Here's a drawing of the highway that the St. Louis County Department of Highways and Traffic want to build, because they're "not a bicycle department." Image: NextSTL

“We’re a highway department; we’re not a bicycle department.” This is how a spokesperson for the St. Louis County Department of Highways and Traffic decided to deride opposition to the proposed South County Connector project. The statement, offered to reporter Michael Calhoun of KMOX, is both revealing and a display of stunning ignorance.

There is no bicycle department in St. Louis County, nor a pedestrian department, nor a quality of life department, though there should be. The Department of Highways and Traffic, however, does exist within an environment that includes these unformalized concerns. Nearly every cyclist is also a motorist. Nearly every pedestrian also travels in a car. The idea that a highway is a highway, nothing more and nothing less, insulated from other concerns is myopic, dysfunctional and untrue.

The statement above reveals that not only is there not a “bicycle department,” but that the Department of Highways and Traffic will refuse to acknowledge the voices of those who it would derogatorily label as such. In its espoused worldview, municipalities and concerns other than level of service (for cars) and traffic throughput are obstacles to be first avoided, then dismissed and likely next attacked.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Reconnecting America discusses the connections between transportation, neighborhood form, and the obesity epidemic. Greater Greater Washington considers whether DC should prioritize projects that help people access downtown or travel between neighborhoods. And Exit 133 explains why recycling can work better in compact, urban areas.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Bike traffic is already booming on Market Street, the city's main civic thoroughfare and most direct route to many major destinations. Does anybody really think ignoring this natural traffic pattern is a good idea? Photo: Mark Dreger, San Franciscoize/Flickr

Updated at 9 p.m. with street configuration diagram at bottom.

Two public meetings on Better Market Street will be held on July 17 and 20, and a webinar will be held on July 18.

The idea of building protected bike lanes on downtown Mission Street instead of Market Street, as proposed by the Department of Public Works and the SFMTA, doesn’t seem to have many adherents aside from the planners who proposed it.

The agencies framed the proposal as a simpler engineering task than protected bike lanes on Market — where the vast majority of people already ride, and are expected to continue to ride. But the idea was roundly criticized by advocates and city officials yesterday at the latest Board of Supervisors hearing on the Better Market Street project.

Although SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin said the option is worth studying, he also said he “shares many of the concerns” about trying to divert bicycle traffic off the city’s main thoroughfare.

“If it’s not going to be a world-class bicycle facility that will be a better choice and naturally attract cyclists to Mission Street, and many bicyclists still end up on Market Street, then it won’t have achieved its goal of trying to de-conflict transit and cycling,” said Reiskin.

Paul Valdez, a bicycle commuter who spoke against the Mission option — as did every other speaker who commented on it — called it “absurd.”

“Scratch that option. Please re-focus your energies, time, and resources” on improving Market Street, he said.

A rendering of Market Street, between 1st and 2nd Streets, featuring a raised, protected bike lane. Image: Better Market Street

Planners at DPW and the SFMTA proposed the Mission alternative because they say road space constraints imposed by Market’s BART station entrances make it difficult to engineer protected bike lanes there, while Mission’s traffic signals could be synchronized with a 14 mph “green wave” for bikes. However, it would be more expensive than a bikeway on Market, require people on bikes to take indirect and counterintuitive detours, and would require major bike improvements on every SoMa block between Mission and Market to maintain a high standard of bicycling conditions.

People on bikes would be expected to take these detours off of Market to reach their destinations. Image: Better Market Street

Essentially, it would go against a primary principle of bike planning: improving the most direct routes, which people are naturally drawn to use.

“If the bike riders are voting with their wheels, so to speak, by riding down Market Street, then it would be foolish” to pursue the Mission option, said Nik Kaestner, director of sustainability for the SF Unified School District and a board member of the SF Bicycle Coalition.

Transit advocates have also voiced concern over the proposal in the Mission alternative to re-route Muni’s 14-Mission line and other buses on to Market, which, as the city’s main transit trunk, already struggles to provide enough capacity for the high number of existing bus and streetcar lines.

“Adding these are going to overload Market, and will degrade transit time on Market, even if you eliminate private cars,” said Rick Laubscher, president of the Market Street Railway, a nonprofit that advocates for the preservation of Market’s historic F-Line streetcars. “If we compromise [the goal of efficient movement] for other considerations, we will be saddled with higher Muni operating costs and less safe conditions for bicyclists and pedestrians for decades to come.”

Livable streets advocates and planners on the project have also noted that the vision of Better Market Street is to make the city’s main civic thoroughfare a safe, inviting place to be, and welcoming people on bikes is key to realizing that vision.

“We’ve always seen cyclists as a contributor to public life,” said Neil Hrushowy of the Planning Department’s City Design Group. “The more we can do to treat them as a pedestrian than as a hard object like a vehicle, I think the better off the system is.”

To make the case for the Mission alternative, Andrew Lee, the SFMTA’s lead planner on the project, presented [PDF] a recent survey showing that many current bicycle riders would be willing to detour a number of blocks to use a protected bike lane. (KTVU also introduced the idea to folks on the street yesterday, finding one bike messenger who favored the idea, and a few cabbies who seemed to be unfavorable toward adding any bike lanes.)

But the goal is to create a main boulevard where just about anyone, regardless of age, can easily hop on a bike. People who are brave enough to ride in the current conditions can’t speak for the needs of the broader population.

Survey results and bike usage data collected by the SFMTA.

A sample protected bike lane configuration for Market between First and Second Streets. It does show an unprotected section of lane next to one of the BART entrances. Image: Better Market Street

Alta Planning + Design's rendering of different options for a future bicycle/pedestrian bridge over Highway 101 in East Palo Alto. Images: Alta

The dream of reconnecting the two halves of East Palo Alto divided by Highway 101 with a bicycle/pedestrian bridge moved one step closer to reality last month with the release of the project’s draft feasibility study [PDF].

Five alignments for the bicycle/pedestrian bridge were analyzed in the feasibility study.

Alta Planning + Design, which conducted the $300,000 study, examined five different possible alignments for the bridge, which are estimated to cost between $6.5 million and $9.5 million to design and construct. According to Alta’s estimates, the bridge would be used for 130,000 to 230,000 trips per year (350 to 630 per day) — an unusually high volume for bike/ped bridges due to the dense residential and commercial development on either side of the highway.

EPA City Council members who reviewed the study at a meeting last Tuesday didn’t indicate a preference for any of the bridge designs, though all four of those present voiced their support for the project (one, David Woods, was absent).

“The current overpass over the 101 freeway is not safe,” said Council Member Laura Martinez. “I see this project as a solution to get our residents across town. This is a major connection for our residents to get to schools, shopping, our grocery store. This overcrossing encourages walking and biking.”

When planners gathered input on the project at a series of community meetings last year, “issues of traffic safety rose immediately to the top,” said Alta’s Casey Hildreth.

As Mayor Ruben Abrica noted, East Palo Alto is one of the last Peninsula cities divided by Highway 101 to receive a bicycle/pedestrian bridge. “There has been a pedestrian bridge in Menlo Park, there has been a pedestrian bridge in Palo Alto, for many years. We are the only ones who don’t have one,” he said. ”It’s good for business, it helps children get to school, it connects us more to the surrounding communities, and to the Bay.”

On the west side of 101, the various options would either place the bridge ramp along West Bayshore Road (a frontage road) with the entrance at Newell Road, or on a vacant, privately-owned parcel where the two roads intersect.

The vacant parcel at West Bayshore Road and Newell Road could be used to construct a public park and water storage tank in addition to the bike/ped bridge ramp, if acquired from its private owner.

Placing the western ramp on the vacant parcel would allow the city to create a new public park there — the first in East Palo Alto on the west side of 101. The parcel was also recommended as a potential location for a future water well and storage tank that the city aims to build.

However, that land is owned by the Young family, which told the City Council that they are not interested in selling it to the city. Ken Young explained that since 1955, the city has already invoked eminent domain twice in order to make room for the highway and for Newell Road, destroying his family’s flower business. ”This cut our property in half, making it impossible to grow flowers,” he said.

Planning Commissioner Bernardo Huerta said the city should avoid acquiring private land for the bridge project because “that will trigger a price war. It’ll be property you can’t afford.”

Placing the ramp on the frontage road would avoid delays and costs associated with acquiring private property. The three most recently constructed bike/ped bridges nearby, over Highways 101 and 237 at Sunnyvale’s Borregas Avenue (built in 2009), and over 101 at Menlo Park’s Ringwood Avenue (built in 2012) make use of frontage-road ramps on both sides.

All the options analyzed by Alta include a 12-foot-wide bridge — the same width as the bike/ped bridges over Highway 101 in Burlingame at Broadway and the one built over Highway 280 in Cupertino at Mary Avenue — both of which opened in 2009.

Of the five alternatives, Alta recommended two — known as Alignment 1 and Alignment 4 — that include portions which exceed the maximum 5 percent slope recommended by Caltrans to ensure accessibility for children, seniors, and people with disabilities. These designs would use the same land for the bridge entrances: the private parcel at West Bayshore Road and Newell Road for the western ramp and a small city-owned parcel at East Bayshore Road and Clarke Avenue for the eastern ramp. Alignment 1 would be longer and less steep than Alignment 4, and would require the removal of 18 to 20 parking spaces because its ramps would stretch along the frontage roads in order to reduce its slope. Alignment 4 might entail removing one or two parking spaces for optimal column placement.

Photo-sims of the two conceptual designs recommended by Alta Planning for East Palo Alto's proposed bicycle/pedestrian bridge over Highway 101: Alignment 1 (top), and Alignment 4 (bottom).

Another option, Alignment 2, would only use public land for the western ramp, includes frontage-road ramps and would be the least expensive to construct. However, it would require putting more of PG&E’s overhead power lines underground compared to other alignments, adding two to five years to the project’s timeline, according to the study.

Alignment 2 is a common U-shaped design that places the ramps on city-owned frontage roads.

Estimated construction costs range between $6.5 and $9.3 million, depending on the design. For each option, costs would increased as much as $1.4 million if the city opts for a “signature” bridge design, like the suspension bridges over I-80 at Berkeley’s University Avenue and Cupertino’s Mary Avenue bridge over Highway 280.

Construction is expected to take a year and a half and begin no sooner than 2018.

Cost estimates for each of the five designs considered in the feasibility study.

Military installations around the world are in the midst of a livability revolution. Here's a plan to add transit at Washington's Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Image: Urban Collaborative

“The largest redevelopment opportunity in the world is at the Department of Defense.”

Rep. Earl Blumenauer wasn’t exaggerating when he uttered those words to an audience of smart-growth developers earlier this month. While U.S. DOT, the EPA, and HUD get all the glory as the Partnership for Sustainable Communities – which celebrated its fourth anniversary this week – it may be the Defense Department that has the most potential to reinvent the way land is used in the U.S. and abroad. The Pentagon is now using smart growth planning models to re-design the vast amounts of land it controls at its bases. And the military chain of command is bringing its full authority to bear on the matter: Livability is mandatory.

Even before a 2009 executive order mandating sustainability practices within the federal government and a 2008 report that sounded the alarm about the military’s dangerous reliance on oil, the Pentagon was making big changes. One of the largest institutional energy consumers in the world, DoD started increasing its investment in clean energy in 2006 and then set about taking a long, hard look at how it uses land.

It was inspired, in part, by former Air Force architect and planner Mark Gillem, now a professor of urban design at the University of Oregon. Gillem wrote a book in 2007 about the Pentagon’s practice of exporting inefficient suburban development to its bases abroad. U.S. military bases, in this country and elsewhere, are often entire cities unto themselves, and they’re often cities that suffer from auto-centric sprawl that limits connectivity and makes for unappealing living environment. It’s the kind of development the free market is rejecting wholesale these days — but the military is no free market.

It wasn’t always this way.

“The military, back in the 20s and 30s, led the way in creating compact, walkable communities,” Gillem told Streetsblog. “Our historic army posts – Fort Sill, for example, in Oklahoma; F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Randolph Air Force base in San Antonio — these all follow the principles that have great sustainability benefits, and they just abandoned it, like most of America abandoned it.”

In order to be a better neighbor overseas and to use resources more wisely, Gillem counseled the military to stop wasting valuable land. He recommended a shift away from low-density, auto-oriented development on military bases toward a more compact, walkable, urbanist model.

So the military hired him to rewrite its planning rules.

After a process that involved senior planners from all four branches of the military, as well as military families (who expressed a strong preference for compact and walkable communities), the new rules came out a year ago: the United Facilities Criteria (UFC) for Installation Master Planning [PDF]. It’s the first update since 1986.

And as Rep. Blumenauer told the Smart Growth America-affiliated developers, the new UFC looks like something they would have written themselves. Here’s one excerpt:

Sustainable planning leads to “lasting” development – meeting present mission requirements without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The goal of such development is to make the most effective use of limited resources, reduce fossil fuel use and increase the use of alternative fuels, and to create more compact and sustainable communities that still meet security and safety requirements.

It goes on to exhort planners to incorporate principles of compact, transit-oriented, mixed-use infill development into their master plans and area development plans. Noting that physical fitness is key to military readiness, the document stresses that “high connectivity, mixed land uses, and well-designed pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure decrease auto dependence and increase levels of walking, running, and cycling.” It includes a sample transportation plan, a pedestrian and bikeway plan, and an open space plan. And it incorporates some factors that most planners never have to deal with: antiterrorism concerns, surveillance, and other security issues.

It’s a huge paradigm shift for the Defense Department, which had gotten into the habit of building massive single-story commissaries and exchanges with a Costco-like footprint, and simply building further and further out when more land was needed.

The four bases that have applied these principles on a pilot basis – one for each of the four branches of the military – have seen enormous success and a lot of “a-ha” moments, according to Gillem. “The commander at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, for example, Captain Jeffrey James — he doesn’t have any planning background, he was a navy ship driver,” Gillem says. “And he totally gets this. He said, ‘Wow, from a commander’s point of view, this makes total sense.’ It gives him some certainty about where the installations can go; it gives him some focus on what he needs to get his plan [for the base's development] achieved.”

That’s not to say that Gillem’s methods haven’t met with some hard-headed military recalcitrance. “There’s just a culture of, ‘This is a way we’ve done it for 40 years; why should I change?’” he said.

One of the four pilot installations – and Gillem wouldn’t name names – encountered some pushback against the new ideas, and it went before the Judge Advocate General – the military’s legal authority – to determine whether the UFC is just guidance or whether it’s mandatory. And the ruling came down just a few weeks ago: The UFC on master planning is mandatory policy. Agencies must abide by it unless they get a waiver – which would need to be signed by the person who originally signed the UFC into effect. Meanwhile, the Undersecretary of Defense issued a policy letter on installation master planning, also directing conformity to the UFC.

And just last week, Rep. Blumenauer got an amendment [PDF] inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act, legislatively reinforcing the requirement for the military to use horizontal and vertical mixed-use development with a focus on pedestrian and cycling plans and consideration for the full lifecycle costs of planning decisions.

There’s a lot more to say about the massive re-design of several hundred vast tracts of military land around the country and the world. Tune in tomorrow for a discussion of the unique benefits of smart growth for military installations, including some that you might not have considered. 

More cities and town served by Amtrak are calling for bikes to be allowed on board, like they are on the Capitol Corridor route. Image: Bikecommutetips.com

Only eight Amtrak routes (Amtrak Cascades, Capitol Corridor, San Joaquin, Pacific Surfliner, Downstate Illinois Services, Missouri River Runner, Piedmont) allow passengers to roll bikes on board fully assembled. Even those that do allow “walk-on” service only do so in very limited numbers; most trains allow just six bikes per train. (Though if you have a folding bike you can store it in carry-on luggage.)

But Amtrak is seeing increased demand for walk-on bike service across the United States. In California, demand for bike accommodations has been so overwhelming that Caltrans and Amtrak recently added a reservations system for walk-on bike service for the Pacific Surfliner. Before the policy, if too many  passengers wanted to bring bikes on board, they were bumped or, at best, forced to hold bikes in the aisle.

Passengers in some states are still struggling to have non-folding bikes allowed on board at all. New York lawmakers are pushing Amtrak to allow walk-on bikes on additional routes out of Penn Station, saying it will boost tourism income for upstate New York. A coalition of lawmakers, including U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer and New York State Senators Betty Little and Brad Hoylman, held a press conference yesterday urging Amtrak to include bike cars on two lines — the Adirondack and Ethan Allen — serving the upstate area and beyond.

Dan MacEntee, a spokesman for Little, said that many New York City residents, as well as many international tourists to New York, do not have access to cars. They might visit the Adirondacks or northwestern parts of the state in the summer but don’t have a convenient method of transport. Little has been advocating for walk-on bike service on Amtrak trains for years, and local bike groups and chambers of commerce around the state have been demanding it. The Saratoga Chamber of Commerce has so far collected more than 500 signatures on its petition to Amtrak President Joseph Boardman advocating for bike access on trains.

“We think that it would be a wonderful service for Amtrak to provide,” said MacEntee, adding that Amtrak would reap more revenue from increased ridership.

Steve Kulm, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the agency is looking for opportunities to retrofit train cars to allow more convenient bike transport. Kulm said most of the lines that allow walk-on bikes receive additional funding from the state. If the state owns some of the train cars, it can design them to accommodate bikes. In the meantime, most folks who want to travel by train will have to leave their bikes at home or seek a different route altogether.

In the late 1960s, much of Miami's Overtown neighborhood, a thriving black community, was cleared and replaced with a massive highway interchange. Image: Transit Miami

Overtown has never recovered. Image: Transit Miami

As decried by 70 year-old, long-time Overtown resident, General White:

Well there’s nothing but a big overpass now!

He’s referring to Interstates 95 and 395, which Nadege Green explains were built in the 1960s. After that:

Overtown was never the same. [Mr. General White] and thousands of other people here were forced out to make room for the highway.

The Florida Department of Transportation recently made a bid to take over more of the roads in the Overtown neighborhood. But City Commissioner Spence Jones issued a strong objection, saying the agency was responsible for destroying the neighborhood and displacing its residents. “FDOT gets an ‘F’ for our community in Overtown,” she told attendees at a City Commission meeting.

Elsewhere on the Network today: The State Smart Transportation Initiative reports that transit spending by state DOTs has increased slightly. We Are Mode Shift described the insane plans to widen two urban freeways in Detroit, despite the devastation such road projects have wreaked on that city. And A View from the Cycle Path considers how best to reach young people and teach them to become lifelong transportation cyclists.

"If the freeway were removed, Mission Creek Park would become an asset to the entire area. The lower drawing shows a future view of Seventh Street to Mission Creek and beyond." Image: SPUR

Taking down the northern spur of highway 280 is the cover story in the latest issue of the Urbanist, the SF Planning and Urban Research Association’s member magazine. SPUR makes the case that if San Francisco is to reap the full benefits of moving Caltrain and high-speed rail underground and re-developing the Caltrain yard at 4th and King Streets, taking down the freeway is a can’t-miss opportunity:

Currently, the stub end of Interstate 280 creates a barrier between the developing Mission Bay neighborhood and Potrero Hill. At the same time, the Caltrain railyard — 19 acres stretching from Fourth Street to Seventh Street between King and Townsend — forms a barrier between Mission Bay and SOMA. The obstruction will only get worse if current plans for high-speed rail proceed, forcing 16th Street and Mission Bay Boulevard into depressed trenches beneath the tracks and the elevated freeway.

Check out the rest of SPUR’s analysis here.

• Tuesday: The SFMTA Board of Directors is set to hear a presentation and give feedback on the agency’s Bicycle Strategy. 1 p.m.
• Thursday: The SFBC’s 21st Annual Golden Wheel Awards will feature keynote speaker Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s nationally-renowned transportation commissioner, who has led the impressive roll-out of protected bike lanes, enhanced bus routes,  public plazas, and, most recently, America’s largest bike-share system. The SFBC will also honor the livable streets accomplishments of CC Puede and the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District. 6:30 p.m.
• Saturday: The Bicycle Music Festival – the “largest 100% bicycle-powered music festival in the world” — returns to pedal sounds once again from Golden Gate Park to the Mission. Noon to evening.

Keep an eye on the calendar for updated listings. Got an event we should know about? Drop us a line.

Young, educated people are demanding better transit options and returning to cities, notes a new report by the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank. Image: Brigham Young University Civil and Environmental Engineering

This think tank, founded by conservative Paul Weyrich (also co-founder of the Heritage Foundation), released a report [PDF] last week extolling the economic benefits of transit investment and healthy cities. The Free Congress Foundation is also holding congressional hearings on its findings on the Hill, bringing some much-needed conservative support for walkable, connected cities to Washington politics.

The report argues that returns on investment in highways are declining. Author Michael Bronzini says healthy, walkable cities are important to attracting talent in a knowledge-based, 21st century economy.

“The history of metropolitan area development in the U.S. since World War II to the present is well known, and has often been described as the ‘flight to the suburbs,’” says Bronzini. “More recently, many metropolitan areas have been seeing somewhat of a return to the city.”

“These new urban residents want walkable communities, social and cultural amenities and good public transportation services that will enable them to access all the opportunities that vibrant central cities have to offer,” Bronzini adds.

While some prominent conservative electeds have starved transit and approached the movement toward cities as a political threat, others, like Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, have shown leadership and recognized the economic value of creating more walkable places. The Free Congress Foundation’s report is more evidence that Republican transit opponents don’t speak for all conservatives when it comes to transportation policy.

Researchers at the University of Utah and AAA found that using hands-free electronic devices and on-board technology can cause dangerous levels of driver distraction. Image: AAA

Distracted driving killed 3,331 people on American streets in 2011, yet car manufacturers continue to outdo each other to add more infotainment distractions in their vehicles. These systems are expected to increase five-fold by 2018, according to AAA. Carmakers seek to show their commitment to safety by making their distractions – onboard dinner reservation apps and social media, for example – hands-free. But a growing body of research indicates that there is no safe way to combine driving with tasks like dictating email or text messages.

AAA recently teamed up with experts at the University of Utah to conduct the most in-depth analysis to date of the impact of cognitive distractions on drivers’ performance. They found that some hands-free technologies, like voice-to-text email, can be far more dangerous than even handheld phone conversations. Unlike previous studies, they also found that conversations with passengers can be more distracting than those on the phone, but only if the passenger is kept unaware of what’s happening on the road.

The researchers had subjects first perform a series of eight tasks, ranging from nothing at all to usage of various electronic devices to something called OSPAN, or operation span, which sets the maximum demand the average adult brain can handle. For the OSPAN, the researchers gave subjects words and math problems to recall later, in the same order, as a way to “anchor the high end of the cognitive distraction scale developed by the research team,” according to AAA’s Jake Nelson.

The more mental energy an activity requires, the more it slows drivers' reaction time. Image: AAA

The subjects then performed these eight tasks while operating a driving simulator, and then while driving on residential streets in an “instrumented” vehicle that captures information about the driver’s eye movements and brain activity.

In each environment, researchers studied how the additional tasks added to subjects’ “cognitive workload” and diminished their eye movements. They found that as drivers devote more mental energy to other tasks in addition to driving, the less observant they become, and the more they fail to scan for roadway hazards.

This bolsters the conclusions of previous experiments: that when drivers are mentally distracted by some other task, they get tunnel vision. They keep their eyes fixed on the road in front of them to the exclusion of everything else — the rear-view mirror, side mirrors, and “safety critical roadside objects” and “cross traffic threats” — such as pedestrians.

The AAA study also found that greater “cognitive workloads” slow drivers’ reactions to events like a ball rolling in front of the car and a kid running out to catch it. (Reaction times were measured with the simulator, not the instrumented vehicle driving on real streets.)

The researchers conclude that hands-free communications can be significantly more distracting and dangerous for drivers to engage in than passive tasks like listening to music:

Some activities, such as listening to the radio or a book on tape, are not very distracting. Other activities, such as conversing with a passenger or talking on a hand-held or hands- free cell phone, are associated with moderate/significant increases in cognitive distraction. Finally, there are in-vehicle activities, such as using a speech-to-text system to send and receive text or e-mail messages, which produced a relatively high level of cognitive distraction. The data suggest that a rush to voice-based interactions in the vehicle may have unintended consequences that adversely affect traffic safety.

Distracted drivers get tunnel vision, looking ahead without checking for other potential trouble spots. Image: AAA

The researchers note that of the eight tasks, only one required subjects to take their hands off the wheel (using the handheld phone), and none involved taking their eyes off the road, so the decreased attention and increased reaction times were are all attributable to cognitive distraction – something all the hands-free gizmos in the world can’t fix.

Increased use of these distracting technologies contribute to a “looming public safety crisis,” said AAA President and CEO Robert Darbelnet in a statement.

The study authors say they hope their findings will be used to craft “scientifically-based policies on driver distraction,” particularly in relation to cognitive distraction.

AAA’s recommendations include:

• Limiting the use of voice-activated technology to core driving-related activities such as climate control, windshield wipers and cruise control, and ensuring that these applications do not lead to increased safety risk due to mental distraction while the car is moving.
• Disabling certain uses of voice-to-text technologies including social media, e-mail and text messaging, so that they are inoperable while the vehicle is in motion.
• Educating vehicle owners and mobile device users about the responsible use and safety risks of in-vehicle technologies.

AAA has met with safety advocates and provided copies of the report to CEOs of all major U.S. automakers as part of its effort to raise awareness of the safety implications of emerging in-vehicle technologies.

If Denver could repair this parking crater (top: before; bottom: after), there's hope for cities everywhere. Image: Nick De Wolf via Flickr

In the 1990s, this type of legislation helped dramatically transform part of Denver from a surface parking wasteland into more of a real downtown. Today, other cities are considering laws along the same lines, including Tulsa, which recently took home Streetsblog’s Golden Crater Award for America’s worst downtown parking crater.

Network blog GUD Thoughts (based in Kansas City and short for Good Urban Deeds) reviews some of the better ordinances addressing this issue around the country:

Over in Salt Lake City, city council “recently” passed a demolition ordinance that does the following:

1. Buildings in the downtown area cannot be demolished for parking garages (heck yeah)
2. Parking garages cannot be built on corners, or along Main street
3. New surface parking lots are allowed either behind buildings, or 75 feet away from the street

That’s all really great news in my opinion, especially when parking lots supposedly cover 20% of downtown. In addition to the above, city council is also working their way toward banning demolition of buildings throughout the entire city, unless an owner has submitted plans to replace the structure. Thankfully, city council is thinking this little tidbit through: normally, if an ordinance forbids demolition, but a property owner really, really wants the building gone, they sometimes let it fall into disrepair, making it unsafe and eligible for demo. Not the case with this ordinance. In the event that a building is deemed unsafe, the owner actually has to provide a bond for landscaping and maintenance of the site. Clever, right?

GUD Thoughts also cites Knoxville and the Tulsa proposal as promising examples, and says Kansas City needs to do better when it comes to creating a walkable environment:

Awesome… but what about Kansas City? What the heck is up with us? Here we are spending all kinds of crazy money on a street car to promote walkability downtown, and yet we’re still totally fine with not only demolishing buildings, but demolishing buildings and erecting parking garages. And, guess what – we seem to be a city that endorses the silent nudge nudge policy of tearing your building down if it becomes “dangerous.”

Didn’t anyone ever tell the folks in our local government that missing teeth (empty lots as a result of demolition – often to accommodate street parking) and parking garages really kill the life on streets?

Elsewhere on the Network today: Walkable Dallas Fort Worth says that TxDOT is acting more like a propaganda arm for big highway projects than a dispassionate public agency. My Wheels are Turning writes that block parties can be a first step in reclaiming streets for communities. And Cap’n Transit explains why large cities need transit.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Sunday Streets on outer Mission Street in the Excelsior last October. Photo: Frank Chan/Flickr

When San Francisco streets are opened up to people for Sunday Streets, the influx of foot traffic brings a host of health and economic benefits to the city’s neighborhoods, according to findings presented by Dr. Susan Zieff, a professor of kinesiology at SF State University, at a Board of Supervisors committee hearing yesterday.

Zieff and her team surveyed 600 Sunday Streets participants at events 2010 and 2011, collecting data that makes a strong case for investing in open streets events. One of the data points we reported in late 2011, for instance, is that every dollar spent on running Sunday Streets yields an estimated savings of $2.32 in medical costs.

The studies “have been really invaluable to us,” said Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, which organizes Sunday Streets with help from city agencies.

The top reason people come to Sunday Streets, said Zieff, is to enjoy the city’s streets in a way that’s impossible at nearly any other time, when the space is primarily reserved for traffic and parking.

“Over and over again, people talk about being able to walk down the middle of the street with their families, do physical activity in a safe environment, not to worry about vehicle traffic, and generally be around people who are having a good time,” said Zieff.

In Zieff’s survey, 51 percent of participants reported coming from outside the neighborhood, and the average participant traveled 3.25 miles, round trip, to the event. Among those who had attended Sunday Streets more than once, 25 percent reported an overall increase in physical activity since they began participating in the events. And, Zieff noted, the ethnic demographics at Sunday Streets are generally representative of the city as a whole, meaning the events appear to be effective at increasing physical activity among African-American and Latino residents, who tend to suffer the highest rates of cardiovascular disease.

The data “affirms what we understood anecdotally,” said Radulovich. “Sunday Streets is getting San Franciscans to walk, cycle, and exercise more, and integrate active transportation into their everyday lives. It has also been successful in reaching San Franciscans of all ages and backgrounds.”

During each event, 44 percent of businesses report an increase in customer activity and sales, with an average increase of $466 in net revenue along each route, said Zieff. As Sunday Streets organizers have reported, merchants who initially resisted Sunday Streets for fear of losing business are now clamoring for the events to come to their neighborhoods.

“We know there was some merchant concern about loss in business,” siad Zieff. “We actually show the opposite.”

Although restaurants have reported an overall decrease in walk-in customers on event days, shops and other types of businesses generally see an increase. Merchants that hold outdoor activities to engage with participants at the events — just under 20 percent of those surveyed — reported an average jump in business of two-thirds.

The influx in business also means more available work, as one in five businesses report increasing their staffing for the event, said Zieff. A total of 70 extra employees, on average, were scheduled to work at businesses along Sunday Streets routes compared to regular Sundays. That means “more employees, more salaries, more income to spend and so forth across the city,” said Zieff.

At the most recent Sunday Streets event, held in the Dogpatch and Bayview neighborhoods last weekend, a number of restaurants on Third Street that are normally closed on Sundays remained opened for business, said Rebecca Gallegos, manager of public relations and fundraising for the Bayview Opera House.

Organizers purposefully avoid allowing outside vendors at Sunday Streets in order to encourage attendees to visit local businesses, said Radulovich. “We actually want people to shop in the neighborhood.”

Even after a Sunday Streets event is over and streets are once again the dominion of cars, Zieff noted that there are lasting benefits that aren’t as easy for researchers to measure, such as the increased sense of community, and the effect of discovering a new neighborhood.

“One piece that’s really difficult to measure here,” she said, “is those 25,000 people who walk by stores in the Mission and notice a store for the first time, and make a note to return to that store.”

High-occupancy toll lanes outside Seattle aren't attracting as many drivers and as much money as expected. Image: Sightline

The 10 miles of priced lanes — the only “HOT” lanes in the Pacific Northwest — were converted from HOV lanes in 2008 and cost $18 million to implement. Five years later, Seattle-based sustainability think tank Sightline Institute reports that usage and toll revenue on the lanes are far lower than anticipated. Last year, the lanes collected about one-third the revenue of the most conservative predictions from the Washington Department of Transportation. The state had planned to expand “hot” lanes around the state, but the experience with SR 167 could change that, the News Tribune reports.

Two factors seem to be at play: People are driving less, and they aren’t as willing to pay their way out of congestion as was assumed.

Sightline’s Zachary Howard and Clark Williams-Derry report that in 2006, planners predicted that traffic on 167 would rise 2.5 percent a year. Instead, it fell three out of the following five years, including a 5 percent dip in 2008.

Less congestion means less incentive to pay for 167′s HOT lanes. But there’s more going on than that: Not only are fewer people choosing to use the priced lanes than expected, those who do are paying lower prices than expected. The lanes are dynamically priced, with the costs rising — and falling — based on demand. Sightline reports:

According to WSDOT figures for 2011, northbound drivers during peak morning hours paid an average toll of $1.75 to enter the HOT lane, saving about nine minutes in the process. Southbound evening peak-hour travelers paid $1.25 for about six minutes of time savings. Given those values, peak hour HOT lane toll payers apparently are willing to spend about $12 for every hour they save in traffic.

The prevailing theory about HOT pricing is that people would be willing to pay half their hourly wage rate to avoid sitting in traffic. But based on income data from WSDOT, far more commuters earn more than $24 per hour than are opting for the priced lanes, reports Sightline.

“Most drivers, even those from high-income households, would simply prefer to sit in traffic, rather than pay for a little speed,” Howard and Williams-Derry conclude. “Which raises a question: given that drivers may not be all that willing to pay for a quicker trip, does it really make sense for taxpayers to invest so much in trying to give them what they won’t pay for themselves?”

Gina McCarthy will infuse the EPA with a smart growth ethic -- if Republicans ever let her nomination proceed to a vote.

Committee Republicans boycotted her confirmation hearing but submitted an astounding quantity of questions for her to answer – more than a thousand of them, almost two-thirds from Ranking Member David Vitter. She responded to every single one, but Vitter still claims that the EPA is withholding information. He said this week he’ll delay the vote until the EPA can provide justification for some of its regulations.

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt is joining Vitter in holding up the nomination for his own reasons, something to do with a dispute over a quarter-mile gap in a levee in his state.

The pity of it is that McCarthy has the chops to be an excellent EPA administrator. She comes from the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation, which oversees air quality issues. But before that, she left an impressive smart growth legacy in New England – including a significant stint during the progressive and forward-thinking part of Mitt Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts.

Romney was the fifth Massachusetts governor McCarthy worked for, and he promoted her to undersecretary for policy at the Executive Office for Environmental Affairs. That office was merged with the state departments of housing, transportation, and energy to form the Office for Commonwealth Development – a precursor to President Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities – and Romney picked McCarthy to be its deputy secretary of operations.

According to a Mother Jones article from last year, environmentalists in the state enthusiastically praised McCarthy’s performance in the role, calling her “terrific — plainspoken, smart, and very aggressive.” The office used state funds to support compact and transit-oriented development, implemented a far-reaching Climate Protection Plan that sought to reduce emissions enough to “eliminate any dangerous threat to the climate,” and crafted a 20-year Strategic Transportation Plan that focused on transit.

When Romney got it into his head to run for president, he turned his back on his own best ideas, and the people he’d hired to implement them. Luckily for her, McCarthy had split the state by then, crossing the border to Connecticut to run that state’s Department of Environmental Protection.

McCarthy is lauded for taking politics out of that department and helping to propel the state’s landmark responsible-growth law, which established a task force to guide the state’s economic development decisions and study state land use policies and programs.

“We are charting a new, anti-sprawl course for Connecticut,” Republican Governor Jodi Rell said upon introduction of the legislation. “With this law, we will have at long last real planning throughout Connecticut. Real planning that makes sure that housing developments provide ready access to passenger rail and bus service. Economic growth planning that coordinates the work of our state agencies in the areas of transportation, housing, public health and work force development. Planning that promotes roadway design supporting state and local economic development while preserving the character as well as the walkability of our communities.”

Rell spoke eloquently of her commitment to stop “demolishing beautiful green fields and flattening hillsides” for development and to encourage more walking, biking and transit in “attractive, livable, economically strong communities.” Gina McCarthy’s stamp was all over those policies.

McCarthy also helped create the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a New England emissions-reduction pact, and pioneered the best-named program in environmental protection: No Child Left Inside, an effort to get kids to explore the outdoors.

Indeed, no one says McCarthy isn’t qualified for the EPA job. Despite what Republicans say about their concerns regarding transparency, at least one Democratic insider says the real point of the delay is just to hobble the agency for long enough that Obama can’t push any big initiatives on climate change before he’s a lame duck.

Of course, as the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin noted a few weeks ago, the delay on McCarthy’s nomination is leaving interim chief Bob Perciasepe in the role – and he may be an even more uncompromising environmental defender.

Raquel Nelson's long legal ordeal is finally over, but people around the country must still deal with the dangerous conditions that claimed her son's life. Image: T4A

Charges of vehicular homicide against Nelson — who was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when her son A.J. was struck and killed — were dropped yesterday in exchange for a guilty plea on jaywalking charges alone. She will pay a $200 fine, according to Transportation for America.

Nelson’s case gained national attention as an illustration of poor road design as a civil rights issue. The homicide charge was based on the idea that she was recklessly “jaywalking,” but Nelson was simply trying to get from the bus stop to her apartment, and the closest crosswalk was one-third of a mile away.

David Goldberg at Transportation for America says that while Nelson was finally cleared of the unjust charges, many other people around the country face the same kind of conditions that took the life of her son:

That particular ordeal is over for Raquel Nelson. But the underlying crime persists – not just in Cobb County, GA, but also in cities and inner-ring suburbs all over the country. Areas built since the 1950s to be automobile dependent now are home to many lower-income families who don’t have access to cars. Nevertheless, the busy roads around them typically have not been retrofitted with safety measures for people on foot, bicycle or getting to and from the bus. The situation is getting exponentially worse as low-wage workers and recent immigrants move to these areas for their more affordable housing.

Fortunately, Goldberg reports, some progress has come out of this case. Greater Atlanta is starting to change the way it approaches road design:

The good news from Georgia is that this case — and similar tragedies, as the pedestrian fatality rate rises in metro Atlanta — have led the Georgia Department of Transportation to take a serious look at these issues, according to Sally Flocks, the executive director of Atlanta’s PEDS.

“I’ve been really impressed by the extent to which the Georgia DOT now sees the need for safe crossings on busy roads, and mid-block crossings at transit stops,” Flocks said. PEDS is working with GDOT to help identify solutions and ways to evaluate the places to fix. The department now is changing policy to use federal safety money in proportion with the fatality rates, Flocks said.

Hopefully other cities will see the light and prevent similar tragedies.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Human Transit says that cynicism regarding transit problems is tantamount to accepting the current state of affairs. Urban Velo shares a news story explaining how bikes have given immigrant women in the Twin Cities new independence and power. And Bike Portland reports that city is surveying women to promote gender equality in cycling.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Photo: Matt Haze Kaftor

A driver smashed into a Muni shelter on Sutter near Taylor Street last night, and Matt Haze Kaftor witnessed the aftermath. It’s not apparent if anyone was injured. “By the time I saw the vehicle, it appeared all its inhabitants had been evacuated from the scene,” Kaftor said. “Front side and rear airbags were all deployed.”

Fingers crossed here — hopefully no one was unfortunate enough to be waiting at the shelter in the path of the driver, who reportedly decimated a concrete trash can on the sidewalk.

SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said the cost of repairing Muni shelters doesn’t come out of the agency’s pocket — they’re repaired by Clear Channel, the contractor that uses them for advertisements. No word on if they pursue reimbursements from the driver’s insurance company in incidents like this.