Sens. Barbara Boxer and James Inhofe worked hard to negotiate an agreement on transportation enhancement funding -- a deal now threatened by House Republicans. Photo: Transportation Issues Daily

Transportation Enhancements is the primary source of funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects. It comprises less than two percent of total federal transportation funds but has been a source of bitter contention, nearly derailing talks in the Senate. The two sides eventually made a deal under which TE is subsumed under the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement program’s “additional activities” category. Per that agreement, states can opt out altogether, and some road uses compete with bike and pedestrian projects for funding. An amendment to maintain some local control over the funds made it somewhat more palatable for advocates.

Sen. James Inhofe, the conservative top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, warned House members at the outset of the conference that “the conservative position is to pass this thing,” even if members are not 100 percent satisfied with the compromise. The changes to the enhancements program constituted “the most meaningful reform to conservatives” in the bill, he said.

Transportation conference chairwoman Barbara Boxer said today that lawmakers “have a chance” to make the bill longer than two years, as the Senate bill is written. She also said that 80 percent of the EPW Committee’s portion of the bill is not controversial and has been agreed to. According to Boxer, House Speaker John Boehner told her last night that he has instructed House negotiators to get a bill done.

Still, a staffer familiar with the ongoing conference talks has told Streetsblog that TE is again an issue of contention. Freshman Republicans have made a point of expressing their dissatisfaction that any funding whatsoever remains in the bill.

In addition to TE, Republicans took issue with one of the most popular bill elements among transportation reformers: the provision allowing for more flexibility for transit agencies in times of high unemployment. The Senate bill allows agencies in such cases to spend federal funds normally reserved for capital improvements on operations. GOP opposition to these programs is part and parcel of the urban/rural divide, according to Streetsblog’s source, who said some House members are bent on redistributing money from urban areas to rural districts.

Many House members also oppose Senate bill language that would, for the first time, give safety oversight responsibility to the FTA. Though the federal government has a role in overseeing road, air and rail safety, conservatives have resisted expanding oversight to transit.

Changes to environmental reviews have also led to “lots of yelling,” the source said.

The Tea Party-backed House members making hay about these issues have been the only lawmakers showing up at meetings that are largely among staffers. Our source said it’s set up an uncomfortable dynamic and has put a chill on what should be frank conversations. The professional staff members understand they’re there to compromise, but the lawmakers themselves don’t seem inclined to do so. No one has conceded anything, we hear.

The much-ballyhooed Keystone pipeline is a significant point of contention, but it’s not the only one, and some Democrats complain that it’s getting far too much attention in the mainstream press — to the point that reporters often ask lawmakers whether they’re really going to allow the whole process to be stymied over the pipeline issue. Democrats, of course, feel that it’s Republicans who are hamstringing the conference by insisting on something they know will provoke a presidential veto.

Our source said the committee staff is still “walking through” the bill section by section and identifying areas of disagreement, of which there are many. Senator Harry Reid told reporters yesterday that 80 percent of the issues had been resolved, but the staffer we talked to, while not explicitly refuting the majority leader’s assertion, wasn’t so sure.

The Finance committee staff is reportedly meeting tomorrow for the first time to tackle the other thorny issue: how to pay for the bill.

The seven Tea Party members showing up to all the meetings aren’t the only obstacle to agreement — there are lots more compromise-averse freshmen in the House who could vote no on the conference report. If that’s the case, Republican leadership would need to count on Democrats to vote for it.

Sorry, Ford: the honeymoon is over. Photo: Loti

The data tell us that young people are driving less; that Americans are driving fewer miles — and it’s not just because of the economy. Now the Washington Post asks a more transcendental question: Is the spark gone?

America’s fabled love affair with the car hasn’t ended, but like many a romance that gets off to a smoking-hot start, it has evolved over the years into more placid coexistence rooted more in need than pleasure.

There are a multitude of reasons: The roads don’t seem so free or open as they were when the affair blossomed after World War II. Congestion and the pillory at the gas pump have reined in some of the wanderlust.

Even the ad man who made muscle cars a status symbol, Jim Wangers, is quoted in the Post article saying, “In the 1960s it was absolutely mandatory that you had a swinging set of wheels. Now, personal mobility has been replaced by personal mobility on the Web.”

There are economic reasons and environmental reasons, as well as a culture shift away from the drivable suburbs of prior generations.

GM has hired MTV consultants to try to find out what makes young people tick these days but even their hired gun seems a little pessimistic about the auto industry’s chances of winning back this demographic. His prescient glimpse into the mind of today’s youth: “They think of a car as a giant bummer… Think about your dashboard. It’s filled with nothing but bad news.”

Less than half of 16- to 19-year-olds even bother to get their driver’s license anymore (compared to 64 percent in 1998), and Americans under 35 drove 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than they did in 2001.

To illustrate the point, the Post story uses two anecdotes: 1) More than a quarter of DC residents don’t own an automobile, and 2) NASCAR fans are graying. (Corvette owners are, too.)

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last week in which Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard asked readers, “Would you rather own a car, an iPad or a Facebook membership?” — as if it were a rhetorical question. But does everyone really want a car, Mr. Karlgaard? According to the research firm Gartner, 46 percent of drivers aged 18 to 24 said they would choose Internet access over owning a car.

To Karlgaard, though, there’s only one logical answer. “By 2050 the planet will have nine billion inhabitants and three billion cars,” he wrote, even while noting: “This will create huge demand for fuel and road access.”

Sure, we can keep building infrastructure for a car-choked future the data tell us isn’t coming, or we can ride the wave of diminished interest in cars to channel resources toward more sustainable forms of transportation.

Administration priorities for the conference bill came down from headquarters. Photo: Wikipedia

Everyone from the petrochemical industry to environmental and equity groups [PDF] to state DOT officials [PDF] are penning their missives to committee members, asking for everything from expedited project delivery to fix-it-first to automatic approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

U.S. DOT got in on the letter-writing campaign last week too, expressing the Obama administration’s priorities for the bill [PDF].

The letter, signed by Secretary Ray LaHood, started off reiterating the promise to veto any bill mandating automatic approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. The administration opposes the GOP’s bid for coal ash deregulation but doesn’t threaten a veto over that issue. It also opposes some of the streamlining proposals made by the House, saying they “would radically change the application of environmental laws” and would undermine the National Environmental Policy Act.

The administration says it “strongly supports local decision-making and boosting the capacity of agencies that perform statewide, metropolitan, and rural transportation planning” — staying agnostic in the battle between state and city power. It supports the Senate’s Buy America language, which the House has instructed its conferees to accept. New Starts, high-speed rail, and TIGER all get a shout-out too.

U.S. DOT supports transit operations funding in times of high unemployment and in the wake of a disaster, and it reminds conferees that the administration’s 2013 budget included $3.2 billion for for transit maintenance. It mentions CMAQ only to oppose a House change to the program that never passed but does not weigh in on the changes to CMAQ in the Senate bill.

Georgia Democrat John Barrow is doing the GOP's bidding on the Keystone pipeline. Photo: Statesboro Herald

On top of all that, members are beginning to submit “instructions” to their fellow conferees, telling them how to vote.

On Friday, the House passed two instructions. The first was sponsored by T & I Ranking Member Nick Rahall and it instructed House conferees to reinforce “Buy America” provisions by closing certain loopholes. The Senate bill includes Buy America language to ensure that more manufactured goods and commodities are produced within the United States.

The Amalgamated Transit Union is in favor of Buy America provisions because they protect manufacturing jobs in the U.S. But many other transit advocates oppose them because they can make transit so much more expensive and present many bureaucratic obstacles.

It’s no surprise that Rahall, a Democrat from West Virginia coal country, would support a provision intended to create American manufacturing jobs. But the second set of instructions was a little more surprising. John Barrow — a Democrat — put forward a motion instructing House conferees to “insist on Title II of the House bill, regarding approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.”

According to Politico, Barrow is a conservative Georgia Dem who’s highly vulnerable in the next election. Perhaps he thought he could score some right-wing points with the vote. But it’s no indication that Democrats are warming to the pipeline idea. In fact, as Larry Ehl mentioned in Transportation Issues Daily, “Fewer House Democrats support Keystone XL than House Republicans claimed.” The House bill to go to conference got 69 Dem votes, but many of those held their nose voting for a bill containing Keystone just to get a conference process started. Only 26 Democrats voted “yes” on Barrow’s motion Friday. And as Ehl points out, that means “the House does not have the votes to override a Presidential veto” – in the “somewhat remote case” that the bill passes Congress with the Keystone XL language.

Once conferees have been named, House members have 20 calendar days and 10 legislative days to submit instructions if a conference report has not yet been filed. The “motion to instruct” is a privileged motion, which means the House majority can’t stop them from being voted on. “It’s a recipe for crippling the House floor and forcing votes on uncomfortable topics, if the Democrats want to play it that way,” wrote Kathy Wolfe at Politico.

Both Barrow and Rahall indicated that their instructions were intended to force the conferees to act, but the instructions are non-binding recommendations on highly contentious issues, which members will vote according on to their own values and constituencies.

Despite the fact that the House is on recess this week and the Senate is on recess next week for Memorial Day, staff members have been working hard to come to agreement on the issues in the bill. If they make progress, they’ll have some points of agreements to show their bosses when they are all back in DC at the beginning of June. Boxer has said the committee needs to pass its bill by June 7 in order to get it voted on by both chambers and signed by the president in time for the June 30 deadline. Some experts are beginning to show a cautious optimism that it could actually happen.

Source: The Demand Institute

The data suggests otherwise, though. Earlier this week, the Demand Institute (a think tank created by the Conference Board — “a global, independent business membership and research association” — and Nielsen — yeah, the TV ratings people) released a report on the housing recovery. They say the worst of the housing crash is over and glimmers of recovery are on the horizon. But hope isn’t spread out uniformly across these United States. Those exurbs like Blaine and Farmington, Minnesota? They’re not coming back so fast.

Urban areas didn’t lose as much value during the recession. Home prices didn’t crash so hard. Not so many people found themselves under water, owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. And urban areas are bouncing back faster. The Demand Institute calls these places “Resilient Walkables.” Only 15 percent of the U.S. population lives there.

The report bases its prognosis for recovery on seven factors: population size, walkability, severity of the crash, current affordability, unemployment, foreclosure inventory, and foreclosure policy. The Institute found what Angie noted earlier: Walk Score is positively correlated with strong housing prices. The Institute’s analysis of almost 1,700 U.S. cities showed that walkable cities had more positive price growth.

And it found that these “Resilient Walkables” were resilient indeed, with house prices projected to rise three percent next year and five percent a year for the four years after that.

Compare that to the places the Institute calls “Slow and Steady” – where more than a third of Americans live and where double-digit housing declines destabilized the market. Economic indicators are gloomy for these areas, but the authors find the planning solid, so the future is relatively bright. These are places like Charlotte, NC, Dallas and semi-urban D.C. suburbs like Gaithersburg, MD, and the study forecasts three percent growth starting in two years.

Then there are the “Damaged But Hopeful” areas – a category that encompasses big but depressed cities like Chicago and smaller ones like Stamford, CT. Thirty percent of Americans live in these places, too many of them fighting foreclosure. It will take them a little longer to get to three percent growth but from 2017 onward, the Demand Institute predicts that they’ll beat the national average.

And then there are the exurbs and small suburbs. Twenty percent of Americans live there, but perhaps not for long. The report classifies them as “Weighed Down” – by precipitous price drops and high foreclosure rates. “The fact that housing is relatively cheap compared to the national average will not greatly assist recovery,” the report states. “Indeed, long-term prospects are most uncertain. We do not expect price rises to reach the national average even by 2017.”

The relative cheapness of land was the big draw out to new suburbs over the past few decades. The report seems to be foretelling the end of “drive till you qualify.”

The authors also predict the rental market will grow faster than the homebuyer market, and they say house size will shrink, as necessitated by the mass gravitation to a denser development pattern. Houses are already smaller now than their peak of 2,500 square feet in 2007, and the study forecasts they will shrink by another 10 percent by 2015 to about 2,150 square feet – still plenty of space.

So, while some people are content with the wide-roads-and-big-yards way of exurban life, many more are getting out – as soon as they can sell their house, which for many, won’t be anytime soon. Those who can are fleeing the toxicity of foreclosure, the soul-sucking commutes at $4+ a gallon, the dead street life.

And young families, who in the last decade fueled outward growth with their zeal for big houses with small price tags, are pulling back now. When they move out of their parents’ basements they’ll be looking to rent instead of buy. Home ownership rates among people in their early twenties has gone down 17.5 percent, while the home ownership rate for all age groups is down less than three percent.

It’s all part of a pendulum swing back from the mass drive out to the suburbs in the postwar period. According to this research, the growth is now in cities and close-in suburbs that offer a mix of uses within easy and pleasant walking distance. Transit plays a role too, as one major amenity being sought in urban areas is access to public transportation, “a significant advantage as traffic pressure in major metropolitan areas worsens owing to limited investment in road infrastructure,” the report says.

Some of the callers this morning made their outer-ring lifestyles sound lovely and bucolic. One of them said he and his wife both worked from home, so one of the major downsides of the exurbs – the commute – was a moot point for them. That may be, but they are increasingly isolated in their decision to live in that kind of place. As Chris Leinberger has noted, the places that were supposed to be a refuge from urban crime are finding that big-city problems have followed them. Nothing destabilizes a neighborhood like a vacant house – even if that house is a McMansion.

Image: Arizona Department of Transportation

Does walkable development really lead to worse traffic congestion? Opponents of urbanism often say so, citing impending traffic disaster to rally people against, say, a new mixed-use project proposed in their backyards. But new research provides some excellent evidence to counter those claims.

A recent study by the Arizona Department of Transportation [PDF] found that neighborhoods where houses are closer together actually have freer-flowing traffic.

Researchers compared some of greater Phoenix’s denser neighborhoods – South Scottsdale, Tempe, and East Phoenix — with a few of its more sprawling ones – Glendale, Gilbert, and North Scottsdale. Some interesting patterns emerged.

In the more compact neighborhoods, the average household owned 1.55 cars, compared to 1.92 in more suburban areas. Residents of higher-density neighborhoods also traveled shorter distances both to get to work and to run errands, the study found.

The average work trip was a little longer than seven miles for higher-density neighborhoods; in the more suburban neighborhoods, it was almost 11 miles. Residents of the three compact neighborhoods traveled just less than three miles to shop, while residents of sprawling locations traveled an average of more than four miles. All of this led the more urban dwellers to travel an average of nearly five fewer miles per day than their suburban counterparts.

The density divide also played an important role in transit use. Rates varied from as high as eight percent transit ridership in high-density neighborhoods to as low as one percent in the more sprawling areas.

All of this translated into a reduced strain on roadways in the places that had more people — running counter to one of the strongest objections to mixed-use development. Comparing one suburban corridor to two of the streets in the more dense neighborhoods, the study found that on the more urban streets, traffic congestion was “much lower,” or about half as high (measured by the ratio of the capacity of the roadway to the actual volume of cars on it).

How did more compact neighborhoods manage to have less congestion? It’s not just because residents there drive less overall. Two design characteristics also ease traffic, according to AZ DOT. Fine-grained street networks distributed traffic evenly across the higher-density neighborhoods, while every driver in the suburban neighborhoods was funneled onto the same big arterials. At the same time, improved pedestrian conditions in commercial centers made it easier for some drivers to park once and walk from destination to destination, taking cars off the road precisely in the areas that attract the most people.

The results of the Arizona study may not apply everywhere, due to the state’s extremely spread out pattern of development. The higher-density neighborhoods still only had between six and seven households per acre, compared with between three and four in the lower-density places. As the report notes, “By Eastern U.S. standards, all of these densities are effectively suburban in character.”

But the report controls for a host of factors, strengthening the conclusion that the different travel behaviors were really the result of design, rather than income, say, or the student population.

The Arizona Department of Transportation deserves credit — first of all, because this is a fantastic, thorough, well-timed study, but also for pointing out the important policy implications. The agency’s recommendations include a public awareness campaign about the benefits of mixed-use, compact development; better planning and public engagement tools; and providing incentives for smart planning.

The authors noted, for example, that outdated policies sabotage planning efforts that are beneficial for livability, public health, and the environment in the name of maintaining traffic flow. The supreme irony — in light of the study results — is that these policies ultimately fail the congestion test too:

Local planners and planning commissions are still using traditional traffic engineering approaches to assess the impact of development projects. By looking only at traffic congestion levels on adjacent links, ignoring through travel, and failing to account for the efficiencies of mixed-use development on lower vehicle trip rates and VMT, progressive projects are likely to be rejected or unreasonably downsized.

The DOT also concludes that congestion isn’t always a bad thing, that density is the key to successful transit, and that short blocks are critical for building vibrant, mixed-use places.

According to research assembled by the American Public Transportation Association and Building America's Future, an increase of $1 per gallon in the price of gas creates roughly 500 million transit trips. Image: APTA/BAF

When gas prices go up, it can be a big motivator for people to start taking transit more frequently. But according to a study released by the American Public Transportation Association and Building America’s Future [PDF], even when gas prices start to go down, the newly converted keep riding transit.

The report, “Volatile Gas Prices Point to Increased Use of Public Transportation,” draws on independent research about “the elasticity of transit ridership” — economist-speak for how much a change in gas prices affects transit use. As APTA points out in their press release, the results indicate an unexpected relationship between gas prices and transit ridership:

 It showed that on average, nationwide public transportation systems will add nearly 200 million new trips this year even as gas prices fluctuate by as much as 50 cents per gallon.

The report carries significant implications for transportation policy as Congress continues its effort to pass a new transportation bill before the June 30 deadline. Early proposals out of the House forbade the use of Highway Trust Fund dollars to pay for transit, and while those proposals have disappeared for now, it still remains a popular viewpoint among many on the political right.

But with more Americans opting not to drive, this is precisely the wrong time to start shortchanging transit. As APTA and BAF note, “the nation’s public transportation infrastructure is not prepared to handle the long-term unpredictable nature of gas prices.”

“Americans view our transportation network as one system, which is why public transportation and our road network should continue to receive funding from the highway trust fund,” said Gary Thomas, chair of APTA and CEO of Dallas Area Rapid Transit, in a conference call with reporters yesterday. “We should fund, build, and plan it like one system, where our public transportation system makes our road network more efficient.”

Naturally, with greater reliance on transit comes greater funding needs. Many transit agencies have had to resort to fare hikes and service cuts, even as their ridership climbs. But the dwindling power of the federal gas tax to fund needed improvements to transit has been well-documented, and Congress has been slow (unwilling, really) to enact a long-term transportation strategy.

Speaking on the same call, BAF co-chair and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell predicted that very little in the way of reform will come out of the current conference process, but when the process repeats itself in 2013, “Congress and the administration have to come to grips with problems facing not only transportation infrastructure, but all infrastructure,” including power, water, and broadband. Rendell said that something on the order of a 10-year comprehensive reauthorization effort was needed, as opposed to the 18-month measure which will likely result from the current conference.

Members of the Google robocar team. Photo: Inhabitat

Writer Michael Lind argued that the “case for infrastructure investment has suffered from the lack of a plausible vision of the next American infrastructure.” Things that are not “plausible,” according to Lind, include “renewable energy and mass transit.” He wrote:

The idea that the U.S. could transition quickly from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind power and solar power inspired many liberals to support artificially rigging markets in favor of renewable energy by methods like cap-and-trade and renewable energy standards that force working-class consumers, via utility, to buy expensive power from uneconomical wind, solar or biofuel sources. And for a brief moment in time, the center-left in the United States was entranced by the mirage of a continental high-speed rail system.

Okay, we’ll give you a second to consider that this was printed in one of the country’s leading, left-leaning online magazines.

“Rigging markets” is some pretty debatable rhetoric to describe renewable energy standards and cap-and-trade — a policy that is supported by the overwhelming majority of economists. (Billions of dollars in tax breaks for gas companies and subsidies for road building – some people might describe that as “rigging markets” in the opposite direction, but we digress.)

Unlike “uncritical,” “unrealistic” and “entranced” proponents of rail, Lind has a vision for the future that is very much like the present, or even the past. Brace yourself, readers: In the future, the U.S. will have an endless supply of fossil fuel thanks to “environmentally responsible” shale gas exploration. Plus, in the future, rail and bus transit of all kinds will never be able to complete with Google’s self-driving cars.

Lind is a big fan of Google robocars. He goes on about their many benefits:

Robocars may be fatal for fixed-rail transportation, at least for passengers rather than freight. Google has been test driving self-driving cars in California and Nevada has become the first state to legalize driverless vehicles. No doubt it will take several decades for safety issues and legal arrangements to be worked out. But high-speed trains might find competition in high-speed convoys of robot cars on smart highways, allowed higher speeds once human error has been eliminated. And the price advantage of subway tickets over taxi fares in cities may vanish, when the taxis drive themselves. Point-to-point travel, within cities or between them, is inherently more convenient than train or subway journeys which require changing modes of transit in the course of a journey. Thanks to robocars, much cheaper point-to-point travel everywhere may eventually be cheap enough to relegate light rail and inter-city rail to the museum, along with the horse-drawn omnibus and the trans-atlantic blimp.

What Lind — and Salon — fail to mention is that his professional interests are very much entangled with the producer of those cars.

Lind works for the New America Foundation — a nonprofit think tank whose board chairman is Google executive chair and former CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt holds company stock worth billions, and both Schmidt and Google Inc. are among the think tank’s largest financial supporters. According to the New America Foundation, Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, gave between $250,000 and $1 million to the organization in 2010. (Its annual budget was about $15 million in 2010, according to IRS data.) Google itself funded the organization at between $100,000 and $249,999.

In a 2010 article for the New Yorker, reporter Jane Mayer — writing about fossil fuel industry titans the Koch brothers — warned of think tanks with close links to the economic sectors affected by their policy recommendations:

You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank which hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.

Google has surely made a significant investment its self-driven car technology. Now that this economic behemoth has a stake in robocars and robocar infrastructure, let’s hope we won’t see a rash of Koch-esque intellectual posturing in favor of auto-oriented transportation policies.

The New America Foundation does some good work, which we’ve occasionally highlighted on Streetsblog, with funding from a diverse array of sources. The organization is a far cry from transparently self-interested groups like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. It would be a shame if it started drifting in that direction.

Source: RAND Corporation

The brilliant thing about car-sharing is that it leads people to drive less by providing access to cars. It allows people to give up their personal vehicles (along with the gas, maintenance, parking, and insurance costs they entail) without giving up the ability to use the car once in a while when necessary. It diminishes the need for parking spaces, since one vehicle can serve several households. And it makes people think harder about the trips they take, since each trip constitutes a higher cost than in a personal vehicle, which come with high upfront costs but low per-trip costs, encouraging more driving just to get your money’s worth out of your investment.

But only 0.27 percent of U.S. drivers participate in car-sharing programs.

A recent study from the RAND Corporation estimates that that number could rise to 4.5 percent if policies were put in place to support car-sharing. RAND’s outer estimate of the potential of car-sharing goes as high as 12.5 percent of the 21-and-older population of major cities. The potential for greenhouse gas emissions savings is significant.

The RAND authors cite a 2008 survey showing that for every shared vehicle in use, nine to 13 private vehicles are taken off the road, and that half of car-sharing participants either sold a car or didn’t buy a new car because of their membership. Another survey found that average vehicle ownership per household fell from an already-low 0.47 to 0.24 cars after adopting car-sharing. Average vehicle ownership per household is 1.87 in the United States.

RAND attributes the greenhouse gas reductions from car-sharing to a) fewer vehicle miles traveled, b) fewer cars being manufactured, and c) more efficient vehicles being used more of the time. After all, car-sharing can avoid SUV syndrome, where people buy a big, heavy car for the one time a year that they actually go into the mountains with it, and then spend the rest of the year driving alone on highways and trying to park it in small spaces. Also, intensively-used shared cars will be replaced more often than private vehicles, meaning that more of them will have the most modern fuel-efficiency ratings. The report doesn’t mention the GHG savings if car-sharing results in the building of fewer roads or parking spaces.

The estimates of car-sharing’s potential market penetration are among the most helpful elements of the RAND report.

In the most optimistic scenario — 20.3 million car-share users, or about 36 times the current rate — car-sharing would reduce overall car emissions by 1.7 percent. A more realistic scenario of 7.5 million users, which would still require the widespread adoption of policies to support car-sharing, leads to a 0.6 percent emissions reduction. The authors provide a “cautionary note that estimates of growth in vehicle sharing have previously been proven wrong.” They cite a 1994 study that predicted that the market potential in Germany was 2.45 million members; “however, ten years later, the market stood at 70,000.”

On a per-person basis, car-sharing doesn’t cut emissions as much as transit. One person taking transit to work instead of driving can save more than two metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, according to APTA, as opposed to the above estimate of 0.89 tons per person car-sharing. But car-sharing also works in tandem with transit, functioning best where people can rely on transit for many trips. Car-sharing remains a largely urban phenomenon, according to the RAND report, with the only non-urban success stories on college campuses or eco-communes.

The other major contribution of the report is that it suggests some ways to make car-sharing more attractive. They say it will never take off unless car-sharing is 1) cheaper and/or more convenient than owning a personal automobile, 2) profitable for providers, and 3) reaches critical mass in a geographic area. To make that happen, they recommend reducing impediments in insurance policies and tax codes and increasing provisions for “one-way, dynamic vehicle sharing,” and better ride-matching services. The recommendations also include the promotion of short-distance, low-speed “neighborhood vehicles,” like the golf carts senior citizens drive around retirement communities, and the promotion of driverless vehicles. The report doesn’t explain in detail how driverless cars would enhance vehicle-sharing.

That long car commute could be destroying your health. Photo: AOL News

Less attention has been paid to the threat of the lengthy car commute. But a new study [PDF] from the Center for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health and American Cancer Society is confirming what many have long suspected: lengthy car commutes are terrible for your health.

A study of more than 4,000 residents of greater Dallas found that those who commute more than 15 miles by car get less exercise and have larger waistlines and poorer cardiovascular health. Those who commuted more than 20 miles were also at greater risk for high blood pressure.

The results were adjusted for age, gender, education, family circumstances and health history.

One rather obvious explanation noted by researchers is that long commutes replace time that could be dedicated to exercise. The study’s authors also noted that “participants with long commutes were more likely to live in suburban neighborhoods, which often possess built environment features that are associated with physical inactivity and sedentary behavior.”

In addition, high blood pressure may also be caused by the stress of commuting, or the social isolation it produces, researchers said.

Factoring in proximity to bike lanes, street connectivity, topography, and commuter cycling rates, the Bike Score algorithm rated Minneapolis America's most bikeable city. Image: Walk Score

The people behind Walk Score, the real estate rating service that goes by the slogan “Drive Less, Live More,” are out with a new rating system, based on hard data, that should prove useful to prospective city dwellers: Bike Score.

The company launched the Bike Score website today, using its new algorithm to rank the ten most bikeable cities in the country. (We covered their release of city rankings for transit last month.) Minneapolis ran away with the top prize with a 79 percent bikeability rating. San Francisco tied Portland for number two, despite the fact that hilliness was a factor. D.C. and New York also placed highly (while the NYC core rates very highly on Bike Score, the bike lane deserts outside the center city score quite low).

The staff of Walk Score is made up of a whole lot of bike commuters. No wonder they were excited to launch a new bikeability ranking. Photo courtesy of Walk Score

In other bikeability rating news, the League of American Bicyclists released its 2012 list of Bicycle Friendly Communities today. There’s a lot of overlap between the BFCs and the Bike Score winners, but they are compiled use vastly different methodologies. For one thing, you won’t find two of the League’s top three cycling cities on the Bike Score list because Bike Score, so far, only looks at cities with populations over 200,000. Sorry, Boulder and Davis.

Colorado and Montana did well in the League’s rankings this year. Missoula and Durango moved up to gold, and the Colorado towns of Gunnison and Aspen made it onto the list for the first year, rolling in at the silver level. Look for your city on their updated BFC list [PDF].

The League bases its BFC choices on somewhat subjective criteria. They look for the “five Es”: engineering, education, encouragement, evaluation & planning, and enforcement. Decisions are made by staff and external reviewers, in consultation with local stakeholders.

Bike Score, on the other hand, is based on pure numbers. Individual addresses are rated on a scale of 0-100 based on four factors:

• the availability of bike infrastructure (with on-street and off-street facilities weighted differently)
• the hilliness of the area (the one factor a city can’t control)
• amenities and road connectivity
• the number of bike commuters (because “biking is social” and there’s safety in numbers, explained Walk Score’s chief technology officer and co-founder Matt Lerner)

To then determine the score for the city, the individual address scores are used to compute scores for each block, and then the block-by-block scores are weighted by population density.

“For every location in the city, we add up the number of meters of bike lane, and there’s a distance-to-K function so the closer you have a meter of bike lane, the more valuable it is, and we don’t give you any credit after about a mile out,” said Lerner. “For every address, we do that calculation. It’s a new metric that is really about a specific location, not about the city overall. So what we’re really measuring is, for average person in that city, how good is biking.”

Note: The capability to score your own home isn’t available on the website yet, as it is for Transit Score and Walk Score, but Lerner says they hope to enable that soon so real estate agents can use Bike Score to advertise the homes they have for sale, as they do now with the other two. Walk Score has an Apartment Search function that allows renters to search by nearby amenities, distance to transit, commute time, price, number of bedrooms – and, of course, Walk Score. It interfaces with craigslist to show the complete ad all in one place with the walk/bike/transit information.

Right now you can plug in any address in the country and get a Walk Score for it, but even once Bike Score’s full functionality is rolled out, it won’t be so widespread. “With Bike Score we have to go out and get bike lane data from each city,” Lerner said, “so it’s more of a manual process.” They’re taking votes via Twitter for the next cities they should score.

Chicago's transportation "action plan" calls for increased camera-based traffic enforcement. Image: Chicago DOT

The city’s “Chicago Forward Action Agenda” [PDF] places strong, even revolutionary, emphasis on safety, in addition to some admirable cycling and transit ridership targets. Highlights include:

• A target of zero traffic fatalities annually in 10 years. (The city has been averaging about 50 a year)
• 20 miles per hour zones in all the city’s residential areas
• A five percent bike mode shift on trips less than five miles (currently 1.3 percent of Chicagoans travel by bike, but in the central city the figure is as high as two percent)
• An emphasis on street maintenance, or “fix it first”

In his introduction, Emanuel makes it clear that it’s a new day at Chicago DOT.

“Where we once built expressways that divided our communities, we are now reconnecting neighborhoods with new bus lanes and extensive and expanding bicycle facilities that offer safe, green, and fit ways to travel for all ages,” he says.

In the plan, the city makes a commitment to address problem intersections. The plan calls for the city to “analyze all fatal crashes involving pedestrian and cyclists” and as improve the city’s top 10 traffic collision locations annually.

City leadership also promises to invest in new infrastructure to smooth the ride for cycling and transit. The plan calls for a pilot project with 10 bicycle signals, 500 new bike racks per year and 100 transit-priority traffic signals.

The “Action Agenda” appears to be modeled after New York’s sustainable streets plan. It lays out a roadmap for Chicago DOT over the “next 24 months.” This is the city’s first ever comprehensive plan for transportation, according to Steven Vance at Grid Chicago.

Vance is generally pleased with the plan, though he says some areas are more ambitious than others.

“Much of the plan’s actions are new and impressive, and it puts onto paper tasks and activities that CDOT was already doing (or announced it will do, like build new CTA stations),” Vance said in a blog post last week. “It gives the public more information than it’s ever had about how it can hold CDOT accountable for maintaining streets, improving traffic safety, and managing a transportation system.”

Vance interviewed Klein about the plan last week. On the traffic fatalities goal — the highlight of the report — the commissioner said the city was aiming high, and hoping to come close.

“We have to push ourselves,” he said. “Some things are aspirational.”

The city will be reporting regularly on its progress toward the stated goals, said Klein.

Source: FRED

Everyone’s trying to figure out why, after decades of consistent growth, the amount Americans drive is leveling off and even declining. The decline started during the recession, to be sure, but was more dramatic than in previous recessions. As the economy began to get back on its feet, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) just barely ticked upward — and then fell again.

High gas prices probably have something to do with it. Young people embracing cities over suburban living — and valuing smartphones more than cars — might have something to do with it. It could be peak car – the theory that continued growth in driving simply can’t go on forever.

Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider found the trend notable enough to give it this headline over the weekend: “This Collapse In Automobile Usage Is Completely Unprecedented In The American Economy.”

Looking at VMT data now available on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s Economic Research site, Weisenthal posted two charts that put the one above in a little bit of perspective. (Note that these look somewhat different from the first chart because they look at the change from year to year, not the absolute numbers.)

Source: Business Insider

The two lines — GDP and VMT — track pretty closely together until just now. The rate of change in GDP more or less holds steady, but the VMT line takes a major dip. This was what Weisenthal found so unbelievable: that the reduction in VMT could be decoupled from economic fluctuations. But then he remembered something else that’s seemingly decoupled from GDP these days: employment.

When the blue line dips, that means the "population not in the labor force" increases. Source: Business Insider

The graph shows a rough correlation between growth in the number of people out of the workforce and decline in VMT. Indeed, this has been called a “jobless recovery” so the growth in people commuting probably has not been as strong as the rise in GDP.

Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt tackled this issue in a post two months ago and concluded that VMT was dropping despite job growth, and in terms of absolute numbers, that seems to be true. The chart above adds complexity to the picture but doesn’t discount Angie’s conclusion. High gas prices are still causing people to leave the car in the garage and take transit. Decline in exurban growth and strengthening preferences for walkable development mean trips get shorter and can even be taken without the use of the automobile.

It remains to be seen what will happen when or if employment fully bounces back, but there’s reason to believe the downward trend in miles driven could have legs.

Image: AmericaBikes

At a press conference outside the Capitol this morning, where gusty winds nearly carried off the visual aids (if it weren’t for a few diligent supporters), bicycle advocates joined members of Congress to unveil the results of a new survey about federal funding for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. The telephone poll of 1,003 Americans, commissioned by the advocacy group America Bikes and conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, was unequivocal: 83 percent said that federal bike-ped funding should increase, or at the very least be maintained.

“Even we were surprised,” said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. “From this day forward, we can say with total confidence that this issue has bipartisan support and is in the national interest.”

The poll is timely, coming the day after the first official meeting of the House-Senate conference committee charged with hammering out a compromise transportation bill before policy expires on June 30. The Senate bill includes some protections for bike-ped programs and devolves certain funding decisions to cities and local governments, while early drafts of the House bill eliminated those programs altogether.

Even more notable than the overwhelming support for current funding levels (and “increasing” had the edge over “maintaining,” 47 percent to 36) was the constant level of support across geographic, demographic, economic, and — perhaps most surprisingly — political boundaries. Among self-identified Republicans, 80 percent still favored maintaining or increasing bike-ped funding, compared to 88 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Independents.

“Every way you cut the numbers, it makes it all the more perverse that a few members of Congress would be opposed to this,” Clarke told Streetsblog.

Mount Bikemore: Reps. Petri and Blumenauer, Sens. Cardin and Durbin. Photo: Ben Goldman

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Congressmen Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Tom Petri (R-WI) were on hand to tout the survey’s results and defend the importance of bicycle and pedestrian programs.

“Some people fight crime, some people fight terrorism,” said Durbin, enumerating just a few reasons to enter public service. “The Tea Party came to fight bikes.” Durbin, who sits on the transportation bill conference committee, said that even his suburban and rural constituents are incredibly proud of their bicycle infrastructure and want to see continued federal support.

Fellow conferee Blumenauer invoked the “soft-spoken” mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, as one leader who understands the link between bike-friendliness and the retention of young graduates from colleges and universities. (The Princeton survey found over 90 percent of respondents aged 18-29 support bike-ped.) Chicago, along with New York and Portland, will soon join Washington in embracing bike-share programs, and Blumenauer pointed out that in addition to bicycling’s obvious benefits to health and congestion mitigation, “D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare is the only mass transit system in the United States fully funding its operating costs.” (Well, close enough.)

Clarke praised Petri, the lone Republican lawmaker present, for his “courage and fortitude” in defending bicycle programs against a strong prevailing wind from the right wing of his own party — though Petri questioned whether his actions can truly be called courageous if 83 percent of Americans are with him. Petri previously co-sponsored an amendment to the controversial House bill, H.R. 7, which would protect crucial sources of bike-ped funds such as the Transportation Enhancements and Safe Routes to School programs, but it was voted down in committee despite bipartisan support. Some have speculated that his steadfast defense of bike-ped funding may be the reason he was not nominated to the conference committee by Republican leadership.

“It’s great to have conferees [Durbin and Blumenauer] speaking out in support of this issue,” said Caron Whitaker, campaign director of America Bikes. Whitaker said she hopes the survey results will help convince the conference committee to retain the provisions of the Cardin-Cochran amendment to the Senate bill, which places bike-ped funding decisions directly in the hands of local authorities.

The greater D.C. community was also represented at the event as an example of what local commitment to biking and walking can look like. Angela Fox from the Crystal City Business Improvement District said she is focused on shifting perceptions of her modernist community, sandwiched between the Pentagon and Ronald Reagan Airport and built atop a system of underground tunnels. Under her direction, Crystal City has invested heavily in Capital Bikeshare, which Fox says has helped attract and retain the type of employees local firms prefer. (She has also expanded National Bike to Work Day, scheduled for next Friday, into Bike to Work Week in Crystal City.)

Local parent Sandra Moscoso was also on hand, having come directly from an event commemorating the first ever National Bike to School Day at nearby Lincoln Park. Her organizing campaign within the D.C. Public Schools system succeeded in getting 324 children to ride their bikes to school that morning, a strong showing that Moscoso believes is reason enough to want to see Safe Routes to School funding survive the conference process.

It’s unusual for conferences to meet in public, and leaders have indicated that this won’t be the only meeting they have in front of television cameras. Still, the sausage-making always happens behind closed doors. Here’s what we’ll be looking for as things get underway today:

Could the transportation bill be Rep. John Mica's downfall? Photo: Roll Call

Will anything come of it? “The first day will tell you exactly nothing,” Scott Slesinger, NRDC’s director of legislative affairs, told reporters last week. “You’ll walk out of there convinced that there’s no way they’re going to do a bill.”

In fact, the conventional wisdom right now is that this whole process will end in yet another extension, probably until the lame-duck session after the November election. But this conference committee could lay the groundwork for that bill. Both parties want to get a bill done, but Republican leaders are worried that their base will revolt at the sight of them negotiating with Democrats. So, in public they’ll be all hard-line rhetoric and uncompromising conservatism, and when the cameras are off they’ll horse-trade.

How strong is the Senate’s hand? The House has pretty limited leverage in this process because they didn’t pass a real transportation bill. The Senate is bringing to conference a bill that got a remarkable vote of confidence from senators across the political spectrum, and “the House sent over beach ball,” according to NRDC’s David Goldston.

“The House can’t figure out how to get even its own members together so they send these partial things over to the Senate to cause trouble,” said Goldston, “while the Senate has a bill that’s been passed by about three-quarters of the members of the Senate and was written by [Senators Barbara] Boxer and [James] Inhofe. The fact that Boxer and Inhofe were able to write a bill together is one of the least-appreciated stories of this Congress. So, peace breaks out but people say, ‘We’d rather continue to have war.’ That’s unfortunate.”

How significant are the “tweaks” the House is trying to make to the Senate bill? The amendments the House has put forward don’t have much to do with transportation but they sure could hold up this bill. Amendments to eviscerate the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) and de-regulate coal ash are controversial, but nothing will stir up as much trouble as the provision to force approval of the Keystone pipeline. The president has already vowed to veto any bill with such a provision, so the House knows that its insistence on this is just another way to kill the transportation reauthorization.

Meanwhile, the differences between the unpassed House proposal and the Senate bill are stark. The Senate breaks the commitment to dedicated bike/ped funding but hands more power over air quality funds to localities (rather than states), meaning more of that money will probably go to bike/ped. The Senate includes more performance measures, including for state of good repair. The House sticks to old formulas. The Senate does enough damage to NEPA by doling out penalties for missed environmental review deadlines, but that’s nothing compared to the House’s position that a missed deadline triggers an automatic approval. The Senate, admittedly, funds its bill with some deficit spending, while the House proceeds with the fiction that its proposal can be paid for with oil drilling.

Technically, none of this is up for consideration in the conference, since it’s not included in the bill the House passed and sent to conference. But House Transportation Chair John Mica has told Politico he’ll push to include as much policy from the original five-year House bill as he can. “You can do anything in conference,” he said.

If this goes to the lame duck, is it even worth it to pass the Senate bill? People refer to the Senate’s legislation as a “two-year” bill because it would have been, if it had been passed last September. But the end date is fixed at September 2013, and isn’t being pushed back along with the start date. So, if it’s passed in December, it’ll only be a 10-month bill.

Still, advocates say the Senate bill includes some worthwhile policy changes that would be an important basis for the next round. Plus, success breeds success in Washington. Proving that you can pass a bill — even a short bill — improves your odds of passing the next one.

Even if you see a 10-month bill as nothing but a glorified extension, at least it’s a 10-month extension — longer than any that we’ve gotten in the (almost) three years since the last bill expired.

Will Senate Republicans stand by their bill? So far, they’ve been pretty quiet. Inhofe and top Banking Committee Republican Richard Shelby both say the Senate has passed a good bill and they plan to defend it. Still, they both support the Keystone pipeline, so it’s unclear how this will shake out.

Given the amount of difficult compromise that happened to get a consensus bill passed in the Senate, it seems everyone there is serious about passing this legislation, meaning they might not go along with the House’s provisions, even if they agree with them, because they know it could sink the whole enterprise. Last summer, when Senate Republicans kept trying to kill bike/ped, Inhofe consistently voted against their attempts because he was committed to using a correct process.

Will House Republicans finally unite behind the conference report? Once all is said and done, if the conference committee does manage to agree on a bill through September 2013, would the House agree to it? After all, conference isn’t the final stage — each chamber still needs to approve the work of the conference committee.

Politico notes that Senate Democrats named some heavyweights to the conference committee while House leadership is taking a backseat. Still, some members speculate that GOP leaders will need to get involved at some point to whip enough support for the bill.

Will Mica and Boehner survive this? While reports of Mica’s demise turned out to be “greatly exaggerated,” experts say the failure to pass a substantive bill will almost certainly cost him his committee chairmanship — if he’s even re-elected to Congress. And Mica might not be the only casualty of the transportation bill debacle. House Speaker John Boehner’s lieutenant, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, is rumored to be planning a coup d’etat. While the two have tried to make nice in public of late, the tension between the two of them has led to a less united party than usual. Cantor could use Boehner’s failures to get the transportation bill through his own party as a reason to topple him.

Detail of a map showing the distribution of walkable blocks (in yellow) and federally-subsidized affordable housing (in purple) around Denver's transit lines and stations. Image: Denver Regional Equity Atlas

As more cities look to revive or expand their transit networks in the face of rising gas prices and maddening congestion, planners have had to remain vigilant to ensure that underprivileged communities are not displaced or adversely affected by the same transit improvements that could offer them numerous benefits.

A few different techniques have emerged that could assist planners and policymakers in making sure the benefits of transit are equitably distributed. Just last January, for instance, Streetsblog reported on the Health Impact Assessment for St. Paul, Minnesota’s Central Corridor, which analyzed how a proposed light rail line could better serve disadvantaged areas along the route from a public health standpoint.

Last month in Denver, the national nonprofit Reconnecting America debuted the Regional Equity Atlas, a geographic encyclopedia of the Mile High City’s ambitious long-range transit plans – known collectively as FasTracks — and the anticipated effects on surrounding communities. The report, a project of the Mile High Connects coalition, is a visual compendium of how the proposed transit expansions will affect not just health but housing, education, and economic development in greater Denver.

“It should be immensely useful not only to city officials, advocates, planners and social scientists in Denver, but also to anyone looking for a state-of-the-art analytical model to assist the coordination of transportation, housing, jobs, and access to important services in other American cities,” Kaid Benfield, director of sustainable communities for the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote last week. “It must have cost a fortune to underwrite.”

The impetus behind the Atlas, starting with the formation of Mile High Connects some 18 months ago, was the decision by the Ford Foundation to invest in Denver, said Catherine Cox Blair, Program Director at Reconnecting America.

“We have strong local foundations in Denver who came to the table,” including the Piton Foundation, which specializes in educational issues and is a co-author of the Atlas, Blair told Streetsblog. “Ford urged them to answer the question, ‘You are building this massive transit system, but how do your giving priorities align to support FasTracks? How can you augment access and opportunity for everyone?’”

The first step in making sure access and opportunity could be equitably distributed would be to make sure all stakeholders knew how their diverse range of issues — senior mobility, public health, education — connected to transportation. And the best way to do that turned out to be with maps.

“Nobody has really thought about this spatially before,” project manager Bill Sadler told Streetsblog. “People know the neighborhoods, they know where hospitals and grocery stores are, but they’ve never seen on a map, how far away things are or how close they are. That’s the biggest reaction.” Once the different partner organizations saw how they interacted with the transportation network, Sadler helped whittle their data down to 31 maps (still a big number, according to Sadler) that told the story of what transit means for all of Denver.

Partner foundations can use this information in countless ways. As Benfield pointed out on his blog, one point that comes through loud and clear is that the supply of affordable housing is larger than most people might realize — but not all of it is close enough to transit. A local foundation, in reviewing community development grant applications, could adjust their priorities to support more initiatives that promote pedestrian and bicycle connectivity at transit stations, based on what they can learn by looking at a few maps in the atlas. At the same time, foundations dealing with public health could develop more accurate ideas of the catchment areas of different clinics and hospitals to guide them in their own grantmaking. All of a sudden, community groups with diverse interests and priorities are all looking at the same map to gauge their progress.

The Equity Atlas represents one full year’s work for Sadler and his team, and through that work they have already identified their next area for research. “We have a jobs piece underway, drilling down into the jobs maps and looking at middle-skill jobs and small businesses in two corridors, so we can figure out how to connect people to those jobs, to where the training centers are, and make a stronger equity case within the economic development sector,” said Sadler. “It’s our goal within the collaborative to hold ourselves accountable as we build out our network. We want to look back in 5 or 10 years and see we’ve improved the quality of life for people in the region.”

As for being a model for other cities to follow? “We got the idea from Portland,” Sadler readily admits, referring to the Coalition for a Livable Future’s equity atlas project, started in 2002. “I’d love to see it become a national model. There’s still a lot of case-making to be made.”

Neither Democratic nor Republican proposals will have any impact on gas prices, but that doesn't seem to matter in the political blame game. Photo: FuelEconomy.gov

Republicans are blaming President Obama for the “high” prices, saying his refusal to sign onto more oil drilling, weaker regulations, and the Keystone pipeline is costing Americans at the pump. Obama shot back with his plan to increase regulation of oil speculators. Neither plan will do much of anything about gas prices, but they make for good election-year candy.

The GOP has passed a raft of bills to increase oil drilling, even (especially!) in environmentally sensitive areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Rocky Mountains. We’ve covered on this blog several of those bills that were supposed to help pay for infrastructure.

Now Republicans have a new plan to lower gas prices by giving your kid asthma.

The Gasoline Regulations Act would water down the 40-year-old Clean Air Act requirement that pollution standards be decided purely on the science of public health. Instead, it would introduce a cost factor. It also mandates research on the economic impact of EPA regulations and delays the enactment of air quality rules until the study is complete. “This legislation raises the cost of gasoline to a new level,” NRDC’s Scott Slesinger said. “Americans would have to pay with both their money and their health.”

Under existing law, cost concerns can factor into how air quality problems are mitigated, but they can’t be a factor when determining how much pollution is unhealthy to breathe. That part, these days, is still left up to science. The Supreme Court upheld this standard in 2001, with none other than conservative mainstay Antonin Scalia writing the majority opinion.

NRDC also claims “the bill won’t do a thing to lower gas prices,” and the organization’s C4 wing put out a video of bill sponsor Ed Whitfield admitting that fact (while other Republicans line up to say otherwise).

Meanwhile, President Obama announced his plan a couple weeks ago to rein in Wall Street oil speculators. The proposal would beef up the ability of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to oversee trading (to the tune of $52 million), increase penalties for market manipulation, and force traders to spend more of their own money on the deals.

Republicans are trying to remove regulations, not strengthen them, so the House is unlikely to go along with this plan. Then again, Democrats are unlikely to go along with the GOP Gas Act. And really, most bills and proposals introduced these days don’t go anywhere. According to GovTrack, only five percent of bills introduced are signed into law on a good year – and if you hadn’t noticed, this is not a good year.

“A lot of Beltway scorekeepers think Obama’s announcement is smart, simply because it produced headlines such as, ‘Obama Moves to Curb Oil Speculators,’” Matthew Philips wrote in BusinessWeek. “That may be, but it’s not clear the plan would actually lower the price of oil, because the demand to invest in it would remain.” He added that if investors can no longer invest in oil speculation, they might just go ahead and “start buying actual oil.”

None of these measures will do anything to impact gas prices, wrote USA Today’s Wendy Koch. “U.S. gas prices are largely determined by global crude oil prices,” she wrote, “which depend on a widening and shifting array of factors half a world away: economic sanctions on Iran; deepwater drilling off Brazil; spare oil capacity in Saudi Arabia; auto use in China; less nuclear power in Japan.”

“So oil rigs may be hopping in North Dakota,” she went on, “but what happens in the Strait of Hormuz will likely have more impact on prices at the local gas station — even though the U.S. doesn’t import a single gallon from Iran.”

Koch lists five factors that do impact prices at the pump:

• Global crude oil price increases – the price of crude determines 72 percent of the price of a gallon of gas
• Iran and other geopolitical uncertainties in places like Yemen, Syria, and Sudan
• Limited spare capacity (meaning even small changes in supply or demand can swing prices)
• Rising worldwide demand – it’s going down in the U.S. as we invest in more efficient technologies and driving levels off, but in emerging economies oil demand is booming
• Refinery closures and production costs

One element largely missing from the bipartisan outcry over skyrocketing gas prices is the pesky truth that gas prices are actually dropping. Not by a lot, but the average cost of a gallon of gas went down eight cents next month, and experts agree that it’s peaked for the year. But don’t expect reality dampen the bloated political rhetoric six months before the election.

Photo: Flickr user Dok1

When it comes to improving existing transit, however, the mess in Washington is still threatening to delay some much needed improvements to Chicago’s century-old system of elevated trains.

Chicago’s Red Line is the city’s busiest, as well as one of its oldest, with some segments of the route dating to 1900. It’s long overdue for a modern overhaul, but current federal laws don’t offer much in the way of support for aging transit networks, making it much easier to get federal money if you’re starting from scratch. As an article in the Chicago Tribune describes it, the fate of the Red Line hinges on the work of the conference committee currently hashing out a national transportation bill:

Under existing federal transit rules and the House proposal, the Red Line replacement wouldn’t be eligible for “new starts” funding because the project is on an existing transit line.

The Senate bill, however, “recognizes common sense and says you’re building a new railroad,’’ [Chicago Transit Authority President Forrest] Claypool said. “It just happens to be within the existing right of way that is serving an increasing number of riders each year, despite its deteriorating condition.’’

Cost estimates for the rebuilding range from $2 billion to $4 billion depending on “options for new stations and other upgrades” according to the Tribune, and that’s only the first phase, covering about nine miles on the city’s north side. A planned 5.3-mile extension on the south side would cost an additional $1.4 billion, and is also on hold pending Congressional action.

Rebuilding the Red Line had been suggested as a possible use of financing from the new infrastructure trust, but it’s not clear how any borrowing would be paid back. Matt Sledge at the Huffington Post raised the point that Emanuel still hasn’t been specific about what kind of projects the trust will be able to finance — and who will benefit from them.

Absent some additional certainty in Washington, it seems increasingly unlikely that city hall can fill in all the gaps, even in a city with as much forward momentum as Chicago.

Washington, DC has been experimenting with performance parking. Does a new hire mean the city is going to make more sweeping changes? Photo: We Love DC

New DC parking czar Angelo Rao has all the trappings of a real reformer, according to Josh Hendel at TBD on Foot, and his selection by Mayor Vince Gray could be telling.

For a few years now, Washington has taken some important steps toward a smarter parking system. Among them: a pilot project in performance parking began in 2008 under then-mayor Adrian Fenty, and the City Council voted this week to let the pilot expand citywide. Gray’s recently stated goal of making three out of four trips car-free by 2030 also presumably carries major implications for parking policy.

Rao seems like an apt choice if Gray is serious about parking reform, Hendel reports:

Parking in particular will play a crucial role as D.C. struggles to manage its gridlock and transportation priorities. Mayor Vince Gray identified parking as one of the short-term priorities in his Sustainable D.C. plans, which call for three out of four trips to be car-free within 20 years. Of the two short-term actions the city needs: “Reduce building parking minimums and increase the availability of on-street parking through citywide performance parking districts.”

Luckily Angelo Rao’s sensibilities seem to fit right into the direction that D.C. is heading — although they have apparently provoked controversy in the past.

In a 2009 presentation down in Florida, Rao named his father Giuseppe as his hero and referred to his motto: “If I can’t walk or take a streetcar to it, it isn’t worth going to.” In the presentation, Rao emphasizes right-of-way concerns and pedestrian rights. He shows how the speed of cars coincides with pedestrian fatalities. His slides point to traffic calming measures. “Think pedestrian first,” Rao advises, and “share the road.”

If that wasn’t endearing enough, rumor has it that Rao was let go from his job as transportation director of St. Peterburg, Florida for his “controversial” “vehicle-slowing devices.”

Elsewhere on the Network today: Bike PGH celebrates the coming unveiling of Pittsburgh’s first on-street bike corral. Rust Wire outlines greater Lansing, Michigan’s regional sustainability initiative. And Twin City Sidewalks presents a partial list of why St. Paul, Minnesota is a great biking city.

Photo: KVAL

This perfect storm suggests the time may be right to adopt vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fees — charges based on how much people drive — to pay for the nation’s surface transportation system. Congress is unlikely to pass a multi-year transportation bill anytime soon, and current stop-gap funding is due to expire at the end of June. But the results of a two-year University of Iowa VMT national field study offer a path forward for sustainable funding of surface transportation.

Preliminary findings from the federally-funded field study (the full report has not yet been released by the Department of Transportation) show that the system could work on a nationwide scale. The results, contained in a Transportation Research Board Journal paper authored by University of Iowa professors Paul Hanley and Jon Kuhl, also show that the public would accept the concept of paying a fee for road use based on distance traveled instead of gas consumed.

The field study was based out of 12 sites, monitoring more than 2,600 volunteer participants who drove a total distance of 21 million miles throughout the United States (except Alaska and Hawaii), for an average of roughly 9,000 miles per driver.

The study deployed a prototype mileage-based charging system with an on-board unit installed in each participant’s vehicle. The unit computed mileage-based user charges for federal, state and local jurisdictions and periodically uploaded accrued charges via a cellular link to a central billing center. The center subsequently created monthly billing statements that were sent to participants.

Privacy concerns, often cited as an argument against VMT-based charges, were taken into account in the study’s design. While the onboard unit in each vehicle used a GPS receiver to determine driver location for the purpose of assessing state and local charges, the system did not retain or transmit any specific information regarding vehicle location or routes travelled.

The results of the field test showed that a nationwide system of mileage-based fees is completely feasible using existing technology. Early misgivings on the part of drivers faded as they gained more experience with the system: At the outset of the study, only 42 percent of participants held a positive view of GPS-based mileage fees; approval increased to 70 percent by the study’s end.

The results also indicated a marked preference for accuracy over privacy on the part of participants. Over the course of the study, the monthly invoices issued to drivers were presented in varying degrees of detail. A whopping 60 percent of participants favored highly audited statements, which include a daily review of miles traveled. Only nine percent preferred the maximum privacy version, which lists only the total miles traveled per month. (In a second phase of the study, a modified version that fell somewhere between the two was favored by most of the participants.)

Three years ago, two separate federal commissions on surface transportation released reports recommending that the federal gas tax be gradually replaced with VMT charges. But the White House flatly refused to seriously consider the proposals at the time. With the House and Senate now at loggerheads over how to fund the nation’s transportation system – the House has taken a tenth short-term extension to a conference committee with the two-year bill the Senate passed in March – it is highly unlikely that a multi-year transportation bill will pass this election year.

We know that a national vehicle mile user fee system can work. The administration ought to take the initiative and support what most experts say is a fairer, more sustainable method to fund our roads, bridges and transit. But that likely won’t happen until long after the November election.