Streetsblog San Francisco

For decades, cyclists bickered amongst themselves about the efficacy and safety of bike infrastructure. With the proliferation of protected bike lanes in recent years, however, everyone can see that predictions about bike lanes making streets more dangerous for cycling simply didn’t come to pass. Network blogger Elly Blue at Taking the Lane says the debate has been settled.

The evidence that protected bike lanes improve safety and retail performance has demolished the arguments against bike infrastructure, Blue writes. And cities around the country have New York to thank for that:

In 2007, New York City added protected bike lanes, also known as “cycle tracks” to two previously car-centric one-way arterials in Manhattan, 8th and 9th Avenues. (This short movie explains more.) These lanes—basically, regular bike lanes with a physical barrier (often parked cars) and special signals at intersections in order to separate people on bikes from people driving and walking—were controversial before and after construction, with lots of dithering and yammering about how they would hurt business and freight, cause crashes, hold up traffic, and waste time and money.

The city’s transportation department released a study last October, however (I’ve been busy and just got in on the game this week), that puts much of that criticism to rest, with a zing. (Read about the study here or download the PDF here.)

First, on safety: True to form, this bike infrastructure did more than make cycling safer: The study found a 35% decrease in traffic crash related injuries to all street users on the 8th Ave path, and a whopping 58% on its 9th Ave counterpart.

Meanwhile, retail sales income in locally-based businesses along the 9th Ave lane went up as much as 50%. Yep, half again what they were before 2007. And this was during a recession. In the same period, borough-wide retail sales only increased 3%.

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Alon Levy at Pedestrian Observations ran a thought-provoking post today about the level of democratic involvement that goes into major American transportation projects.

The problem in the United States, he writes, is that most big transportation spending decisions are made by a handful of powerful interests who believe that keeping the public in the dark is to their advantage. That’s helped produce a lot of bad projects and made good projects worse, Levy says:

When there is democracy – by which I mean not just periodic elections offering two parties to choose from, but a referendum process, transparency, and community consultations – people have an incentive to be informed. It’s possible to sway many people in one’s community and have a positive effect on local state services. Local politicians who are informed on the subject will be able to lead spending and planning efforts and can count on the support of informed voters. In contrast, when there is democratic deficit, being informed is far less useful, because decisions are made independently of what people think unless they are power brokers, or perhaps wealthy, power-brokering communities.

Transit advocates also need to be advocates for transparency and an informed public, writes Levy:

Throughout the transit activist community, including nearly every blogger and commenter but also the main activists on the ground, there’s a tendency to view any community opposition to a project as NIMBYism and to ask for changes that make it easier for the government to get its projects done, as in the Robert Moses era. Social democrats and neo-liberals are equally complicit in the march for not just centralization, which can be done with democratic checks, but also concentration of power in the hands of state officials.

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As New York readers know, bike-share stations are hitting the streets after the program encountered a few snags last year. When members start taking the first rides on Citi Bike later this month, it will be the nation’s largest bike-share system, launching with 6,000 bikes.

Right now the sight of those new bike stations is generating all sorts of reactions, and plenty of people outside New York are also watching to see the results. Network blog Boston Streets offers some friendly advice from a city that’s been through the experience of launching an unfamiliar form of public transportation, and watched it exceed expectations:

Dear New York:

We here in Boston wanted to be the first to welcome you to the bikesharing club. It’s an exciting time for you, we know. We were curiously watching these “bicycle stations” get deployed around our city just two years ago. Like you, we didn’t know exactly what to expect. We had heard about their success in Europe, but that didn’t mean much to us. Those of us who were familiar with DC’s experience were excited and optimistic we’d see the same success they had.

It turns out we did. Hubway ridership continually eclipses projections. When the stations closed last fall for winter, we had complaints as people were forced to get around the city the boring way: walking, driving, or taking the T. There is discussion of keeping some stations open next winter, and we can’t wait!

We know, it hasn’t gone smoothly so far. You’ve had some fits and starts. But trust us, it will be worth it…

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Leaders in the Dallas-Fort Worth area recently came together to discuss the idea of resilience — whether the region can withstand big shifts like climate change and oil price shocks, and bounce back from unanticipated setbacks.

That got Patrick Kennedy at Walkable Dallas Fort Worth thinking about how sprawl — one of the Big D’s defining characteristics — can influence a region’s ability to adapt with the changing times:

Just fly in or out of DFW. As you’re taking off or landing, look down. Get to know the incredible and overwhelming sameness of it all. The lack of neighborhoods replaced by the presence of generic sameness of houses made of sticks and spit jammed onto cul-de-sacs of social isolation. Drive the highways and arterials. Pretend you don’t know where you are and ask, “Where am I?” You probably could be anywhere.

Local leaders made the point that the regional economy is diverse — a key element of resilience. Kennedy points out of that in other critical ways, the region sorely lacks diversity and choice:

But what about interconnections, the physical infrastructure that allows for the invisible social and economic bonds to exist? That of the top 20 metropolitan areas in the country, only Detroit has a higher percentage of driving commuters. There is no positive way to spin that. It’s a homogeneity of transportation. If you lack choice, you lack adaptability, a key component to resilience.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Greater Greater Washington chronicles the ongoing saga of “who’s parking in the L Street bike lane.” Pennsylvania Bikes and Walks looks at how the state can rise in the League of American Bicyclists’ annual Bike-Friendly States ranking. And The City Fix examines how countries around the world are financing sustainable transportation projects.

In 2010, 4,280 pedestrians were killed in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and another 70,000 were injured. That’s one death every two hours.

It’s impossible to quantify the human toll of traffic fatalities, but as David Nelson at Project for Public Spaces points out, AAA estimates that traffic crashes cost America $300 billion annually in the form of medical expenses, lost wages, pain and suffering, and other factors [PDF]. That works out to three times the annual cost of congestion reported by the Texas Transportation Institute. But while we’re spending billions “fighting congestion” with expensive new roads, getting a handle on pedestrian deaths and injuries is almost a non-issue at your average state DOT.

Nelson says the silence about pedestrian fatalities arises from a tendency he calls the “accident axiom” — a set of assumptions that presume no fault, or assign culpability in simplistic and stereotypical terms, when a pedestrian is struck:

Given that all forms of transportation begin and end with walking, this is essentially a right to be a pedestrian—a right severely restricted by expensive and counterproductive high-speed roads that we’ve built. A key problem in defending this right is that very few laws motivate law enforcement to consider killing a pedestrian as a crime. Involuntary Vehicular Manslaughter is a potential charge, but it’s hard to prove constructive manslaughter since a little speeding is rarely seen as a crime, and the threshold for recklessness is hard to meet. Anecdotally, drivers who kill a pedestrian are better off waiting for the police to arrive, because hit and runs really are about the only time the police reliably pursue these drivers with any prejudice. New laws specifically dealing with pedestrian-vehicle crashes are needed.

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An acquaintance once told me that Joel Kotkin is like the climate change denier of the urbanism world.

He’s a professor at Chapman University in Orange County, California. And his shtick is trying to convince people that suburbs — not cities — are the future of American living. To compose his narrative, he has to play fast and loose with facts.

Kotkin, as is his custom, has written a story about how low-density suburbs are the one environment Americans truly love. But as Matt Yglesias points out on his blog at Slate, if that were the case, places like San Francisco would be a lot more affordable:

If people hate dense urban areas so much, why isn’t Manhattan one of the cheapest places in America to buy a house? Why isn’t San Francisco cheap? If people are voting with their feet for sprawl, why is land in Georgetown so much more expensive than land in Georgia?

And look to be clear it’s not impossible for this to happen. Detroit really has suffered massive population flight and a total collapse in the value of land and structures. In some Detroit neighborhoods you can buy an existing house for less than the construction costs of a new house in rural areas. But note that despite the fact that buildings depreciate in value over time, this is an unusual fact about Detroit. It is not, in general, cheaper to acquire 2,000 square feet of housing in a dense urban area than to build a 2,000 square foot house in the far exurbs.

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Later today President Obama is expected to nominate Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx to replace Ray LaHood as transportation secretary.

The last time we reported about Foxx, the North Carolina Legislature was trying to thwart his plans to pursue a streetcar and light rail expansion at the same time.

Speaking to the Washington Post, an anonymous White House official alluded to Charlotte’s economic health and transit progress as qualifications for the appointment, noting that Foxx is a supporter of high-speed rail and some of the president’s other transportation priorities.

Foxx has been mayor of Charlotte for about four years. Over that period, he has pursued both highway and transit expansion.

Sustainable transportation advocates are greeting the news about Foxx with guarded optimism. Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland reviews his qualifications for the job:

He’s a former lawyer who has spent most of his professional life in politics. From what I’ve seen reported so far, it appears Foxx does not have much transportation experience. He’s pushed for highway widening projects, he’s started a streetcar revival in Charlotte and he’s a big proponent of rail transit in general.

As for bicycling, Foxx has actively supported it. He’s held an annual “Bike to Breakfast” event and he hops on a road bike to help launch “Bike Charlotte,” an annual cycling promotional campaign. When Charlotte launched their bike share system last summer, Foxx grinned for the local media during the inaugural ride [above].

Richard Masoner at Cyclelicious, meanwhile, takes a deeper look at his local experience:

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Seattle resident Heather Barnett was making her usual bike commute to the University of Washington campus last September when she was t-boned by an SUV driver who blew a stop sign. Needless to say, it was a life-altering incident for the young woman.

She tore her MCL, chipped her femur and broke her tibia, both wrists, and her nose. Her boyfriend had to take off two months of work to care for her. The couple had to move in with friends because their apartment was not wheelchair-accessible.

While the consequences for Heather were severe, that wasn’t the case for the driver. Anne-Marije Rock at Cascade Bicycle Club writes that Washington State’s “vulnerable user” law is supposed to help protect victims of traffic violence, but law enforcement officials were completely oblivious to or uninterested in the fact that they could apply it to Heather’s case:

“We were most interested in a citation to show proof of liability,” explained Heather. “Collisions like this just aren’t taken very seriously – the cyclist gets taken away in the ambulance, and the driver moves on with their lives. It’s just not right.”

Under the Vulnerable User Law, which Cascade worked to pass through the Washington Legislature in 2011, a driver committing a traffic infraction—such as speeding, texting while driving or running a stop sign—that results in the serious injury or death of a vulnerable roadway user will face an automatic fine of up to $5,000 and a 90-day suspension of driving privileges.

It took weeks before they were able to speak to the police officer on the case.

“The officer was less than receptive,” voiced [her attorney John] Duggan with agitation. “Non-cooperative even.”

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Florida, to its detriment, has become the national capital of the gated community. Not only do fenced neighborhoods make it nearly impossible to walk anywhere, they also help perpetuate and institutionalize social divisions, which was brought home recently by the Trayvon Martin case.

Sadly, however, public officials in the Miami region still enthusiastically embrace walls and fences in the name of crime prevention, Felipe Azenha writes today at Network blog Transit Miami:

We often hear that Miami is becoming a world-class city, but the sad truth is that Magic City is quickly becoming the country’s first gated city. What’s even worse is our elected officials are championing and using public funds to build walls and fences along the public right-of way, reducing mobility options for the general public and dividing communities in a futile attempt to reduce crime. This type of reactive urban planning is being used by elected officials to appease their constituents, but the truth is there is no evidence that gated communities are any safer than non-gated communities.

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If you’ve ever made the case that roads and parking shouldn’t be subsidized, you’ve probably heard the counter argument that raising parking rates, gas taxes, or tolls is regressive policy that will hurt the poor. And it’s true that raising the prices of those things would mean everyone, including those with low incomes, would pay more for them.

But as Bill Lindeke masterfully lays out at Network blog Streets.mn today, ending car subsidies still leads to more equitable development than perpetuating them:

It’s a perverse paradox where the automobile’d sprawling American landscape is justified because it helps the poor. For example, you’ll see the pro-sprawl lobby use housing costs to justify limitless development, or gentrification activists argue that transit or bicycling investments are bad because they increase property values, hurting the poor.

What this argument is missing is how the current system is regressive. The present structure of subsidizing driving, parking, and boundless urban development harms the ‘inner city’ through freeway and road expansions. It benefits the wealthy far more than the working or middle classes.

Next time you’re on the city bus, look around and think about who is riding with you. The vast majority of transit users are poor people. Meanwhile everyone pays for freeways and parking and the mortgage interest tax deduction, whether they use them or not. The current system of subsidies is not a progressive force of social justice. Free and easy motoring increases social and spatial inequality at the expense of more egalitarian urban fabric.

In fact, I’d argue that the opposite has occurred. We’ve demolished affordable housing to make room for freeways and parking garages. We’ve eroded government services through municipal fragmentation, civic tax shelters, and fostered spatial segregation. We’ve abandoned our transit systems, relegating them to the margins. We’ve refused to accommodate transportation alternatives in ways that foster deep inequalities.

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