Streetsblog San Francisco

While many Americans may not think riding a bus is the sexiest form of transportation, the reality is that a majority of public transit trips in the U.S. are taken by bus. The numbers are even higher in the Bay Area. Every one of the hundreds of thousands of passengers who boarded a bus in the last year has a story to tell and there are probably lots of Streetsblog readers who would love to share a tale about their favorite line. So why not nominate it as the best bus route in America?

Transportation Alternatives, New York City’s advocacy group for bicycling, walking and public transit, has joined with GOOD Magazine for a contest asking public transit riders to email in their photos and brief captions making a case for why their bus ride is the better one. From GOOD’s website:

Bicycles can be chic, subways artful, but buses? Buses are not exactly the golden child of transportation. They’re more like the red-headed step child: Deep down you know they mean well but they’re just a little harder to love.

Yet public buses are an essential form of transit in cities across the country, and they account for a big chunk of the nearly 10.2 billion trips Americans took on public transportation in 2009. We think it’s time to give a little love to one of the least celebrated modes of transit. To that end, we’ve teamed up with Transportation Alternatives and an impressive group of bus-loving jurors to see and hear why your bus route is the best in America.

What is it about your bus route that you love? Is your bus driver brilliant? Is the view from your window breathtaking? Do your fellow riders characters belong in a Hemingway novel?

The judges include Earl Blumenauer, Enrique Peñalosa and TA Executive Director Paul Steely White. I’m honored to also be a judge. You only have until next Wednesday, November 10th, to submit your entry. You can email them to busroutes@goodinc.com or tweet the entry to @GOOD and use the hashtag #bestbusride. Good luck!

Editor's note: Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) sent us this commentary on the the BP oil spill, climate change and the need for transportation reform.

Last week, President Obama delivered his first speech from the Oval Office on the single greatest challenge our nation faces: how we supply and consume energy.

The searing images we’re seeing from the Gulf Coast -- of the families who lost loved ones, of people out of work and of oil-coated birds and dolphins -- are daily reminders of what’s at stake when we drill, baby, drill.

The truth is that we are drilling 150 miles offshore and one mile below the earth’s surface because we have run out of accessible oil. Most shocking is how small a difference this oil makes to our energy needs. The 35-60,000 barrels spewing daily from the Gulf floor would be enough to power our nation’s cars for just four minutes.

Whether from the Gulf of Mexico or Persian Gulf, we cannot meet our nation’s energy needs by drilling. We are at a precipice, and I stand firmly with President Obama when it comes to Congress passing legislation that arms the nation with clean energy.

But frankly, we need to do more on these issues, especially by addressing transportation and how we build in our communities.

The transportation sector accounts for almost three-quarters of U.S. oil consumption and one-third of our carbon emissions. If we really want to break our dependence on oil and improve our global competitiveness, we must focus on the way people commute and move goods.

Being truly aggressive about where and how we build can save even more money and energy -- with the potential to cut carbon pollution 12-16 percent by 2030 and save more than a million barrels of oil a day.

This is not the first thing that comes to mind for most people, but to ensure our energy security, we need a comprehensive approach. I hope this becomes part of the future message and, more importantly, a key focus of Congressional action.

Addressing a packed house in Washington last night, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, founder of the Congressional Bike Caucus, posed a Zen-like ‘universalist cyclist question’.

"How many people, right now," he asked, "are stuck in traffic on their way to ride a stationary bike in a health club?"

The quip got a big laugh. But at yesterday’s launch of Cities for Cycling,
a new project spearheaded by the National Association of City
Transportation Officials (NACTO), Blumenauer urged fellow cyclists to
consider their cause "serious business."

The mission of C4C,
as outlined by NACTO President Janette Sadik-Khan, is to collect and
share best practices for the introduction of local bike lanes and other
cycling infrastructure — the type of strategies that have succeeded in
cities but not yet been added to the Federal Highway Administration’s
traffic control manual, also known as the MUTCD.

"Some
of the most celebrated and popular [bike] improvements are not even in
the national guidelines," Sadik-Khan explained, adding that C4C
ultimately aims to help develop "a new MUTCD, designed for cities, not
highways."

The C4C kickoff,
held in the shadow of the Capitol and sponsored by the Brookings
Institution, was imbued with a sense of hope for future federal and
local policies to encourage bicycling expansion. The Obama
administration had a strong presence in the room, including Federal
Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff, befitting its public push for more sustainable community development.

Still,
Blumenauer and Sadik-Khan emphasized that bolstering the uneven federal
commitment to bicycling, and its urban benefits in particular, would
require hard work and political organizing on the part of bike
advocates.

Read more…

On the issue of clean transportation, from transit to bike paths to
clean water, few members of Congress are as knowledgeable or active as
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). Chief of the Congressional Bicycle Caucus
and founder of the new Livable Communities Task Force,
the Portland lawmaker is on the front lines of Washington’s biggest
infrastructure debates. Streetsblog Capitol Hill spoke with him
yesterday about the prospects for transportation in the coming jobs
bill, which he has said could be paid for in part with Wall Street bailout money. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

SCH: There is a growing focus
on Capitol Hill on new infrastructure investments as part of a jobs
bill that moves separately from the six-year transportation bill. What
are your thoughts on the merits of moving on new spending versus a
broader long-term bill?

EB: There is a terrific
and very important complementary opportunity. Make no mistake, we need
to have a six-year blueprint for how we rebuild and renew America for
transportation. We’ve got a lot of work that has been done for last
two-and-a-half years by the transportation committee; they’re in the
home stretch. Literally, in a month, they could have a finalized
version [of a six-year federal bill] and work it through with the
administration, send it over to the Senate.

That’s not to
say we shouldn’t be looking for opportunties to put people to work
tomorrow, and the two are not by any stretch of the imagination
mutually exclusive. We have so many transit agencies with deferred
maintenance [needs], so many bridges that are functionally obsolete or
dangerous.

I recently finished a conversation with Gov.
[Ed] Rendell [D-PA], and the opportunities in his state are amazing.
Lieutenant Gov. Dick Ravitch in New York, he’s got literally billions
of dollars of things that need to be done. I’d be prepared to argue
that we should go ahead with a big, comprehensive transportation bill,
but there’s no reason we cannot put money out the door, literally
within weeks, that can put tens of thousands of people to work in
virtually every state in the union within a matter of months. Done
right, the [two bills] will complement each other.

SCH:
Clearly speed is a big concern, given that the goal is to put people to
work quickly on projects. But we saw a lot of, for example, paving
projects funded by the stimulus that may have created jobs but didn’t
address larger problems with crumbling infrastructure. To what extent
should the quality of transportation projects, and the need for a "fix-it-first" requirement, be a factor?

Read more…

Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer is one of Capitol Hill's strongest voices for walking, biking and transit. Soon after arriving in Congress in 1996, he started the Congressional Bike Caucus, now more than 160 members strong, and he's the founding chairman of the House's new "Livable Communities Task Force," which he announced two weeks ago here on Streetsblog.

Blumenauer's bike commute to the Capitol has become as much a personal hallmark as his predilection for bowties. So when he went to New York City over the weekend to stump for a progressive federal transportation bill, the congressman didn't pass up the chance to tour the city's evolving bike infrastructure with bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. Clarence Eckerson and his camera were there too, of course.

Watch this Streetfilm to hear Blumenauer's thoughts on the big federal transportation bill, the emergence of a national movement for safe biking and walking, and the difference between protected bike lanes and regular old Class 2 facilities. Then ask yourself: When will we get to see a congressperson or senator from California walk, bike, or ride the bus with Clarence?

Also, a reminder that Streetsblog San Francisco Editor Bryan Goebel and Reporter Matthew Roth will be in Portland, Oregon, this week, reporting on Congress for the New Urbanism's Project on Transportation Reform. Catch them on our Twitter feed and look for posts starting tomorrow.

The Congress for the New Urbanism will meet in Portland, Oregon, in early November for the annual Project for Transportation Reform, a summit to further define and clarify emerging urban transportation policies that embrace entire networks, rather than interdependent transportation segments, and that seek to balance modal transportation splits and reduce overall vehicular miles traveled (VMT).

Summit attendees and partners, including Streetsblog, will participate in discussions on emerging network planning and develop a strategy for informing the national transportation infrastructure debate, of particular significance as the climate and transportation bills move forward. As the draft CNU Statement of Principles on Transportation Networks notes [PDF], climate change and infrastructure problems in the US continue to intensify:

The US now has the world’s highest level of VMT per capita, while simultaneously experiencing the highest traffic fatality rates of any developed nation. Per capita traffic delay has more than doubled in the United States since 1982. This deterioration in transportation system performance has occurred in spite of an ongoing public investment of more that $200 billion per year in transportation infrastructure."

CNU President John Norquist said the current focus by transportation professionals on road capacity gives us cities like Detroit, where consistent spending to widen roads has destroyed communities.

"Federal and state DOTs don't understand how cities work. They still want to take rural forms and jam big roads into cities." he said. "Rather than measuring projected traffic flow, they should be measuring how much value it adds to a neighborhood. The US can't afford to be energy wasting and spending money on projects that destroy the value of neighborhoods."

Read more...

Having entertained legislators' own ideas about how best to fund future transportation spending, the House Ways and Means committee turned to representatives from the administration and key interest groups today to hear their thoughts on the matter.

The administration's view could not have been much clearer -- this business is all very important, but we're not ready to commit to anything at this time.

Roy Kienitz, the Department of Transportation's Undersecretary for Policy, made it quite clear that the administration is not prepared to support any of the new funding mechanisms proposed -- not a VMT tax, not indexing the gas tax to inflation, and not taxes on imported oil and refined gasoline.

Kienitz did leave the door open to a tax on trading of oil futures, which he said the administration would have to investigate thoroughly. A key concern is that in a world where oil is traded on global markets, such a measure would simply shift trading off of American soil.

Why the stubborn refusal to engage in the funding debate? Ostensibly, the administration is reluctant to adopt new taxes or fees amid recession.

But this explanation rings hollow. Congress could easily delay the time at which revenue-raising measures take effect until 2011 or later, as is being done with funding mechanisms in the health reform bills under consideration.

The president must know this. A reasonable assumption is that he simply does not want to have a tax debate at this time, not with other key priorities involving new tax burdens also being considered.

Read more...

Moments after he delivered the keynote address to the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), Oregon's Rep. Earl Blumenauer, head of the Congressional Bike Caucus, met with us for this exclusive one-on-one chat.

Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naparstek talks with the congressman about the current federal stimulus bill and how advocates can better engage their leaders. Of the new White House team, which has not shown much energy in pushing transit or livable streets issues thus far, Mr. Blumenauer states:

Just because [people and advocates] may feel more comfortable with this administration -- it doesn't mean they should let up on the pressure.

Amen. With the big federal transportation bill coming up, this is an important year, people. Let that sentence stick in your noggin for the next 324 days.