetscape improvements, and $20.3 million for transit and pedestrian signal infrastructure improvements. It would also create about 1,600 jobs, according to the Mayor’s Office.

SFDPW has not released a list of specific bicycle and pedestrian improvements but Reiskin said many of the remaining projects in the Bike Plan could be built and that the city’s Pedestrian Safety Task Force was working actively to identify where the most pressing needs are. Supervisor Jane Kim, who supports the measure, has said that she would work to see that some of the money is directed to pedestrian improvements in District 6, which has the highest rate of pedestrian fatalities and injuries.

“The first thing this bond measure does is to start improving the average condition of the streets,” Reiskin said. “The second thing that is important is bicycle facilities, whether it’s striping or dedicated bike lanes. A lot more streets that serve bicycles will get done if this bond passes.”

Although a similar measure was defeated in 2005 — it failed to get two-thirds — Reiskin pointed out that 56 percent of voters still said yes, without any kind of campaign. This time around, he expects a campaign and seems more confident it will pass. He added that many major cities use debt financing to resurface streets, including New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Houston, among others.

“We’re supporting it because the city needs money to fix our streets and make them safe to walk on, and this is one good revenue source among hopefully many that we can bring to this important goal,” said Elizabeth Stampe, the executive director of Walk San Francisco. “The bicycle and pedestrian improvements are investments in long-term, permanent improvements in our city streets, and that is exactly what a bond is for.”

“It’s not only about the repaving but investing in better bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure that is above and beyond maintenance,” said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum. “There’s a lot of really important projects that are building momentum that this will give real legs to, just in the next three years. It could be a really big boost to great streets.”

 Some Transit Advocates Opposed

The vote to support the measure on the SFBC’s board was 10-1, with Amandeep Jawa casting the lone dissent. In an email to Streetsblog, Jawa explained that he feels the measure is “irresponsible” and a “bad deal.” He argues the lifetime of the debt could last longer than the repairs and construction.

“If we are to sign on to such a stop gap, it is only responsible to do so if it buys us time to fix the real problem.  But this proposal has no such long-term solutions in it,” Jawa wrote. “We are just signing on to ‘borrow money and hope for a better tomorrow.’ In effect, all we are doing by supporting this measure is kicking the can down the road so that in 10-15 years we will have the same crisis, but we will be in worse shape financially as a City.”

Tom Radulovich, the executive director of Livable City, shares Jawa’s concerns. Livable City is officially opposed to the measure, citing several reasons. For one, Radulovich is frustrated that SFDPW is not adhering to the city’s livable streets policies when it repaves most streets because of a lack of funds.

“When they’re rebuilding city streets, per city law, per the Complete Streets plan ordinance and the Better Streets ordinance, they’re supposed to be using the major streets rehab to do pedestrian improvements, but they’re failing to do that,” Radulovich said. “I love fresh asphalt. I just want less blood on it.”

Radulovich said the city shouldn’t conceal the costs from motorists, and ought to consider a user fee — such as congestion pricing, a gas tax, adjusting the price of residential parking — to help fund street and parking maintenance.

“As a driver, you’re not going to pay anymore to drive, but as a non-driver I’m going to pay more for automobile infrastructure. We’re sending the wrong economical signals by continually hiding the trust cost of motoring from drivers,” Radulovich said.

Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, who voted against the measure along with his colleague Mark Farrell, was also concerned there isn’t a long-term funding component “to ensure that 10 years from now we don’t have another backlog. That’s my frustration.”

“I agree with Tom that there is a cost associated with driving a car, owning a car and the impact that those cars have on our streets. Absolutely. I get that,” Elsbernd told Streetsblog, adding that he would support “some new fee or some new tax,” such as a hike in the vehicle license fee, to pay for street resurfacing.

A bill by State Senator Mark Leno would allow San Francisco to restore the vehicle license fee to previous levels, which he said could generate up to $44 million annually “to help restore and preserve essential programs.” The legislation, SB223, passed the upper house last month and is scheduled for a hearing before the Assembly Appropriations Committee August 17, said a spokesperson for Leno.

Supporters Say Short-Term Funds Needed

Supporters of the measure agree there needs to be a long-term funding solution, but argue that until there’s a consensus SFDPW cannot let the city’s backlog get worse.

“The fact that the cost of repairing a street gets exponentially more expensive over time means that rather than spending four dollars down the road we can spend a dollar now and save money in the long-term even if we’re borrowing to get that dollar. It’s still cheaper in the long-term,” said Reiskin.

“The streets are in such bad shape that even if this not long-term we need to do it,” said Bob Planthold, the chair of California Walks who is also the pedestrian coordinator for the Senior Action Network (SAN). “Otherwise, things get worse and the city assumes a great financial liability for injuries caused by broken jumbled pavement so that neglect, inactivity means greater litigation and damage costs that the city will incur in the future.”

Although Planthold supports the measure, SAN has not taken an official position on it. He said he planned to encourage SAN’s board to support it.

“We have been negligent, you know, for about 30 years and have systematically underfunded our roads and the chickens are coming home to roost,” said Supervisor Scott Wiener. “This bond will allow us, for three years, to really do what we need to do on our roads and start bearing the backlog and that gives a three-year period to establish a sustainable funding stream.”

Next: We’ll take a look at some of the long-term funding solutions that have emerged to pay for street maintenance and repaving, and the political realities of implementing them.

Weekday crossings. Graphic: Eric Fischer

When the tolls on Bay Area bridges were increased on July 1, the Bay Bridge was given a higher toll at the times of its greatest usage in an attempt to reduce congestion by discouraging drivers from using the bridge at peak times.  Crossing the bridge into San Francisco costs $6 from 5:00 to 10:00 am and 3:00 to 7:00 pm on weekdays, $4 at other times on weekdays, and $5 on weekends.  However, the toll structure does not seem to have had the desired effect.

Using data for about 50,000 bridge crossings from Stamen Design’s Cabspotting and from NextBus for AC Transit, I calculated and plotted the time required to cross the bridge at different times of day before and after the toll increase.

The graphs are noisy because of the small sample size, but the time required to cross the bridge by car at the morning and afternoon weekday peak times seems basically unchanged since 2008.  The off-peak weekday crossing is a little slower than it used to be, perhaps because of the S-curve detour for construction of the new east span.  On weekends, the off-peak crossing time seems to be unchanged since 2008.

The weekend peak data from 2008 is especially noisy so it is hard to tell exactly what has changed there, but if anything, it takes longer to cross the bridge now than it did before.  It seems that either the demand for the bridge is so inelastic that the variable tolls are not an effective way of shifting or reducing demand, or that the price differential has not been made large enough to have an effect.

What does seem to be effective is the exclusive bus lane that allows AC Transit buses to cross the bridge nearly as quickly during the morning weekday peak as at off-peak times.  I don’t understand why it doesn’t provide the same benefit during the afternoon peak.

Weekend crossings. Graphic: Eric Fischer

John Goodwin, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said it’s too early to draw any conclusions but a group of UC Berkeley professors, including Robert Cervero, was hired to do a comprehensive analysis of the new toll schedule, including the impact on the Bay Bridge. Some preliminary results are expected to be released next week.

“It’s still far too early to draw any meaningful conclusions but we’re very much interested in getting as much data as we can. We’re certainly looking forward to receiving the initial findings,” said Goodwin.

A report [pdf] released by the MTC in October showed that Bay Bridge traffic did not significantly decline in 2010 when compared to 2009. ]]> http://sf.streetsblog.org/2011/01/05/data-show-bay-bridge-crossings-not-affected-by-congestion-pricing/feed/ 28 http://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/12/14/sf-congestion-pricing-study-moves-forward-without-san-mateo-boundary/ http://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/12/14/sf-congestion-pricing-study-moves-forward-without-san-mateo-boundary/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 03:00:41 +0000 Matthew Roth http://sf.streetsblog.org/?p=260439 [...]]]>

Flickr photo: Michaelangelo van Dam

The study analyzing numerous options for congestion pricing in San Francisco touched off such a political furor in San Mateo County, you’d have thought San Francisco was about to moat up and charge a fee for admission. Politicians and planners from Daly City and San Mateo spoke about the plan today as though they were jilted lovers getting a mandate from the beautiful city to their north without being allowed to get a word in edgewise.

“It hasn’t been a conversation with San Mateo County, it has been a monologue with San Mateo County,” said State Assemblymember Jerry Hill, who testified with numerous San Mateo officials at the board meeting of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), which conducted the study. Hill said he and others from San Mateo County were supportive of efforts to reduce congestion and deal with climate impacts, but not if it included charging drivers to cross the county line.

In case San Francisco didn’t move affirmatively to drop the Southern Gateway option from the study, said Hill, he was prepared to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for one county charge other counties “punitive measures” like pricing.

“I am a professional supporter of appropriate congestion pricing,” said Richard Napier, executive director of the City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County (C/CAG). But Napier warned that congestion pricing worked in cities like London and Stockholm because the charging areas were dense and transit was good, much like the northeast portion of San Francisco. Of the southern gateway option, Napier said, “I don’t think it would meet the criteria” for significantly reducing traffic.

Following San Francisco Supervisor Sean Elsbernd’s lead, the Board of Supervisors, in their capacity as SFCTA directors, voted 9-2 to strip the San Mateo option from the study. The board then voted 8-3 to give the SFCTA staff permission to seek federal funding to continue studying the two Northeast Cordon options and to enter into environmental review. SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich explained to Streetsblog that he would submit a grant for up to $2 million in federal funding for the next phase of the study, at which point the city would be expected to match with about $400,000 in local funds.

The two remaining pricing options would establish a London-style cordon that would use FasTrak and camera technology to charge drivers during peak periods for crossing into the zone, which would be bordered by 18th Street to the south, Guerrero/Laguna Street to the west and the Bay to the north and east.

One of the cordon scenarios would charge $3 (with a maximum of $6 daily) from 6-9 am and from 3-7 pm, raising an estimated $80 million net for transit and non-driving mobility options like bicycling and pedestrian improvements. This option would also reduce traffic up to 12 percent, emissions up to 16 percent, and would be expected to improve transit times by up to 20 percent.

The other cordon fee proposal would target the driving commuter by charging $6 for trips leaving the northeast cordon from 3-7 p.m. in the outbound direction only, an option studied after evening business interests worried the charge would discourage downtown visitors for dinner and shows. This would raise $70 million annually for transit and would have fewer traffic and emissions reductions benefits than the morning and evening scenario.

Michaela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, and Bevan Dufty, the three dissenting supervisors who voted against even studying pricing further, all said the current economic situation made them reluctant to add a further fee for driving into certain parts of the city. Chu noted the city has numerous other options for pricing, including better parking management, such as the SFPark trial and other scenarios.

Alioto-Pier was particularly insistent in her opposition to the study, saying until the ramification of the new fee and tax measure Proposition 26 was clearer, she didn’t think the city should move ahead with spending money on something that might never pass.

She also said the impact to small businesses would be too great to bear and that the current study didn’t demonstrate those impacts sufficiently. Of the southern gateway, she said the lack of regional support was disconcerting and that pricing sent the wrong signal to people outside the zone. “To me it looks like a fee to enter San Francisco,” she said.

After the vote, SFCTA chair Ross Mirkarimi lauded his fellow directors for the decision, though he said he wasn’t surprised by the outcome. “This is the natural course of how a conversation and a potential study would unfold. I’m not surprised,” he said. “We have been effective in stimulating the larger discussion.”

Moscovich pledged to do significant work to demonstrate the impacts pricing would have on small businesses and said the SFCTA has about one month to submit its application to the federal government. As to whether or not the city would eventually adopt pricing to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, he responded affirmatively.

“I think it’s inescapable. We don’t’ have that many strategies, we’ve already done everything else,” said Moscovich. “We already are a large transit-oriented development, this city. We’re already putting people next to their jobs. The next frontier is pricing.”

San Francisco traffic planners will study congestion pricing further, following the vote of approval today by the Board of Supervisors in their capacity as directors of the SFCTA. The action puts the debate to bed for a couple more years, but expect the turmoil to begin anew when the SFCTA completes the required environmental review and the region debates the merits of pricing driving in congested areas. KALW asked me to be on Crosscurrents to discuss the issue further. You can listen here.

In today’s San Mateo County Times, Mike Rosenburg brings us the news that “fuming” officials in San Mateo County are considering retaliating against San Francisco for studying congestion pricing, though their solution might seem counter-intuitive:

Instigating what one Peninsula politician said would be a “border war,” some San Mateo County officials said they would try to implement a toll to enter the county from the north during rush hour if San Francisco enacts a similar entrance fee for its city. The threat by Peninsula leaders is an effort to persuade San Francisco leaders to shelve their plan.

Finally, San Mateo County officials are talking some sense, though they probably don’t realize it. Assemblymember Jerry Hill goes on to say: “You will see a battle of tolls — everyone will try to out-toll the next jurisdiction to beat the one that started it. No one wants to see that.”

Wrong, Mr. Hill. That’s actually my fantasy.

Considering the astronomical toll that driving takes on our region (see the video above), wouldn’t this be an ideal world? Make driving expensive and build up a world-class sustainable transportation system in the Bay Area through congestion tolls. That’s exactly what the Bay Area will need to do to meet its obligations under California’s climate change and smart growth laws. Reduce driving. Reduce congestion. Reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve transit and make tolls competitive. Brilliant.

San Francisco is onto something, and now, so is San Mateo County.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

You’d think the Tea Party had descended on San Mateo County, what with the piqued rhetoric in the media over San Francisco’s congestion pricing study. I don’t like to invoke Sarah Palin’s jargon, but I keep coming back to her horrible phrase “lamestream media” when I see yet another story that paints San Francisco transportation planners as greedy car-hating vampires and gets the facts on the pricing study so terribly wrong.

Take John Horgan, a columnist for the San Mateo County Times, who calls San Francisco the Boondoggle by the Bay and the Duchy of Dysfunction, while lamenting that the poor “plebians” on the other side of the city’s “moat-like pay gate” should boycott San Francisco businesses and frequent those in San Mateo if the pick-pocket plan ever passes..

Running with a similar trope, Mike Sugarman of CBS 5 calls the proposal a “border war,” while erroneously painting a scenario where he drives across the charging zone line, forgets something back in Daly City and ends up paying $12 for crossing the line four times (in each of the four pricing zones being studied, a daily charge to a driver would be capped at $6). Sugarman then sticks his microphone in the face of a bunch of drivers and asks them if they would pay for something they currently get for free. Hmm, can you kids guess what the answer is going to be?

You have to wade through 2:20 of bad reporting to get to the first two factual items in Sugarman’s piece, when he says San Francisco is only studying congestion pricing and it wouldn’t go into effect before 2015 at the earliest.

Ken Garcia at the San Francisco Examiner takes the crusade on factual reporting even further, misrepresenting almost everything about the congestion pricing study, conflating the various options for congestion zones into one big tax-happy, driver hating city of lunatics. And on a stylistic quibble, I don’t think Garcia could have stuffed any more puns into his day-after Thanksgiving report (see Jon Stewart’s recent bit on media abuse of puns), from trotting turkeys to gravy to squash and communal platters. If the Examiner had editors, they could have trimmed several hundred words worth of fat from that holiday bird and left us merely with specious claims about money grubbing supervisors “taxing” the “privilege” and “pleasure” of driving.

A London-style cordon encompassing the northeast section of the city. Cordon boundaries would be at 18th Street to the south and Guerrero and Laguna Streets to the west. Image: SFCTA.

This recent round of press attention started when the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) held a media breakfast on November 10th to update transportation reporters on the agency’s priorities and projects for the coming year.

As we have written before, according to the models run by the SFCTA, without any action, traffic in San Francisco during rush hours will get significantly worse as the region grows, leading to an increase in traffic related costs. The SFCTA predicts a 20 percent increase in traffic delay in San Francisco by 2030, rising to 30 percent by 2040, or the equivalent of adding 40,000 more vehicles per day in the already busy downtown.

In response to this expected traffic growth, the SFCTA has proposed several pricing options, including a London-style cordon that would use transponder (such as FasTrak) and camera technology to charge drivers crossing certain streets during the peak periods. SFCTA staff would prefer a northeast cordon, where the charge boundary would be at 18th Street on the southern border and Guerrero and Laguna Streets on the western edge.

In the cordon scenario with a morning and evening charge of $3 (with a maximum of $6 daily) the SFCTA predicts raising $80 million net for transit and non-driving mobility options like bicycling and pedestrian improvements, with traffic reductions of up to 12 percent, emissions reductions up to 16 percent and transit speed improvements of up to 20 percent.

The day after the November 10th press briefing, the three other reporters present wrote stories on the SFCTA’s plan to present its board of directors, who are the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, with an update on the progress they have made and to ask permission to continue studying further, including the possibility of a pilot.

Cue the madness.

Though none of the stories misrepresented the facts, the Chronicle story led with a first sentence that said congestion pricing could cost drivers $1,560 a year (writer Rachel Gordon presumably multiplied 260 work days per year times $6 to get that figure). Unfortunately, the article posits the four pricing scenarios being studied, but doesn’t make clear that they would not be simultaneously enacted (which Garcia concludes in his op-ed).

Fueled by members of the San Mateo political class taking opportunistic pot-shots at the study, especially Daly City Councilman David Canepa, the salient number has become that $1,560 driving tax.

“It’s making people crazy thinking this is just a money grab,” said Tilly Chang, SFCTA deputy director for planning. Chang said the SFCTA has met many times with San Mateo county officials and staff, explaining the various scenarios under study and emphasizing the benefits. “We really want to have a more thoughtful and informed conversation so that we’re listening to each other and hear each other. They’re missing the point that this is a shared regional problem.”

In my conversations over the past year with the SFCTA planners doing the study, they made it clear that the most effective pricing zone option for reducing downtown traffic, speeding up Muni and raising significant money for improving city streets is the northeast cordon. They noted that the southern boundary option would not have the desired traffic reduction in downtown because 70 percent of the peak period drivers to the northeast cordon are coming from a San Francisco address to begin with. True, San Mateo drivers don’t pay tolls to drive into downtown San Francisco like Marin and East Bay drivers do, but they represent only a small fraction of traffic in the target pricing neighborhoods.

Perhaps the most disappointing piece of disinformation came from Adrienne Tissier’s op-ed in the Examiner yesterday. Tissier is a San Mateo County Supervisor and is about to become the chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the region’s transportation and planning authority. In her op-ed, Tissier plays up the same tax-hungry bogeymen as the columnists, but she also makes the irrational assertion that congestion pricing will increase traffic by encouraging peak-hour commuters to travel at different times.

Um, Ms. Tissier, this is exactly the point of congestion pricing: it reduces peak period traffic and encourages some people to choose a reasonable transit alternative, which according to the SFCTA, includes 80 percent of those currently driving downtown. If this is Tissier’s attitude for San Francisco, I fear for the region, where she will be presiding over the recently announced target of reducing greeenhouse gas emissions 15 percent by 2035. No serious planner believes this can be accomplished without adequate pricing of driving.

“We understand that we’re a culture addicted to our cars,” said the SFCTA’s Chang when asked to explain why this issue has blown up in the press. “We know from any 12-step program, there’s anger, denial and blame and then you get through to acceptance and understanding the issues and the problem and maybe then the acceptance needed to make a change.”

“Doing nothing is just going to relegate us to a region in decline,” she added.

Kheel was an ally of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

Ted became famous in the 1950s and 1960s as the mediator who settled newspaper strikes, railroad strikes and other high-stakes disputes. He was a fixture in The Times — his square jaw and determined face signifying probity and civic virtue. But much of his finest work was done out of the spotlight. It was Ted’s heretical but constant agitation to allocate surplus toll revenues from Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority to the financially ailing public transit agencies, that in 1968 led NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to combine the TBTA with the Transit Authority and the commuter railroads into the MTA — and destroy Moses’s power to fund highways and starve transit.

Ted’s transit advocacy rested on what he called “the fundamental principle that car travel and mass transit are interrelated, like two sides of an equation. There should be a balance,” he wrote, “but instead, our system is enormously, unconscionably out of balance,” causing road gridlock on the one hand and inadequate transit service on the other. Ted fought for five decades to correct that imbalance, with stories in New York magazine like “How To Stop Cars from Devouring the City” [PDF]; with a self-financed lawsuit [PDF] to overturn bond covenants through which the Port Authority enjoined itself from expanding mass transit, that Ted pursued all the way to the Supreme Court (losing on a tie vote); and, in his final years, with an even more audacious venture that would draw me into his orbit and point the way to a new transit revolution with the potential to surpass that of 1968.

In early 2007, already well into his nineties, Ted asked transportation engineer George Haikalis to examine whether congestion pricing could generate enough revenue to finance free mass transit throughout the five boroughs. Yes, free, not just to help drive a stake through traffic gridlock but to establish urban transport as an essential public service, on a par with public education and safety, while giving working people the equivalent of a pay raise. George hired me onto his team, and by fall I had fashioned a skeletal spreadsheet model that appeared to answer Ted’s question affirmatively: a $16 congestion toll, charged 24/7, would allow 100 percent free buses and subways [PDF].

On a brilliant October Sunday, I went to Ted’s Fifth Avenue office and showed him my work. Ted loved the model, which he dubbed the “Balanced Transportation Analyzer.” What really stays with me from that day, though, was Ted’s ringside recollections of events that had rocked New York City and State and even the nation. As Central Park’s blazing colors softened into shadow, Ted and I relived fifty years of history: the fateful 1966 transit strike, Lyndon Johnson’s dangling of Supreme Court seats in front of prospective nominees, and implacable personages from TWU chief Mike Quill to Rockefeller and JFK.

Komanoff and Kheel looking forward to free transit.

That day three years ago marked a personal turning point. With Ted’s active guidance and the generous support of his Nurture Nature Foundation, I threw myself into fleshing out the BTA and becoming an advocate for Ted’s vision of free transit. The work has been by turns frustrating and exhilarating. Frustrating because we lacked the political muscle to get our more-nuanced congestion pricing approaches considered alongside the plans advanced by Mayor Bloomberg in 2007-08 or the Ravitch Commission in 2008-09. But exhilarating because the BTA has blossomed to where it can handle time-of-day-varied toll and fare plans and estimate the resulting revenues and travel time savings. (The current BTA spreadsheet can be downloaded here; requires Excel 2007 or later.)

The BTA also reveals the extent to which the proverbial “one additional car trip” to the CBD slows down other vehicles on the road: by several hours (the aggregate of the seconds of road delay imposed on hundreds or thousands of cars and trucks), worth $100 of lost time, plus or minus, depending on time of day and week. This novel element, a kind of “foundation stone” of congestion pricing, attracted the interest of financial blogger Felix Salmon and Wired magazine. Felix’s article in the June Wired conveys Ted’s prescient grasp of the extent to which the social costs of car use far outweigh fiscal support for transit:

Now 95 years old, Kheel has been trying to improve New York’s traffic for more than half a century. He is obsessed with the economic damage that cars do to cities — damage that’s much greater than most people realize… in a New York magazine cover story arguing against another fare increase [he wrote]: “Any balanced analysis will surely prove that the taxpayer actually pays, for every person who chooses to drive to and from work in his own car, an indirect subsidy at least 10 times as great as the indirect subsidy now paid the mass-transit rider.”

When the article was published, in June, I went to Ted’s apartment and read it aloud. We beamed, seeing our handiwork manifested in print. Ted had cast his bread upon the waters and seen it returned as mathematical validation. I had found, in this protean man, both a patron and a kindred spirit.

Ted’s Nurture Nature Foundation has subsequently retained renowned environmental campaigner Alex Matthiessen to spearhead education and outreach to fulfill Ted’s vision of tolling driving to finance transit. With deep deficits in Albany and at the MTA placing free transit off limits for the time being, Alex is reconfiguring free transit as Sustainable Transit and helping make Ted’s and my plan even more synergistic and compelling. The mutually reinforcing elements — time-varied tolls to drive to the CBD; medallion taxi charges so that outlying boroughs and counties don’t subsidize Manhattan; off-peak transit discounts; targeted improvements in transit service today while supporting the MTA capital plan for tomorrow — promise 20 percent improvements in CBD travel speeds along with a time-out from the endless spiral of fare hikes. (Several versions of the plan are on display in the “Results” tab of the BTA; see earlier link.)

“I’ve been to the mountaintop,” Martin Luther King declared in his sermon in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated. “And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” Ted Kheel, a political ally and financial supporter of Dr. King’s, was privileged to live a long and full life. He may not have made it to the promised land of free transit. But Ted did as much as anyone to bring New York to the mountaintop of a transportation system that subordinates the damages caused by the auto to the needs of public transit and the multitudes who benefit from it.

Thank you, Ted, for letting me walk with you in the last part of your journey.

While the full results of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority's (SFCTA) congestion pricing plan, the SF Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (SFMAPS), have not yet been released, the agency will hold a series of public meetings starting next week to discuss the general principles of congestion pricing and how it could work in San Francisco. At the public meetings, the SFCTA will detail several possible scenarios to charge drivers for driving into San Francisco's downtown during peak periods, a prospect that should spark significant public and media debate.

In the best-case scenario, the SFCTA predicts raising $80 million for transit and non-driving mobility options like bicycling and pedestrian improvements, with traffic reductions of up to 12 percent, emissions reductions up to 16 percent and transit speed improvements of up to 20 percent.

While these numbers sound great, the agency still has to convince a lot of people about the benefits of congestion pricing, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was an early advocate for the concept, but who is not so sure now is a good time to try it.

"I've worked very hard to promote this construct, but I want to do it in a thoughtful and judicious way and I want to do it in a way that's not going to hurt the economic growth of this city at a time when we're trying to recruit companies and trying to recruit people," Newsom told Streetsblog. "We have a lot more work to do on that. We need a lot more outreach, a lot more consensus."

"I'm not ideologically opposed by any stretch," added Newsom, but "I'm not sure this is the right time to be having this debate."

Whether or not this is the right time, the SFCTA will present its findings to the public this week and then present the full study to the Board of Supervisors, acting as it's board of directors, this fall.

Tilly Chang, Deputy Director for Planning at the SFCTA acknowledged the significant political hurdles for congestion pricing and said right now they are primarily concerned with educating the public around the region.

"We're fighting a huge amount of skepticism," she said. But, she added, there is "no decision to take right now about doing it or not. We just need to educate people and create awareness. The whole region needs to understand and see the benefit of it."

Several Options for Pricing Boundary and Fees

According to the models run by the SFCTA, without any action, traffic in San Francisco during rush hours will get significantly worse as the region grows, leading to an increase in traffic related costs. The SFCTA predicts a 20 percent increase in traffic delay in San Francisco by 2030, rising to 30 percent by 2040, or the equivalent of adding 40,000 more vehicles per day in the already busy downtown.

In response to this expected traffic growth, the SFCTA has proposed several pricing options, including a London-style cordon that would use transponder (such as FasTrak) and camera technology to charge drivers crossing certain streets during the peak periods. SFCTA staff would prefer a northeast cordon (pictured above), where the charge boundary would be at 18th Street on the southern border and Guerrero and Laguna Streets on the western edge.

Drivers crossing these new cordon borders could be charged in several ways, depending on what option is finally chosen by the Board of Supervisors, acting as the SFCTA's board of directors.

With the northeast cordon, the SFCTA has proposed two fee options. The first would charge drivers $3 between 6-9 a.m. and another $3 from 3-7 p.m. on weekdays only. All other times would be free and there would be a cap of $6 per day. This option would raise the most money, a net of $80 million annually, but it has been unpopular with downtown business focus groups because of the perception that it will impact theater goers and evening trips made by car, according to the SFCTA.

Projected revenue from the various options.

Another fee proposal would target the driving commuter by charging $6 for trips leaving the northeast cordon from 3-7 p.m. in the outbound direction only. This would raise only $70 million annually, but would not have any impact on people who choose to drive into the cordon area in the evening. This option would also have fewer traffic and emissions reductions benefits than the morning and evening charges.

The last significant option would be a Southern Gateway fee area paired with citywide parking pricing, including commercial off-street facilities in conjunction with SFPark. While details on this option are not in the SFCTA's report, Gabriel Metcalf, Executive Director of the transportation think tank SPUR and a supporter of this option, said the benefits were significant.

Metcalf said congestion could be reduced by charging the $3 at the cordon boundary or at the parking space and it would have the same congestion reduction benefit because drivers would incorporate the new price of their driving trip into their calculations and decide whether or not to drive in the same way they would with the cordon.

The parking fee, however, "would be infinitely flexible," said Metcalf, and could be applied in any congested area around the city, not just the cordon zone.

"Transportation is absolutely something that can be improved through better pricing, but I think the jury is still out on whether a London-style cordon is the right answer or whether it might not be simpler to just charge people at the parking space," said Metcalf.

"We could have demand-based parking pricing all over the city, which would mean that where there is plenty of parking, it would be free and where there is not enough parking to meet demand, it would rise."

Common Misconceptions About Driving in San Francisco

No matter which plan might be selected, the SFCTA's Chang was preparing to dispel a host of common misconceptions about driving in San Francisco, perhaps predicting the issues that would come up at the public meetings this week.

One of the bigger conceits held by many San Franciscans, according to Chang, is that all the traffic in the city is from drivers who don't live in the city. In fact, 70 percent of driving during rush hour to San Francisco's downtown is done by San Franciscans.

"It's one of the big dirty secrets," said Chang, who noted that 20 percent of the driving downtown comes from downtown drivers. "It's easy to think it's all the regional people, South Bay people. It's not, it's San Franciscans."

Another huge misconception is the fallacy that congestion pricing would be a regressive tax on poor people who need to drive into the cordon area. According to SFCTA data, only 10 percent of drivers to, from, and within the downtown area during the morning rush are from households making less than $50,000 annually. What's more, only 3 percent of total trips to, from, and within dowtown are made by people in this demographic. The vast majority of low-income San Franciscans ride transit, walk, or ride bicycles.

Whether or not this data will help shape the perception of congestion pricing is another matter. Chang said in addition to the public meetings, the SFCTA has applied for federal and state grants to conduct a 6-month congestion pricing pilot, should city stakeholders agree to try it.

No matter what happens in the coming months, the SFCTA will start its environmental impact report for congestion pricing would start in 2011 and likely be completed in 2013. Implementation could happen by 2014.

The first in-person meeting will be held next week, July 27, 2010, from 5:30pm to 7:00pm at the San Francisco Ferry Building in the Port Commission Room, 2nd Floor. The second in-person meeting will be held Wednesday, July 28, 2010, from 5:30pm to 7:00pm at the SFCTA Hearing Room, 100 Van Ness Avenue, 26th Floor.

Two webinars will be held on Wednesday, August 4, 2010, from 12:00pm – 1:00pm and Thursday, August 5, 2010, from 12:30pm – 1:30pm. You can sign up for the webinars at www.sfmobility.org.

UPDATED: 2:30 pm

Pricing at all the bridge crossings and the southern entries to the city with combined off-street parking pricing, the option preferred by SPUR and some business interests.

Emissions benefits from the various options.

Traffic benefits of the various options.

I presented a paper last week at an international forum on traffic congestion in Guangzhou, China. People in that city are beginning to look at congestion pricing, and I was asked to discuss why the Bloomberg toll plan failed politically.

As part of my talk, I described the “social delay costs” from an additional car trip into the center of Manhattan -- literally, the total time that all road users combined spend in traffic because any one of them decided to drive. Afterwards, one of the organizers, a professor of transportation engineering, asked me to present a technical version of my paper to his students at South China University of Technology.

The next day, when I came to the part about social-delay costs, the professor peppered me with questions about my methodology. As I went through the steps -- basically, every trip takes up an incremental amount of limited street space, which lowers speeds, which adds to everyone's travel times -- the professor grew more intrigued. It wasn’t that the idea itself was new, but that if traffic speeds and other baseline data were known, then the delay-impact of one trip could be quantified. And, moreover, that the impact varied enormously depending on the time of day: when there is ample spare road capacity, say, in the middle of the night, an extra trip has little discernible impact, whereas one trip during congested peak times adds several hours to the aggregate time that all other vehicles must spend on the road.

I daresay that for the professor, my elucidation of one trip’s delay costs helped move congestion pricing from the realm of abstraction to something tangible and, perhaps, essential. If a peak trip to the center of New York or some other city can impose one or two hundred minutes worth of delays on others -- and if no driver is ever called on to take that impact into consideration -- then of course the city will be awash in gridlock. No city, not even Guangzhou, despite an emerging 21st century transit infrastructure of Bus Rapid Transit and new subway lines, will be able to forestall the tide of free driving.

The same construct animates the FreshDirect analysis in my Time Thieves paper, except that there the bulk of the delays result from the trucks’ double-parking. The point is the one I made in my Dot Earth post from Guangzhou: Motorists who pay only for their own lost time, but not for the time their trips take from other motorists, have little incentive to make efficient decisions about when to drive and how often. In the case of FreshDirect, this "time theft" averages $15 per delivery. If that cost were added to the delivery price, FreshDirect’s business, I estimate, would drop off by around 20 percent.

Then again, no one in New York City -- myself included -- is proposing congestion tolls even close to the social delay costs of the trips that would be tolled. The Kheel-Komanoff Plan’s $2-$9 variable tolls ($2-$3-$4 on weekends and holidays, $3-$6-$9 on weekdays) are a little under 10 percent of the same trips’ respective $30-$130 congestion costs. Yet, as I told the forum in Guangzhou, even this toll -- modest relative to the trip's full social cost -- would eliminate enough car trips that speeds within the Manhattan CBD would rise more than 15 percent.

Photo: Matthew Roth

Democracy in action, I suppose. Long-time bicycle advocates from the East Bay and San Francisco converged on this meeting, hoping to convince the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) to support using some of the new tolls ($5 on all bridges as of July 1, with $6 congestion pricing on the Bay Bridge during rush hour, and for the first time, a half-price toll for carpoolers) to fund a new west-span bicycle/pedestrian/maintenance/safety lane to make the bridge safer, and to finish the transbay route for bicyclists and pedestrians too, not just motorized vehicles. But that effort was bureaucratically sidetracked before this meeting even started.

Surrounding the MTC hearing room were bicycle advocates from around the region. Photo: Chris Carlsson.

The BATA's legal advice from a prior meeting was that they have no authority to allocate toll monies toward this new path, in spite of language in the law that allows for maintenance and safety improvements, which the new path unambiguously represents.

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates has asked for a second legal opinion from the State Legislative Counsel, which he said will take 2-3 months to get. Moreover, he followed the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) chair's admonition to the assembled cycling advocates to save their comments for another time (since the question of funding and building a new west-span side path would not be addressed in this meeting), by stressing that the fight was no longer at BATA or the MTC but had moved to the state Legislature in Sacramento.

It's hardly a surprise that the MTC wanted to duck this issue and pass the buck to Sacramento. The 15-member MTC is a lopsided status-quo minded entity. That was revealed again today when San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, responding to several public commenters who were casual carpoolers and feared the new toll would wipe out the phenomenon, proposed the $2.50 carpool toll be reduced to $2.00. A roll-call vote went 13-3 against the proposal, only Daly, Tom Bates, and Bay Conservation and Development Commissioner Ann Halstedt voting for it.

One comment from an employee of the Bay Area Air Quality Control District pointed out that casual carpooling reduces congestion, saves money for those who do it, AND builds community, but the majority of the commissioners were not inclined to tinker with their staff's proposed new toll schedule. Nor did any of them choose to question the formula by which truckers have new tolls phased in over 3 years, denying the bridge budget $60 million according to their own calculations (recreational vehicle owners also showed up to challenge their being classified as trucks for purposes of bridge tolls, which will raise their bridge-crossing costs by 150%).

There is a long and charming local history of bicycle advocates who have pushed BART, Caltrain, the Golden Gate Bridge, and local bus systems for greater accommodation for bicycles and cyclists. It's a thankless, Sisyphean task, and we can all be thankful for those folks who have stuck with it.

That said, I've always been astonished at the eager sincerity a lot of people bring to these governmental processes. As far as I can tell the system is deeply broken. The inordinate emphasis, even at this very late date, on automobiles, freeways, "level of service," etc., seems to always trump common sense efforts to promote the incredibly modest beginnings of a new infrastructure. After all, there are state laws mandating major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. How is that going to be achieved without an alternative as obvious as a Bay Bridge bike path?

It was Jason Meggs and some stalwart friends a decade ago who rode bikes across the Bay Bridge to dramatize the absurdity of denying access to a central transportation artery. But most of the energy these days goes into attending these hearings with homemade signs, with earnest behind-the-scenes message making so as not to offend the commissioners, or become unseemly or too aggressive.

The urgency of altering how we live day to day gets quite lost in these processes. The moods of commissioners, the technical language in obscure appropriations bills, the muscle-bound lobbying strength of corporate behemoths, together become the focus of political action, rather than the terrain of our daily lives. I like the slogan "Bridge the Gap" just fine, but I couldn't help but feel that the real gap needing bridging at today's hearing was between the building trades workers out front clamoring for "jobs" and the bicycling advocates inside who were firmly but cautiously seeking support for a maintenance lane to be added to the west span.

I wondered if anyone had spoken with the building trades folks about supporting the bike/ped/etc. lane? Or has thought to propose a much broader alliance on local projects? (And what is it with union workers and their leaders that they always abdicate control over deciding what work is worth doing to those with the purse strings? Shouldn't workers be central deciders in how their work is employed in our communities?) What about a massive overhaul of local roads and bridges, adding Copenhagen-style bike lanes on every street and span? Think how much work that would be! Oh but we can't pay for it is the immediate rejoinder.

And if you accept the narrow constraints of institutional political reality as it is, then the argument is lost. But what about repealing Prop 13, at least as it applies to major corporations in California? What about ending the U.S. empire's military bases in over 100 countries around the world? Why is the U.S. spending as much on guns and bombs and death and mayhem as the rest of the world combined? Why did the federal government give away $1.5 trillion to the wealthiest owners of businesses instead of embarking on the much-promoted "Green New Deal" that if done honestly, might have provided resources for just this kind of drastic and dramatic reorganization and rebuilding of our urban physical infrastructure?

Common sense is trivialized and marginalized in the public process.

The west-span bike lane is a pipe dream for now. But by making it contingent on a massively expensive new lane being added to the existing bridge (and done under the design and control of the brazenly anti-bicycle Department of Highways, oops, I mean Caltrans), aren't we shooting ourselves in the foot?

A bike/ped/safety/maintenance lane could be put on the top deck of the Bay Bridge in two weeks if we had the political vision to do it. Here's how: Admit that traffic on the inbound west span rarely exceeds 30 mph and make that the new speed limit during rush hour. It's a pretty drive anyway, who cares if you have to go slower? And most of the time you can't get near 30 mph anyway, given the congested traffic. Narrow the five lanes from 12 feet to 10 feet, take the new 10 feet of space and barricade it with a cement railing. Voila! You have a bike/ped/safety/maintenance lane. The other five lanes are open during rush hour, but only 4 lanes are open the rest of the time, leaving a buffer lane next to the bike/etc. lane for additional safety. When traffic is light and only four lanes are open, the existing 50 mph speed limit can prevail... If we wanted to do it, we don't have to wait 3 months for a new legal opinion, and then another 2-plus years for another toll increase, and then 5-7 years for design and building of this new lane.

We could do it by March 1. Why not?

What’s good for the driver in the middle is also good for public health. (Photo: FHWA)

Take performance parking.
Both urbanists (and drivers) seem to believe that it’s good (or bad),
because it makes parking more expensive, which is bad (or good) for
drivers. But this assumes that a free parking system, where open spots
are almost never available, is desirable for drivers.

That’s
like saying that a store that gives away bread for free — and which
subsequently never has any bread — is good for people who like eating
bread.

For the most part, thinking about congestion pricing
follows this same rule. Urbanists tend to like it because it makes
driving more costly and raises revenue for transit infrastructure.
Drivers tend to oppose it, because they don’t want to pay more to
drive. In fact, congestion pricing would be good for people who really
want to drive and good for people who’d like to have an alternative to driving.

This
message has been slow to sink in, but the fact that drivers may benefit
from congestion pricing may be beginning to resonate with urbanists.
Unfortunately — and so powerful is the
what’s-bad-for-drivers-is-good-for-cities mentality — the absorption
of this message has caused some urbanists to conclude that they’ve been
wrong all along, and that congestion pricing really is bad. If drivers might benefit, it must be the case that cities, and the earth, will not.

So writes the New Yorker‘s David Owen, in an extremely misguided piece in the Wall Street Journal.

By requiring car drivers to pay a fee to drive in a city
at peak hours, congestion pricing reduces traffic and raises money that
can be used to support public transit—both worthy goals.

Yet congestion pricing has dubious environmental value. Traffic
jams, if they’re managed well, can actually be good for the
environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers
into subway riders or pedestrians.

He is saying that congestion pricing is a bad idea, because traffic encourages
drivers to switch to transit or otherwise get off the roads. But this
misses the point that congestion pricing works by … encouraging drivers
to switch to transit or otherwise get off the roads. And as a bonus, it
creates revenue which can be used to build more transit alternatives
for frustrated drivers.

Owen seems to be arguing that the primary effect of congestion
pricing may be to spread driving out over a longer period of time
rather rather than to encourage a shift away from driving. But of
course, the primary effect of congestion might also be to spread driving out
over a longer period of time rather than to encourage a shift away from
driving, particularly in places that don’t have good transit systems
(which makes the revenue question all the more salient).

The
argument doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t appear to be supported by
actual experience with congestion pricing schemes, as Charles Komanoff
points out here. In
London, better driving conditions after the adoption of a congestion
pricing regime encouraged some drivers to take additional trips, but
that increase didn’t come close to offsetting the drop in vehicle trips
induced by the cordon charge.

As difficult as it may be for all involved to accept, congestion pricing manages to benefit transit riders and drivers. Commutes are faster and emissions are reduced. But the benefits don’t stop there.

A
new economics paper by Janet Currie and Reed Walker explores what
happened to neighborhoods near congested highway toll plazas after
those plazas were replaced by the E-ZPass electronic tolling system. Here‘s the abstract (paragraph breaks mine):

This paper provides evidence of the significant negative health
externalities of traffic congestion. We exploit the introduction of
electronic toll collection, or E-ZPass, which greatly reduced traffic
congestion and emissions from motor vehicles in the vicinity of highway
toll plazas.

Specifically, we compare infants born to mothers living
near toll plazas to infants born to mothers living near busy roadways
but away from toll plazas with the idea that mothers living away from
toll plazas did not experience significant reductions in local traffic
congestion. We also examine differences in the health of infants born
to the same mother, but who differ in terms of whether or not they were
“exposed” to E-ZPass.

We find that reductions in traffic congestion
generated by E-ZPass reduced the incidence of prematurity and low birth
weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8%
respectively. Estimates from mother fixed effects models are very
similar. There were no immediate changes in the characteristics of
mothers or in housing prices in the vicinity of toll plazas that could
explain these changes, and the results are robust to many changes in
specification.

The results suggest that traffic congestion is a
significant contributor to poor health in affected infants. Estimates
of the costs of traffic congestion should account for these important
health externalities.

That last line is key. We’re used to seeing
estimates of the costs of congestion, which tend to peg those costs in
the tens of billions of dollars annually in the United States. Those
estimates primarily estimate cost in terms of wasted time and wasted
fuel. Some may attempt to estimate the cost of additional greenhouse
gas emissions. Few take into account the direct health effects of
congestion.

It’s interesting to think about this research in
light of the equity arguments made against congestion pricing. Set
aside the fact that drivers tend to be richer than transit riders, and
that congestion pricing would generate revenue for progressive transit
improvements. Neighborhoods located in the shadows of congested
highways are unlikely to be filled with wealthy families.

We
want our cities to work better, and congestion pricing is one of the
very best policy tools available to help that happen. It can make
cities more efficient, more equitable, and greener, and it can lead to
improved mobility for transit-riders, pedestrians, cyclists, and
drivers.

As tempting as it may be for those who love cities
to conclude that whichever policies irk drivers the most are the ones
we should adopt, far more progress will be made if we recognize that
some of the most promising policy changes can be good for nearly
everyone.

The administration's view could not have been much clearer -- this business is all very important, but we're not ready to commit to anything at this time.

Roy Kienitz, the Department of Transportation's Undersecretary for Policy, made it quite clear that the administration is not prepared to support any of the new funding mechanisms proposed -- not a VMT tax, not indexing the gas tax to inflation, and not taxes on imported oil and refined gasoline.

Kienitz did leave the door open to a tax on trading of oil futures, which he said the administration would have to investigate thoroughly. A key concern is that in a world where oil is traded on global markets, such a measure would simply shift trading off of American soil.

Why the stubborn refusal to engage in the funding debate? Ostensibly, the administration is reluctant to adopt new taxes or fees amid recession.

But this explanation rings hollow. Congress could easily delay the time at which revenue-raising measures take effect until 2011 or later, as is being done with funding mechanisms in the health reform bills under consideration.

The president must know this. A reasonable assumption is that he simply does not want to have a tax debate at this time, not with other key priorities involving new tax burdens also being considered.

With the administration all but out of the discussion, the rest of the hearing seemed somewhat academic, but the committee pressed on. The primary interest groups are, not surprisingly, arguing for their own protection.

C. Wick Moorman, CEO of the regional freight rail operator Norfolk Southern, declared himself supportive of tax incentives for new freight rail investments. Peter Pan Bus Lines President Peter Picknelly asked that the intercity bus line fuel tax exemption be extended in any new transportation bill reauthorization.

And Barbara Windsor, there to represent Hahn Transportation and the American Trucking Association, was quite adamant in expressing the trucking industry's opposition to new revenue-raising measures.

ATA has endorsed continued reliance on fuel taxes, but it strongly opposes use of a VMT tax, or any tolling of lanes not associated with switching HOV lanes to HOT.

Windsor also had sharp words for the Waxman-Markey energy bill recently passed by the House.

She said she'd been told that it would result in an increase in diesel fuel prices of between 70 cents and 90 cents per gallon for truckers (numbers that are almost certainly incorrect; reports from the Congressional Budget Office and other reputable sources suggest that the carbon prices necessary to generate that increase in fuel prices won't obtain for decades).

Given that America's trucking fleet averages about 6.2 miles per gallon, according to Windsor, those higher fuel costs would be quite damaging to the industry.

A more hopeful note was sounded by the American Automobile Association's Robert Darbelnet, who noted that AAA supported an increase in transportation investment and supported measures to raise revenue to fund that increase.

Darbelnet pointed out that the value of the federal gas tax has declined some 50 percent since it was last increased in 1993, thanks to inflation and increased fuel efficiency.

Given improvements in accountability and a comprehensive national transportation plan, AAA could support an increased gas tax, a VMT tax, or congestion pricing in places with alternatives to travel on priced roads.

All told, it was plenty for the administration and legislators to chew on as they attempt to fill the $200 billion gap between current revenues and planned spending. One important thing to keep in mind -- while new taxes might play poorly now, amid recession, recovery will almost certainly result in higher oil prices, which will also make it politically difficult to raise or introduce new taxes.

There's never a perfect time to try to increase revenue. Hopefully leaders will soon coalesce around a few good ideas, so they can begin the difficult job of selling voters and interest groups on the necessary measures.

The biggest menace to motoring since pedestrians. Photo: Matthew Roth

Your story today on SFPark is a new low, infantilizing a parking management pilot that is the envy of municipalities across the country and has the attention of cities as far-flung as Tokyo, Japan. For an agency that is getting more than enough bad publicity on things that it does poorly--and we're the first in line to harp on the negative--the MTA deserves credit for coordinating with the Port to develop the largest and most sophisticated parking management system in the world, which will allow city managers to finally measure with precision the driving and parking patterns in San Francisco so that the streets can become more efficient and less congested.

How do you cover this giant leap for parking-kind? You exaggerate a simple learning curve for a new multi-space meter as though it were a technological Berlin Wall.

"These newfangled meters take much more skill to operate than simply dropping coins into a slot," writes Rachel Gordon, who I'm hard pressed to believe took this editorial tack on her own, given that she rides transit regularly, has been covering transportation issues for awhile and isn't as bound to the windshield perspective as her editors seem to be.

Just how much more skill do these "newfangled meters" take?

Drivers have to remember the number assigned to their space and then log in the information on a keypad. Then they have to decide whether to pay with a credit card, debit card or coins, and finally they have to figure out how to select how much time they want.

To steal from SNL's Weekend Update: Really? Really?!?

However will the piteous parkers decide what form of payment to use and how much time they're planning to park? I guess they should just give up before they begin, not come into San Francisco at all, and spend their dollars at the mall in Walnut Creek, where parking is so much more civilized and free (what's more ridiculous is that some of the comments on the story essentially say as much).

MTA spokesperson Judson True, ever more diplomatic than me, acknowledged that this kind of coverage is unfortunate.

It's a little frustrating to have the focus be on the challenges that are natural with any new program, but we are working hard to improve the signage and fundamentally we know that these new meters and all new SFPark meters are going to bring better parking management to San Francisco.  That's going to be more convenient for people and better for the city as a whole.

The story comes around at the end with a compensatory nod to one of the primary benefits of SFPark, namely that it provides more payment options for motorists. Not to mention the radical departure it will mark from the catch-as-catch-can parking management, enforcement, and meter maintenance that passes for street management currently. With future iterations of SFPark likely to include real-time parking information beamed to cell phones, static directional signs, and on-board navigation systems, San Francisco will see a great reduction in cruising for parking and the attendant environmental and congestion impacts of what, in some cities, is as much as 45 percent of all traffic.

Good solutions to this could net you $50,000. (Photo: ITSA)

Well, it's time to make notes on that brilliant traffic-calming idea. The Intelligence Transportation Society of America (ITSA) kicked off a $50,000 "Congestion Challenge" today that seeks to pair social networking with innovative transportation policy-making.

Co-sponsored by Spencer Trask, a private equity firm specializing in high-tech investments, the contest asks transportation professionals and everyday citizens to submit their proposals for clearing the nation's jam-packed roads, bridges and transitways. Each submission will be judged based on its ability to address five issues: sustainability, safety, behavioral impact, economic competitiveness, and speed & efficiency.

But the most compelling aspect of the challenge is its approach to judging. Instead of subjecting entries to an evaluation panel that might be too tied to outmoded ways of thinking, the ITSA asks aspiring judges and contestants to set up their own Facebook-style profile pages (mine can be seen here) and rate entries themselves.

Photo by Bryan Goebel

I also asked him about criticism from some advocates and officials in other agencies that the Mayor has hamstrung the MTA in some areas, preventing bold action to make San Francisco a true Transit First city.  

"I think, from my meetings with the mayor, there’s some situations where he wishes we were moving a whole lot faster," said Ford. "There are situations where we are very aggressive, and then there’s some situations where we need to be a little bit more deliberate in what we’re doing."

Part II of the interview with me and reporter Matthew Roth was recorded on April 8th:

On the funding crisis facing transit agencies:  "All of us are working very hard to develop a strategy to talk about the relevance of the funding, and it is very interesting to me at a time where we are seeing ridership increases over the last year or two that now is the time we’re going to have a difficult time trying to increase our service capacity.  So this couldn’t come at a worse time.  We are working hard to educate our local legislators; we’ve sent letters to them.  Two weeks ago, there was a state lobbying day for all of the transit systems.  We participated in that.  But we have a lot of work ahead of us, because I think the voters, this was a mandate from the voters; they wanted this state transit assistance program to be part of the state budget, and now for it to be raided and divvied up at a time that the citizens probably need transit more than they ever needed it for their transportation needs, it’s unfortunate.  So we will be working closely with our colleagues across the state."

On criticism the Mayor is preventing bold action at the MTA: "From my meetings with the mayor, I think there’s some situations where he wishes we were moving a whole lot faster, but for resource constraints and things of that nature, we want to be very deliberate in what we’re doing.  We are testing out some things with the pavements, the parks strategy in terms of projects that make the city more walkable and enjoyable, and there are situations where we are very aggressive, and then there’s some situations where we need to be a little bit more deliberate in what we’re doing.  I think we’re fortunate between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors, we have passionate people about transit.  They may have different opinions about how we go about it.  Passionate about transit, but passionate about pedestrians, passionate about bicyclists.  So we’re not short for any passion and advocacy on any of those fronts. We get an adequate amount of pressure to move things along, but I mean for example, with the bike plan, what is it, shoot and then aim?  And I think in this case we shot and then ended up with an injunction that slowed us down significantly, because we wanted to be very aggressive in terms of expanding the bike network.  I think that should be a lesson to all of us that while we all feel we have the greatest idea and the timing is right to move forward rapidly, not everyone agrees with us and there’s ways...legally, through the courts...to make sure that we adequately review what we’re doing before we implement it. "

On moving the Bike Plan forward:  "As soon as we get from under the injunction, we’re moving rapidly forward with the projects that are listed out in the plan.  We do have to bring this back to the MTA Board to get their approval before we go forward, and full disclosure, one of the challenges that we’re seeing for I’d say a small percentage of the projects, is there are trade offs and some controversial trade offs as it relates to its impact on Muni versus impact to automobiles versus impact to pedestrians, and I think that’s a difficult challenge the staff will have to try and balance out.  We have a transit first mantra, and that’s the city’s charter policy in terms of transportation decisions, but we do recognize that there is a shared use of our rider ways and our conveyances, and we need to balance that out.  So I think the vast majority of the project is pretty straightforward; it’s striping, it’s building and getting some infrastructure in place, and we’re excited about that.  And then we do have the more difficult trade off type situations that we just need to think through and make sure we’re trying to make the right decision." 

How do you balance the different modes? "I’ll tell you, I think that’s the type of stuff that keeps me awake at night and keeps a lot of our staff challenged and we’ll go in my conference room and we’ll lock the doors and we’ll come out hopefully with something that the vast majority of our citizens would prefer.  The challenge that we do have is we live in a dynamic environment, and there’s no kind of cookie-cutter policy on these things. I guess some would say it’s cut and dry, transit first, bikes, pedestrians.  We have to be very careful in that, and we want to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the city.  I think it’s very clear, there’s a large majority of individuals that feel that automobiles should be last on the list, and automobile or parking infrastructure, parking availability should be last on the list, and we take that very seriously.  We are transit first.  We want everyone to ride Muni, and if they’re not on Muni, either walking or riding a bike, and we’ll put those filters into place when we make those decisions."

What are the MTA's goals for reducing the amount of auto trips? "Well one, our goal, initially I think our primary goal, is to get them on a reliable transit system, and then if people do choose and need to use an automobile, that when we provide our parking resources, that they’re adequately priced, so they help out the transit system. If there is a parking need, that availability is readily available so people don’t have to circle around to find a parking spot, thereby creating more greenhouse emissions, thereby creating more congestion.  Our SF Go and SF Park projects are kind of build around that, primarily the SF Park project, which is real time information on parking availability, but also pricing that parking based on the availability at that moment.  So it’s not going to be easier to park, but if you need to park, we’re going to make it readily available for you to quickly get in your parking spot, and then we’re going to charge you what the appropriate rate is to discourage you from doing it, but also to support the transit system and the bike infrastructure and the pedestrian infrastructure in the city.  So that’s our global strategy in trying to deal with that.  There are some people that definitely need to use an automobile, but we’re going to make sure all the other conveyances are first rate, and then if they choose to, that they’re doing it in a very orderly fashion."

Next in Part III: Pedestrian safety and infrastructure in the city.

Listen to Part I.

After seven rounds of voting and nearly an hour of exasperating political theater, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors chose newly elected District 3 Supervisor David Chiu as its president.  A voluble cheer erupted in the North Light Court at City Hall, the overflow room where more than three hundred people crowded around a television monitor.

Supervisor Chiu, the son of immigrant Chinese parents, is the first Chinese-American president of the Board of Supervisors, and will preside over the first "majority minority" board in San Francisco.  His district, which includes Fisherman's Wharf and parts of the downtown business district, will be the epicenter of the fight over congestion pricing. It will also host Sunday Streets this summer and play a significant role in the pilot zone for SFPark.

Supervisor Chiu lives car-free, utilizing a car-share service when a vehicle is needed, and regularly extols the benefits of mass transit and cycling.  In his campaign, he said he would support measures to reduce the number of private automobile trips and increase the mode share of transit and cycling even if it means making driving and parking more difficult.

Livable Streets advocates were understandably thrilled with the outcome.

"David is somebody who understands sustainable transportation and understands how we need to prioritize walking, biking and transit," said San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) Executive Director Leah Shahum.  "He's a regular bicyclist himself--he's not one of those guys who just says he rides--I've encountered him on a bike, in his suit, with his briefcase, on his way to work.  He will bring a breath of fresh air to the board."

"The Decider," District 5 Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi

The vote saw the five moderates on the board steadfast in their support for Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, while the progressive wing leaned first toward Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, then shifted to Chiu when it was clear Mirkarimi wouldn't get the required six of eleven votes.  Ironically, it was Mirkarimi who cast the deciding yea for Chiu, a fact he was quick to point out in an interview later in his offices.  Laughing, he dubbed himself "The Decider."

When asked about what the city's transportation priorities should be even moderates who voted for Supervisor Maxwell struck a promising tone on transportation policy.  Supervisor Bevan Dufty said his priorities were increased funding for transit, especially the J-line, and community plans to widen sidewalks and improve pedestrian amenities on Castro Street and at the Duboce and Church transit hub.  Supervisor Maxwell said she was very excited to see the continuation of Sunday Streets in 2009.

Photos: Matthew Roth

The Municipal Transportation Agency's federally-funded parking experiment, SFPark, is shaping up to be the most powerful tool remaining in the city's traffic-busting toolbox considering the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce's criticism of congestion pricing and Mayor Newsom's recent tempered support for the plan.

SFPark is the largest dynamic parking demand management project in the world, with 6,000 curbside parking spaces and 11,500 off-street spaces in city-owned garages. The pilot will last for a year-and-a-half and focus on seven target areas, most in the downtown business district and tourist areas along the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf.

Assuming the time line isn't delayed, the MTA will release a request for proposals by the end of January for vendors to install the technology required to map parking patterns in the pilot areas.   With $19.8 million in federal funding from San Francisco's Urban Partnerhip Agreement set to roll into city coffers in February, the MTA will install meters, sensors and networks within two months and start collecting baseline data in May.  After sixty days, parking managers will start adjusting parking rates, which by law can be raised by no more than $.50/hour every 30 days in the pilot zones; the control zones will not see any change in pricing throughout the trial.

Jay Primus, the MTA's SFPark project leader, believes the public outreach that has already occurred with businesses, transportation experts, environmental advocates, and community stakeholders will facilitate its acceptance. If the pilot works as projected, Primus said the MTA expects the rate of parking fines will be reduced.  Though San Francisco's parking fines are 57% of parking revenues (PDF, page 3)--a far cry from New York City's parking woes, where parking fines are half a billion dollars annually and more than 500% of parking revenues--the agency hopes to fulfill its mandate to voters to improve the management of city streets

"Part of [SFPark] is to continue to realize the original promise of the MTA," Primus said.

Better parking data should reduce traffic from cruising.

The theoretical framework of dynamic parking management was popularized by Donald Shoup in 2005 with The High Cost of Free Parking, a nearly 800-page parking and land use bible.  Shoup’s dynamic management principles borrow from the example of telecommunications systems operating during peak load capacity periods.  Like telephone lines, parking in a city is essentially a fixed supply, though demand can fluctuate wildly by time of day and location.  When there is more demand for parking than supply, drivers waste a great deal of time and fuel looking for scarce spaces. 

Shoup argues that parking managers should price parking in accordance with market demands, raising the cost during peak usage periods and lowering it when there are surplus vacancies.

Shoup demonstrated that because of curbside saturation from under-priced parking, drivers in a 15-block area in Westwood, Los Angeles, traveled the equivalent of two round trips from the Earth to the Moon and burned over 47,000 gallons of fuel each year looking for parking.  In Park Slope, Brooklyn, Transportation Alternatives found that  45% of traffic is circling the block looking for a place to park.

Most advocates, like Tom Radulovich of San Francisco's Livable City,  hold out hope SFPark will deliver as advertised:

The way we manage on-street parking creates shortages and the political response is to create a lot more off-street parking.  It doesn’t fix the on-street problem, but drives up the cost of building, makes housing less affordable, and generates more traffic.  Hopefully SFPark will show San Franciscans that the solution to the problems with on-street parking is not to require more off-street parking but to manage on-street parking better.