Streetsblog San Francisco

This Twitter photo of LeBron James biking to American Airlines Arena before facing off against Derrick Rose and the Chicago Bulls last night has gone viral on sports news sites all over America.

There are some interesting sociological currents swirling around LeBron James, bike commuter. While the photographer labeled James a “manchild” for taking to Miami’s none-too-friendly streets on a bike, the prevailing sentiment in the ESPN comments section seems to be that the sight of LeBron riding to work will help rehab his public image.

After the Heat edged the Bulls, James told reporters in the locker room that bike commuting is pretty routine for him. In fact, he seems to enjoy talking about the bike ride more than the basketball game:

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The year-end pledge drive for Streetsblog and Streetfilms is in full effect. Thanks to everyone who’s contributed so far to support high-impact news, commentary, and videos that make the case for safer streets and sustainable transportation.

If you haven’t contributed yet, here’s a little extra incentive. Give between now and the end of the week, and you could win a lovely, sturdy, functional Zero Tweed Bag courtesy of the fine San Francisco-based manufacturers at Rickshaw Bags. Feast your eyes on the prize:

Donate between now and Friday at midnight and you’ll be entered to win one of these puppies. We’ll announce the winner next week.

Whether you claim the prize or it goes to someone else, you’ll come away with a warm feeling after making a contribution to your online voice for livable streets.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming…

A couple of car-related ads in heavy NFL rotation caught my attention mostly for their emphasis, intended or not, on car-free transportation.

Exhibit A is from Geico, which as usual doesn’t use cars in its ads for car insurance. Instead, in this spot the company’s ubiquitous cartoon spokeslizard is depicted walking the center line of the Brooklyn Bridge bike-ped path, extolling the value of Geico auto, RV and motorcycle insurance. Then comes the caveat — “You want to find a place to park all these things? Fuhgeddaboudit! This is New York.” — before the lizard is almost squashed by a cyclist who yells at him for being in the way.

Whether you’re from the city or not, you’re in on the joke: New York is a place where space is tight and people are on the move. But also: You don’t need a car to live here, and in fact, you’re probably better off without the hassle.

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I’m pleased to announce that Streetsblog is adding a new service: the Streetsblog jobs board. If you have a job opening in the fields of urban planning, transportation engineering, or livable streets advocacy, you’ll reach a talented pool of people by placing the position on Streetsblog.

Posting on Streetsblog gets the word out about your job opening to a national audience of professionals and advocates who are committed to moving cities toward a more sustainable future.

Each month, nearly 200,000 unique visitors come to Streetsblog, making us the most watched transportation and planning news source in America, according to the web analytics site Alexa.com. A job listing posted on Streetsblog will reach a targeted and educated audience:

• 41 percent of our readers have advanced degrees
• We have a strong following among professionals in the public and private sectors who specialize in bike and pedestrian planning, transit planning, urban design, parking management, and the intersection of transportation and technology
• We’re widely read by non-profits working for safer streets, smart growth, and more sustainable transportation
• Our readership ranges from students and professionals at the outset of their careers to top executives and experienced managers

The price for a job listing on Streetsblog, which will be highlighted on all of our sites, is $50. Early adopters get a 100 percent discount: Our first 40 listings are free.

If you’re searching for a job, it’s easy to browse our database for openings in your field. (We have ten listings in five cities — and counting — as we go to press.)

As an independent, not-for-profit news source, we’re also excited about the jobs board as one more way to diversify the way we fund Streetsblog and support the work we do. Try it out and if you have any feedback on how we can improve it, please drop us a line at tips@streetsblog.org.

This article was written by Steve Hiniker, executive director of 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin, and was reprinted with permission of that organization. It originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Governor Scott Walker’s proposed budget has more than enough pain to go around. Schools get hit with more than $800 million in cuts over the next two years. Recycling programs are not funded. Health care for seniors and the poor is slashed. Local road aids are cut. Some transit systems may not survive the proposed reductions. State revenue sharing is going down, putting more pressure at the local level to cover the costs of cuts to state aids – and without raising property taxes.

It’s called austerity.

Unless you happen to be a road builder.

Then this budget is called a bonanza.

While other programs are cut, highway expansion projects totaling more than $400 million get the green light. Highway expansion raids the general fund of more than $140 million, crushing any arguments that “highway users pay for the costs of roads.” In fact, the general fund and property taxes will pay about half of roadway costs in the future. So-called user fees are soon to be eclipsed by decidedly nonuser fees.

When you look at the increase in highway spending, it is also important to pay attention to where the money goes. Local road aids are cut, meaning that even though there is more money going for major highway expansion, there is less money for local units of government to fix those bone-jarring potholes that crop up every spring. Maintenance dollars for highways are down as well.

Walker has said that the highway expansion is needed for our economic recovery. The governor is putting a lot of faith – and capital – in having superhighways be the cornerstone of the state’s economic recovery. After all, he could have put the money in building better communities with better schools as a basis of economic development.

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Apologies for a little bit of self-promotion, but there are only about ten hours left to vote for Streetsblog in Treehugger’s Best-of-Green awards. We’re up for Best Transportation Website, and we stand out a little because Streetsblog is all about transit, biking, and walking, while the other worthy contenders are all largely about hybrid, electric, and low emissions cars.

We’ve probably benefited from some vote splitting among readers of the green car sites, but Streetsblog still trails the current frontrunner, EcoModder, by a little less than 100 votes. (EcoModder covers how to modify your car or motoricycle to achieve greater fuel efficiency.) Voting ends at midnight tonight, and I think a final push from our readers could put Streetsblog over the top, like a last-minute bid on eBay.

For many transit riders, there’s another fare hike coming down the track, one that many may not even be aware of.

A provision of the stimulus bill that offered a larger tax break for some transit riders is set to expire at the end of the year. A new report by TransitCenter [PDF], a non-profit that works to provide tax-free transit benefits, outlines just how many riders will be affected by the end of those benefits, and how hard it will hit ridership numbers. By letting the transit benefit revert back to its pre-stimulus levels, Congress would push Americans away from riding transit and pinch the pocketbooks of those who keep riding.

The tax break was slipped into the stimulus bill by New York Senator Chuck Schumer in early 2009. Previously, riders could buy up to $120 in transit fares per month without paying taxes on that income, while those driving to work could deduct up to $230 in parking costs (one example of how the incentive to drive is embedded in the tax code). Schumer’s proviso equalized the caps, but only temporarily. It expires at the end of this year.

TransitCenter found that the higher transit benefit helped increase the number of people who took advantage of it. In 2010, 17 percent more firms offered the pre-tax transit benefit than in 2009, and 29 percent of employers reported higher enrollment in commuter benefits programs while the higher cap was in effect.

Without the higher cap, transit riders paying the national average tax rate of 31.6 percent could see their commuting costs rise up to 18 percent higher. For riders facing such a large effective fare hike, the train won’t look so appealing anymore. The report looked at studies of previous fare hikes and found that an 18 percent increase in price will translate into a five to nine percent drop in ridership among that group.

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The New York Times called Ted Kheel, who died Friday at the age of 96, New York City’s pre-eminent labor peacemaker from the 1950s through the 1980s. And he was. Ted was also a steadfast advocate for civil rights, a fierce champion of mass transit, a stalwart defender of labor, an urbanist, a philanthropist, and a visionary. And, for the better part of a century, a vital element of progressive struggle in New York and beyond.

Ted became famous in the 1950s and 1960s as the mediator who settled newspaper strikes, railroad strikes and other high-stakes disputes. He was a fixture in The Times — his square jaw and determined face signifying probity and civic virtue. But much of his finest work was done out of the spotlight. It was Ted’s heretical but constant agitation to allocate surplus toll revenues from Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority to the financially ailing public transit agencies, that in 1968 led NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to combine the TBTA with the Transit Authority and the commuter railroads into the MTA — and destroy Moses’s power to fund highways and starve transit.

Ted’s transit advocacy rested on what he called “the fundamental principle that car travel and mass transit are interrelated, like two sides of an equation. There should be a balance,” he wrote, “but instead, our system is enormously, unconscionably out of balance,” causing road gridlock on the one hand and inadequate transit service on the other. Ted fought for five decades to correct that imbalance, with stories in New York magazine like “How To Stop Cars from Devouring the City” [PDF]; with a self-financed lawsuit [PDF] to overturn bond covenants through which the Port Authority enjoined itself from expanding mass transit, that Ted pursued all the way to the Supreme Court (losing on a tie vote); and, in his final years, with an even more audacious venture that would draw me into his orbit and point the way to a new transit revolution with the potential to surpass that of 1968.

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We
are excited to announce the official launch of Streetsblog Capitol
Hill. With major transportation, climate and energy legislation coming
before Congress in the next year or two we felt that it was critical to
have a talented journalist down in Washington D.C. covering the issues
on a daily basis. With the financial support of the Surdna Foundation
and the Wallace Global Fund the Livable Streets Initiative has hired
reporter Elana Schor
to cover the federal beat for us. DC.Streetsblog.org (as it’s known to
your web browser) will be her new home. Sarah Goodyear, editor of our national blog nework, and talented writers like Ryan Avent will be contributing to Streetsblog Capitol Hill as well.

Broadly
speaking, we hope to do two things with this new edition of
Streetsblog. First, we aim to make it a high-quality daily source for
news and analysis of federal transportation policy and related issues.
We want to create a blog that is a daily must-read for the advocates,
lawmakers, Congressional staffers, urban planning practitioners, policy
wonks and lobbyists who are working to shape the future of America’s
transportation systems.

Our second goal for Streetsblog
Capitol Hill is to help bring outsiders into the federal transportation
policy-making process. For decades, transportation policy on Capitol
Hill has mostly been an arcane, complex insiders game
– a game that’s been played best by highway lobbyists. Streetsblog
Capitol Hill will put locally-oriented livable streets advocates on the
playing field and help them better understand the rules of the game. As
the 293 bloggers who are now members of the Streetsblog Network
make clear every day, a vibrant, grassroots movement for sustainable
transport, smart growth and livable streets is active and growing
increasingly powerful in cities and states nationwide. Streetsblog
Capitol Hill will help connect these local activists to the important
action taking place inside the Beltway. 

Regular
readers will notice that "Capitol Hill" has replaced "National Blog
Network" in the tab above. Streetsblog.net has not gone away. You will
still find Sarah Goodyear’s daily Network round-up posted on all of our
blogs. Network headlines and access to the Network web site can be
found in the sidebar at right. Likewise, the RSS feed for Streetsblog
Capitol Hill can be found here.

Ray LaHood is known for his disarming candor -- his recent admission that he's not "that great a transportation person" being a case in point -- and those qualities were on vivid display today as the Transportation Secretary delivered an address to the National Press Club.

LaHood's speech was aimed at countering a recent flurry of media coverage that questioned the potential for success, as well as the spend-out rate, of the White House's $787 billion economic stimulus plan. But his feistiest pushback ended up coming in response to the George Will column that already has sparked a debate challenge from Portland's local congressman.

Asked if his emphasis on livable communities was, as Will's column argued, a veiled effort to "make driving more torturous" and "coerce people out of their cars," LaHood was unbowed.

"It is a way to coerce people out of their cars," he said, observing that few people enjoy spending an hour behind the wheel to travel to work or run an errand. While every community cannot be redesigned to coax more residents onto transit or bikes, he added, the encouragement of those opportunities is important.

"The only person I've heard object to this is George Will," LaHood said. Pressed again to answer conservative critics who see the hand of Big Government in his agenda, the former Republican congressman quipped: "About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people's lives."

But LaHood didn't stop there. He went on to address local transit agency budgets, how to fund the next six-year federal transportation bill and other pressing questions.

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