Streetsblog San Francisco

In a couple of hours, the House will vote on the transportation extension bill – under unanimous consent rules. That means a single vote in opposition could delay passage.

Sen. Tom Coburn has an axe to grind with bicycle safety. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

It’s unclear how we went from a House determined to cut spending levels by more than 30 percent to a House unanimously committed to passing a bill with current spending levels. It’s unclear even that this unanimous vote plan will work. Republican party discipline isn’t what it used to be, what with the Tea Party revolt just loving to accuse House Speaker John Boehner of being a tax-and-spend liberal.

However, rumor has it that House Republicans are being told that the extension’s spending levels don’t change the appropriations levels the House is willing to approve, and that’s $27.7 billion for the year for highways and $5.2 billion for transit. So if the extension authorizes $19.8 billion for highways for the first six months and $4.2 billion for transit, that’s fine: It just means that for the whole second half of the year, highways would only get $7.9 billion and transit would only get $800 million. Those are deadly cuts, but it appears that transportation leaders are putting off that fight till later in order to pass an extension now.

Meanwhile, if the extension bill doesn’t pass the House by unanimous consent, the House will need to follow normal rules of order to pass it by majority vote. That means it’ll need to wait a full 72 hours between the posting of the bill and the vote, and that would mean a Wednesday vote. It could also open the door to a messy amendment process.

Speaking of amendments: In the Senate, Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn is planning to file an amendment to cut Transportation Enhancements from the six-month extension. It’s good news that he’s doing it as an amendment and not a hold on the bill, since a hold is a unilateral move to force the Senate to utilize a much more time-consuming process to vote on the bill. His amendment will likely fail, since many senators who would normally vote with him to cut bike/ped funding are committed to passing a clean extension, with no amendments.

If Coburn’s amendment does fail, he can lose graciously — or he can try to filibuster. It’s unclear whether he plans to do that. While the House is hoping to have 100 percent support for the bill, insiders fear that in the Senate, the bill could fall short of the 60 percent majority it needs to overcome a filibuster.

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Image: SFMTA

San Francisco could be headed on a course toward transportation sustainability, granted it’s the politically popular thing to do.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) recently released its 2011 Draft Climate Action Strategy [pdf], laying out a progressive blueprint for how the city should tackle reducing its greenhouse gas emissions from one of their leading sources: driving.

“The Climate Action Strategy is a citywide plan, but since the SFMTA is responsible for the streets, arguably we have the biggest part in all of this,” said SFMTA Director Cheryl Brinkman.

Transportation makes up 36 percent of the city’s emissions, says the report, and 89 percent of that is from private automobiles. The SFMTA’s goal is to cut transportation emissions to half of 1990 levels by 2035 by reducing the current share of driving in half to a mode split of 30 percent of trips by car, 30 percent by transit, and 40 percent by bicycling and walking.

From parking regulations to transit-oriented development to complete streets, the plan recommends the most effective measures to take and perhaps most importantly, the political processes required to fund and implement them. But while the SFMTA staff and directors may seem mostly on board, support from other agencies will be crucial to cause a major shift in the city’s transportation and land use policies.

“We need to hold the line on our transit-first policy,” said Timothy Papandreou, SFMTA Deputy Director of Transportation Planning for the Sustainable Streets Division. “It’s something that we’ll continue to be challenged on, but that’s really our major policy move.”

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Different vehicles shape a different streetscape in Peru.

Our daily urban lives shape our imaginations in so many ways. Few things box us in like our everyday transit options, and the patterns of traffic that shape our sense of public space. These patterns themselves are historical of course. A quick look back at the famous Market Street film shot a few days before the 1906 earthquake shows how chaotic and unpredictable the flow of traffic was when San Francisco’s main artery hadn’t yet been paved and standardized. Similarly, leaving the U.S. and visiting other countries provides a fantastic opportunity to experience other assumptions and possibilities for urban space, and surprisingly perhaps, a different range of vehicles.

In Peru for a couple of weeks I first had to adjust to a major cultural difference–unlike California, pedestrians don’t have any legal rights, let alone cultural preference. When you start to cross the street at a corner in a Peruvian city, you better be ready to run. Because the cars are not going to wait for you, in fact they tend to speed up when they see someone trying to use the road space ahead of them. I noticed the same thing on highways too, a consistent refusal to yield to entering traffic, a universal assumption of individual ownership of the right of way. Here’s a video below the break we shot standing on a traffic island in Peru’s second largest city while waiting for the traffic to clear so we could cross the street.

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SFMTA Chief Nat Ford presented his “State of the SFMTA” [pdf] report to the board of directors at a special workshop today, a mostly glowing assessment of the past few years but one that acknowledged the pains of its funding crises and the many challenges the agency faces as it looks to the future.

It was also the beginning of a process to update the SFMTA’s strategic plan and set a framework that will guide its sustainable transportation policies and goals.

“We are working hard to shift from planning for cars to planning for people,” said Ford, reading from prepared remarks. “Like the FDA’s food pyramid, too many carbs are not good for you. And so it is true for the mobility pyramid. Too many cars are not good for our city.”

Ford pointed out that San Franciscans account for the majority of auto trips being made, particularly within the northeast part of the city, but that overall vehicle miles traveled is down because of the economy.

A slide of the SFMTA’s mobility pyramid was displayed to the board which showed that the city would need to liberate itself from the private automobile, converting a vast majority of trips to walking and bicycling followed by transit, rideshare and car sharing. The pyramid was prepared by the SFMTA’s Deputy Director of Planning Timothy Papandreou.

“As it relates to a sustainable mobility goal, we need to advance from a 65 percent auto, 15 percent transit, 20 percent pedestrian/bicycle mode split to a 30 percent auto, 30 percent transit and 40 percent pedestrian/bicycle mode split to help with congestion and create a greener, healthier San Francisco, ” said Ford.

He said land use and infrastructure alone would not meet the goals by 2030, and a concerted effort would need to be made related to “parking, road pricing and other measures.”

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States with the highest obesity rates also tend to be where the fewest people bike or walk to work. Image: CDC

Two
reports released last week underscored the increasing severity of
America’s obesity epidemic. And the eye-opening findings add to the
mounting evidence that stopping the spread of obesity and its attendant
health risks will require changes to the nation’s transportation system
as surely as it demands altering our diets.

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Tuesday
showed the number of obese Americans has increased by 2.4 million since
2007. There are now nine states where more than 30 percent of the
population qualifies as obese — up from three states in 2007. (Just ten
years ago, no state had obesity levels above 30 percent). 

The following day, Gallup released a ranking
of the nation’s most and least obese states as part of a broader index
of well-being. By its accounting, a cluster of states in the southeast
– West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina –
have the highest rates of obesity, while the thinnest states, mainly in
the west and New England, tend to have obesity rates about ten
percentage points lower.

In the CDC ranking of states (which varies slightly from the Gallup
ranking), Colorado and the District of Columbia are the only states
with obesity rates under 20 percent, making their rate nearly 15 points
lower than the most obese states. Their secret? During a press briefing, the CDC’s Bill Dietz speculated
that Colorado’s investment in biking and walking trails, as well as
District residents’ frequent use of public transportation, which goes
hand in hand with walking and thus burns more calories than driving, are
possible factors.

Indeed, if you look at rates of active commuting (walking and
biking) in the most and least obese states, a revealing correlation
emerges. Three of the five most obese states in the Gallup ranking are
also among the five states with the smallest percentage of people who
bike to work. At the other end of the spectrum, four of the ten thinnest
states are among those where people bike to work most frequently. (The
commuting rates come from Census data detailed in this League of American Bicyclists report.)

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Graph: FHWA [PDF]

Federal funding for pedestrian and bicycle projects reached a new high last year, according to a report released today by the Federal Highway Administration. In terms of dollars, federal investment in walking and biking more than doubled compared to the previous high, set in 2007, thanks largely to an infusion of $400 million in stimulus funds.

The share of all federal transportation spending devoted to bike-ped projects also rose to an unprecedented level -- all of two percent. Advocates for walking and biking applauded the trend while pointing out the potential for much greater federal commitment to active transportation.

"It continues to be an improvement, and it continues to be a tiny fraction of the money that's available to potentially be spent on biking and walking," said Andy Clarke of the League of American Bicyclists.

Subtracting the $400 million one-shot in stimulus funding, Clarke noted, yields a less impressive year-on-year increase. And part of the increase in reported bike-ped spending might also simply reflect better record keeping by state DOTs, as agencies document the construction of sidewalks and bike lanes as part of larger projects, according to Barbara McCann of the National Complete Streets Coalition.

The spending figures come from an update on the state of walking and biking that the feds release every five years. The original National Bicycling and Walking Study, released in 1994, set two major targets: to double walk and bike mode-share, from 7.9 percent of all trips to 15.8 percent; and to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities by 10 percent.