Streetsblog San Francisco

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FTA chief Peter Rogoff announced the winners of $293 million in competitive grants for bus and streetcar projects today. The biggest chunks of funding will help build streetcar projects in Cincinnati, Charlotte, Fort Worth, and St. Louis, as well as rapid bus corridors in New York and Chicago. All told, the funding will be distributed among 53 projects, chosen from more than 300 applicants.

While streetcar projects got the largest individual grants, most of the funding will go toward bus projects, including a number of grants for smaller cities to build, expand, or improve stations like Des Moines's Multi-Modal Transit Hub. Several bus projects have an information component, promising to make service more predictable and convenient by giving riders a clear sense of when buses will arrive.

Also on the list is Boston's regional bike-share network, slated to receive $3 million to help build more than 500 public bicycle stations. The bike-share project made the cut because of its potential to expand the reach and accessibility of the bus and rail system. Boston's bike-share launch recently got pushed back to 2011, but at that scale, it would be, by far, the largest system in the country.

Here's a sample of the major projects that got a boost:

• Cincinnati will receive $25 million to help build a six-mile streetcar route, with an eye toward spurring mixed-use development downtown. The city planning commission recently took the enlightened step of reducing parking requirements along the future streetcar route.
  
• Chicago received support for a pair of rapid bus projects: $11 million for the Jeffery BRT corridor, which will improve service to major job center on a route with poor access to trains, and $25 million for a two-mile, east-west bus priority street serving several routes downtown.
  
• New York City's 34th Street busway got an $18 million grant. Streetsblog NYC readers have been following this project for a couple of years. NYCDOT recently announced its intention to make 34th Street the first physically separated busway in the city.
  
• One of the surprise winners was Fort Worth, which received about $25 million for a 2.5-mile one-way streetcar loop, intended to serve as the hub in a future network. Streetsblog Network member Fort Worthology called the grant "incredible and extremely positive news" for the larger streetcar project.
  

You can see the complete list of projects here.

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Back in the late 1970s, when Washington's Metrorail system first began operating in Arlington County, Virginia, the future of Arlington and other old, inner suburbs was far from certain. Across the Potomac, the District of Columbia was suffering from depopulation, rapidly rising crime rates, and serious fiscal difficulties.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Arlington, Fairfax County was enjoying a stunning period of growth. People were flocking by the hundreds of thousands to Fairfax's sprawling residential subdivisions, and employment centers popped up and grew rapidly around freeway interchanges.

The future looked as though it belonged to Fairfax County, and Arlington's decision to target development around its new Metro stations seemed quixotic and anachronistic.

But now, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, Arlington seems to have been extraordinarily foresighted in its decision to grow around Metro. From 2000 to 2008, Arlington's population grew by 10 percent -- all of it infill development, and a remarkable achievement for an inner suburb.

Even more remarkably, this growth has led to a negligible impact on local traffic. Daniel Malouff, author of the BeyondDC blog, reported this week on a meeting with Arlington's Department of Transportation, at which officials recounted some numbers that had emerged from research on the effects of county development choices.

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Don't look now, but NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan's magic may have rubbed off on DPW Director Ed Reiskin, to San Francisco's benefit.  Reiskin has been leading a multi-agency effort to close a small portion of 17th Street where it meets Market Street to vehicle traffic and convert the space into a trial pedestrian plaza, which he hopes to see operational by May. 

The historic trolley that loads at the proposed location will still operate in the area, but the DPW will put out planters and other moderately heavy stone elements that will serve as seating and tables, much like Gansevoort Plaza in New York City. 

"As we’ve seen what folks in New York City have done in terms of taking excess asphalt and returning it to people, to more diverse uses, we're inspired," said Reiskin.  "The approach we’re taking here is to try it.  If it’s great, it will be great.  If not, we’ll take it out."

Reiskin has been coordinating the effort with the MTA, the Planning Department, Supervisor Bevan Dufty, the Castro Street Community Betterment District (CBD), and the Mayor's Director of Greening, Astrid Haryati.  Public Architecture, a private firm, is working pro bono to create the design for the new public space. 

MTA Executive Director Nat Ford was very upbeat.  "We're really excited about this. We’ve been trying to identify locations around the city to make these quick improvements that help us to green the city and make it more pleasurable for pedestrians or workers who want to have their lunch outside in public space."

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As we reported last week, several city agencies have begun to look at ways to improve Market Street when it is repaved, including an inter-agency process spearheaded by DPW and the Planning Department.  Yet, we've still heard nothing from Mayor Gavin Newsom that suggests he'll make the transformation of San Francisco's most significant street an urgent priority. 

Given the political capital he's willing to spend on six car-free Sundays this summer, which we applaud wholeheartedly, we don't understand why he wouldn't marshal all the Market Street principals together, especially when his allies are calling for change and his political nemeses are rallying their troops to do it in spite of him.

Streetsblog San Francisco obtained a copy of a letter sent to Mayor Newsom several weeks ago by a group of signatories that don't always see eye to eye on street issues (PDF).  In the letter they urged the Mayor to bump Market Street to the top of his list of priorities for this year. 

"Unfortunately today Market Street does not live up to its potential as a landmark boulevard.  Transit performance, vehicle traffic congestion, pedestrian and bicycle accessibility and safety, and economic vitality all are in a poor state along much of the Market Street corridor."

While it's little surprise that advocates like SFBC, Livable City, and Walk SF would want the Mayor to act, we were heartened to read that the Chamber of Commerce, San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Central Market CBD, the North of Market/Tenderloin CBD, and the Market Street Association were all on board.

Though the letter is clearly more middle of the road than one coming exclusively from the advocates, it does list a number of targets:

• Decrease transit travel time and improve transit reliability
• Improve pedestrian circulation and safety
• Create a safer, more inviting bicycle route
• Accommodate necessary motor vehicle trips
  

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Seattle's South Lake Union Streetcar is a 1.3-mile line that opened in December 2007, the first leg in the city's commitment to new transit and light rail. It passed the half million passenger milestone in its first year, surpassing ridership projections.

The streetcar features many top-of-the-line tech amenities, including real time arrival message boards, solar-powered ticket vending machines, and human-activated doors to save energy while the train is in layover mode. If you go to the Seattle Streetcar web site, you can find out the next arrival time and actually watch the streetcars moving via GPS trackers.

As you'll see in the film, development is booming along the South Lake Union corridor. "If you build it, they will come" certainly seems to apply here.

The debate among policy makers and community stakeholders over the merits of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) versus Light Rail Transit (LRT) is often heated, and usually centers around whether LRT recoups the substantial capital costs of implementation over time versus BRT, and whether BRT has a more substantial carbon impact. Sometimes it can also boil down to a debate over whether buses are sexy enough to get people out of cars and onto transit.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) recently presented a report comparing BRT and LRT in the “medium investment” range for the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) on the Purple Line, which would connect suburbs around Washington DC with the city center.   WRI’s analysis confirms that BRT is the option that would work locally to fight global warming, with a medium-investment system cutting carbon dioxide emissions by almost 9,000 metric tons per year, equivalent to taking about 1,600 cars off the road (PDF).

In an interview with Worldchanging, the report's authors, Dario Hidalgo and Greg Fuhs, address the CO2 numbers: "While this could change in the future with a major and permanent shift to low-carbon energy sources, for the foreseeable future we would likely continue to see higher CO2 emissions from light rail in this case," said Fuhs.

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