Photo: TransForm/Flickr

Members of a broad coalition hailing from throughout California are headed to Sacramento next week to push policymakers to save transit funding and enact sustainable transportation planning reforms.

The Oakland-based transit advocacy group TransForm has amassed about 150 advocates to descend on the capitol for its two-day Transportation Choices Summit, the first known event of its kind, where they will meet with state representatives and urge them to prioritize walking, bicycling, and transit.

TransForm State Policy Director Graham Brownstein said the action came out of the organization’s Invest in Transit campaign, launched last year to address the “very, very serious crisis” facing transit systems in California. The state has made dramatic funding cuts totaling more than $4 billion over the last decade, and TransForm recognized the immediate need for “creative policy reforms that will stabilize, and then grow transit funding in California,” said Brownstein.

The cornerstone of the campaign is a push to ensure that a major portion of the revenue from California’s nascent cap-and-trade program will be dedicated to transit operations and affordable housing projects located near transit.

The cap-and-trade revenue could go a long way toward restoring the damage done to transit funding under the Schwarzenegger administration. By selling emissions permits, Governor Jerry Brown’s administration anticipates the cap-and-trade program will generate $1 billion in the 2012-2013 budget and $10 billion annually by 2020, according to TransForm [PDF].

Brownstein said transit agencies need all the help they can get to avert a much deeper statewide crisis.

“Piecemeal, at this point, isn’t going to cut it,” he said. “We’re looking at just billions of dollars that are needed really pretty rapidly, or else you run into a situation where some of these systems that have not had proper maintenance and rehab for years start to really not function, and it becomes much more expensive, and it’s not just a repair, but a replacement kind of an issue.”

TransForm’s proposal is targeted to help the state meet its air quality goals, particularly for disadvantaged communities, as mandated by AB 32, passed by the state legislature in 2006. The goal, said Brownstein, is to combine “the investments in transit infrastructure and operations with transit-oriented development in the right places so that you’re maximizing the drop in people driving their cars, maximizing the increase in the ability of people to take transit, walk, and bike, and therefore you’re maximizing the greenhouse gas reductions, which cap-and-trade is all about, ultimately.”

He also pointed out that investing in transit options benefits low-income communities the most. “You’re maximizing the benefits that accrue to people in this state who are suffering the most because of our over-reliance on cars. They’re suffering because of the hit to their pocketbook, they’re suffering because if they’re low-income they’re much more likely to live next to a freeway or near a port or other facility where lots of polluting motor vehicles are located.”

The coalition will also push for reforms in how the state plans and funds transportation projects, “all of which aim to either increase funding for transit, bike, and pedestrian facilities, consider health and equity impacts as they’re making transportation planning decisions, create some new tools for local governments to have financing to support needed infrastructure and housing investments,” said Brownstein.

The coalition amassed by TransForm has grown to represent “not just the usual do-gooders,” he said, but also local governments and transit agencies, business and labor, affordable housing proponents, and disability advocates. The campaign coalesced to ”stitch these interests together.”

“This has become much bigger than about transit and housing,” said Brownstein. “It’s now really about integration of the various modes of transportation — transit, bike, ped, and cars — and the ways in which we coordinate, or fail to coordinate, transportation and land-use planning to maximize the benefits of these investments.”

The Transportation Choices Summit will take place in Sacramento next Tuesday and Wednesday, May 1 and 2. Registration for the event is still open, and you can also sign a petition to show your support.

Not pictured: a 400-space undergound parking garage and all the car traffic it will generate. Image: Hutner Descollonges via 8Washington.com

A luxury waterfront condo and parking garage development is on its way to the central Embarcadero, even though it would add three times the number of residential parking spaces allowed by law, plus 255 public spaces, to one of San Francisco’s most transit-rich destinations.

The SF Planning Commission approved the environmental impact report for the 8 Washington Street project in a 4-2 vote yesterday after a joint hearing with the Recreation and Parks Commission that lasted seven hours. The project must still be approved by the Board of Supervisors.

The garage would include a parking spot for each of the 145 units (three times what the planning code permits) and 255 public spaces, which the Port claims are needed to replace other nearby parking being removed. The project would bring some park space and pedestrian enhancements, but the enormous underground public parking garage will wipe out any benefit by serving as a magnet for car traffic in an area that already caters too much to the automobile, even after its revitalization following the removal of a freeway.

“We think it’s a terrible idea,” said Livable City Director Tom Radulovich, who argues the area already accommodates excessive amounts of car parking given its proximity to multiple downtown transit options. “With the exception, maybe, of Midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop, I can’t think of a place in the United States that has got more transit service.”

8 Washington will be located within walking distance of numerous neighborhood amenities and transit lines, including Muni light rail and BART stations. Radulovich also noted that future transit projects like high-speed rail are poised to make it an even more ideal spot for reliable car-free travel.

Jonathan Stern, the Port’s director for waterfront development, argued to the Planning Commission that the parking is needed for Ferry Building customers who drive to “carry large objects” and who compete with driving commuters for spots, also noting that the underground garage will be “out of sight.” The Port says that 961 parking spaces within a 15-minute walk of the building, including the 105-space parking lot currently located on the 8 Washington site, have recently been removed or will be removed in coming years.

Advocates who’ve looked at the numbers say the Port’s parking supply analysis is severely flawed. Existing parking garages and lots in the area are poorly utilized, according to Radulovich, who says that more than enough parking would be provided by converting underused commuter parking spaces to short-term parking for Ferry Building visitors who drive, though that could be challenging to do in private garages.

“The Port’s taken this position that the high watermark of parking, the maximum number of historic parking spaces, is the natural or logical number of parking spaces,” said Radulovich. “We think that’s kind of a bogus approach.”

A 2005 study [PDF] by the SF County Transportation Authority found that despite “a perceived shortage” of parking in the area, off-street lots and garages were occupied at a rate of just 21 percent and on-street parking 70 percent. “This could be because some garages are less visible or in areas that less familiar to tourists,” the study says, “which implies that better driver information systems, even just better signage, would improve the parking situation today.” It also noted that luring drivers into garages with comparatively lower prices, as the SFPark program is currently doing, would help optimize use of the existing parking.

As for 8 Washington’s residential parking, the developers argue that building nearly three times as many spaces as permitted is justifiable because the parking ratio is similar to the regulations for a nearby district. They propose to mitigate the impacts with public realm improvements like park space and new pedestrian connections to the waterfront. City agencies like the Port will also benefit from substantial fees and taxes on the property.

Planning Department staff seems willing to let the exception slide, recommending only to reduce the number of spots to 126. But there was some dissent on the Planning Commission: Cindy Wu and Hisashi Sugaya voted against approving the EIR.

“The question is, ‘Why? What is the overriding public good?” said Wu. “I know there is a park, or an open space considered on part of the site, and that they’re paying into the fees of the city, but I feel like what is being asked and what kind of public good is being given — they don’t match for me.”

“If it’s so transit-rich as [the sponsors] are trying to present to us,” said Sugaya, “then why are we having one-to-one parking?”

Radulovich also pointed out that the walkability of the neighborhood around 8 Washington is a huge part of what makes it such an attractive site, even to the very rich who can afford the new condos and who the Port assumes will need to store their cars on-site. ”The fact that it’s luxury housing doesn’t necessarily mean we have to throw out our goals around sustainability and around transit-first,” he said. “[In] Midtown Manhattan, not everyone who lives on Park Avenue has to own their own car.”

“I think a lot of people would take issue with [the notion] that if it’s housing for the super-rich, there ought to be a different set of rules,” he added. ”No, there shouldn’t be.”

Image: 7x7 Magazine

Walkability, transit access, good local schools — San Franciscans clamor to live in neighborhoods with features like these.

Potrero Hill artist Wendy MacNaughton’s ”mental map” of the city lists the strongest qualities of seven areas that stand out for her, among them SoMa’s “best transit access in town” and the “convenient, walkable, easy everything” nature of Lower Pacific Heights and the Fillmore area.

It’s no wonder, considering such characteristics correlate strongly with happiness. Unfortunately, walkable neighborhoods are a scarce resource in this country, which means living in one can come at a high price.

I spotted a copy of the poster hanging in the cafe at City Hall, where an employee pointed out that it was featured on the July 2010 cover of 7×7 Magazine, which commissioned MacNaughton to create the map.

Image via SFMTA. See full PDF here.

The Transportation Sustainability Program (TSP) would reform the city’s transportation practices in three key areas: by eliminating reliance on the automobile-centric measuring stick known as Level of Service (LOS), by instituting a system of development impact fees that fund sustainable transportation improvements, and expediting the review process for pedestrian, bicycle, and transit projects. The details are on the wonky side, but if the city delivers on these reforms, SF could be looking at a much more rapid build-out of transit corridors, bikeways, and pedestrian safety measures.

“This program is taking a look at how we manage, regulate, and mitigate for development as it relates to transportation to develop a process that’s more transparent, equitable, and meaningful, and provides a much better nexus between land use planning and transportation,” said SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin.

SF Planning Department Assistant Director Alicia John-Bauptiste presented details [PDF] about the TSP Tuesday to the SFMTA Board of Directors. The program, currently planned for adoption in late 2013, is a coordinated effort between the SFMTA, the Planning Department, the SF County Transportation Authority, and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

One key component to the TSP is the Transportation Sustainability Fee (TSF), which would replace the current Transit Impact Development Fee (TIDF) that building developers pay to the SFMTA to account for infrastructure costs due to car trips and transit trips made by users of those buildings. The TSF would be based on offsetting car trips added by a project, and its revenues could only be spent according to a spending plan to directly fund projects that improve transit service and bicycle and pedestrian safety. Developers would receive discounts on the TSF for building less car parking, and it would apply to residential buildings (except affordable housing), which the TIDF doesn’t.

According to John-Bauptiste, many developments and transportation projects will also no longer be required to conduct an environmental impact report (EIR) as part of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which would lead to major time and cost savings. “Individual projects will be relieved of having to study cumulative transportation impacts because the TSP EIR will study those impacts. Project-specific analysis will be limited to site design issues such as loading docks, curb cuts, and pedestrian and bicycle safety,” the presentation says.

The savings largely come from relieving planners of the need to measure projects using LOS, a tool that grades transportation projects based on how much they might slow down cars. LOS often calls for planners to take measures that “result in inconsistencies with achieving the city’s transit-first policies,” said John-Bauptiste.

A recent cartoon about LOS by Andy Singer.

Image: Andy Singer

“If what we’re concerned about is how quickly automobiles are moving through a particular intersection or roadway segment, a logical mitigation might be to expand roadway capacity, to add a lane of traffic,” said John-Bauptiste. “That is, first of all, often infeasible in a built-out, urban, dense environment such as San Francisco. It, secondly, can often be in contradiction to our policies supporting the bike network or pedestrian safety.”

Instead, the program would implement a new metric called Transit System Performance, which turns the LOS approach on its head by evaluating the transportation network holistically and focusing on reducing driving and improving conditions for transit, walking, and bicycling. This metric was developed as an alternative to LOS over recent years, and in 2009, San Francisco agencies successfully lobbied the state to allow cities to use alternative metrics.

“This is the latest in a long-running conversation about reconciling our practice of CEQA with our city’s wonderful adopted policies,” said Andy Thornley, policy director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “We decided as a city quite a long time ago that we didn’t want to use LOS in CEQA.”

Under the TSP’s new environmental review system, projects would move so much faster that Reiskin said some improvements currently in development might get finished sooner by waiting until after the reforms are adopted.

“One of the main cost- and schedule-drivers of environmental review is transportation analysis, and that’s for any large development project,” said Reiskin. ”Somewhat ironically, that has created cost and schedule extensions for our own projects, even those that on the surface would appear to be very clearly imparting positive environmental impacts to the city — the Bike Plan is perhaps the poster child for that.”

As another example, he pointed to the Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP), which Mayor Ed Lee has said is his #1 priority for Muni. The SFMTA is now at the outset of a 21-month, $2 million environmental review process for the TEP, said Reiskin. The TEP “is really about speeding up transit — a very clearly environmentally-beneficial initiative, but because we currently are under a Level of Service methodology… the TEP is subject to a full environmental impact report,” he said, though he noted that the TSP reforms won’t come soon enough for the project to take advantage.

The SFMTA Board roundly praised the program, and directors Joél Ramos and Bruce Oka emphasized the urgent need to implement it. “Every month that we don’t have a policy like this in place, we stand to lose, who knows, millions of dollars,” said Ramos.

Director Malcolm Heinicke hailed the program as a “creative way to restructure at the more local level to meet our goals and still satisfy the state act.”

“There’s always complaints about the CEQA process. There’s always calls to reform it at the state level,” he said. “It’s impressive that someone is actually doing something about this rather than just throwing up their hands and saying, ‘CEQA screws up everything.’”

Aside from the program’s cost savings, the TSF is expected to generate $630 million over 20 years and leverage $820 million more in other funding. The streams of revenue would fund “a comprehensive and strictly regulated $1.4 billion plan targeted at highly-efficient transportation system improvements,” according to the SFMTA presentation. Every two years, the city would dedicate funds to projects like the Market Street redesign, Muni’s TEP, Bus Rapid Transit on Van Ness and Geary, regional improvements like Caltrain electrification, the bikeway network, and pedestrian improvements.

City staff are currently reaching out to stakeholders for the program. This month, they plan to introduce a legislative ordinance and begin conducting the program’s EIR, which should finish next summer. The program is set to be heard and adopted by the SF Board of Supervisors in fall of 2013.

A rendering of CPMC's proposed 555-bed hospital and medical office building at Van Ness and Geary. Image: Rebuild CPMC

Nearly 10,000 additional cars [PDF] are predicted to travel every day to the gigantic Cathedral Hill California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) at Van Ness and Geary after it opens in 2016. While the city is negotiating how much the institution will pay to help mitigate the impacts those cars will have on Muni and pedestrian and bicycle safety, some advocates argue that won’t make up for a fundamental flaw: The medical center will include too much parking.

The 555-bed hospital and medical office building will include more than 1,200 parking spaces. CPMC projects half the visitors and employees to come by transit, foot or bike. But based on CPMC’s track record at three of its existing sites in the city, Marlayne Morgan of the Cathedral Hill Neighborhood Association doesn’t think that’s likely.

CPMC’s transit incentives for employees aren’t enough, says Morgan. “Even with giving $100 to take public transit, they can’t get 50 percent of their employees out of their cars,” she told the SF Board of Supervisors at a four-hour hearing last week on the transparency of CPMC’s negotiations with the city. “There’s no way to mitigate the impact of this facility unless you take it down in size.”

Cathedral Hill’s staff will be comprised largely of current CPMC employees at its other San Francisco locations, just under half of whom live outside the city, according to the transportation analysis in the CPMC’s Institutional Master Plan [PDF].

“They’re taking three hospitals and putting them in one location,” said Morgan. “It’s hard to believe that this is going to change the patterns at Cathedral Hill.”

Trip mode share at three existing CPMC campuses, from the Institutional Master Plan PDF

CPMC spokesperson Kevin McCormack said employees can get “up to $230 a month in pre-taxed pay to buy commuter checks for use on all Bay Area mass transit from MUNI and BART to Caltrain and van pools,” seemingly a reference to federal tax benefits that also provide incentives for employees to drive to work. (In fact, as of January 1, 2012, the maximum monthly pre-tax benefit for parking will be $240, while the maximum benefit for transit will drop back down to $125.)

“We also have shuttles that run between campuses and to and from Muni and BART stations so staff don’t have to bring their cars into the city or into downtown,” McCormack added. He couldn’t provide information on the parking benefits CPMC offers.

Ultimately, to reduce traffic generated by a specific facility, sustainable transportation advocates say that planners must reduce the amount of parking. “Parking spaces – particularly commuter or visitor spaces – are like magnets for cars,” writes Jeffrey Tumlin, a principal at San Francisco-based Nelson/Nygaard Associates, in his upcoming book Sustainable Transportation Planning.

The Cathedral Hill center would be more transit-accessible than the existing CPMC sites. Its location at the intersection of two BRT lines set to open on Van Ness and Geary in 2016 could lure more employees to take transit. But that also makes the high volume of parking all the more superfluous and the traffic generated all the more harmful to transit performance. As Livable City Director Tom Radulovich told Streetsblog last year, “If you’re going to maximize damage to Muni’s network, that’s where you would do it.”

While no bicycle improvements have been promised, CPMC could help fund an SFMTA study under the agreement being negotiated with the city. But unless protected bikeways are added to streets like Post, Sutter, and Polk, few commuters are expected to bike to the center.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which is pushing for a protected bikeway on Polk Street in its Connecting the City campaign, said in a statement that it “is looking to the CPMC Cathedral Hill to really embrace bicycle transportation for its staff and visitors. Supporting the creation of a top-notch bikeway on Polk Street will benefit the hospital, the neighborhood and countless destinations and people throughout the city.”

The Cathedral Hill center is set to begin construction next year and open in 2016.

For Minneapolis residents along the Hiawatha rail line, that convenience is worth tacking on an additional 10 percent to housing prices. Chicagoans near the Midway transit line are willing to pay about 19 percent extra. And in Portland, folks are willing to fork over an additional 31 percent for an abode within one-quarter mile of a rail transit station along the Westside extension line.

Selling prices for homes within 1/2 mile rose 31 percent after the addition of light rail in Portland, according to one study. Photo: Wired Autopia

The Center for Housing Policy recently completed a comprehensive review of the existing research on housing prices and proximity to rail. According to dozens of studies over decades, a rail station within a short walk can add 6 to 50 percent to home values.

The center’s analysis shows, however, that not all rail lines are created equal, at least when it comes to housing price appreciation.

Some important considerations for potential investors: Is the station walkable or is it located near highway infrastructure? Does the rail service operate frequently and offer service to desirable destinations? What is the strength of the regional housing market?

All of these factors are important. But ultimately they point to a central conclusion: the premium buyers are willing to pay to live near rail transit correlates roughly to how much accessibility the transit service offers relative to other modes. In a congested city with a strong housing market and robust transit system — New York City, for example — rail transit proximity results in the largest premiums. Meanwhile, weak market cities with poor transit and relatively traffic-free highways — like Buffalo, New York — may see little price appreciation around rail transit stops. In these cases, rail transit has little inherent advantage over highway travel.

Other interesting insights from the study:

• Apartments and condos generally enjoy greater price appreciation with proximity to rail transit than single family homes. In a 2008 study of San Diego, the premium was 17 percent for condominiums, but only 6 percent for single-family housing. Researchers theorize this is because multi-family housing dwellers (generally single) have less complicated transportation needs than their single-family counterparts (often families).
• Some evidence shows that appreciation is greater in higher-income neighborhoods. However, other studies have shown that price appreciation also takes place in low-income neighborhoods, indicating that the value of transit is capitalized into housing prices across income levels. For example, after plans were announced for Atlanta’s Beltline rail transit corridor, housing value increases were observed only in the lower-income portions of the route on the south side of the city.
• Price increases are not generally observed for bus transit because they lack the permanence of rail transit. However, fixed bus-rapid-transit routes, like the bus-only corridors in Pittsburgh, did offer a measurable appreciation effect on nearby housing.
• Building transit stations near freeway facilities can counteract the livability benefits of transit and lessen or even eliminate housing price appreciation.
• Housing price appreciation was not found to take place near park-and-ride rail transit facilities, perhaps because of the nuisance caused by increased traffic.
• There is little information about how proximity to rail transit affects rent prices.

In general, study authors found, communities can expect proximity to rail to add up to about 10 percent to nearby home values. Researchers also found that home values generally continue increasing as the value of the new service becomes more widely understood.

The Center for Housing Policy recommended that cities undergoing rail expansion take care to maintain affordable housing by stations. The group also recommended that public agencies attempt to capture some of the value created by transit investments through tax increment financing and use that money to support the rail expansion.

Nancy Skinner.

The benefits of capping the total amount of car parking, or at least reducing the requirement to build parking, in developments near plentiful mass transit is probably obvious to you if you’re reading this article. Reduced car parking insures that the people living in the T.O.D. will be the one using transit and the new developments will actively reduce the number of car trips made in the area. But there are other benefits as well. By reducing parking mandates, the cost of new development construction goes down, meaning projects for lower-income and transit-dependent populations become more economically doable. AB 710 also provides some flexibility to local jurisdictions that may require higher minimums if written findings are made based upon substantial evidence in the record including a parking utilization study.

Despite the dramatic changes this legislation could bring to development patterns throughout the state, the legislation hasn’t received a lot of attention. An Internet search of the legislation brought up a few bill summaries, a resolution opposing the legislation by the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors, and a blog post by American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles Chapter’s, Will Wright supporting it.

Wright explains how A.B. 710 supports the state’s smart growth and emissions reduction goals approved by the legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger in recent years:

The state has shown interest in helping communities realize the goals of developing more sustainably. California has taken steps over the last several years to establish programs and policies to help incentivize sustainable regional and local planning and development efforts; however, there is still much that can be done to remove barriers and incentivize new development with public transit and alternative transportation options.

The Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors note in their opposition that there are two areas that would be impacted in unincorporated Contra Costa County, and both of those areas would see their parking maximums reduced. The Supervisors felt that, while supporting the concept of maximum parking requirements, A.B. 710 takes away too much autonomy from the County.

AB 710, if enacted, would establish parking maximums for all transit-oriented development projects, or projects located in “transit intensive areas.” While County staff agrees that strict parking requirements, in principal, are necessary for transit-rich areas and areas with high transit-oriented development investments, the discretion for establishing said requirements should remain with the local jurisdiction. This legislation would eliminate the County’s autonomy in establishing parking standards we deem appropriate for our transit-oriented development project areas.

As this legislation moves through the Assembly, it is bound to attract more attention. Streetsblog will keep track of the bill’s legislative path and any news articles it generates in the coming weeks.

A family connects to BART from the 49 bus using the inviting new walkway. Photo: Aaron Bialick

BART riders will no longer be squeezed alongside Muni tracks to get into Balboa Park Station. A new walkway connecting travelers to Ocean Avenue on the north side was unveiled Friday as one project in a host of efforts aimed at improving access to the busiest BART and Muni transit hub outside of the city’s downtown area, though it may be just a baby step in the eyes of some advocates.

“For nearly four decades, we did not have a proper entrance to Ocean Avenue from the station for folks going to City College, or to the Ocean Avenue shopping district, or to Balboa Park,” said BART Director Tom Radulovich. “Now we have a fully-accessible, direct entrance, which is great. I’m happy it’s there.”

The walkway is a welcome improvement to commuters using the station to and from Ocean Avenue who previously had no choice but to squeeze through a narrow passage alongside trains or circumnavigate the station to get inside.

“When the trains are actually running and they go past you, it’s a little dangerous,” said Jocelyn, a BART rider who lives in the neighborhood. “Now it’s a lot easier and safer, I feel.”

Erika, Jocelyn’s friend, said she regularly uses the station to visit her from Berkeley. “I think it’s great if you come home late, because it’s all lit up,” said Erika. “I feel a little bit safer up here where people can see me.”

Balboa Park Station, looking south. The new walkway is on the right side. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Balboa Park Station serves at least 12,000 passengers per day as a key hub for BART trains as well as Muni’s J, K, and M Metro lines and seven other buses, all while doing duty as a major Muni maintenance facility.

The new walkway helps link cycling commuters to the bike lanes on Ocean Avenue, which have served as a more comfortable connection to City College of San Francisco and the Ingleside district since they went in late last year.

“This is definitely going to be a lot easier for me riding my bike to the station than having to go down that gravel path to the other side,” noted Jocelyn.

Although the improvement helps solve some issues for BART passengers connecting to the 49 bus or other destinations north of the station, Balboa Park’s original planning seems wrought with fundamental oversights in safety and access. Pushed right up against the 280 freeway, the pedestrian-heavy area is surrounded by dangerous roads swarmed with car traffic from four nearby ramps.

“Crossing Geneva, crossing San Jose, is a real challenge. You put your life in your hands,” said District 11 Supervisor John Avalos, who noted the particular difficulty for those with wheelchairs and strollers in the largely working-class neighborhood.

With significant changes, the station has the potential to be the center of a neighborhood transit village. However, some advocates and city officials say it has a long way to go.

“It’s an embarrassment,” said Avalos, who brought the issue of the poor state of the station to the forefront at a January Board of Supervisors meeting. “It’s an embarrassment for the entire city that this is something that the people who live in the backbone of San Francisco – the Excelsior, Visitacion Valley, [Ingleside, and Sunnyside] – have to put up with the most uncomfortable transit operation that we have.”

Dangerous traffic conditions on the streets surrounding the station, as well as heavy industrial uses, cut it off from the rest of the area, says Radulovich, creating a “hole in the donut” of otherwise rich neighborhoods.

This tight corridor was previously the only direct route into the station, and remains so for those boarding Muni trains. Photo: Aaron Bialick

“It’s a disaster on a number of levels,” he said. “We located this intermodal transit station in the middle of a freeway interchange and in the middle of a Muni maintenance facility. Hopefully the lesson we’ve learned is those are three uses that don’t go well together.”

Lessening the impacts of the freeway ramps is one of the key issues in improving the station, said Radulovich, ”but to solve the really big problems, we need to engage Caltrans and Muni, and that’s been really challenging.”

“Everyone’s crossing their fingers in different directions,” said Avalos, who highlighted that the SFMTA recognizes the station primarily as a maintenance facility, not a transit hub.

“They want to look at it as a place to store vehicles that they might need to store 15, 20 years from now,” he said. ”That makes it very difficult to deal with how buses and pedestrians are constrained to the actual use of Balboa Park Station.”

“That is not the way we need to be working collaboratively on land-use issues and transit-oriented development in San Francisco,” added Avalos.

The end of the walkway meets an intersection with a freeway onramp. The two nearest crosswalks are 1/3 of a mile from each other. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Dysfunction in agency priorities and coordination seems to be the biggest obstacle to implementing the The Balboa Park Area Plan, a vision developed by the SF Planning Department in collaboration with the local community. It calls for the Balboa Park Station to become the hub of a connected, lively transit village and was adopted by the Board of Supervisors in 2009.

The plan aspires to fill in the “donut” in the area by improving the quality of place around the station, illustrating ideas as bold as building a deck of buildings and public space over the freeway that would remove physical barriers and better connect the two sides it currently divides.

But for now, even simple pedestrian safety improvements remain difficult to implement. At the end of the new west side walkway, there isn’t a single crosswalk on Ocean Avenue, although Radulovich said the SFMTA has funding from the Safe Routes to Transit program to install them.

The next project lined up for the station is an east side walkway that would connect the Muni boarding area with the new one, which is only accessible by entering BART fare gates. Radulovich said construction on that is hoped to begin early next year.

Until then, Muni riders coming from the north side must still walk the gauntlet.

The end of the new walkway where it meets Ocean Avenue. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The new entrance into the station, which is accessible only by BART fare gates and for those needing to use the elevator upon request, said Radulovich. Photo: Aaron Bialick

This westbound Ocean Avenue bike lane helps connect people by bike up the hill to City College, but there is no convenient way to access it from the station. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The plan for a freeway deck over I-280. Image: SF Planning Department

Image: David Baker + Partners Architects

The Tenderloin could see a 14-story mixed-use building replace a parking lot within the next few years. Developers hoping to bring new affordable housing and space for a much-needed grocery store to the neighborhood received a $10 million funding commitment from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) today.

“We will transform this part of the Tenderloin,” said Donald Falk, executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC), which is developing the planned Eddy and Taylor Family Housing building. ”This is not just smart growth in the conventional sense. Four-hundred people will have a place to call home, with zero parking, because we’re two blocks from Market Street and Muni.”

The development at 168 Eddy Street would provide 153 new apartments reserved for low-income families and space for a 12,000-foot street-level grocery store. It would help quell some of the high demand for affordable housing in the neighborhood, where valuable lots used to park cars diminish the urban fabric despite very low car ownership. Bringing the first full-sized grocery market to the neighborhood would also provide access to healthy food options within walkable distances.

The MTC’s contribution was allocated to the $50 million Transit Oriented Affordable Housing Fund (TOAHF) through its Transportation for Livable Communities program along with a collection of other private and public investors. The construction of up to 3,800 low-income housing units in the Bay Area is expected be aided by the TOAHF.

The Livable Communities program falls in line with the Sustainable Communities Strategy currently being developed by the MTC, which aims to locate new housing near convenient public transportation options in order to reduce automobile dependency. Prioritizing transit-oriented development is key in reaching the MTC’s goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent while significantly reducing the cost of living for families.

Falk said construction on the site could start as early as 2013 after further funding is secured.

The site is currently a parking lot. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The Pearl District in Portland is Often Held Up as an Example of TOD

(This article first appeared in Progressive Planner, the official magazine of the Planner’s Network and is reprinted with the author’s permission. Gen Fujioka is the senior policy advocate with the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. This article was written in collaboration with the Urban Communities of Color Caucus which seeks to advance practices that strengthen existing diverse neighborhoods. For further information contact: gen@nationalcapacd.org)

Transit-oriented development (TOD) has become a leading policy prescription for reversing America’s sprawling path of growth. The Obama administration, through its Sustainable Communities Initiative, state and local agencies and progressive think-tanks all emphasize TOD as a means to achieve housing, transportation and environmental goals, often through public-private-partnerships. But as TOD has been justifiably promoted as the cleaner alternative to auto-dependent development, gaps have appeared in the discourse that understates its costs. This report seeks to fill in some of those gaps with snapshots from four communities of color that have been impacted by various stages of TOD in the cities of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Minneapolis-Saint Paul, respectively.

What Is a TOD?

Non-profit community development organizations were early innovators in building TOD projects, seeking to link affordable housing with transit. Today, TOD projects vary but they can be generally defined as mixed-use, higher density development oriented toward nearby public transit. In its varying forms, TOD is being promoted by a growing range of government programs. The largest federal transit program, New Starts, strongly favors projects that incorporate TOD, and many state and local governments have created expedited approval processes, incentives and zoning and land use policies that foster TOD.
As the concept has been embraced by some market-rate developers, even some TOD proponents concede there may be social costs of such development. The federally funded Center for Transit-Oriented Development and others have published a number of policy toolkits and best practice guides for equitable TOD. While these publications describe individual exemplary projects, missing is an evaluation of the impacts at scale. The experiences described below suggest that much more needs to be done to ensure that TOD does not become a greener version of gentrification.

Affordable Housing Fuzzy Math in Seattle

ID Village Square, with 31 affordable units, opened in 2004. For more information, click here.

The multi-ethnic and Historic International District of Seattle (also known as the ‘ID’) lies on the southern edge of the city’s financial district. A majority of the neighborhood’s residents are very low income and people of color. Originally Seattle’s Chinatown, the neighborhood became a business and residential district for successive waves of Asian immigrants. In addition to housing, it offers a range of ethnic restaurants, shops and services. The ID is now also the central nexus of the region’s transit, including light rail, buses, Amtrak and the future high-speed rail station connecting Seattle with Portland.

The convergence of new rail lines and downtown growth led the city to adopt a transit-oriented upzoning that will allow more than a doubling of housing units in the already high density district. On paper, the plan’s goals would create 4,500 units of housing affordable for lower income households, however, the new zoning does not ensure the affordable units will ever be built. Over the next six years the city’s estimated $145 million housing fund will support the production of 1,800 affordable units for the entire city. If the ID received a proportionate share of the projected funding, it would only support several hundred new affordable units. “So far, smart growth in Seattle doesn’t add up,” says Ken Katahira, housing development staff for InterIm Community Development Association, a nonprofit that has built affordable housing and a community garden in the neighborhood. “Zoning for higher densities does not necessarily create more affordable housing.”

Upzoning the ID for taller buildings and greater densities has compounded the development pressure already generated by the new transit infrastructure. And as a practical matter, taller buildings cost more. Concrete and steel construction, required for structures over six stories, is unaffordable to even moderate- income families without deep public subsidies. In the absence of more prescriptive regulation and more robust funding, the city’s plan to foster TOD through zoning in the ID threatens existing affordable housing and small businesses located in “underdeveloped” buildings without ensuring affordable housing within new construction.

Transit-Oriented Displacement in the Mission District of San Francisco

Compared to many other urban centers, San Francisco has maintained a strong commitment to transit and affordable housing. With a dense urban core, regional transit hubs and an expanding network of light rail, a majority of San Franciscans take transit or walk to work. San Francisco has also pioneered many of the housing and land use policies that are now proposed by policy guides as innovative models for equitable smart growth, from inclusionary zoning to demolition and conversion controls.

Found sprayed on the wall in the Mission District.

One test of San Francisco’s affordable housing policies came in the 1990s during the dot-com boom. Amidst a hot real estate market, development pressures grew particularly in transit-rich areas. Evictions reached record levels and entire neighborhoods were transformed in a few years. According to research by UC Berkeley’s Center on Community Innovation, during the period between 1995 and 2000, the out-migration of low-income households exceeded 9,800 each year while the numbers of upper income households grew. Proximity to transit was a significant factor in explaining the pattern of displacement. Neighborhoods within a half-mile of major transit were particularly at risk of gentrification and displacement, suffering marked declines in the number of households of color.

The heart of the city’s Latino community, the Mission District, was ground zero for displacement. Located between two major BART stations (the city’s regional rail system), near new tech enterprises and overall transit rich, the primarily working-class neighborhood experienced widespread evictions in which entire buildings were cleared for young professionals attracted to urban, transit-accessible living. In the midst of this crisis and despite the booming market, city administrators regularly provided developers with exemptions from inclusionary housing requirements and zoning controls.

“The original challenge wasn’t a lack of affordable housing policies— those that we had were not being followed. The first challenge was about building community power so that we could have policies enforced when they mattered,” recalls Nick Pagoulatos, then an activist with the Mission Agenda Coalition (MAC), a grassroots anti-displacement organization, and now a planner at Dolores Street Community Services, an organization that continues to serve the neighborhood.

Over the objections of overflow crowds mobilized by MAC, the city’s commissions repeatedly approved ever larger development projects fueling more displacement in or within walking distance of the Mission. With both established policies and neighborhood concerns being ignored, MAC and a citywide coalition turned to the ballot and elected an anti-displacement majority on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Voters also amended the city’s charter, breaking up the mayor’s exclusive control over the land use process. These changes led to the adoption of an extraordinary moratorium on new development in the Mission.

The moratorium stopped the largest abuses but led to a grueling eight-year planning process. “In the end we did not get the full protections we wanted,” says Pagoulatos. “The extended process itself wore the community down. And we did not have the community-based institutions that could provide the technical expertise to take on the developers at every step. But we did change the rules of the game so that development became more transparent and potentially more democratic— it’s still a question of power.”

Putting TOD in Context in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles

Mariachi Plaza two days before the Gold Line Eastside Extension opened.

In contrast with Seattle or San Francisco, Los Angeles is still in the early phases of rebuilding its regional transit system. One of the first new light rail lines runs through the predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood. Even before it opened, the line spurred the start of gentrification. “After they started construction we had a wave of evictions near the station,” reports Isela Gracian, director of community organizing for the East Los Angeles Community Corporation (ELACC). “Landlords were looking for any excuse to evict tenants. Fortunately, many families contacted us so we were able to help them assert their rights. The recession also hit so the soft market has helped slow the evictions.”

With years of prior organizing and investments in the neighborhood, ELACC was in a position to proactively challenge the transit agency in other ways. ELACC worked to keep the neighborhood’s small business community in place. “The transit agency did not understand the community that was here before they started the project,” Gracian recalls. “It wasn’t just that they didn’t speak the language. They didn’t appreciate what we had that would be lost.” One of the specific enterprises threatened by the line was space along the main business corridor where Mariachi musicians gathered and promoted their services. ELACC helped bring public and media attention to the issue—ultimately ensuring that merchants, musicians and the community will still be able to keep the streets as their own.

ELACC also pressed the transit agency to ensure that the properties it acquired for the construction of the line would provide a long-term public benefit. On one of those sites, ELACC has completed the community’s own version of mixed-use TOD: affordable housing and community services, including offices for the newly formed Mariachi musician’s association. “TOD is much more than building some affordable housing,” observes Gracian. “It needs to be a part of supporting the whole neighborhood . . . we need to be positioned to help address the changes that are coming ahead.”

Regionalism’s Challenge in St. Paul

MAC’s impact on the city planning process and ELACC’s impact on shaping TOD in oneneighborhood were based upon neighborhood and community based organizing. But the shift towards regional governance may favor large developers while undermining public engagement.

Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) have long played a central role in directing regional transportation investments. But as transit investments begin to drive land use planning and the allocation of other scarce public resources, MPOs wield greater power. The shift towards regionalism is reinforced by progressive initiatives such as HUD’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program and California’s greenhouse gas reduction legislation (SB 375), each giving MPOs more influence over local processes. But MPOs are more insulated than city governments from local and neighborhood-based organizing and are often governed by a mix of elected and unelected appointees and agency representatives. Furthermore, their structure and highly technical forms of discourse pose new challenges for democratic participation.

For example, the federally funded Central Corridor Light Rail Transit project, designed to connect the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, runs through the predominantly African-American and Asian-American neighborhoods known as the Rondo and Frogtown districts, respectively. The original plans provided the fewest number of stations relative to the number of transit riders in those neighborhoods. While offering little service, the project threatened years of construction disruptions and the elimination of most street parking.

Only after each community filed a civil rights complaint with the Federal Transportation Agency did the region’s MPO, known as the Met Council, agree to install additional station stops in the minority communities. Now with the stations approved, the communities are being offered little to ensure that market-driven TOD does not displace existing small businesses and low-income residents. “We’ve basically been shut out of the planning process,” says Veronica Burt, organizer with the Preserve and Benefit Historic Rondo Committee, a coalition that includes the local NAACP, church groups and community development organizations. “The Met Council went through the motions of holding meetings but didn’t listen to community concerns. There has been no way to make them accountable.”

The Need for Critical Assessment

Making regional agencies more accountable is an inherent challenge for communities of color in obvious part because of demographics. While African Americans, Latinos and Asians may have gained local representation in many urban areas, they remain electoral minorities in almost all regions. Less obvious but no less daunting for organizers is the need for a common language to convey what is at stake in regional planning —what David Harvey describes as the need for ‘translation.’

Such translation is not merely for non-native English speakers; even in plain English the abstract and dislocated language of regional planning is generally indecipherable to all but professionals and developers. For communities to become engaged and participate on a regional level requires a radical reinterpretation of planning proposals in terms of real, place-based experience—an approach that organizations such as New York’s Center for Urban Pedagogy have begun to develop but needs to be widely expanded.

Despite these and other challenges, efforts are under way to engage communities in regional policy discussions. This is driven in part because transit itself is connecting communities, creating shared needs and interests. For example, ELACC has participated in the formation of the Los Angeles Neighborhood-Based Community Development Coalition to connect Latino, African-American, and Asian Pacific Islander neighborhoods to proactively engage in the future planning of LA’s new light rail stations. And in Seattle, InterIm and other community organizations have joined the newly created Regional Equity Network to directly participate in their MPO’s planning process, which has received the support of HUD’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program. What remains to be developed across regions is a community-based agenda, reinterpreting the meaning of TODs to benefit existing diverse neighborhoods and incorporating a sharper critique of the dominant paradigm.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: This concludes our 5-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.”  Thanks to Island Press, a few lucky Streetsblog readers will be selected to receive a free copy of the book. To enter the contest, fill out this form. We’ll choose the winners tomorrow.

The most important community-scale system dependent on urbanism is transit. It has long been known that density and transit ridership are linked, but it goes much deeper than that. The key to viable transit systems is not just density but walkability and mixed use—true urban places. If people cannot walk the quarter mile to or from a station, chances are they will not use the transit. Conversely, if they can easily run errands and coordinate trips on the way to or from a station, they are more likely to use transit. European data show that the percentage of walk or bike trips always exceeds that of transit trips—often by more than two to one.²⁷ In fact, walking by itself constitutes 30 percent of all trips in Great Britain (versus 9 percent transit), and in Sweden walk/bike trips are 34 percent of the total (versus 11 percent transit). ²⁸ Transit supports and extends the pedestrian environment; transit is pedestrian dependent, not the other way around. The primary alternative to the car and all of its environmental costs is the pedestrian environment and the walkable urbanism that supports transit.

A good transit system has many layers, from local buses to bus rapid transit and streetcars, from light rail to subways and commuter trains. They all feed into and reinforce one another, and they all depend on walkable urbanism at the origin and destination. The quality of the interface from walking to transit, and from one form of transit to the other, is central to displacing car trips and is the greenest technology that urbanism provides.

The relationship among transit, urbanism, travel behavior, and carbon emissions is complex but can be summarized with one key quantifiable metric, vehicle miles traveled (VMT)—effectively, the amount we drive. VMT is determined by the number and distance of trips we take, and our “mode split”—the percentage of trips taken by various transportation modes such as walk, bike, car, carpool, or transit. Each household, depending on its location, income, and size, has an average VMT per year, which when combined with various auto technologies will generate its travel carbon footprint.

Many factors affect VMT, and there are many complex models that simulate the travel behavior behind it. For example, the modal split among auto, walk/bike, and transit is affected by location and level of transit service as well as how pedestrian friendly the streets are; the average length of each type of trip is affected by land use patterns and how closely destinations are located; the number of trips per day is affected by household size; and auto ownership rate is affected by household income and size. The most significant variables in all this are the walking and transit opportunities of urbanism, a compact development form, and land use patterns that bring destinations closer together.

The power of place over travel behavior is demonstrated by mapping VMT per household across a region. While averages always lead us to stereotypes, different environments across any region reveal dramatically different travel behaviors. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a typical household in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco has an average VMT of 7,300 miles a year. This neighborhood averages only three stories but is dense by suburban standards; has a rich mix of shops, restaurants, and services within walking distance; and is a short transit ride from downtown. Its walk score (an algorithm that awards points based on the distance to the closest amenity in several categories) is 98 out of 100—as good as it gets.

The Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland was created as a streetcar suburb back in the prewar days of the Key Route Trolley system, which connected most of the Bay Area until 1948. It is filled largely with bungalow and small-lot single-family homes but has small apartment buildings at corners and a wonderful mixed-use main street along with a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train station at its center. The average household there drives about 12,200 miles a year and has a walk score of 74. Out in San Ramon, a low-density East Bay suburb without good transit connections, development patterns fit the standard sprawl paradigm, with isolated single family subdivisions, strip commercial arterials, malls, and office parks. VMT for the average home there is around 30,000 miles a year, and the walk score is 46.²⁹

So there is a four-to-one range in travel behavior over three neighborhoods in one region. They differ in density, mix of uses, walkability, proximity to job centers, and level of transit service. The density in Russian Hill is 62 units per acre, but home values are $555 per square foot. In Rockridge, the density averages 15 units per acre and values are $420 per square foot. Finally, in San Ramon, considered a very high end suburban community, the average density is 3.4 units per acre and the value averages just $320 per square foot.³⁰ The market itself is telling us that walkable places have value and, as a bonus, can reduce our carbon emissions and oil dependence. So desirable is the walkable neighborhood that a 2009 study found that in cities like San Francisco and Chicago, moving from a household with a city’s median walkability to one at the 75th percentile would increase the unit’s value by over $30,000.³¹ The challenge, of course, is to create walkable places as authentic and beautiful as Russian Hill and Rockridge that are affordable.

The point is that all of these community-scale systems—whether power, water, waste, or transit—need urbanism to be effective. Urbanism is essential for the viability of community cogeneration systems and the savings they provide in energy consumption. Denser, mixed-use development can provide the open space, community parks, and riparian setbacks needed by ecological water and waste recycling systems. And, of course, transit depends on urbanism for its fundamental viability.

These community-scale systems built around urbanism are not intended to replace the emissions reductions of efficient industrial processes, renewables in our utility portfolios, or better fuel standards for our cars. It is just that those supply-side strategies alone will not take us far enough quickly enough—and they come at a large cost premium. The combination of transit-served urbanism and green technology at the community scale is essential to complete the picture.

All of this discussion boils down to some simple choices in community building. One alternative simply extends our current land use patterns, architectural types, everyday aesthetics, and civic habits. As one example of this, imagine a room with a low-hung ceiling, sealed windows, and fluorescent lights; within a building with a mirror glass skin, set behind a parking lot off a six-lane arterial; in a zone of commercial development making up part of a suburb of subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks connected by a freeway to a metropolis of decaying inner-city neighborhoods, struggling first-ring suburbs, exclusive suburban enclaves, failing school systems, and underfunded civic programs. This would seem like a biased contrivance if it were not so commonplace.

The other choice involves a quality of place making we seem to have lost touch with. It could be described as a room with high ceilings filled with natural light and breezes; in a building wrapping a courtyard and lining a street; in a neighborhood with tree-lined avenues, village greens, and local shops; making up a part of a city filled with streetcars, public squares, parks, and cultural districts; providing the focus of a metropolis with a constellation of many varied towns and cities connected by transit, growing economic networks, cultural institutions, and social opportunity. This also may seem like a biased contrivance, but it has been realized in some significant U.S. metro areas.

In both models, each layer is interdependent and connected by deep-rooted economic, policy, and social systems. Each is a complex that cannot easily exist piece by piece but nests layer by layer into a self-reinforcing “whole system.” Certainly, the future will be a mix of these two extremes, but the question is: in what proportions?

Just how much change in land use, technology, and place making we can tolerate is the topic of the next chapter. A look back over the past fifty years of development and urban form reveals just how dramatic the shifts can be—and what trends will direct future growth. The question then becomes how to shape a vision for our future and what will be the best balance of design standards, policies, technologies,
and economies to bring it about.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright @ 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

27. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “Safety of Vulnerable Road Users” (Paris: OECD, 1998), 47.
28. OECD, “Safety of Vulnerable Road Users.”
29. John Holtzclaw, Mary Jean Burer, and David B. Goldstein, “Location Efficiency as the Missing Piece of the Energy Puzzle: How Smart Growth Can Unlock Trillion Dollar Consumer Cost Savings” (Asilomar, CA: Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, 2004); Front Seat, “Walk
Score: Helping Homebuyers, Renters, and Real Estate Agents Find Houses and Apartments in Great Neighborhoods,” http://www.walkscore.com/ (accessed February 10, 2010).
30. Prices per square foot are calculated using the online real estate services of Trulia.com using quarterly real estate statistics from 2009. Densities are calculated as a net of residential parcels using data from city and neighborhood boundaries established by the corresponding municipality.
31. Joe Cortright, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities” (Chicago, IL: CEOs for Cities: 2009), table 8

Obama is a "breath of fresh air," according to APTA President William Millar, but Congress needs to step up. WMATA via APTA

Around the country, Millar said, voters have chosen again and again to raise their own taxes for increased service. And, he added, “it’s a breath of fresh air” to see a U.S. President get behind infrastructure investment the way Obama has.

After Millar, a panel of officials from HUD, DOT, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Portland Development Commission gave another reason for hope: the very “unnatural” action that federal agencies are beginning to take cooperating with each other.

DOT’s Beth Osborne said it’s easier for each agency to stay in its silo – and the challenges to collaboration are often surprising. “It’s not getting your high leadership agreeing to pool money or to relinquish some control over the decision-making process,” she said. “It becomes, your budget systems are different, or your computer systems don’t coordinate and communicate.” But as the TIGER II and HUD Sustainable Communities grant programs show, agencies are beginning to address those challenges and work together.

Rocco Landesman, chair of the NEA, whose stated goal is to infuse the arts into every federal agency, said that people choose homes based on access to high-quality education and access to culture. And, he said, the cause and effect of developing vibrant communities is understood differently today than it was in the past.

“It used to be thought that people followed businesses,” he said. “We now know that it’s the opposite. Businesses want to move where there’s an educated, committed, enlightened workforce. Businesses follow the people. It’s the Field of Dreams in reverse. If you come, they will build it.”

Erin Flynn, Portland’s Urban Development Director, agreed. She said businesses are moving back from the suburbs in to the urban core because “all of our creative talent lives in these close-in neighborhoods – and they want to bike to work.” It becomes a competitive advantage for employers to allow their workers to maintain the walkable, bikeable, transit-based lifestyle they want.

Evidence of this trend can be found even in small cities like Dubuque, Iowa, which just rebuilt its downtown and attracted 1,300 IBM jobs.

The Tucson Modern Streetcar project was awarded $63 million in the first round of TIGER funding. (Image: Tucson Regional Transit Authority)

That’s the word from the DOT, which announced on Friday that it had received about $19 billion in applications for nearly 1,000 projects “from all 50 states, U.S. territories and the District of Columbia.” The volume of applications, which range from “highways and bridges to transit and ports,” far exceeds the $600 million available in TIGER II funds.

States competing for TIGER II money need to show that their transportation projects will have significant economic and environmental benefits at a city-wide, regional, or national level. Since the money is awarded at the discretion of DOT using set criteria, not disbursed through the rote formulas that govern most transportation funding, it’s been a catalyst for innovative transportation projects.

David Burwell, a co-founder of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, isn’t surprised at the overwhelming response to TIGER II. “It shows the enormous interest states have in discretionary money,” he says. “With formula money, states will tell you, ‘That’s our money; we don’t have to do anything for formula money.’ Offer discretionary money and they’ll do backflips.”

According to Burwell, who now heads up the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the volume of TIGER II applications indicates that state DOTs are willing to reform their focus on highways, but they want something in return for the reforms they make. “Otherwise they’ll spend all their money filling potholes and keeping bridges from falling down,” he says. In other words, if you want states to make real advances on transit and smart urban design, you have to give them some incentive.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made a similar point in last week’s announcement. “The wave of applications for both TIGER II and TIGER I dollars shows the back-log of needed infrastructure improvements and the desire for more flexible funds,” he said in a statement. According to the DOT, the appetite for TIGER II funds is not quite as ravenous as it was for TIGER I, when the department got $60 billion in applications for $1.5 billion in available grants.

This time around, TIGER II includes a partnership between the DOT and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to disburse planning grants. $35 million in TIGER II funds will combine with $40 million from HUD to pay for transit-oriented development. In another sign of the closer collaboration among federal agencies, two other departments – Agriculture and the EPA – are getting in on the action too, helping to evaluate the planning grant applications.

Shaun
Donovan, Ray LaHood, Lisa Jackson: Together forever? The Livable
Communities Act would codify the partnership between HUD, US DOT, and
the EPA. Photo: EPA

The administration has been taking steps since last March to coordinate between the Department of Transportation, HUD, and the EPA. This bill, carried in the Senate by Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, would formalize those partnerships and authorize substantially more funding to work with. 

Most of the action would flow through HUD. This year the agency is funding $150 million in grants
supporting regional efforts to improve access to transit and promote
walkable development. The Livable Communities Act promises to scale up
that program significantly, creating a new office within HUD, called the
Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, that will distribute
about $4 billion through competitive grants.

The initial round of grants would fund comprehensive plans — local
initiatives to shape growth by coordinating housing, transportation,
and economic development policies. Most of the funding — $3.75 billion
– would be distributed over three years to implement projects
identified in such plans.

While some Senators from rural states had expressed skepticism
about the benefits of the bill for their constituents, yesterday’s vote
split strictly along party lines, with Democrats Jon Tester of Montana
and Tim Johnson of South Dakota both voting in favor.

To make the case for the bill to his rural and Republican counterparts, Dodd singled out Envision Utah,
a campaign that has built public support for smart growth policies in
one of the country’s reddest states. Not a single GOP Senator voted for
the bill, however, even Utah’s Bob Bennett, who told UPI, "I think the overall philosophy is wise, but I will be voting against it."

Some of the strongest backing for the bill has come from AARP,
which sent a letter to committee members on Monday pointing out that the
country’s aging population will be poorly served if development
patterns don’t evolve to make driving less necessary. "Nine out of ten
of our members tell us they want to stay in their own
homes as they age — most are living in suburban or rural areas and
don’t have access to public transportation," said Debra Alvarez, senior
legislative representative for AARP. "There’s a lot of things that can
be done in small towns: co-locating
things like post offices, grocery stores, pharmacies, and putting
housing there too."

Advocates for transportation reform are now looking at the path
forward for the bill. "We applaud the Committee for taking this major
step forward on behalf of communities both small and large, and for
American families looking for affordable homes in healthy neighborhoods
with reliable transportation options," said Transportation for America
director James Corless in a statement. "We urge the full Senate to
follow their lead and give final passage."

Dodd has vowed to shepherd the Livable Communities Act through to become law
before he retires in January. With Congress about to adjourn until
September 13, he’ll face a tight time frame. In addition to awaiting a
vote in the full Senate, the bill has yet to clear a committee vote in the House, where Colorado representative Ed Perlmutter is the sponsor.

Editor's note: This is the first of a three-part series on the past, present and future of traffic engineering in San Francisco. 

Jack Lucero Fleck remembers his teenage years as a sputnik, the kind of kid who was as "nutty as a slide rule," loved math and science, and knew he was headed in that direction. It was the summer of 1965, and living in Peoria, Illinois, the same town where US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood grew up, Fleck couldn't quite peg what he wanted to do in life. And then there were the Watts riots.

"I got kind of interested in, 'well, what caused that? Why were people burning down their neighborhood?'," Fleck, 62, explained during a recent interview. "I decided I would go into civil engineering because I liked to do math and science and engineering and I would combine it with city planning to make cities better places to live, so people wouldn't want to burn them down."

For the last 25 years, Fleck, who retired yesterday from his job as San Francisco's top traffic engineer, has had a hand in almost every major transportation project in San Francisco, from the demolition and boulevard replacement of the Embarcadero and Central Freeways, to helping in the design of the T-Third line and Central Subway, to crafting a controversial proposal to remove the bike lane at Market and Octavia Streets.

He has sometimes been the bane of transit advocates for defending post-World War II traffic engineering orthodoxy favoring one-way street networks, such as those that roar through neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and SoMa. While some advocates have been working to dismantle some of the one-way arterials, Fleck, who became lead traffic engineer in 2004, is a firm believer in them. Still, those advocates and transportation professionals who have worked with Fleck (none we contacted would go on the record with their criticisms) say he has been a true professional and easy to work with.

"His views are very progressive and he's very environmentally conscious," said Bond Yee, the interim Director of Sustainable Streets at the SFMTA who has been at the agency four years longer than Fleck. "He epitomizes what the new generation of transportation professionals is becoming. He's a little bit ahead of his time."

Fleck had a lot to talk about during our 90 minute interview last week. Some answers are revealing and offer insight into his thinking as a traffic engineer who has been entrenched in the design of our city streets for more than two decades.

Fleck in his office at the SFMTA.

Fleck said he learned the word livability from Don Appleyard while he was studying City Planning as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley and it struck him "that that's what I wanted to do, make cities 'livable,' and I don't know that it was really a word that was used a lot until recently, but it does make sense."

Fleck's first job out of school was working on the Berkeley traffic diverters, and he got a stern lesson that traffic engineering doesn't always have to do with left or right politics.

"Some of the NIMBY types are pretty conservative, but then some of my friends on the left would surprise me that they would be pretty hostile to the diverters, you know? That they were people who were with the anti-war movement or whatever and they were just inflamed, 'oh the idea of those things in my way.' So I kind of realized that traffic is a funny issue, it's not exactly left and right and people get very emotional about it."

Fleck recalls, for example, the battle over tearing down the Embarcadero freeway after the 1989 earthquake, when lefty Terrence Hallinan (who went on to become the long-time district attorney before Kamala Harris), was among the supervisors who voted 6-5 to rebuild it. He was working for the Department of Public Works at the time.

"These freeways were taking land off the tax rolls. They weren't really making the city a better place or anything. So, it was great to see it go," said Fleck, who was engaged in a debate at the time about whether the traffic from the demolished freeway would live up to predictions of gridlock on city streets.

"The fact that all that traffic didn't go away, actually, helped us win the argument to say that they didn't need the freeway because the city streets were handling it all."

"Going back to my Berkeley experience I do feel there are arterials that need to carry more traffic and then there are residential areas that you want to protect. So I don't really support the idea that the traffic should just be tossed out there widespread."

Fleck cites the demolition of both the Embarcadero and Central freeways as projects he was involved in that were some of his greatest accomplishments, but building the staff at the SFMTA, and changing the culture of the agency, is something he's most proud of.

"I think we've really looked at people who have backgrounds in both engineering and planning because they have that diverse sort of broader viewpoint," said Fleck." I think that we have people who really get it in terms of the Transit First policy and pedestrians and all the things we are trying to do here. I think in terms of a lasting legacy I would feel that that's more significant than anything."

"From the 50s, to now, almost 60 years, it's incredible to think back. There's only been five traffic engineers. And Jack's number five," said Yee, who was the longest serving traffic engineer before Fleck from 1990 to 2004.

Among the Transit First accomplishments Fleck listed in a slide presentation (PDF) at a recent SPUR luncheon are the city's 40 miles of bike lanes (bikes and pedestrians were added to the policy in 2000), 13 miles of transit lanes, transit signal priority at more than 100 intersections, pedestrian countdown signals at 800 intersections and a 30 percent reduction in injury collisions over the past 30 years. He also used this graph to point out that traffic fatalities have been on a steady decline.

"I kind of feel like this is in response to people who feel like traffic control devices actually are unsafe or less safe. I really don't subscribe to that. I think there is an argument to be made on big wide open intersections with low volume that it works pretty well without stop signs or anything because people have lots of visibility, and especially if you put traffic signals in, those can work."

Fleck attributes the decline to the three e's: engineering, education and enforcement, but thinks it's also the signals, the mast arms, the countdowns "and all those things that improve safety."

Fleck spent the first two days of his last week at the SFMTA attending the Western Institute of Transportation Engineers conference in San Francisco, where he made this presentation (PDF) with Yee titled, "What It Will Take to Stop Global Warming: The Case for Electric Cars." While he acknowledges that there is a danger electric cars could perpetuate sprawl and generate more auto-oriented development, Fleck sees them as key to fighting global warming.

"It's not the ultimate total, everything solution, but I think given the danger of global warming, and being underwater, it kind of makes everything else moot. We can fight about all of the other things that we want to do, but if we are under water it's not going to matter."

Fleck plans to continue working on global warming solutions, and hopes to improve his neighborhood in Oakland by encouraging "the political forces there to get solar panels on people's roofs and plug-in facilities in their driveways so people can have electric cars, and they won't be generating all this C02."

About leaving the SFMTA and the challenges ahead, Fleck was optimistic.

"I think we are in good hands. I really feel great about the staff and I feel like the organizational structure right now is very good," said Fleck. "I like the idea of introducing the word 'sustainability' into our name. I think traffic engineering has traditionally been safe and efficient movement of people and goods, which I support, but adding the word sustainable will also be a plus as we think to future generations and make sure that whatever we do now isn't damaging."

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris
Dodd (D-CT) (Photo: The
Washington Note)

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.

After acknowledging that sprawl is a problem, lamenting that in
Montana housing has replaced some of the best farmland, Tester pressed
the witness panel to explain how the Livable Communities Act would work
for a town like his, with only 700 people. The two representatives of
rural areas on the panel each suggested some sort of funding set-aside
for rural communities, an idea which seemed to intrigue Tester.

Two other senators spoke who are not already sponsors of the bill.
Sherrod Brown (D-OH) primarily discussed his own legislation
specifically tailored to shrinking industrial cities, of which there are
many in Ohio, but seemed supportive of Dodd’s legislation. Mark Warner
(D-VA) told the committee that he supports the goals of the Livable
Communities Act, but would like to make sure that the bill is rigorously
defined. "Is it just squishy livability?" he asked. "Is there a way
that we can define this with metrics?" Witnesses assured him that
results like the volume of reduced greenhouse gases, acres of preserved
open space, and rises in property values can be measured.

No Republican Senators attended the meeting.

Click the map to enlarge. Image: Greenbelt Alliance.

That's the message the Greenbelt Alliance has delivered with its series of public workshops to promote "Grow Smart Bay Area," a regional plan for infill development near transit coupled with the protection of open space and agricultural land. As a blueprint for walkable, dense development, Grow Smart Bay Area is an optimistic projection of how planners can accommodate growth within existing towns and cities without giving into the temptation to sprawl further from job centers.

Greenbelt Alliance gathered a panel of experts last week at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek to discuss the challenges of promoting these development patterns and to debate how to make the Bay Area, to borrow Greenbelt Executive Director Jeremy Madsen's phrase, "a sustainable global metropolis."

"Grow Smart is not merely about accommodating the Bay Area's next generation of growth. It's about using growth as a catalyst," said Madsen. "We can use growth as a tool to make our neighborhoods more sustainable, more equitable."

To identify priority development locations, Greenbelt used the California Infill Parcel Locator database and the Smart Growth Strategy/Regional Livability Footprint Project, both developed at UC Berkeley. Those were then cross-referenced with growth projections from the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's (MTC) Transportation 2035: Change in Motion report.

In the analysis, Greenbelt skipped single-family neighborhoods and focused on sites that would be mixed-use low density, downtown medium density, and mixed-use medium high density. They identified 40,000 infill development lots in seven smart spots for growth (see map above), including northeast Santa Clara County, El Camino Real in San Mateo County, portions of San Francisco along BART and Muni lines and other transit-oriented development locations like BART transit villages.

Several of the panelists at the event in Walnut Creek made strong arguments for developing in accord with Grow Smart principles. Dr. Wendell Brunner, Director of Contra Costa Health Services, said the built environment was ever more significant to health professionals who recognize the negative consequences of sprawl and long commutes.

"There has been an enormous increase in vehicle miles traveled," said Brunner, which "leads to pollution, considerable stress and long commute times."

Brunner said the over-reliance on "car culture and the associated built environment that grows up around it contributes" to the obesity and diabetes epidemics, as well as asthma and attendant problems in urban areas.

"What we need to promote health are dense walkable communities," he said. "These are what's essential to build healthy, sustainable communities."

San Pablo Avenue in Oakland. Photo: Greenbelt Alliance.

San Pablo imagined as a multi-modal, mixed use street. Image: Urban Advantage.

Good plans alone won't be sufficient, however, without political will and persistence to be sure growth is targeted in the right areas, warned James Kennedy, Redevelopment Director at the Contra Costa County Department Conservation and Development and current president of the California Redevelopment Agency. Kennedy said county planners and redevelopment agencies needed to develop good plans, vetted by the public, so developers could have assurances that if they met conditions for smart growth, they could have reliable and dependable timetables for building.

"Specific plans are good resources," he said. "The fundamental premise of specific plans is that it provides dependability for communities and developers."

Jeff White, Senior Developer at AvalonBay Communites, held up his company's new Contra Costa Centre Transit Village as an example of good growth by building close to transit in counties further from the urban core. The 125-acre Centre, which is located around the Pleasant Hill BART station with 2300 multi-unit residential properties and two million square feet of office space, moved its first residential tenants in on May 1st and expects to keep selling through the end of the year.

White said the plan for the Centre facilitated the development, though he lamented how long it took to build. "What would we do differently? Build faster and at less cost," he said.

Rather than play on the historic divide between environmental stewardship and job creation, Scott Littlehale, Senior Research Analyst for the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council, said that the distance between work and affordable housing degraded workers' living standards. 

"For many of our members now, the sprawling, decentralized development isn't working well for us," said Littlehale. "Our members have miserable commutes."

He estimated that construction workers who commute out of Contra Costa County will spend an average of one hour longer in a car each day, or the equivalent of "six extra work weeks behind the wheel."

Al Courchesne, the owner of Frog Hollow Farm near Brentwood and the only panelist that clearly didn't work behind a desk under fluorescent lights, said farmers were often left out of the discussion around development. "I think awareness of food and agriculture should be an intrinsic part of this discussion of smart growth," said Courchesne, who argued planners and towns needed to do more to protect agricultural lands and prevent sprawl.

"If we want our food to come from local agricultural areas, we need to be proactive about protecting them," said Courshesne

To underscore this point, Courshesne, Madsen and other panelists all warned of Measure F, the Brentwood Urban Limit Expansion proposition that goes before voters on June 8th, which they argued would allow sprawl to encroach on farmland and valuable open space.

Measure F, they argued, would be a good test whether there was political commitment to smart growth or if there was only lip service paid to the current buzzword.

"We have to see farmland not as something that is pretty to drive by and look at," said Madsen. It's essential to our ongoing environmental security."

A rendering of the proposed mixed-use development at 555 Fulton Street. Image: San Francisco Planning Department.

The project, proposed to go in at 555 Fulton Street in the Western Addition, three blocks west of City Hall, would add a 32,800-square-foot grocery store and 136 dwelling units, 16 of them affordable. Most neighbors, the Planning Commission, and Planning Department staff all strongly support adding the store and housing, but the number of parking spaces and the design of the project have been bitterly contested.

In fact, a grocery store is so urgently desired in the neighborhood that the Planning Commission adopted a Fulton Street Grocery Store Special Use District (SUD) in 2008 specifically to encourage a mixed-use project with a large grocery store in the project area. But the hitch in the developer's plan was the inclusion of 252 total parking spaces -- almost twice the 134 spaces the Market/Octavia Plan allows for projects of its size by right, and still far more than the 193 spaces the plan allows under special circumstances with Conditional Use (CU) authorization.

The purpose of the plan, which was adopted in 2007, is to slow the growth of auto trips in a neighborhood that's dense, well served by transit, and already overrun with automobiles, while allowing for growth. But instead of adhering to the 0.5 parking spaces-per-residential-units allowed by right in the Market/Octavia Plan, or even seeking the 0.75-spaces-per-residential-units allowed with a CU, the developer insisted that each unit have its own space.

The project developer also sought to stuff the building with 106 parking spaces for the grocery store, 40 more than the Market/Octavia Plan allows by right for a grocery store of its size, and 15 more than it allows even with a CU.

With any less parking, the grocery store would be a failure, argued David Silverman, the developer's attorney. "There's no doubt that most if not all of the grocery patrons will arrive by automobile," he said. "They'll need a place to store their automobile while they're there."

"We must assure that the 33,000-square-foot grocery store will be a successful venture," Silverman told the Planning Commission. "This cannot be accomplished by hoping that families shopping for the week can transport bags of groceries on bicycles. Muni bus services are notoriously unreliable and also impractical for transporting large amounts of groceries."

Silverman cited other large grocery stores around town, "almost all" of which have over 300 spaces, he said.

Members of various neighborhood groups in the Western Addition also spoke up for the project with the higher parking levels, though most of the comments eventually turned to the employment opportunities the project would create.

Despite protests from members of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, who argued that the project should be built, but with far less parking, several of the commissioners started out sympathetic to -- and credulous of -- the developer's arguments.

"I would not be opposed to 0.75 for residential parking in this situation," said Planning Commission President Ron Miguel. "I do think that for a grocery store of this square footage that the parking that is requested is not necessarily out of line."

Commissioners Michael Antonini and William Lee also both stated their support for the developer's parking request, citing concerns about families who need to drive their kids to school and to the grocery store for large shopping trips.

The debate appeared headed towards a potential split vote, with four of the other commissioners questioning the extra parking request. "This is taking advantage of the Market/Octavia Plan for the increased heights, bulks and density," but then turning around and rejecting its parking limits, said Gwyneth Borden.

Vice President Christina Olague said she was out of patience with requests for more parking than the Market/Octavia Plan originally intended. Commissioner Hisashi Sugaya was even more pointed. "This is the city. This an urban area. It's denser than anything around the Bay Area," said Sugaya. "We're not talking about installing a suburban grocery store, here, folks."

Planning Director Weighs In

But just as the directors appeared headed for a split vote, Planning Department Director John Rahaim weighed in, expressing his frustration with the project developer for requesting so much parking -- and for suggesting that every large grocery store in the city has as much.

"I normally wouldn't weigh in at this point before you vote," said Rahaim. "[But] I have to take offense, frankly, to the comment that comparable stores have hundreds of parking spaces. They simply do not. There are many grocery stores in the city that have been built in recent years that have far fewer parking spaces than are being proposed here. I know of three Whole Foods' that I personally shop at where that's the case."

Rahaim said that grocery stores are already learning to adopt to lower parking limits. "I would argue that grocery stores in the city and elsewhere have come to terms with that issue," he told the commissioners.

Rahaim's comments appeared to hold great weight with the commissioners, all of whom proceeded to approve the project with the condition that it include a total of 148 spots, as Planning staff recommended. On another contentious issue, however, the commissioners sided with the developer, overriding staff's recommendations for changes to the aesthetics of the project. The Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association as well as many other groups (and Chronicle architecture critic John King) supported the developer's original design.

Jason Henderson, a member of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association and a geography professor at San Francisco State University, called the vote a victory for the city's Transit First policy.

"It is a turnaround for the Planning staff and Commission," said Henderson. "I don't think it's over by any means."

As Streetsblog reported last year, the Planning Commission previously approved a CU allowing more parking than the Market/Octavia Plan allows by right for a smaller project on Valencia Street, which the Board of Supervisors ultimately upheld on a split vote. Parking reform advocates were concerned that might set a precedent, but last Thursday's vote is a reversal of that trend -- at least for now.

"We've got the big Whole Foods proposed on Market and Dolores," which is also covered by the Market/Octavia Plan, said Henderson. "These issues are going to come up again."

"The developers are marketing San Francisco as a very walkable city to people who own Mercedes," said Henderson. "Parking is like a granite counter top."

White House budget chief Peter Orszag challenged employees to boost their walking last fall. (Photo: CSM)

The budget also proposes a $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, a rechristened National Infrastructure Bank that would use federal money to leverage private capital for large-scale projects improving the nation’s built environment.

The $530 million request for the three-agency sustainable communities partnership, which got $150 million
from Congress for the current fiscal year, would go directly to the
U.S. DOT for "comprehensive regional and community planning efforts
that
integrate transportation, housing, and other critical investments,"
according to the White House budget office.

The
administration requested $160 million in total for the two other
agencies involved in the partnership, the Environmental Protection
Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

As promised to Congress in December,
the White House also set aside funding for the implementation of its
plans for a new federal role overseeing rail transit safety. The U.S.
DOT would receive $30 million in today’s budget to train new inspectors
and help cities such as Washington D.C. come into compliance with
minimum safety standards.

On the controversial question of
the cash-strapped highway trust fund — which is expected to run out of
money this spring, not long after the expiration of the latest
short-term extension to the 2005 federal transportation law — the
presidential budget maintains its insistence on waiting until 2011 to fix the nation’s transport funding crisis.

In the budget’s U.S. DOT section, the White House writes:

The
current framework for financing and allocating surface transportation
investments is not financially sustainable, nor does it effectively
allocate resources to meet our critical national needs. The
Administration recommends extending the current [federal bill] through
March 2011, during which time it will work with the Congress to reform
surface transportation programs and put the system on a viable
financing path. …

[T]he Administration seeks to integrate
economic analysis and performance measurement in transportation
planning to ensure that taxpayer dollars are better targeted and spent.

In
a separate section of the budget dedicated to long-term fiscal
analysis, the White House describes its $43 billion estimate for
highway spending in 2011 as a placeholder, not intended to reflect the
funding strategy "that the Administration and Congress necessarily
should or will adopt for the long-term reauthorization" legislation.

"Rather,"
the budget adds, "its purpose is to accurately reflect the condition of
the [highway trust fund] and recognize that, under current law,
maintaining baseline spending" on highways will require more transfers
of cash from the general Treasury.

Denver’s light rail, in the background, ended up increasing the value of nearby homes. (Photo: Denver Post)

Either [local planners] view [transit access] as too distant a possibility to factor in or,
ironically, they view rail transit as a means to get employees to
sprawling office parks built with ample municipal tax breaks or as a
park-and-ride commuting option for residents. And so even if transit is
being considered as part of a larger regional plan, sites are sought
that can provide highway visibility and acres of surface parking.  

The reality is that planning for rail transit in these communities as
part of a larger strategy of transit-oriented development [TOD] makes sense,
whether or not the train ever arrives. Such planning ultimately
promotes the long-term economic viability and environmental
sustainability of these downtowns.

Payton’s
assessment tracks with on-the-ground data from cities such as Denver,
where property near the first local light-rail line grew more
valuable even as the broader housing market declined last year. Even
now, as Denver’s rail expansion slows down, the New York Times found nonprofit groups snapping up land near future transit sites to ensure working-class access to the lines.

Still, localities’ fondness for pairing transit with park-and-ride structures (often aided by
federal funding) is unlikely to abate in the short term, particularly
without Washington raising its voice in promoting best practices for
TOD.

But it’s easier to envision the Obama administration, perhaps through a much-needed reform to the New Starts
grant program, deciding to award transit money to cities and towns that
pursue mixed-use development very early on in the process.

When
local officials decide to pursue the downtown revitalization that
Payton discusses, their priorities often begin and end with economic
growth — those often-misguided municipal tax breaks, are often used to
lure new employers to a particular area. A federal system that rewards
localities for promoting density even in the absence of transit would
provide a powerful incentive to look beyond businesses promising that,
say, 1,000 new parking spaces are a prerequisite for job creation.