San Francisco’s newest bike lanes: made $1 million pricier by environmental reviews. (Photo: Streetsblog SF)

Citing Republican senators’ concerns that
existing National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements have
caused lengthy delays in transportation project planning, Loris writes
that adding climate change to NEPA will

guarantee that the billions in infrastructure spending in this stimulus
bill will not be spent till years after the economy has already
recovered. The money that will be spent in the near-term won’t be spent
efficiently; it will be spent overcoming unnecessary regulatory hurdles …

One wonders if Heritage would describe the three-year delay in San Francisco’s planned bike lanes, caused by local bike critic Rob Anderson’s request for a full environmental review, qualifies as an "unnecessary regulatory hurdle." Streetsblog San Francisco reported that the final price tag for the city’s review topped $1 million.

Or how about the opponents of a car-free trial in New York’s Prospect Park, who attempted
to delay the project by pushing for an environmental review? Their
efforts would hardly meet Heritage’s definition of "green tape"
promoted by environmental advocates.

Perhaps Loris would take a different position on the northeast corridor’s failure to secure federal high-speed rail money thanks to the burdensome length of environmental reviews. Since Heritage had previously blasted
the entire high-speed rail program as "fiscal waste on the fast track,"
the group might hail any "regulatory hurdle" that standing in the way
of rail expansion.

The moral of the story: NEPA-mandated
reviews can be utilized successfully by liberals, conservatives, green
groups, highway boosters, and just about every constituency under the
sun. That’s an argument for streamlining the environmental review
process, not eliminating it.

California Senator Barbara Boxer will be at the center of a battle over whether or not the reauthorization of the transportation bill will address the global warming impacts of transportation, given her Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee is responsible for writing much of the bill's language. Any chance of reforming the transportation bill, which advocates are clamoring for, will require deft political maneuvering to mollify ranking committee member Senator James Inhofe. 

Several sources said that Boxer's cooperation with Inhofe is simple math. The $312 billion baseline for transportation over six years is insufficient to meet state of good repair needs and set the country on a course for innovation. Minnesota Representative James Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation Committee, has suggested $400-500 billion would be needed, while the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Organizations (AASHTO) and the American Public Transit Association (APTA) argue in their Bottom Line Report that at least $160 billion will be needed annually. In order get from $312 billion to $500 billion or better, Boxer will need to get approval for new revenue streams, which would require a filibuster-proof majority, something she might not get without Inhofe and other reluctant members on the committee. 

Several interviewees also pointed to Senator Boxer's alliance with Inhofe on an amendment in the federal stimulus bill for an additional $50 billion in highway money as a bad sign.

"You have polar bears and glaciers on your website... then throw people back in their cars?" said one official who insisted on anonymity.

Because Boxer has traditionally been a champion for environmental causes, several advocates said that monitoring her on this issue would be new and potentially uncomfortable. TransForm Executive Director Stuart Cohen said he first saw a red flag late in 2008 when Senator Boxer spoke in San Francisco about highway and road infrastructure needs in the stimulus bill while failing to mention transit.  But, Cohen added, "we would have to adjust to the idea of watchdogging Senator Boxer; she has been such a reliable ally."

Transportation for America (T4A) Communications Director David Goldberg said an appropriately large sum of money is needed in any discussion of the transportation bill, but he was more concerned about how legislators would spend that money. "We think there is a need of at least $500 billion, but support is contingent on reforms that would make it a wise investment."

Colin Peppard, Climate and Infrastructure Campaign Director for the Environmental Defense Fund echoed the T4A sentiment. "What we've gotten for our money so far is not a good deal," he said. "The public wants a better product. Hopefully the authorization lays out priorities that enhance safety and focuses on investment in new capacity that increases energy independence and reduces greenhouse gases." 

Getting Inhofe, one of the premier global warming deniers, to support a bill that calls for reducing greenhouse gas impacts from driving would be a political coup. He has said that environmental review is an onerous burden for infrastructure investment and that the inclusion of global warming rhetoric in a transportation act is unacceptable. From a recent op-ed in Roll Call:

One thing we must not do in this year’s reauthorization discussion is allow debate over other national policies to distract us from surface transportation issues. This bill historically has enjoyed broad bipartisan cooperation and support. The insertion of controversial issues, such as global warming, would pose serious threats to that bipartisanship and would significantly slow, or even halt, the reauthorization process.

Democratic leaders in both the Senate and the House of Representatives have voiced the intention to consider stand-alone global warming legislation at some point in the next two years. It is within that context, and not during transportation reauthorization, that we should debate the merits, or lack thereof, of various proposals to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Inhofe spokesman Matt Dempsey added in an interview:

Senator Inhofe and Senator Boxer have worked very closely together on infrastructure legislation-there is no question how closely they work together on infrastructure.... Certainly Inhofe has been the leader in the Senate in opposing cap-and-trade legislation; that is the direction he would go with transportation.  And there are other Senators on the committee who would oppose global warming legislation in the transportation bill."  

Relying on other legislators and other committees to tie climate change to transportation is a risk as well. AASHTO only days ago sent a letter to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman urging him to exclude rules for reducing transportation sector greenhouse gas emissions from his draft climate bill (PDF).  AASHTO Executive Director John Horsley said that they "believe that any changes to the transportation planning process, along with a funding mechanism to support that process, should be addressed by the House Infrastructure and Transportation committee as part of transportation authorization legislation."

When pressed for a response to this story, representatives from Boxer's office and the EPW press office refused to comment on record and instead pointed Streetsblog to the Senator's own Roll Call op-ed and a speech she gave to APTA (PDF) in 2008 for her position on the issue. 

The significance of this reauthorization cannot be underscored enough. With a President and US DOT Secretary both publicly calling for reform in regional planning and transportation policy, political support at the top is no longer the sticking point.

Randy Rentschler of the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission compared the significance of the passage of the current transportation act to the writing of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991, when the focus of federal funding shifted from completing Eisenhower's interstate system to funding multi-modal transportation with emphasis on transit and metropolitan regions.

The job [Boxer] has is incredibly important. If you want to make a connection between this opportunity we have now and another moment, you have to think back to [Representative] Norman Mineta and [Senator Daniel Patrick] Moynihan.  They saw that the interstate era was coming to an end - they not only saw it, but found the political coalitions and strength and turned a highway completion program into another program altogether.  The entire industry believes we're in that position now.

A controlled explosion from the filming of the TV series "Trauma," on a closed portion of I-280

"As we saw this weekend with the filming of the new TV series 'Trauma,' we can close a section of 280 and it doesn't back up all the way to San Bruno," said Mayor Newsom.  "I'm committed to actively looking for projects where we can transform our streets into public open space, especially in neighborhoods that have so little of it.  Show me another project that gives back more space to our great city than this."

Mayor Newsom painted a grand vision of a ribbon park in the footprint of the current freeway and said the city would rezone much of the area for residential development, much of which would be affordable housing, he claimed.  "Think Rock Creek Park for the next century," said Mayor Newsom.  "If New York City can convert an old rail line through Manhattan into the Highline Park, surely we can transform our outdated infrastructure into green space."

Caltrans' Kempton said that the agency had considered various freeways that underperformed their transportation function after the successful removal of segments of the Embarcadero Freeway and Central Freeway to Market Street, but said that they weren't seriously thinking about this section of I-280 until Mayor Newsom approached Governor Schwarzenegger late last year. 

"We've understood that it was possible to make changes to further segments of the Embarcadero Freeway," said Kempton, "but we didn't see it as a priority until Mayor Newsom made it so.  Now, we're only committing to study it, but we know the Obama administration is looking for innovative transportation projects, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are unspent federal stimulus funds from other states that we can apply for in six months, a year from now."

"Highway de-construction can be just as shovel-ready as highway re-construction," said Kempton.

Caltrans will study the freeway removal in two phases, the first from the 101 interchange to King Street, a 2.9 mile segment running through the Excelsior neighborhood and the new Mission Bay developments.  Phase 2, from 19th Avenue to the 101 interchange, would include the restoration of Islais Creek and the construction of greenways along each side, funding for which could come from federal Rails-to-Trails monies.   Kempton said Phase 2 was a distant possibility, but that the agency was amenable to "looking at all the possibilities."

Caltrain Director Scanlan said his agency was working with the Mayor to study options for putting Caltrain below grade through the park.  "With our application for stimulus funds for the electrification of Caltrain, we need take the opportunity to improve all aspects of the Peninsula Corridor," he said.

Advocates were very supportive of the project.  Tom Radulovich, Executive Director of Livable City said:

Removing I-280 and placing the rail line below grade will allow the SoMa street grid to connect to Mission Creek Channel, will connect Mission Bay to Showplace Square, and will connect the Mission Creek Greenway to the Mission Creek Channel Park.  I-280 dumps far too much traffic onto the SoMa street grid, and getting rid of I-280 will advance the community-based efforts to make SoMa's streets safer and more livable.

Jason Henderson, Assistant Professor of Geography at San Francisco State University, was more blunt:

It is wonderful that Caltrans is moving forward with this after fifty years of denial. It will liberate the people of the Excelsior from fifty years of being cut off from the rest of San Francisco, not to mention rid the area of excessive noise, soot, and toxins from all those solo commuters. It will also make the potential to redevelop around the Balboa Park BART station much easier and definitely more attractive.

"To think that this mayor could find inspiration in both Washington DC's Rock Creek Parkway and the long lost Burnham Plan for San Francisco to come up with such an innovative and literally groundbreaking concept!" said Chris Carlsson, founder of Shaping SF.  "What a pleasant surprise!"

SPUR Transportation Policy Director Dave Snyder, who had been briefed on the project before it was announced publicly, was supportive.  "With the downtown extension of Caltrain, I-280 becomes a superfluous transportation resource."

SPUR Policy Director Sarah Kurlinsky, who was at the press conference, said, "As we learned in the Market/Octavia planning process, we can extract a lot for affordable housing by using public land formerly occupied by freeways."

Caltrans said it hoped to complete the necessary studies by this fall. Kempton hinted that the precedent set by the state in relaxing CEQA requirements for highway projects slated for stimulus funding could bode well for an expedited timeline.  Mayor Newsom said this was a project he wanted to get started before he left office, which could be as soon 2010, if his nascent bid for governor is successful.

"This is the kind of bold thinking that we need in this city, and this state," said Mayor Newsom with a smile.

Happy April Fool's Day, Streetsblog Nation! But wouldn't it be nice?

Flickr photo: iandhd

Riding down Kirkham at 33rd Ave with a view of the ocean

Kirkham Street is one of the Big 56 bike lane projects that hasn't raised many eyebrows. Unlike the looming battle over 2nd Street or 5th Street, the Kirkham lane will be on a relatively quiet residential street that runs east-west from Ocean Beach to 6th Avenue, where it will connect with the remainder of bicycle Route 40.  

District 4 Supervisor Carmen Chu said in an interview that she had not heard of any community resistance to the plan, in large part because there would be only minor parking removal in one of the proposed options and none in the other. 

"There have been a number of individuals who have expressed a desire to have an integrated bike network where bike riders feel they get get across the city in designated lanes," she said.  "I think that would be good for the district, some path of travel that is clearly marked for bicyclists."

Kirkham Street is part of bicycle Route 40

Neal Patel, SFBC's community planner, thinks the Kirkham lane is not only an important connector in the bicycle network, but the existence of a lane might convince more people to ride. 

"The Kirkham project is important because there are so few bike lanes in the Sunset District," he said.  "This route will make it easier for all residents to get downtown and most points East; it's great to have a more direct option for commuters.  And having more bike lanes should hopefully attract new riders."

Flickr photo: real plastic trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

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

The Pseudo-Science of LOS

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

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

LOS delay from Highway Capacity Manual

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

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

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

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

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

The Clamor For Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flickr photo: cbcastro

Governor Schwarzenegger sent a letter Tuesday to President-elect Obama encouraging massive expenditure in the federal stimulus package on a host of projects in California.  The letter comes a month after the governor and president-elect discussed the stimulus package in person:

When we met, I had identified $28 billion in infrastructure projects ready to break ground in California within the first 120 days of your administration.  I am writing to report that we now have nearly $44 billion in projects that are ready to start construction or place orders.

Schwarzenegger proposes spending $11 billion of the $44 billion "in investment in road, transit and rail construction."  But when pressed for a detailed project list, the governor's press office refused to elaborate and punted to regional officials.

The Municipal Transporation Commission (MTC), the Bay Area's transportation planning and federal fiscal conduit, was only slightly more forthcoming with specifics.  While the MTC confirmed it has a long list of projects, it would not elaborate on the specifics for fear the public would view the project wish list as a slate of promises.

MTC spokesman Randy Rentschler was clear most of the projects that could be built within 90-120 days of Obama's inauguration would be road maintenance repairs that would not significantly alter the long-term strategic vision for the region. 

"We could dig holes in the desert and they might contribute to the economic recovery," he said.  "But then you've got holes in the desert."

Will the fiscal stimulus plan be a bridge to the future, or a bridge to nowhere?

What really needs to be done, he argued, are projects similar to the scope and vision of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge.

"We can set the tone for transportation spending with the stimulus package, but the real debate will happen with the re-authorization of the transportation act" later this year, said Rentschler.

According to the MTC, the specific proposals for funding fall in three general categories, in no particular order:

1. Maintenance of local streets and roads
2. Investment and maintenance of the region's transit system
3. Investment in new transit and roadway projects (examples cited: bus-priority signalization and metering lights on freeways)

In lieu of official project documentation, Streetsblog San Francisco compiled a list of transit and street infrastructure projects (download the PDF) from the Bay Area cities associated with the Mainstreet Economic Recovery report, a project of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.  It adds up to $1.6 billion and more than 14,000 jobs.

Though some cities like Santa Clara and Fremont are not part of the Conference of Mayors, most of the big-ticket Bay Area transit items are included in the list, including funding for the new Transbay Terminal, MTA's Transit Effectiveness Program (TEP), BART to San Jose, and the electrification of Caltrain. 

Flickr Photos by: WarzauWynn and planetlight.