Streetsblog San Francisco

The Transportation Enhancements program, which requires states to set
aside 10 percent of their federal transport money for new bicycle and
pedestrian facilities, among other projects, turns 19 years old this
year. But you’d almost never know it after reading Saturday’s Fort Worth
Star-Telegram, in which the paper
tallies — with no shortage of alarm — the federal money not being
spent on new roads.

The Star-Telegram story, which soon got snapped up
by the Associated Press, begins by challenging Dallas’ Woodall Rogers
Deck Park, a groundbreaking
effort to cap the city’s Woodall Rogers Freeway and create a
5.2-acre green space for the public. The park, aimed at creating a
walkable link between Dallas’ local districts, received
$16.7 million in stimulus funding from the Obama administration.

From the Star-Telegram:

The Woodall Rodgers project is a glaring example of how,
at a
time when many Texans distrust their transportation leaders, huge
chunks of federal and state money are being spent on projects that have
little or nothing to do with directly improving traffic.

"Texans
should be outraged by it, especially when they’re being asked to
support tax increases for transportation," said Justin Keener, vice
president for policy and communications at the Texas Public Policy
Foundation, a nonpartisan research institute in Austin.

The Star-Telegram reviewed 515 state projects awarded
funds
under the federal transportation enhancement program during the past 18
years and found projects large and small that had little to do with
mobility.

As it happens, the "nonpartisan" Texas Public Policy Foundation
makes no bones about its political alignment on its website, which outlines a
mission of "limited government" and offers a litany of pro-industry
critiques of the Democratic health care bills.

The group’s leadership is stocked with veteran advisers to
Republican Gov. Rick Perry (TX), and chairman of the board Wendy
Lee Gramm is a former Enron lobbyist who
aided her husband Phil Gramm, a former Texas GOP senator, in his
late-1990s push to de-regulate Wall Street.

Yet aside from Gramm’s group, the Star-Telegram story includes no
sources criticizing Texas transportation enhancements, which have
received $997 million since the program began in 1991.

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Let’s say you’re at the movies, and you look up at the box office
only to see no ticket prices listed. You know you’re going to have to
pay for the show eventually — perhaps even during income-tax season –
but for now you can watch all you want, seemingly for free.

How many movies would you see? One, two … or as many as you wanted to?

Former federal highway official Steve Lockwood presented that hypothetical at today’s University of Virginia conference to illustrate the nation’s wacky notion of transportation pricing.

"The reason we don’t have a flexible dialogue when it comes to pricing is that we don’t know how much things cost," he said.

Right now
tolling is prohibited on existing interstate highway systems built with
federal funds, with a few exceptions. But conference speakers on both
ends of the political spectrum agreed that the transportation system
must be priced more accurately in order to avoid catastrophic
consequences.

In other words: It’s time to start properly labeling the price of a movie ticket.

Douglas Foy, the former development secretary of Massachusetts, and transit critic
Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation, sparred on many issued but
agreed that any new highway capacity should include charges beyond the
gas tax.

The comparison of film-going to driving is an
imperfect one, to be sure, but the core need to inform the public about
the consequences of decision-making applies to both activities.

"People
love to believe they can be free riders," Jay-Etta Hecker of the
Bipartisan Policy Center told conference attendees today. "People need
to be educated that this isn’t a free-rider system."

The
federal effort to encourage sounder urban transportation pricing
remains in its infancy, however. Mary Peters, George W. Bush’s second
transportation secretary, introduced the Urban Parternship Agreements
(UPA) in 2007 to incentivize congestion mitigation efforts, but New
York City lost its chance at the UPA cash after the state legislature
voted down congestion pricing.

As Washington conventional wisdom has it,
raising gas taxes or creating a vehicle miles traveled tax to pay for
transportation is impossible during the current recession. After all,
who would want to squeeze cash-strapped commuters during tough economic
times?

As it turns out, the public is very willing to pay for the
shorter commuting times that result from less traffic — and they’re
willing to pay top dollar, as IBM’s new Commuter Pain Index (CPI) shows.

When
asked what value they would place on every 15 minutes sliced from their
daily commute, 36.5 percent of CPI respondents said between $10 and
$20. That’s about five times the recent trading price of a ton of carbon emissions on the nation’s climate-change exchanges.

And
the price of a shorter commute was higher in more congested cities. In
Los Angeles, 22 percent of residents said every 15 minutes not spent en route to work would be worth between $31 and $40 — or more than $100 per hour.

What
does the data mean? For one thing, those who fear that voters would
revolt if asked to pay more for a more efficient, less congested
transport network shouldn’t let that stop policy-making. As every
successful politician knows (and the president is re-learning on health care), messaging is the key to winning over the public.

In
other words, Democrats who feign unwillingness to subject voters to
higher gas taxes are ignoring their ability to control the message.
When a greater contribution to transportation is pitched as a way to shorten commutes and give workers more free time, the prospect becomes more desirable.

And
it’s not that lawmakers don’t know how to decrease congestion,
particularly in the urban areas that were polled to produce the CPI.
Reducing the number of car trips and lowering demand during peak travel
times are proven to be a cheaper and more effective method of battling congestion than expanding highway capacity.

Is it time to nickname the White House’s Sustainable Communities Initiative the "Shorter Commutes Initiative"?

The Bay Bridge closure this weekend will be the third in four years, and drivers are starting to figure out alternatives, including taking BART, carpooling on other bridges, and simply avoiding unnecessary trips. But this year's closure is different from those in 2006 and 2007: for the first time, the Bay Bridge will have a planned closure on a regular workday. No one knows what that will entail for certain, but BART will likely be packed, and the streets around Rincon Hill and much of South of Market may be strangely calm.

While the bridge is closed, from 8 p.m. Thursday to 5 a.m. Tuesday, crews will cut and roll away a 300-foot-long section of the east span of the bridge. In its place, a new section will be moved in, which will connect to a temporary half-mile-long detour. The detour will allow crews to complete work on a permanent replacement structure, which will eventually be used to connect the new east span of the bridge to the Yerba Buena Island tunnel. The Bay Bridge website has an excellent video explaining this weekend's construction work.

BART will be running trains hourly overnight on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to 14 stations. There will be no overnight service in the early hours of Tuesday, even though the bridge will still be closed. There will also be additional ferry service across the Bay during the bridge closure, and AC Transit will reroute its transbay routes to meet the BART stations at Coliseum/Oakland Airport, MacArthur, North Berkeley, and West Oakland after making the regular East Bay stops. Muni's route 108 to Treasure Island will operate regular service. The Caltrans Bicycle Shuttle, which normally runs only on weekdays, will add weekend service during the closure, via the Golden Gate and Richmond San Rafael Bridges. A complete list of transit options during the closure is available at 511.org.

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A BART strike will leave hundreds of thousands of riders in search of an alternate commute on Monday. Since most of the region's largest transit agencies are already operating near capacity during peak hours, new riders - as well as current riders - will have to squeeze onto already-crowded buses and trains.

AC Transit spokesperson Clarence Johnson said the BART strike could be "a real nightmare" for people who need to cross the Bay. Unlike nearly every other agency in the Bay Area, AC Transit does plan to provide some additional service, depending on how many extra buses and drivers are available. Johnson said the agency doesn't have "a whole lot of extra buses" or drivers though, and it won't be adding any new routes to substitute for BART service. Johnson said he isn't sure how long AC Transit could handle the extra strain caused by the BART strike.

While it won't be providing extra service, Muni will prioritize service along routes that duplicate BART service, including the 14 Mission, 49 Van Ness-Mission, J Church, and N Judah (to and from Caltrain at 4th and King.) This will mostly be limited to making sure these lines run on schedule and runs aren't missed, however, so these routes are still likely to be packed.

Caltrain, VTA, Golden Gate Transit, and SamTrans will all operate regular service.

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It doesn't take much for a car illegally driving in Market Street's transit-only lanes to set Muni vehicles back by an entire stoplight cycle. In fact, it happens all the time, and despite the delay and frustration it causes transit riders and operators, motorists face little risk of getting a ticket.

The lights on Market are timed so that Muni's buses and streetcars stop at red lights, load and unload passengers, and move on when the light turns green. But when cars stop in front of them on a red light, buses can't pull up to the island, and must wait until the light turns green to pull into the transit island. By the time they've finished loading and unloading passengers, the light is red again.

Such violations are rampant in San Francisco, based on interviews with Muni bus and streetcar operators, who insisted on anonymity, and observations by Streetsblog San Francisco.

Driving in a transit-only lane is an offense subject to a $60 fine, according to the city's traffic code. But ask a Muni driver whether they ever see cars in the city's 17 miles of transit-only lanes, and you'll likely hear an unequivocal response: "Oh yeah, all the time." That, more or less, is what nearly every Muni driver surveyed for this story said when asked whether private automobiles get in their way on stretches of streets like Market and Mission that have transit-only lanes. "That's the norm," said one operator.

Cars are in the transit-only lanes on "every run," said another Muni operator, who drives the 71-Haight and uses the transit-only lanes on Market Street. "People want to go on time. How we going to be on time? How can you be on time when all these people are in the bus lane?"

Many of the drivers attributed the rampant violations to a lack of enforcement. "There's no police around. They're supposed to be taking care of that, especially the motorcycle police," said one bus operator.

The San Francisco Police Department's Traffic Company and Muni Response Team are in fact responsible for enforcing transit-only lane violations by moving vehicles.

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When transit-only lanes were first striped in San Francisco in the 1970s, they were meant to be a bold enactment of the city's brand new Transit First policy. But like the policy, the lanes have only been partially implemented and are all too often flouted. Stricter enforcement is part of the equation, but many of the lanes are marked so half-heartedly that it's hard to place the blame on drivers alone.

The Transit First policy was adopted in 1973 and the crux of it was transit lanes. When it passed, "within six months, Muni was supposed to come back to the Board of Supes with a proposal for a comprehensive set of transit lanes," said Tom Radulovich of Livable City. "So, it's an old policy in San Francisco that transit should be given priority over traffic on city streets, and that means, in many instances, dedicated lanes."

Today, there are 17.41 miles of transit-only lanes in San Francisco (see the complete list in PDF format.) About two-thirds of that lane mileage prohibits private automobiles at all times, and the rest is peak-only. The result is a patchwork that is both essential to Muni's operation, but woefully incomplete and often times confusing.

"In practice, a lot of the Muni planners have always complained that the traffic engineers will not allow them to have transit-only lanes on streets," said Radulovich. This is "out of concern of actually keeping traffic flowing."

MTA spokesperson Judson said the Transit Effectiveness Project recently completed by the MTA "recommends transit-only lanes as one technique for reducing transit travel time. TEP market research found that after reliability, Muni customers are most concerned about travel times." If the transit lanes are not available to function as intended, he said, "then Muni service cannot benefit from them."

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A new report on the costs of aging roads [PDF] has gotten a lot of attention over the past week, with both Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and the Washington Post touting its conclusion on the danger of "deficient roadways."

On its face, the report sounds like an argument for prioritizing road repair and modernization over new construction, which is certain to be a flashpoint as Congress works on a new federal transportation bill. But some of the upgrades that the authors suggest rely on outmoded assumptions about driver safety -- not to mention pedestrian safety, a concept never mentioned in the report.

Here's an excerpt:

Numerous solutions -- some simple, some complex -- could help make the roadway environment safer for users. These improvements include structural changes such as adding or widening shoulders, improving roadway alignment, replacing or widening narrow bridges, reducing pavement edges or drop-offs, and providing more clear space in the area adjacent to roadways.

Adding or widening shoulders for bike lanes or pedestrian paths is one thing, but the notion that driving can be made safer by widening and straightening roads (or "improving roadway alignment," as the report puts it) has been debunked by "Traffic" author Tom Vanderbilt, transportation planner Eric Dumbaugh, and others. In fact, making roads more complex and curvy can often serve as a deterrent to unsafe driving practices, particularly on urban streets.

But the report, commissioned by the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC), seems to have concluded that urban areas don't need to be considered separately from interstates.

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The crowded sidewalks on 18th Street between Dolores and Guerrero in the Mission are usually packed with foodies inching their way into renowned eateries like Tartine Bakery and Cafe or Delfina Pizzeria and Restaurant. Couple that with a high volume of bikes and a scarcity of bike racks and the block screams for improvements to benefit the public realm. 

"I think everyone looks at 18th Street as this great pedestrian-oriented street with these really amazing businesses on it where the sidewalks are too narrow and too crowded," said Tom Radulovich, a neighborhood denizen and Executive Director of Livable City, who is working with other advocates and merchants to make the block near Dolores Park more pedestrian and bicycle friendly.

"You see so many more people walking or bicycling through the neighborhood than driving, and a lot of them are locals."

As a first step, the MTA is considering -- and is likely to approve -- eliminating the 7-9 a.m. tow-away zone on the south side of 18th Street eastbound between Dolores and Treat, which would help calm speeding automobile traffic during peak morning hours, and hopefully reduce the amount of collisions in the area.

On a sunny Friday afternoon, while gathering interviews for this story, I witnessed a car collision on Guerrero at 18th, followed by a chorus of "whoas" from Tartine patrons. No one was hurt, but a Tartine employee said she's witnessed or heard at least six collisions in the last year.

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