Streetsblog San Francisco

With financial reform nearly complete, the Senate Banking Committee
turned its attention today to one of Senator Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) next
priorities, the Livable
Communities Act. Local government came out strong for the
initiative to promote sustainable and integrated regional planning, with
representatives of the nation’s cities, towns, counties, and regional
planning organizations testifying in favor. Among committee members,
concerns persisted about whether
the bill would disadvantage rural areas. 

The Livable Communities Act would
provide
about $4 billion in competitive grants to coordinate housing,
transportation, and economic development policy with an eye toward
promoting sustainable development. About $400 million would be slated
for planning with the remainder funding implementation. The bill would
also create a new office within the Department of Housing and Urban
Development to guide and administer the programs. If passed, it would
strengthen the Obama administration’s multi-agency Sustainable
Communities effort. 

At today’s committee hearing representatives of the National League
of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the National
Association of Development Organizations, and the National Association
of Regional Councils each strongly endorsed the goals of the bill. 

Witnesses drew on professional experience — from trying to
revitalize barren neighborhoods in Indianapolis to managing the growth
of a rural Maryland county — to explain how federal policy could spur
better development where they live. The Hartford region, for example, is
investing in a new bus rapid transit line, said Lyle Wray, the
executive director for the region’s Council of Governments, but they
haven’t been able to tie the transit project to broader goals. "Linking
that opportunity to affordable housing, jobs, and sustainability is what
the Livable Communities Act would allow us to do," he said.

Describing the bill today, Dodd stressed that integrated
transportation and land use planning can help address a host of
challenges: high foreclosure rates, climate change and oil dependency,
deteriorating infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the loss of
farmland. Those problems, Dodd argued, aren’t urban or rural. "One
community can use the grants to develop brownfields in a post-industrial
area," he said, and "another might create a livable town center or main
street." 

Even so, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), expressed doubt about whether
his rural state would benefit under Dodd’s legislation.

Read more…

American
advocates for livable streets know that our addiction to the automobile
is almost without peer. We know that we’ve given our land to driving
lanes and parking lots and our air to exhaust fumes. Nevertheless, it
can be hard to step outside of the car culture we’ve spent our lives
marinating in and see the country with a new perspective.

That’s why this letter we received from two British tourists is so
refreshing. It’s both a stark admonishment of how much we’ve given up
for the car, sometimes barely noticing it, and a heartening reminder
that what often seems normal to us need not be: 

We are visitors to the States from England. Our main reason for
coming was to visit friends, however upon researching into transport
options we were horrified to discover that the only viable option to get
from NY to LA via many small towns was by car. Many of our friends have
tried to justify this saying that ‘America is simply too big to have
public transport’. To us, this is purely INSANE. Surely a huge country
should offer the best public transport in the world! Bullet trains could
cover the driving distances in no time.

We are feeling quite ashamed of ourselves as we write this but
inevitably we did end up driving across America. We have found the
American people to be welcoming and friendly and the landscape beautiful
but we have not yet seen a single ‘town’ in the US that we, as
Europeans would class as a town. I would class them more as motorway
service stations. Buildings designed for cars. People waiting in line
for a drive through. People competing for car parking spaces at gyms!
These are not communities as we would recognise – market squares, parks,
rivers, cafes, stations, public art, gardens etc. ‘Towns’ are simply
not towns! We feel saddened that many Americans are not afforded the
community lifestyle that we enjoy in Europe.

Our purpose of writing is not to attack your country and we do
apologise if we have offended. I am writing to urge you, beg with you,
plead with you to keep up the fantastic work that you are doing. Despite
the wonderful time that we have had in the US I simply cannot wait to
get home in order to walk from my flat and pick up a newspaper and a
pint of milk, on my journey I shall say hello to everyone I meet, take
note of the weather and breathe some fresh air.

The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), an advocacy group working to
reform local development practices, is seizing on House Financial
Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank’s (D-MA) recent call for a new system of housing finance to replace government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The
CNU’s concerns about Fannie and Freddie, which the government has used
for more than 40 years to promote home ownership by backstopping
trillions of dollars in mortgage loans, predate the government’s takeover of the two entities in 2008.

Urbanists’
frustrations with Fannie and Freddie stem from a key fact: both
mortgage guarantors will not deal in home loans for properties with
more than 20 percent of space set aside for non-residential use. Plans
for walkable, mixed-use complexes that combine housing, retail, and
office space, therefore, are often out of luck.

"Every Main Street in America violates Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s
rigid standards," CNU President John Norquist said in a statement yesterday reiterating his group’s support for housing finance reform.

Citing
"plenty of mixed-use streets" in major cities where Fannie and Freddie
have played no role in development, Norquist added: "These
neighborhoods often have
impressive purchasing power, transit-service and the potential to be
sites of new opportunity and green redevelopment, but this flawed
government-subsidized lending approach works to keep them locked in a
pattern of disinvestment."

Norquist and fellow urbanists
have reason to hold out hope for government housing support to take on
a more pro-urban cast in the coming years. The Obama administration’s
new inter-agency sustainable communities task force plans to spend some of its initial $150 million allocation on encouraging the issuance of "location-efficient" mortgages that take lower transportation costs into account, rewarding borrowers who move to more walkable or transit-rich areas.

But
where Fannie and Freddie is concerned, Congress has shown little
appetite to make the difficult choices necessary to phase in a new
framework for what’s known as the "secondary mortgage market." Read more…

Two-thirds of America's population, and more than three-quarters of its economic productivity, come from major cities. So why did the Obama administration's economic stimulus law end up giving metropolitan areas the short end of the stick?

Harry Moroz of the Drum Major Institute attempts to answer the question this week in a new article for The Atlantic. Talking with mayors from around the country, Moroz heard deeply felt frustration from mayors in both parties about the decision to route stimulus money -- particularly for transportation -- through state capitals rather than cities:

During the bill’s conception, mayors stressed that a state-focused stimulus would bring slow, inefficient results, and that more jobs could be created if money were funneled directly to urban areas. In a report issued last winter, the U.S. Conference of Mayors listed more than 15,000 “ready-to-go” projects that could provide 1.2 million new jobs in just two years.

So what happened, exactly? “I think we were listened to,” says Stamford, Connecticut, Mayor Daniel Malloy, who will run for governor of his state as a Democrat in 2010. “I just think we were then ignored. And I don’t think we were necessarily ignored by the president. I think we were ignored by the Congress.”

Congress' move to "ignore" city leaders, as Malloy put it, is all the more surprising considering how many senior Democrats hail from urbanized regions: think San Francisco, New York City, and the Washington D.C. area.

But no one can accuse the nation's mayors of failing to speak up. In a February letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood [PDF], 20 city chiefs urged that stimulus funding formulas send transportation aid to metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) from regions with more than 200,000 residents as well as to state DOTs. Their pleas were not heeded, however, and cities ultimately paid a price.

I had the chance to listen in yesterday to top staffers from USDOT explain their collaboration with HUD and the EPA -- the "Partnership for Livable Communities" that was first unveiled in March and touted again by President Obama in July. Three officials, including one of Ray LaHood's top deputies, Beth Osborne, outlined their plans via conference call to several hundred people from all parts of the country.

The details didn't go very deep, but now we know that DOT has $100 million to spend on planning grants next year to foster more sustainable development. They've received 1,400 applications for so-called TIGER grants, a $1.5 billion pool of stimulus money set aside for "innovative" transportation projects. (For a full recap that gives you a flavor for the Obama DOT's priorities, read this blog post by Gary Toth of Project for Public Spaces, which organized the event.)

So the language is encouraging and there are some new pots of money being put to good use. We have quite recent evidence from the stimulus saga, however, that once federal highway funding goes out the door to state DOTs, sprawl projects will follow. So I want to focus on one key moment yesterday, when a participant asked how the feds plan to get state DOTs on board with a livability agenda. Here's how Osborne answered:

The DOTs are wide-varied. Some states are well ahead of the federal government, and some states are not sure that these are the priorities they want to set for themselves. The program we have now is not self-funding anymore. In addressing it at the federal level, there is an expectation within the administration that money that is spent from the federal government is going to have to be spent in a way that allows us to be accountable to our taxpayers. That’s going to realign the program to some extent. The more people learn about livability and sustainability priorities, they see it aligns with their priorities more than they realized (economic growth, development, housing affordability). When you show people the choice between the priorities we have laid out and what they have laid out, it's amazing the headway you can make. We have some training to do, we have some challenges to meet, but we feel confident we can meet them.

Deciphering an answer this cryptic is a bit like reading tea leaves.

Read more...

Experience with case studies has made it clear to many urban planners and environmentalists that to maximize the benefits of transit investments, and to slow growth in traffic congestion, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and carbon emissions, you have to focus on land use.

This knowledge has begun working its way into the policymaking world, to the extent that local and state legislatures are beginning to craft rules that explicitly factor the carbon impact of land use effects into decisions about new development and infrastructure construction. In a few years time, the federal government may follow.

But there's not as much in the way of hard studies of the effects of land use as we might like -- mainly because it's been a non-issue, so far as most of the country is concerned, for much of recent history.

Aiming to address this (and acting under a congressional mandate), the Transportation Research Board recently completed a study that has now resulted in a very large report: "Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO Emissions."

The report is actually five mini-papers, and at nearly 200 pages long it makes for a lot of reading. But the findings reported in the introduction give an idea of what it's all about.

The authors conclude that compact development is likely to reduce VMT: "The effects of compact, mixed-use development on VMT are likely to be enhanced when this strategy is combined with other policy measures that make alternatives to driving relatively more convenient and affordable." No surprises there.

Finding No. 2 is: "The literature suggests that doubling residential density across a metropolitan area might lower household VMT by about 5 to 12 percent, and perhaps by as much as 25 percent, if coupled with higher employment concentrations, significant public transit improvements, mixed uses, and other supportive demand management measures."

They note that were you to move the residents of Atlanta to an area built like Boston, you'd lower the Atlantans' VMT per household by perhaps 25 percent.

Better land use results in reductions in energy use and carbon emissions, the authors report, from both direct and indirect causes. (Direct causes would be a reduction in VMT; indirect include things like longer vehicle lifetimes from reduced use and the greater efficiency of smaller or multi-family housing units.)

But one of the crucial pieces of data included in the report is this:

As many as 57 million new housing units are projected to accommodate population growth and replacement housing needs by 2030, growing to between 62 and 105 million units by 2050 - a substantial net addition to the housing stock of 105.2 million in 2000.

Read more...

The good people at Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com have narrowed submissions in their Reburbia: A Suburban Design Competition to the top twenty proposals for re-envisioning the sprawl that blights the American landscape and keeps us locked in our foreign-oil dependent, ever-expanding commute patterns.

From their announcement:

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? What would a McMansion become if it weren’t a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation?

While there are some very interesting proposals--like turning old big-box stores into residential units and converting freeway signs into horizontal windmills to generate electricity from the movement of cars--there are some other proposals that make personal rapid transit (PRT) look anachronistic.

Actually, it's the blimp transport proposal that currently has the most votes, so maybe you want to go over to the site and vote for something more practical?

Read more...

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.

Read more...

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) yesterday approved its 25-year "Change In Motion" Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), after more than two years of work coordinating with the 26 regional transportation operators, the public, and the many authorities under its control. A slew of bicycle and transportation advocates lined up to thank the MTC for the more than $1 billion it has committed to completing the regional bicycle network and increased funding for Safe Routes to School (SRTS) and Safe Routes to Transit (SRTT) programs.

Andrew Casteel, Executive Director of the Bay Area Bicycle Coalition, urged commissioners to start funding SRTS, SRTT and bicycle network improvements within the first two years of the RTP.  Citing climate action plans in Portland, Oregon, to realize 20 percent of all trips in the city by bicycle by 2030, Casteel said, "The more available infrastructure for bikes, the more people will shift into bikes as a mode of transportation.  The investment in bicycling can be done quickly.  Completing out that network has a lasting effect after it's put there.  It does continue to create that mode shift."

Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Christine Culver echoed praise for increasing funding for the regional bicycle network and for SRTS and SRTT funding, explaining how she traveled by bicycle to Golden Gate Transit from Marin into San Francisco, then took BART to Oakland.  "I like Safe Routes to Transit; this rocks!"

While most of the public comment was laudatory, some expressed concern the RTP fails to make meaningful inroads in meeting climate change goals set out in AB 32 and SB 375.  Stuart Cohen, Executive Director of TransForm, called it a "test run," and said the commission needs to reevaluate the way it plans RTPs and should think outside the box.

"Our objectives used to be congestion relief and mobility, and now it's saving our planet and some pretty imperative stuff," said Cohen. "There's a lot of discussion about how far regions can go in really addressing vehicle miles traveled. What is becoming clear is that if any region is going to lead the way, it's going to be ours.  There's not a lot of innovation that I'm seeing coming out of the other MPOs."

Read more...