Streetsblog San Francisco

Right now, transit riders get the same commuter tax benefits as drivers: $245 a month in pre-tax income to spend to get to work. But next year, straphangers might go back to second-class status, getting just $125 for their ride.

A new bill would save transit riders as much as drivers on their commute. Photo: WJLA

Four members of Congress, two Democrats and two Republicans, have stepped up to make sure that doesn’t happen — next year or ever. Yesterday, Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Michael Grimm (R-NY), James McGovern (D-MA), and Peter King (R-NY) introduced the Transit Parity Act, which would make tax credit parity permanent for drivers and public transportation commuters.

Rather than have to fight it out every year, transit riders and advocates for sustainable transportation would know that our equality is enshrined in law.

The “Transit Parity Act” caps both the transit and parking benefits at $220, making the change deficit-neutral. 

“With rising gas prices and highly congested streets, we should be encouraging New Yorkers to use more public transportation, not push them back into their cars,” said Rep. Grimm in a statement.

“By helping protect commuters’ choices, and preserving equity between those who drive and those who take transit or vanpool,” said Rep. Blumenauer, “we can avoid a tax increase on millions of families, and continue to give workers the option to use a transportation mode that increases economic productivity, reduces congestion, and is friendlier to the environment.”

Parity between the tax benefit enjoyed by drivers and transit riders first became law when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in 2009. Parity continued through 2010 and 2011, but Congress let it expire for all of 2012. The fiscal cliff deal early this year saw a return to parity – retroactively, even, if you can figure it out. If the Transit Parity Act passes, we can stop fighting this battle every year.

Cleveland's East 4th Street today: no longer a den of drugs and prostitution. Photo: East 4th

Ari Maron had no friends.

When he moved back to Cleveland after college, all his friends had moved away. “They’d all gone to New York and Chicago and San Francisco,” he said. “And none of them lived in cul-de-sacs. None of them drove SUVs. They all lived in mixed-use buildings, they were all connected to transit, they were all in walkable communities.” If only they could figure out how to build communities like that in Cleveland, Maron thought, “perhaps I’d have some friends.”

That, he said, was the motivating factor for him to abandon his ambitions of being a concert violinist and join the family construction business.

Maron is part of the LOCUS network of smart-growth-oriented real estate developers, which operates under the aegis of Smart Growth America. LOCUS shows that walkable communities aren’t just pretty and good for the environment — they generate wealth. Not all developers are in it to make friends, after all — they want to turn a profit. The good news is, they can do both.

Maron told his story to a LOCUS conference yesterday in Washington, DC. He said his family firm, MRN Ltd., bought 15 historic buildings in the downtown core, focusing on East 4th Street. The ground floor were all drug fronts, and the street was a center of prostitution. The upper floors were all vacant. There were 250 property owners to deal with, and the big developers just weren’t willing to bother. But Maron and his family bought them out.

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Back in the day, we beheld the future, and in it, we were zipping about in electric cars. Yes, on that day way back in the aughts, we beheld a future in which a passel of problems were about to become passé: crippling gas prices, entanglements with oil-rich frenemies, dirty air, and climate-changing emissions would all disappear through the magic of automotive engineering. Chevy’s Volt, Nissan’s Leaf, and next generation EVs would mitigate car culture’s costs. And we would still get to drive all over kingdom come.

Look, ma, no hands! Behold, Google's self-driving car. Photo: Byte and Chew

What happened to the fantasy of EVs should provide a reality check to our understanding of self-driving cars — but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Just over 71,000 of the vehicles now traversing America’s roads are electric — less than 0.03 percent of the total. Their share is likely to remain in the single digits through 2035. The revolution so heavily televised hasn’t happened.

New CAFE standards championed by environmentalists and set by the EPA have had a more profound effect, forcing incremental improvements to models across automakers’ fleets. Model year 2012 saw the greatest annual boost in fuel economy since 1975; from MY2006 to 2011, emissions dropped 10 percent as fuel economy improved 11 percent. Still, overall fuel economy remains under 24 mpg, far from the triple-digit dream that electric cars presented when rolled out. Experts also caution that the used-car market could undermine these standards, keeping old gas-guzzlers on the road longer as people avoid buying pricier new cars.

The evolution toward a less gas-guzzling car fleet is a slow one, nudged along by force of advocacy and regulation, and so too will be the evolution toward safer, self-driving cars. 

It’s hard to tell this, though, from the coverage of self-driving cars in the media, which might be even more breathless than the coverage of EVs. Hopped-up headlines blare that self-driving cars will “change our lives.” They are going to “change everything.” Crash rates and insurance and medical costs will go down! Fuel efficiency up! Pollution and traffic congestion down! Productivity up! And everything’s going topsy-turvy “faster than you think” — our dramatic new future is once again moments away. Get ready.

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Here’s another obscure but significant obstacle to building walkable places in America: the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ shoddy traffic generation models for mixed-use development.

The model used by traffic engineers around the country to measure “trip generation” at new developments consistently overestimates the amount of motor vehicle traffic produced by mixed-use projects, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. This often increases the cost of building mixed-use projects, because the developers are asked to take steps to compensate for the added traffic. To address this problem, the EPA worked with transportation researchers around the United States to develop a better traffic prediction model.

Current traffic modeling overestimates the traffic caused by mixed-use development by about 35 percent, on average. Image: Kyle Gradinger on Twitter

Reid Ewing, a transportation engineering professor at the University of Utah, helped develop the new model to forecast the traffic generation of walkable development. I caught up with him at the Congress for New Urbanism conference last week in Salt Lake City.

Angie Schmitt: Can you explain the new method?

Reid Ewing: There’s a current methodology, which is the Institute of Transportation Engineers’, and it overestimates the number of external vehicle trips generated by a development if the development has mixed uses. If it’s got residential, retail, and office, those uses interact and a lot of trips stay within the development. And if it’s a development downtown, a lot of those trips that leave the development are walk and transit trips. ITE doesn’t account for that, it doesn’t account for the full number of trips that will stay within a development or the use of alternative modes for those that leave the development. So we developed a methodology.

AS: How many trips are reduced by mixed-use development?

RE: It varies from almost zero to over 50 percent. In a master planned community, it’s huge — a lot of the trips are going to stay within the community. If you have a stand-alone, freeway-oriented community that happens to have mixed-used, a much smaller percentage will stay within the community. But on average, about 35 percent. So the ITE method seems to overestimate by, on average, about 35 percent.

AS: So, how does the ITE method cause problems?

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“Improvement.” “Upgrade.” “Level of Service.” The traffic engineering profession is full of buzzwords laden with meaning — and, for the most part, the embedded meaning is something to the effect of “cars are king.”

Ian Lockwood is also a prolific cartoonist. Image: How We Drive

Ian Lockwood, P.E., has been working in the engineering profession for 30 years. He served as the chief transportation official for the city of West Palm Beach, Florida, before joining the engineering firm AECOM as a consultant and completing a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard.

Lockwood is on a mission to reform the way his profession uses language. I got a chance to sit down with him last week at the Congress for New Urbanism conference in Salt Lake City. Here’s what he had to say:

Angie Schmitt: Are there any words in particular you are targeting?

Ian Lockwood: What I’m really targeting are the values that are behind the words. The words were coined during the golden age of the automobile, the 1930s through the 60s, by the transportation experts. Those folks memorialized those words in our books and technical manuals, like the Highway Capacity Manual. And the intention was to express the values of the profession in those words. The values, of course, were very automobile-oriented.

And we still use those words today, even though our value sets have shifted dramatically. What the words do is perpetuate the bias of the time. So if we want to reform and change things, it’s much more difficult if the automobile biases and culture are literally hard-wired into the language.

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The Better Block project, founded less than 10 years ago in Dallas, Texas, is not only changing streets for the better — in many ways, it’s changing the urban planning process.

Jason Roberts (right) was working as an IT consultant in Dallas when he started wondering why a particular part of his neighborhood was in such bad shape. Image: Pegasus News

Better Block brings “pop-up,” temporary businesses into abandoned buildings, creates temporary bike lanes with chalk and cones, turns underused parking spaces into outdoor cafés, and generally celebrates the awesome potential of ordinary urban places. The strategy of using temporary installations — a prime example of “tactical urbanism” — allows people to reimagine their neighborhoods while circumventing time-consuming and potentially hostile regulatory and political processes.

At the CNU 21 conference in Salt Lake City, I had the chance to sit down with Better Block’s visionary founder, Jason Roberts. Here’s his inspiring call to action:

Angie Schmitt: What is the history of the Better Block project?

Jason Roberts: The Better Block project started in April 2010, in Dallas, Texas. I had a series of blighted buildings in my neighborhood and a street that was really wide. I started trying to figure out why they were boarded up.

I found out it was zoned for light industrial, it wasn’t zoned for retail. The original reason these buildings exist was no longer allowed.

We looked at the streets and said, “Why can’t we get bike infrastructure in the area?” At some point I said, “Couldn’t we make this into our dream block, the blocks that I love in European cities or other places I’ve seen that are filled with flower shops and bakeries and cafes and bike infrastructure and landscaping and people sitting outside and eating and drinking?” I got together with some friends and we decided to do a guerrilla installation.

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Poor Ford.

Ford, you're trying a little too hard. Photo: Just Jared

They’re trying so hard. They’re like the Cassandra of the car world, foretelling the future of less driving, more transportation options, a preference for car-lite urban living. They’ve been re-designing their Mustang to appeal to younger folks and stressing their move away from cars and toward “mobility opportunities” (like driving cars). And now they’re holding panels with hip marketing firms, trying to figure out how to crack that elusive youth market. You know, the one that doesn’t want to buy cars.

Salon was there yesterday and brings us this dispatch:

The invitation from Ford, which had put on the event, told us the goal: “use data, trends and expertise to show that Millennials aren’t just a bunch of PBR-drinking hipsters who spin vinyl and ride bikes.” We were trepidatious. …

Attendees were asked to tweet about the event using the hashtag “#fordtrends.”

Cars went little discussed, at first: The Ford Fiesta, around which the company had tried to build a “movement” by lending cars, for free, to “influencers” and asking them to document their experience online, was generally agreed upon to have been a success among millennial car buyers. But the event was intended generally to get a sense of how brands might attach themselves, lamprey-like, to millennials who lack purchasing power as yet. Said [David] Rabkin, of American Express: “We attract a ton of millennials but aren’t able to approve them for many of our products, so we need to work on a relationship. Who are they now vs. who will they be when they hit our sweet spot of people who spend a lot of money? But we do love their spend.”

If you can decode ad-speak and know what “we do love their spend” means, please let me know in the comments. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure it means they’re trying to suck blood from a stone, so actually, never mind.

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The answer to that question is: Probably not. Reps. Daniel Lipinski, a Democrat from Chicago, and Michael Grimm, a Republican representing Staten Island and a little slice of Brooklyn, announced their new transit-focused Congressional caucus just last week, and this week the House has been in recess.

Rep. Lipinski, pictured here between Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Illinois DOT Secretary Gary Hannig on a Metra train, has formed a Public Transportation Caucus in the House. Photo: CREATE

But according to Lipinski spokesperson Guy Tridgell, there has been interest from other lawmakers, and Lipinski and Grimm will be reaching out to colleagues in the coming weeks to recruit more membership.

Rep. Lipinski is well-known for his support for transit and complete streets. He fought hard against the GOP effort to strip transit out of the Highway Trust Fund in 2012 and has been pushing hard to get more frequent service on the Metra commuter line that runs through his district. Lipinski is also a big believer in federal support for bike and pedestrian projects like Safe Routes to School.

Lipinski is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee but doesn’t serve on the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, serving instead on both Railroads and Aviation.

Congressional caucuses don’t have any formal duties, but Tridgell said the Public Transportation Caucus will be an active one. Aside from engaging on any issue that arises in the House, Tridgell said it will focus on state of good repair for transit systems. Though caucuses don’t hold hearings like committees do, Tridgell said the Public Transportation Caucus would gather input from stakeholders, including riders, employers, transit operators, business community.

Rep. Grimm is one of a small handful of Republicans to publicly support transit. He represents the only borough of New York not connected to the city’s subway system. By New York standards, Staten Island is fairly car-dependent, but by the standards of most of the country’s Republican districts, it’s a transit paradise.

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At the local level, business has been a key force in cementing transit victories. But at a national level, the business voice has been largely absent from heated, high-stakes debates about transit. With a new report called “Bosses For Buses,” Good Jobs First investigates the disparity between local- and national-level organizing efforts by employers.

The involvement of Washington University in St. Louis was pivotal in the passage of a half-cent sales tax for transit in 2010. Image: Good Jobs First

In the past few years, there have been three existential threats to federal support for transit, and at no time did the business community step forward to make its voice heard.

“There’s this kind of schizoid situation where, outside the beltway, we see very strong support for transit among employers and riders and lots of other people and more than 70 percent of state and local ballot initiatives consistently winning, year in and year out,” report co-author Greg LeRoy told reporters yesterday. “But on the Hill, here inside the beltway, for three different episodes, we see a very fractured corporate voice on transit and less positive outcomes.”

Those three episodes were: the Republican proposal to cut federal funding for transit during the last surface transportation reauthorization; the expiration of parity between commuter benefits for transit and for parking; and the elimination of operations support for transit systems from early drafts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act by then-White House Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers.

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