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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].

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his DOT head Gabe Klein have introduced a bold, 100-page plan to to make the Windy’s City’s transportation system more safe and sustainable.

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.

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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.)

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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.

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The first meeting of the transportation bill conference committee is today at 3:00. (To familiarize yourself with the participants, see Ben’s reports on the House and Senate conferees.) We’ll be live-blogging it, beginning to end.

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.

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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.

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Though many transportation reformers, economists and environmentalists would say that gas prices aren’t nearly high enough to disincentivize single-occupancy-vehicle use and to pay for the external harms, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill take it for granted that gas prices are too damn high. In fact, it’s one of the very, very few things that they do agree on these days. And it’s a message that resonates with their constituents, who are suffering under a sluggish economy.

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.

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The transportation news has been flying out of Chicago lately. Last week, in a 41-9 vote, the City Council approved Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Infrastructure Trust, which will be used to build projects with private financing. Earlier this week, Emanuel and transportation commissioner Gabe Klein just unveiled a plan for a downtown bus rapid transit loop that will serve six different routes. Those bus lanes will open within two years. In the meantime, 2012 will see the inauguration of a 300-station bike share system and the city’s first enhanced bus service on Jeffrey Boulevard.

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:

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There’s a new sheriff in Washington, at least when it comes to parking.

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.”

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The shortcomings of the current gas tax are well-known. The federal rate (18.4 cents/gallon) has not been raised in nearly twenty years and is not tied to inflation, yet it remains the primary source of funds for federal transportation spending. The problem is exacerbated by improving vehicle fuel economy. And as electric cars roll off the assembly line in greater numbers and become the vehicle of choice for more drivers, relying on the gas tax as the primary source of transportation funding makes even less sense.

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.

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