Streetsblog San Francisco

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.

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Those looking for hope in this era of transit service cuts took heart from the words of William Millar, President of the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), at Rail~volution yesterday. In his keynote speech, Millar reasons to hope for a better future — despite the fact that 84 percent of APTA members were cutting service, raising fares, laying off personnel, or delaying projects this year due to budget cuts.

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.

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For every dollar awarded from the U.S. DOT’s TIGER II grant program, there are more than $30 that applicants are asking for but won’t be getting.

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.

The Senate Banking Committee voted 12-10 yesterday in favor of the Livable Communities Act, legislation that would bolster the Obama administration’s initiatives to link together transportation, housing, economic development, and environmental policy.

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."

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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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Even as our freeways and bridges in the Bay Area are choked with traffic for hours every day, the population in the region is projected to grow from over 7 million now to over 9 million by 2025. Deciding where to build housing to accommodate the growth will be one of the most significant regional decisions and one that must account not only for issues like infrastructure capacity, but climate change, open space management, job growth and health impacts.

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.

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In a major test of the Market and Octavia Area Plan and of the city's parking policy, the Planning Commission unanimously rejected a developer's request last week for far more parking than is allowed, even with a conditional use permit. 

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."

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The White House officially unveiled its $3.8 trillion budget
for the fiscal year 2011 this morning, seeking $1 billion to continue
its high-speed rail investment and $530 million for the transportation
leg of the Obama administration’s inter-agency push to promote sustainable planning on the local level.

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:

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Yes, says urban planner Neil Payton. From his guest column today on Reconnecting America’s blog:

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.