Streetsblog San Francisco

While owning a car is a massive financial burden, economic incentives can still get in the way of the transition from car ownership to living car-free, even if you already don’t drive much.

As Shane Phillips at Network blog Better Institutions explains today, it’s a classic problem of “sunk costs”:

When someone is interested in shifting from car dependence to greater reliance on active and public transportation, they’re often faced with a problem: the vehicle itself, one of the greatest costs of car ownership, is already paid for. Unlike gasoline and parking, which are relatively fixed and recurring expenses, a car is a sunk cost–the purchase is in the past, and much of its value is irretrievable. At that point the only really noticeable costs of driving–the ones that affect you on a regular basis–are gas, insurance, maintenance, and parking. Taking only these into consideration can make driving seem much more affordable.

This is less applicable to those who wish to sell off their vehicle and abandon car ownership entirely, but few people are willing to take such a leap without trying a car-lite lifestyle first. For those who just want to dip their toes in the water, to try something between complete car dependence and complete transit dependence, using public transportation isn’t so much a replacement and reduction of costs as it is an additional cost. Not only do you still have to pay for insurance and some gas, you now have to pay for bus fare as well, and suddenly the savings don’t seem like such a great deal compared to the relative inconvenience of transit (excluding the few places in the country where transit is actually more convenient). It’s a catch-22: as long as you’re holding onto the car you’re not saving a lot of money, but unless you’re saving a lot of money you may not be convinced to get rid of the car.

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From SFBC:

Bike to School Week Family Ride: Sunday Streets
Sun., Apr. 14 | 11:30AM-1PM | Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 School, 3351 – 23rd St.

Getting ready for Bike to School Week and eager to try biking with your kids, but not feeling up to doing it alone? We’ll get you and family ready to ride so you can get out and enjoy Sunday Streets happening right outside.

Please bring your own bicycles and helmets. Youth under 18 must be accompanied by parent or guardian. RSVP Now

As San Mateo County’s congestion management agency, the City/County Association of Governments (C/CAG), is supposed to be responsible for reducing auto congestion. It also controls the purse strings on transportation projects, doling out millions of dollars in state and federal grants to the region’s 20 cities, whose appointed representatives make up the agency’s governing board.

“It started primarily as a transportation planning agency and to a large extent it still is,” said Joseph Kott, a former transportation planning manager at C/CAG who is now a consultant and visiting scholar at Stanford University.

The man at the helm of the agency for the last 17 years, Richard Napier – an engineer who is a former Sunnyvale mayor — is now retiring. As executive director, he gained a reputation as a skilled politician whose biggest accomplishment was building consensus among his member cities’ parochial interests.

“Richard has been a combination of a traditionalist and a cautious innovator. A traditionalist in the sense that he’s convinced that the automobile is and will remain dominant in our society,” said Kott.

Some of those innovations include programs Napier is proud to talk about: a transit-oriented development incentive fund and a “green streets and parking lot” program. The agency also oversees the county’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC), which makes recommendations on funding.

“He’s a super administrator and really made C/CAG what it is today,” said Sue Lembert, a former San Mateo mayor who sat on the C/CAG Board for four years and writes a weekly column for the San Mateo Daily News. “It wasn’t just a job for him.”

While no one doubts he was dedicated to his work and successful in attracting money, more than a dozen bicycle and pedestrian advocates interviewed by Streetsblog — some of whom would not go on the record — said Napier’s auto-oriented thinking on transportation would be a welcome departure.

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Ever wondered how your favorite sports team is doing in the sustainable transportation arena? Many urban stadiums have some transit connections and some bike racks. From there, though, it can be difficult to measure success.

Maybe what we need is a scoreboard for these things. Darren Buck at Network blog Bike Pedantic has done some preliminary legwork for Nationals Park in Washington, DC.

In order to determine what percentage of fans are biking, he took to counting bikes at a recent NL Divisional Series game. He counted Capital Bikeshare bikes in their docks (about 160). He counted the contents of the Nats’ bike valet (120). He counted racks (250) and he counted spillover, locked to trees, posts and fences (98). What he came up with was a rough bicycle mode share for Nationals Park at the height of playoffs excitement:

By my count, that’s a total of 628 bikes. Only 530 (or 84%) were accommodated by official parking/storage, including the 26% of all riders who used Capital Bikeshare (above my estimate of CaBi comprising 11% of all ridership in DC/Arlington, it should be noted).

With a stadium capacity of around 45,017, that’s about 1.4% of people biking to the game. Following an odd DC trend, this is far lower than our commute-to-work share of 3.3%, and right on par with Washington DC’s estimated bike modeshare for all trips of 1.5%. Given the unfathomably awesome weather, the fact that transit is beginning the rush-hour meltdown everyone knew was coming even as I type this, and the fact that Nats Park lies right in the heart of Livable Walkable Ward 6, I would have expected more (acknowledging that looking solely at the one transportation mode I obsess about is a distortion). What’s missing?

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This is one of the worst parts of biking on a typical American street: You’re riding your bike and you hear a car coming up from behind you. It’s loud; you can tell it’s going fast. Does the driver see you?

WHOOSH … the car passes you at arm’s distance. Nothing like a little trip through the blood pressure spectrum first thing in the morning.

Discourteous, dangerous and illegal passing by cars is uncomfortably common, according to a new study out of Baltimore [PDF], even as three-foot passing laws are beginning to become the norm. But it looks like plain old painted bike lanes make a difference. Seth at Baltimore Velo files this report:

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health published a study this week that takes a look at how well the law is being followed by vehicles. Unfortunately, the answer is not very well.

Here are some key findings of the groundbreaking study:

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Recently, I shared with a car enthusiast friend that I would never enjoy driving as much as he did, in part because cars scared me a little. I had experienced crashes and lost loved ones to them, I explained, which had a lasting effect. This struck him as both silly (who’s afraid of cars?) and serious (what’s life without the joy of driving?). He had an easy solution, though: Take an advanced driving skills class. My fear, if warranted, would be swept away by my improved ability or, if unwarranted, by my newfound confidence.

I balked at the suggestion. Surely, better drivers’ education would make roads less dangerous, and someone with a genuine phobia of cars might suffer in our auto-centric world. But we’d also all be a good deal safer if more drivers held a bit more fear.

Despite advances in traffic and car safety, driving remains the most perilous thing most of us do each day.  And though the average American is more likely to be killed with a car than with a gun, on the whole, drivers have little anxiety about driving.  Hubris is just one of several reasons why. The propensity of drivers to overestimate their ability has been well documented, especially by Tom Vanderbilt. In Traffic, he explains how the false sense of control and ease driving provides, along with humans’ inability to self-assess, allows most drivers to rate themselves “above average.” The dangerous outcome is a “narcissism” that encourages aggressive driving.

“Do the thing we fear, and the death of fear is certain,” Emerson wrote. Do the thing several times a day, and it becomes banal.  Though how much and how fast we drive are key determinants of crash risk, driving everywhere, no matter how short the trip, and speeding, no matter how little time is saved, have been normalized. This normalization is what makes crashes, when they happen, so difficult to process. One grief counselor described how a client, struggling to grasp his brother’s death in a crash, sat in her office “week after week saying, ‘He just went to get milk.’”

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President Obama has released his budget request for the 2013 fiscal year, which includes a proposed $476 billion investment in transportation over six years. High-speed rail, mass transit, and bridge repair would get a big boost under Obama’s plan, which is paid for primarily by war savings as America’s troop presence is drawn down in Afghanistan.

The good news is that the president is still committed to investment in transportation infrastructure, with a focus on expanding transit and rail while maintaining roads that have already been built. The bad news is that his proposal is mostly a political gesture. Both the House and the Senate are getting ready to debate their own multi-year transportation bills this week, neither of which comes close to the scope of Obama’s proposal.

As observers have come to expect by now, the Obama plan doesn’t really address the thorny question of how to fund such an ambitious agenda, as Deron Lovaas writes for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Switchboard Blog:

This is a step in the wrong direction, something I criticized the House Republican Leadership for earlier today. The priorities laid out for DOT in the budget are laudable, but dodging the all-important revenue issue is fiscally irresponsible and disappointing.

Obama’s six-year plan starts off with $50 billion for “immediate transportation investments,” about half of which would go to highway and bridge repair, 30 percent to transit and rail, and the rest to aviation and border crossings. This “fix-it-now” approach had been the centerpiece of the president’s failed jobs plan last fall, but fell on deaf ears amid deficit reduction talks. Then, starting in 2013, the president suggests spending roughly $80 billion per year on transportation for six years:

• $305 billion for highways and $108 billion for transit, which improves the current 80-20 split to 75-25
• $47 billion for rail reinvestment, with a continued focus on intercity and high-speed passenger rail
• $3.4 billion (~$600 million/year) for National Infrastructure Investments, supporting discretionary grant programs like TIGER
• $3.0 billion ($500 million/year) for TIFIA, a fourfold increase over current levels but only half of what the House and Senate suggest per year
• Two new accounts added to the Highway (renamed Transportation) Trust Fund: Intermodal, for transit, and National Infrastructure Investments (see above)

If any of this sounds familiar, that might be because the President proposed a similar but even more beefed-up reauthorization proposal last year. In that proposal, which was larger by $100 billion, Obama had included $30 billion for a national infrastructure bank, and $5 billion per year for livability programs, neither of which is included in his current proposal.

Update: Asked about bike/ped funding at a conference call with reporters today, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood pointed out that Obama’s proposal funds the Livable Communities program at $27 billion over six years.  (h/t Jesse Prentice-Dunn)

I’m pleased to announce that thanks to an outpouring of support these past two weeks, Streetsblog and Streetfilms are more than halfway to our goal of raising $25,000 by the end of the year. If you haven’t given yet and you value the high-impact reporting and videos that we produce day in and day out, help put us over the top. As the headline suggests, we have another great item to give to a lucky donor this week.

Before I get to that, congratulations to the winner of last week’s prize: Long-time Streetsblog reader Marc Agger will be taking home a Zero Tweed bag from Rickshaw.

This week’s prize comes courtesy of Levi’s. Make a one-time or monthly gift by Friday at midnight and you could win a jacket and jeans from Levi’s new Commuter line, designed specifically for cyclists.

I have the Commuter jacket and it’s great for riding in the spring or fall, even in the rain.

Thanks again to all our dedicated supporters. If you haven’t donated yet, please pitch in and help make 2012 a great year for livable streets coverage.