Supervisor Mark Farrell. Photo: Jennifer Low/Flickr

The committee was expected to approve recommendation of the proposal today, sending it to the full board for a vote next Tuesday. However, Farrell said that it was “absolutely inappropriate” for him vote on it today without feeling adequately informed, and that he still wouldn’t be ready in a week. Although the proposal received unanimous approval from the SFMTA Board of Directors today, the SFCTA committee decided to postpone its vote until its next meeting, in one month.

Staying updated on the project, said Farrell, “is a responsibility of mine, for sure, but it’s also a responsibility of the TA [staff].”

“In my opinion, it is very appropriate and, I think, necessary for all the supervisors and commissioners who get affected by this in their districts to be fully briefed on this before we’re asked to vote on any portion of this, even if it might be non-binding,” he said.

The Van Ness BRT design proposal would preserve the center median while allowing the use of right-door buses. Image: SFCTA

The proposal, widely praised by officials and advocates for combining the best features of two design alternatives, was publicly announced on April 27. Responding to Farrell’s complaints, SFCTA Deputy Director of Planning Tilly Chang said agency staff offered to brief the board members at their previous meeting on April 24. “Some did take us up, and some didn’t take us up,” she said.

She also noted that the project “has been out there” in the media, and staff made a presentation on the proposal to the committee today which they’ve given to neighborhood groups and at other public meetings. Today’s committee meeting agenda also included a report [PDF] on the design proposal and a memo [PDF], dated last Thursday, which provides background information.

Postponing the vote could potentially set the entire project back a month, said Chang, as the agency staff needs board approval before completing the remaining analysis needed on the proposal. She said the vote would not bind the agency to the design.

The project, currently expected to be completed by fall 2016, has seen numerous delays since it was first conceived in 2004. “The Federal Transit Administration, in particular, is very keen for us to essentially catch up, as we are behind on our schedule,” said Chang. “However, they do understand the need for a strong local process.”

Source: RAND Corporation

The brilliant thing about car-sharing is that it leads people to drive less by providing access to cars. It allows people to give up their personal vehicles (along with the gas, maintenance, parking, and insurance costs they entail) without giving up the ability to use the car once in a while when necessary. It diminishes the need for parking spaces, since one vehicle can serve several households. And it makes people think harder about the trips they take, since each trip constitutes a higher cost than in a personal vehicle, which come with high upfront costs but low per-trip costs, encouraging more driving just to get your money’s worth out of your investment.

But only 0.27 percent of U.S. drivers participate in car-sharing programs.

A recent study from the RAND Corporation estimates that that number could rise to 4.5 percent if policies were put in place to support car-sharing. RAND’s outer estimate of the potential of car-sharing goes as high as 12.5 percent of the 21-and-older population of major cities. The potential for greenhouse gas emissions savings is significant.

The RAND authors cite a 2008 survey showing that for every shared vehicle in use, nine to 13 private vehicles are taken off the road, and that half of car-sharing participants either sold a car or didn’t buy a new car because of their membership. Another survey found that average vehicle ownership per household fell from an already-low 0.47 to 0.24 cars after adopting car-sharing. Average vehicle ownership per household is 1.87 in the United States.

RAND attributes the greenhouse gas reductions from car-sharing to a) fewer vehicle miles traveled, b) fewer cars being manufactured, and c) more efficient vehicles being used more of the time. After all, car-sharing can avoid SUV syndrome, where people buy a big, heavy car for the one time a year that they actually go into the mountains with it, and then spend the rest of the year driving alone on highways and trying to park it in small spaces. Also, intensively-used shared cars will be replaced more often than private vehicles, meaning that more of them will have the most modern fuel-efficiency ratings. The report doesn’t mention the GHG savings if car-sharing results in the building of fewer roads or parking spaces.

The estimates of car-sharing’s potential market penetration are among the most helpful elements of the RAND report.

In the most optimistic scenario — 20.3 million car-share users, or about 36 times the current rate — car-sharing would reduce overall car emissions by 1.7 percent. A more realistic scenario of 7.5 million users, which would still require the widespread adoption of policies to support car-sharing, leads to a 0.6 percent emissions reduction. The authors provide a “cautionary note that estimates of growth in vehicle sharing have previously been proven wrong.” They cite a 1994 study that predicted that the market potential in Germany was 2.45 million members; “however, ten years later, the market stood at 70,000.”

On a per-person basis, car-sharing doesn’t cut emissions as much as transit. One person taking transit to work instead of driving can save more than two metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, according to APTA, as opposed to the above estimate of 0.89 tons per person car-sharing. But car-sharing also works in tandem with transit, functioning best where people can rely on transit for many trips. Car-sharing remains a largely urban phenomenon, according to the RAND report, with the only non-urban success stories on college campuses or eco-communes.

The other major contribution of the report is that it suggests some ways to make car-sharing more attractive. They say it will never take off unless car-sharing is 1) cheaper and/or more convenient than owning a personal automobile, 2) profitable for providers, and 3) reaches critical mass in a geographic area. To make that happen, they recommend reducing impediments in insurance policies and tax codes and increasing provisions for “one-way, dynamic vehicle sharing,” and better ride-matching services. The recommendations also include the promotion of short-distance, low-speed “neighborhood vehicles,” like the golf carts senior citizens drive around retirement communities, and the promotion of driverless vehicles. The report doesn’t explain in detail how driverless cars would enhance vehicle-sharing.

That long car commute could be destroying your health. Photo: AOL News

Less attention has been paid to the threat of the lengthy car commute. But a new study [PDF] from the Center for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health and American Cancer Society is confirming what many have long suspected: lengthy car commutes are terrible for your health.

A study of more than 4,000 residents of greater Dallas found that those who commute more than 15 miles by car get less exercise and have larger waistlines and poorer cardiovascular health. Those who commuted more than 20 miles were also at greater risk for high blood pressure.

The results were adjusted for age, gender, education, family circumstances and health history.

One rather obvious explanation noted by researchers is that long commutes replace time that could be dedicated to exercise. The study’s authors also noted that “participants with long commutes were more likely to live in suburban neighborhoods, which often possess built environment features that are associated with physical inactivity and sedentary behavior.”

In addition, high blood pressure may also be caused by the stress of commuting, or the social isolation it produces, researchers said.

The Nationals' new stadium has turned a dead urban zone into a hotspot. Photo: NRDC Switchboard

But that doesn’t stop too many cities, and there are examples of places that have gambled on sports facilities and won big.

There’s a new member of that club now: Washington, DC. It’s been nearly 10 years since the city green-lighted a package of 30-year bonds for a new home for the Nationals baseball franchise in a depressed southeastern section of the city. Kaid Benfield at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Switchboard blog reports that the investment is paying off:

According to developers in the area, building didn’t really become financially feasible there until the city committed to the ballpark. Today, the neighborhood’s new projects are about 30 percent built. In addition to the new commercial properties, the area’s residential population has increased from about 1,000 to more than 3,500 and should eventually reach 16,000.

It is especially heartening that even those originally opposed to the stadium like what they see. Neighborhood resident Naomi Monk was a prominent skeptic, arguing that the park would only be an eyesore benefiting millionaire players and businessmen, with nothing in it for low-income residents. But in March she told Fisher that “I have to say, it’s been for the betterment of the community. Our crime seems to be under control. The neighborhood looks 100 percent better. The new housing is a great improvement.”

I’m not going to make a broader point about the extent to which public investment in sports is a good thing. It’s likely situational and, though it has been enormously beneficial here in Washington twice (though in the case of Verizon Center the city paid only for infrastructure), and it also appears to have been beneficial in nearby Baltimore, the facts and circumstances vary.

Benfield reports that the tax issued on big businesses to support the stadium is bringing in twice what was expected. Plus additional property taxes related to new investment have added $13 million to the city’s coffers. Nice, for a change, to see a city enjoying a windfall at this moment in history.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Bike Delaware shares a League of American Bicyclists’ report showing that one in four collisions between cyclists and cars involve cyclists being hit from behind. Bike Portland reports the city’s first open streets event of the season attracted an astounding 28,000 people. And Transit in Utah says sustainable transportation advocates need to do a better job developing sales pitches and buzz words.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Students on Walk to School Day 2010. Photo: Adrienne Johnson/Flickr

San Francisco became the first major city in California to implement all of its planned 15-MPH school zones, the SFMTA announced today. With proper enforcement, the measure promises make the streets surrounding 181 schools safer and more inviting for students and parents walking and biking.

An SFMTA worker installs a 15-MPH school zone sign last August. Photo: Bryan Goebel/Flickr

“This is a big step forward for everyone who walks in San Francisco,” said Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe in a statement. “We applaud the Mayor’s leadership on this, the SFMTA’s quick action to establish the zones, and the Police Department’s commitment to enforcing these new safer speeds.”

The SFMTA began installing 15 MPH speed limit signs at schools in August. Although the agency originally estimated the zones would go in at around 200 private and public K-12 schools, only 181 “are eligible under a 2008 state law which allows the 15-mph zones on two-lane streets for 500 feet around a school,” reads an SFMTA statement. Captain Denis F. O’Leary, head of the SFPD Traffic Company, said police are out enforcing the signs.

“Walking in San Francisco should be inviting and safe for all residents,” said SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin, who added that the agency “is committed to working with our city partners to ensure that kids can get to their schools safely. We will continue to seek out comprehensive and innovative street improvements for everyone.”

“Hopefully,” said Stampe, “this will be the first of many cities.”

Factoring in proximity to bike lanes, street connectivity, topography, and commuter cycling rates, the Bike Score algorithm rated Minneapolis America's most bikeable city. Image: Walk Score

The people behind Walk Score, the real estate rating service that goes by the slogan “Drive Less, Live More,” are out with a new rating system, based on hard data, that should prove useful to prospective city dwellers: Bike Score.

The company launched the Bike Score website today, using its new algorithm to rank the ten most bikeable cities in the country. (We covered their release of city rankings for transit last month.) Minneapolis ran away with the top prize with a 79 percent bikeability rating. San Francisco tied Portland for number two, despite the fact that hilliness was a factor. D.C. and New York also placed highly (while the NYC core rates very highly on Bike Score, the bike lane deserts outside the center city score quite low).

The staff of Walk Score is made up of a whole lot of bike commuters. No wonder they were excited to launch a new bikeability ranking. Photo courtesy of Walk Score

In other bikeability rating news, the League of American Bicyclists released its 2012 list of Bicycle Friendly Communities today. There’s a lot of overlap between the BFCs and the Bike Score winners, but they are compiled use vastly different methodologies. For one thing, you won’t find two of the League’s top three cycling cities on the Bike Score list because Bike Score, so far, only looks at cities with populations over 200,000. Sorry, Boulder and Davis.

Colorado and Montana did well in the League’s rankings this year. Missoula and Durango moved up to gold, and the Colorado towns of Gunnison and Aspen made it onto the list for the first year, rolling in at the silver level. Look for your city on their updated BFC list [PDF].

The League bases its BFC choices on somewhat subjective criteria. They look for the “five Es”: engineering, education, encouragement, evaluation & planning, and enforcement. Decisions are made by staff and external reviewers, in consultation with local stakeholders.

Bike Score, on the other hand, is based on pure numbers. Individual addresses are rated on a scale of 0-100 based on four factors:

• the availability of bike infrastructure (with on-street and off-street facilities weighted differently)
• the hilliness of the area (the one factor a city can’t control)
• amenities and road connectivity
• the number of bike commuters (because “biking is social” and there’s safety in numbers, explained Walk Score’s chief technology officer and co-founder Matt Lerner)

To then determine the score for the city, the individual address scores are used to compute scores for each block, and then the block-by-block scores are weighted by population density.

“For every location in the city, we add up the number of meters of bike lane, and there’s a distance-to-K function so the closer you have a meter of bike lane, the more valuable it is, and we don’t give you any credit after about a mile out,” said Lerner. “For every address, we do that calculation. It’s a new metric that is really about a specific location, not about the city overall. So what we’re really measuring is, for average person in that city, how good is biking.”

Note: The capability to score your own home isn’t available on the website yet, as it is for Transit Score and Walk Score, but Lerner says they hope to enable that soon so real estate agents can use Bike Score to advertise the homes they have for sale, as they do now with the other two. Walk Score has an Apartment Search function that allows renters to search by nearby amenities, distance to transit, commute time, price, number of bedrooms – and, of course, Walk Score. It interfaces with craigslist to show the complete ad all in one place with the walk/bike/transit information.

Right now you can plug in any address in the country and get a Walk Score for it, but even once Bike Score’s full functionality is rolled out, it won’t be so widespread. “With Bike Score we have to go out and get bike lane data from each city,” Lerner said, “so it’s more of a manual process.” They’re taking votes via Twitter for the next cities they should score.

Here are all the highlights from the Streetsblog calendar:

• Monday: SFTRU Forum: Van Ness BRT. Join the SF Transit Riders Union and the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association for a discussion on the selected design for Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit. Staff from the SF County Transportation Authority will make a presentation on the design and answer questions about the project. 7 p.m.
• Tuesday: SFCTA Plans and Programs Committee Meeting. The committee could approve state funding for the Free Muni for Low Income Youth Pilot Program and approve a recommendation of the selected design for Van Ness BRT. 10:30 a.m.
• Also Tuesday: SFMTA Board of Directors Meeting. The Van Ness BRT design is also on the SFMTA Board’s agenda along with a new proposed express bus route connecting the 4th and King Caltrain station with the rebounding Mid-Market area. 1 p.m.
• Thursday: MTC and ABAG Special Meeting. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments could approve a “preferred scenario” for the region’s Sustainable Communities Strategy known as Plan Bay Area, a blueprint for smart growth and transportation funding over the next 25 years, as well as the One Bay Area smart-growth incentive grant program. 7 p.m.
• Friday: Fell and Oak Bikeways SFMTA Hearing. This crucial hearing will determine how quickly the protected bikeways on Fell and Oak Streets are implemented — help ensure the project’s approval by showing up and voicing your support or sending an email to sustainable.streets@sfmta.com. Also on the agenda: the SFMTA is proposing closing a crosswalk at Fulton Street and 14th Ave. and raising the speed limit on Winston Ave. from 25 to 30 MPH. 10 a.m.
• Saturday: SFBC Family Biking Classes. The SF Bicycle Coalition hosts two free classes for expecting parents or those with young children. At Part 1: Biking Pregnant (12:30 p.m.), attendees can meet other parents and “learn the medically reviewed facts about biking pregnant.” Part 2: Biking With Your Baby and Toddler (2 p.m.) will help you choose the right child seat, get your bike “baby- or toddler-ready,” and learn other tips and tricks.
• Sunday: Walk SF Guided Walk: A Visit to Visitacion Valley. Join Walk SF for a walk around Visitacion Valley, where you can “look at the Leland Avenue street design improvements and discuss plans to build transit-oriented development in the neighborhood. We will also visit local parks, including the lesser traveled Bayview Park, which has great views of downtown San Francisco, Sutro, and the Peninsula.” 10 a.m.
• Also Sunday: Green Connections Walk: Green Hairstreak Butterfly: A Walk Through an Ecosystem Corridor. The SF Planning Department continues its series of walks for its Green Connections project, an effort to “improve the city’s streets and routes that lead to our parks, waterfront and open spaces.” Explore the area around Forest Hill and ”provide feedback about what you like along the way and how certain elements could be improved.” 1 p.m.

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

Chicago's transportation "action plan" calls for increased camera-based traffic enforcement. Image: Chicago DOT

The city’s “Chicago Forward Action Agenda” [PDF] places strong, even revolutionary, emphasis on safety, in addition to some admirable cycling and transit ridership targets. Highlights include:

• A target of zero traffic fatalities annually in 10 years. (The city has been averaging about 50 a year)
• 20 miles per hour zones in all the city’s residential areas
• A five percent bike mode shift on trips less than five miles (currently 1.3 percent of Chicagoans travel by bike, but in the central city the figure is as high as two percent)
• An emphasis on street maintenance, or “fix it first”

In his introduction, Emanuel makes it clear that it’s a new day at Chicago DOT.

“Where we once built expressways that divided our communities, we are now reconnecting neighborhoods with new bus lanes and extensive and expanding bicycle facilities that offer safe, green, and fit ways to travel for all ages,” he says.

In the plan, the city makes a commitment to address problem intersections. The plan calls for the city to “analyze all fatal crashes involving pedestrian and cyclists” and as improve the city’s top 10 traffic collision locations annually.

City leadership also promises to invest in new infrastructure to smooth the ride for cycling and transit. The plan calls for a pilot project with 10 bicycle signals, 500 new bike racks per year and 100 transit-priority traffic signals.

The “Action Agenda” appears to be modeled after New York’s sustainable streets plan. It lays out a roadmap for Chicago DOT over the “next 24 months.” This is the city’s first ever comprehensive plan for transportation, according to Steven Vance at Grid Chicago.

Vance is generally pleased with the plan, though he says some areas are more ambitious than others.

“Much of the plan’s actions are new and impressive, and it puts onto paper tasks and activities that CDOT was already doing (or announced it will do, like build new CTA stations),” Vance said in a blog post last week. “It gives the public more information than it’s ever had about how it can hold CDOT accountable for maintaining streets, improving traffic safety, and managing a transportation system.”

Vance interviewed Klein about the plan last week. On the traffic fatalities goal — the highlight of the report — the commissioner said the city was aiming high, and hoping to come close.

“We have to push ourselves,” he said. “Some things are aspirational.”

The city will be reporting regularly on its progress toward the stated goals, said Klein.

This campaign season, opponents of smart growth policies are running against urbanism in greater Portland. Photo: The Oregonian

Even in Portland, a group called the Oregon Transformation Project is running candidates to overturn the region’s longstanding commitment to urbanism. Engineer Scotty at Portland Transport posits that the smart growth opponents are motivated by self-interested fear of the urban renaissance:

Some density opponents are staunch conservatives, motivated by cultural politics, free-market economics, or political solidarity with other conservative constituencies such as big oil. Many other density opponents come from the left — viewing big-ticket capital transportation projects (as well as urban renewal projects designed to encourage infill) as little more than corruption and cronyism, indistinguishable (other than in scope) from the antics of Wall Street banksters, with greenwashing being used to deceive a gullible public. But a common theme that motivates many of the critics on both the left and the right, is a dislike of density itself.

A billboard run by OTP compares a picturesque view of Mount Hood with a grainy, black-and-white photo of downtown Portland, with the words “CONGESTION DENSITY CRIME” lying under the latter. The implication being that if the current course continues, much of Clackamas County will soon resemble the worst attributes of Portland. There seems to be a fear that single-family neighborhoods all over the tri-county area will soon be overrun by apartment housing of the worst sort, and that middle-class communities will be transformed overnight into budding Rockwoods. In some cases, this fear is expressed in near-apocalyptic terms, with dire warnings about an urbanist tyranny literally forcing people out of homes and cars and into Soviet style block housing. (The term “Potemkin Village” gets used quite a bit as well — although the term originates from Tsarist Russia and has nothing to do with communism or forced living arrangements.)

For many people, public investment in new urbanism represents public disinvestments in where they live. One other geometric fact about density is that unless the local population explodes, density can’t go up everywhere. If the overall population stays more or less constant, and one neighborhood sees its density rise, then simple mathematics dictates that some other community will see its population decline. Property values and tax base will go down; and the quality of services will decline, leading to a vicious cycle of decay.

Given all of that, it’s not surprising that a backlash is continuing to brew. The recession hit many people hard, and when government elects not to maintain the status quo, it’s not hard to see how people feel abandoned or even threatened. People are attached to their homes, and will often go to great lengths to defend them.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Extraordinary Observations examines how college graduates cluster in cities. A View from the Cycle Path looks at average commuting distances across Canada’s largest cities. And Human Transit analyzes Tweets about transit agencies in an attempt to assess performance.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

A sample diagram of parking-protected bike lane guidelines.

The SFMTA is developing a new engineering guide for bike infrastructure that should help bring street designs like protected bike lanes to more San Francisco streets. Known as the Innovative Bicycle Treatment Toolbox, the guide promises to accelerate the city’s adoption of high-quality bikeway design treatments.

Intersection guidance markings also known as "green-backed" or "super" sharrows.

“The Innovative Bicycle Treatment Toolbox creates standardized guidance for the city of San Francisco in the use of new bicycle treatments being implemented throughout the U.S.,” said SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose.

The guide is based on proven designs for bike infrastructure that more American cities (including SF) are implementing to make bicycling safer and more accessible to a wider range of people. While these treatments are becoming more common in the U.S., they have yet to be established in “official traffic engineering regulations such as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) or the Highway Design Manual,” said Rose.

The treatments included in the toolbox: protected and buffered bike lanes, door-zone bike lane treatments, green paint on bike lanes and intersection guide markings, bike boxes, “safe-hit” posts (a.k.a. “traffic channelizers”), back-in angled parking, “green wave” signal timing for bike speeds, “two-stage left turn” markings, and “neighborhood greenways” (a.k.a. bike boulevards).

“These are smart, innovative designs that, once implemented in the right places, will make San Francisco’s streets safer and easier to bicycle on,” said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “We commend the SFMTA’s work in thinking out of the box and urge them to move forward with implementation on our many city streets that need improvement.”

Though the SFMTA has already implemented most of the treatments in the toolbox, they aren’t widespread. The most recent examples are the city’s first parking-protected bike lane in Golden Gate Park and the green-backed sharrow markings guiding riders through the Wiggle.

A two-stage left-turn treatment.

The SFMTA plans to use these treatments more frequently to reach its goal of 20 percent bike mode share by 2020. By establishing its own guidelines, the agency can “ensure consistency and predictability of these new treatments within our jurisdiction, while providing discussion of how these new treatments are addressed in existing regulations,” said Rose. ”This toolbox will help planners and engineers decide whether an innovative treatment is appropriate at a given location that is slated for bicycle improvements. It will also make it faster and more efficient for engineers to design the innovative facilities.”

Streamlining this process is critical to the widespread adoption of cycling in the city. The current rate at which the SFMTA is rolling out improvements is widely seen as insufficient to meet its ambitious mode share goals.

The toolbox is largely informed by the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a manual that leading bikeway engineers from cities around the country, including SF, contributed to. Although bike advocates are pushing for legislative changes at the state level to give cities more freedom to use treatments from the NACTO guide, their most recent effort was undermined, and local planners can face greater liability when using treatments not included in more established guidelines like the MUTCD. Creating this set of guidelines could provide planners a set of locally-approved, widely tested standards to rely on.

Rose said the guide “includes specific implementation details that are in line with California laws, while making style determinations to ensure consistency of application throughout San Francisco, even if there is more than one legal way to do so.”

The toolbox could also be looked to as an example for five other cities that will share expertise on innovative bike infrastructure in the Bikes Belong “Green Lane” project.

Agency staff said the toolbox is still in draft form and not ready to be widely published yet. Although the guidelines will “continue to be a living document,” Rose said, the agency will submit “a finalized version” to the SF County Transportation Authority by June 30.

Door-zone treatments to discourage bicyclists from riding in the door zone in conventional bike lanes.

Back-in angled parking.

Green bike lanes.

In Oakland, Mayor Jean Quan and Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente arrive to work by bike. Photos: Ruth Miller

Bike to Work Day in the East Bay broke records once again yesterday, with ten mayors, dozens of council members, and over 17,000 participants riding — an overall 22 percent increase across the East Bay. The record-breaking number of elected officials riding in included the mayors of Albany, Berkeley, Piedmont, Dublin, Fremont, Emeryville, Hayward, Richmond, and Union City.

Piedmont Mayor John Chaing and Vice Mayor Margaret Fujioka at the festivities in Oakland.

“It’s great to see so many of our local elected officials out riding on Bike to Work Day and setting an example,” said Renee Rivera, executive director of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition (EBBC). “They understand the benefits of bike commuting, and they’ve directed city resources to help make bicycling viable as an everyday means of transportation.”

The largest ridership increase was seen in Pleasanton at 40 percent more than last year, followed by Alameda at 29 percent and Emeryville at 17 percent. In Berkeley, more bicycles than cars passed by lower Sproul Plaza for the first time yesterday morning, according to the EBBC. “This a doubling of bike mode share at Cal,” the EBBC wrote on its website, noting that Berkeley has the country’s fourth-highest bike mode share at 8 percent, according to the American Commute Survey.

Oakland has the eighth-largest Bike to Work Day in the United States, according to the Alliance for Biking and Walking. The free pancake breakfast in front of Oakland City Hall yesterday drew over 600 people who were greeted with free valet bicycle parking and tote bags before mingling and enjoying breakfast in the sunshine.

Over 600 people dined at the City of Oakland's annual Bike to Work Day pancake breakfast.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan rode eight miles to downtown from deep in East Oakland. Her bike convoy joined up with District 5 Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente’s at the Fruitvale BART station before riding near a section of East 12th Street, where new bike lanes were approved on Tuesday by Oakland’s Public Works Committee along with three other projects:

• East 12th Street from 14th Avenue to Fruitvale Avenue (1.4 miles)
• Broadway from 38th Street to Broadway Terrace (0.9 miles)
• MacArthur Boulevard from Mills College to Seminary Avenue (0.6 miles)
• Ardley, from 30th Street to MacArthur Boulevard (0.3 miles)

The bike lanes were approved with no opposition at the hearing to removing traffic lanes and parking, according to the EBBC, which said neighborhood surveys found an approval rating of over 70 percent for the projects. Jason Patton, Oakland’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Program manager, said the victory signifies “a culture change taking place in Oakland.”

Rebecca Kaplan (center) announced Oakland's first bike station at 19th Street BART.

“Oakland is making much better use of super-wide roadways in ways that better serve its unique neighborhoods for pedestrians and bicyclists alike,” said Dave Campbell, program director for the EBBC, which pushed for the projects along with Walk Oakland Bike Oakland in their Oakland Bikeways Campaign.

The projects are all expected to be completed in 2013, and three of them will be coordinated with scheduled re-pavings. Also approved by the committee, the EBBC noted, were $75,000 for more bike racks throughout Oakland and $75,000 for new bike-friendly storm grates that are easy to roll over.

By the time Bike to Work Day rolls around again in 2013, Oakland is expected to get its first bike station near the 19th Street BART station, like the one in Downtown Berkeley, Council Member Rebecca Kaplan announced to cheers yesterday. Mayor Quan also said she’s interested in bringing bike-share to Oakland, likely centered around BART stations.

“This is Oakland’s 160th birthday, and we will finish our 100th mile of bike lanes this year,” said Quan. “We have a need for some real celebration here.”

Walk Oakland Bike Oakland invites bike enthusiasts to dream big for next year: Bike to Space!

The West Town Girls' Bike Club in Chicago's Humboldt Park. The neighborhood, once resistant to bike infrastructure, now embraces it. Photo: Grid Chicago

The perception of bike infrastructure as a sign of gentrification used to hold sway in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood too. But John Greenfield at Grid Chicago reports that attitudes toward bike lanes in this Latino and African-American neighborhood have shifted from resistance to enthusiasm:

People in Humboldt Park, a largely low-income Latino and African-American community on Chicago’s West Side, once opposed bike facilities as well. So it was a good feeling yesterday when I took my first spin on new buffered bike lanes under the giant Puerto Rican flag arches of the neighborhood’s Division Street business strip. I viewed them as a sign of how much attitudes about cycling have changed in Humboldt Park over the last decade. And as the city moves forward with the Streets for Cycling plan to install 100 miles of protected bike lanes within Mayor Emanuel’s first term, the story of the Division Street bike lanes offers a lesson on the need to engage local people in the process.

In 2003, the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) installed bike lanes in gentrified, bike-crazy Wicker Park, located just east of Humboldt Park, on Division from Ashland Avenue to Western Avenue, the border between the two neighborhoods. The stretch of Division in Humboldt Park between Western to California Avenue, known as the Paseo Boricua (“Puerto Rican Way”) and defined by the flag arches, is the same road width. But Chicago aldermen have final say on whether bike facilities get built in their wards and Billy Ocasio, Humboldt Park’s alderman at the time, opposed extending the lanes into his ward, according to CDOT spokesman Pete Scales.

The Paseo, lined with Puerto Rican cafes, restaurants, bodegas and salsa clubs, has retained its character over the past decade, but times have changed since Ocasio vetoed the lanes. Wilson, who’s white, says he worked hard to get the blessing of local community leaders before opening West Town on the Paseo in 2009. Since then his organization has taught safe cycling and mechanics skills to hundreds of at-risk kids in Humboldt Park. The store also offers affordable repair services in a neighborhood that already had a vibrant cruiser bike culture as the home of the Chicago Cruisers, a mostly Puerto Rican club that organizes rides with dozens of members parading on classic Schwinns.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Transportation for America outlines its “Transportation Vote 2012″ campaign to bolster smart transportation policies in the upcoming election. Mobilizing the Region reports on how the Connecticut Legislature blew it this session when it came to transportation safety measures. And Walkable Dallas Fort Worth explains why the city’s grand plans for a central park are unlikely to succeed.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Photos: Aaron Bialick

Commuters on the Wiggle got a Bike to Work Day surprise this morning: green-backed sharrows guiding bicycle riders through the intersection of Steiner and Waller Streets.

The “sharrows were painted VERY early this morning and they are permanent,” says a post on the SFMTA’s Livable Streets Facebook page. Agency staff wrote that more will be added “as wayfinding guides all through the Wiggle” along each block and through other intersections in coming weeks.

The green-backed sharrow treatment arose from the SFMTA’s ThinkBike sessions with Dutch bike planners.

One rider told SFMTA staff, “It’s like riding on candy!”

SF Recreation and Parks General Manager Phil Ginsburg seems pleased with the "super sharrows."

Supervisor David Chiu: "Does anyone think we can do better in San Francisco?” Photo: Volker Neumann/SFBC

City officials and advocates rode in to City Hall today alongside thousands of commuters for San Francisco’s 18th annual Bike to Work Day. According to the SFMTA, 1,031 eastbound bicycles traveled through the Market and Van Ness intersection between 8 and 9 a.m. this morning, making up 73 percent of vehicles on Market and averaging 17 bikes per minute.

While the city’s recent cycling boom and expansion of bike infrastructure were widely celebrated, some leaders said SF could do much more to catch up with cities like New York, Minneapolis, and Davis and make cycling on its streets safe and accessible for riders of all abilities.

“Does anyone think we can do better in San Francisco?” said Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, eliciting cheers from the crowd. “San Jose just decided to segregate bike lanes in their downtown area. In Davis, California, they bike at four times the rate of what we do here in San Francisco. Can we do better than Davis and San Jose?”

“Right now, we are spending about a quarter of a percent of our MTA budget on cycling improvements,” said Chiu, who spearheaded the 2010 legislation that led the city to adopt the goal of increasing cycling to 20 percent of all trips by 2020. “We need to do better.”

Supervisor Jane Kim, seen here on her ride through District 6 today, said she'll only feel safe riding regularly on her own with protected bike lanes. Photo: SFBC/Flickr

D6 Supervisor Jane Kim said that while she enjoyed riding with a convoy on Bike to Work Day, she would only feel comfortable biking regularly on her own with protected bike lanes on streets like SoMa’s high-speed motorways — a sentiment shared by many San Franciscans. “I want to keep working make sure we have that type of infrastructure in San Francisco,” she said.

Mayor Ed Lee, who rode in from the new parking-protected bike lanes in Golden Gate Park with SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum and city officials, didn’t seem to have the same sense of urgency for expanding bikeways as other proponents, but did speak about how they could improve his would-be commute. “I think there’s something we can do at the turn onto Van Ness so that I can come to work very easily,” he said.

Mayor Ed Lee rides with his transportation advisor, Gillian Gillett (right), on a Bike to Work Day convoy on Oak Street where a protected bike lane is planned. Photo: Volker Neumann/SFBC

The broad show of support from city leaders, said Shahum, was encouraging. “It’s not often we get so much political support for an issue.”

The turnout for Bike to Work Day this morning appeared to be SF’s biggest yet. Along the Panhandle, one of the city’s busiest bike corridors, a rush-hour platoon of roughly three dozen bike commuters were seen lined up waiting for the light to change at Masonic Avenue. Bike to Work Day counts have increased 66 percent over the last five years, according to the SFMTA. The agency also says 54 percent more people were biking on compared to a regular day one month ago.

D5 Supervisor Christina Olague, who rode in along the Wiggle, said she’s “very committed” to seeing the Fell and Oak Street protected bike lanes implemented by this fall. Although her eastbound ride in was “pretty smooth,” she said, the lack of a protected lane on Fell means she might “have to worry about getting back.”

After the pageantry of Bike to Work Day is over, the question remains whether leaders will make good on the commitment to making the city’s streets safer and more accessible for people to bike to work every day.

SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin rides with the convoy on the Panhandle. Photo: Volker Neumann/SFBC

D10 Supervisor Malia Cohen speaks with Supervisor Eric Mar (left), Mayor Lee, Supervisors Scott Wiener, Christina Olague, and David Chiu. Photo: Volker Neumann/SFBC

D11 Supervisor John Avalos, a regular bike commuter, rode in from the Excelsior District. Photo: SFBC/Flickr

Department of Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru (left), D2 Supervisor Mark Farrell (center), and the SFBC's Andy Thornley in front of City Hall. Photo: Frank Chan/SFBC/Flickr

Source: FRED

Everyone’s trying to figure out why, after decades of consistent growth, the amount Americans drive is leveling off and even declining. The decline started during the recession, to be sure, but was more dramatic than in previous recessions. As the economy began to get back on its feet, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) just barely ticked upward — and then fell again.

High gas prices probably have something to do with it. Young people embracing cities over suburban living — and valuing smartphones more than cars — might have something to do with it. It could be peak car – the theory that continued growth in driving simply can’t go on forever.

Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider found the trend notable enough to give it this headline over the weekend: “This Collapse In Automobile Usage Is Completely Unprecedented In The American Economy.”

Looking at VMT data now available on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s Economic Research site, Weisenthal posted two charts that put the one above in a little bit of perspective. (Note that these look somewhat different from the first chart because they look at the change from year to year, not the absolute numbers.)

Source: Business Insider

The two lines — GDP and VMT — track pretty closely together until just now. The rate of change in GDP more or less holds steady, but the VMT line takes a major dip. This was what Weisenthal found so unbelievable: that the reduction in VMT could be decoupled from economic fluctuations. But then he remembered something else that’s seemingly decoupled from GDP these days: employment.

When the blue line dips, that means the "population not in the labor force" increases. Source: Business Insider

The graph shows a rough correlation between growth in the number of people out of the workforce and decline in VMT. Indeed, this has been called a “jobless recovery” so the growth in people commuting probably has not been as strong as the rise in GDP.

Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt tackled this issue in a post two months ago and concluded that VMT was dropping despite job growth, and in terms of absolute numbers, that seems to be true. The chart above adds complexity to the picture but doesn’t discount Angie’s conclusion. High gas prices are still causing people to leave the car in the garage and take transit. Decline in exurban growth and strengthening preferences for walkable development mean trips get shorter and can even be taken without the use of the automobile.

It remains to be seen what will happen when or if employment fully bounces back, but there’s reason to believe the downward trend in miles driven could have legs.

Dallas wants to add another downtown freeway. Jason Roberts says the city will soon have to confront the limits to car-based planning. Photo: Freelancecrunch.com

This Dallas highway proposal could turn out differently than previous ones. There is real opposition at the grassroots level. And even though the majority of local decision makers are supportive, a notable few have vocally joined the opposition. Still, the endless road widening campaigns and the complete lack of vision are getting to Jason Roberts at Bike Friendly Oak Cliff – and to other people he knows. Roberts says the Big D’s apparent inability face up to its unsustainable development patterns will be its downfall:

What we’re witnessing today is a generational divide where outdated philosophies are represented by a leadership that refuses to acknowledge the obvious fact that their children are all saying, “I’d rather live in Austin/Portland/NY/SF/Chicago than Dallas.” Stubbornly, the parents keep saying, “they’ll come back for the jobs,” without realizing that the jobs are starting to go where the people want to be. We’re well aware of the $1.4 billion levee toll road, and the Winfrey Point parking debacle at the Dallas Arboretum (both ironic due to their nature vs. machine conflict), but another instance also making the news is the “lack of parking” headlines in the historic (and walkable) Bishop Arts District. Every week we’re seeing one costly issue after another related to our endless pursuit of maintaining unsustainable suburban development patterns, and the solutions are always the same: take more land, and give it to cars. For some reason, the adage “When you’re in a hole, stop digging” has been completely ignored, and I’m beginning to become numb to the monthly, “I’m finally leaving Dallas!” emails that friends keep sending me.

While other major US cities are disincentivizing auto use and incentivizing mixed transportation models in order to balance their costly strain on infrastructure, we continue to do the reverse.  It’s obvious that our leadership is going to have to eventually take a stand (and a few arrows) and say, “we’re going to have to try something different,” or else they’re going to be the embarrassing “Before” picture to an eventual leader who decides to take the inevitable path that every other city around them is taking. Like George Wallace in 1963, Dallas is waiting for its Bobby Kennedy.

Elsewhere on the Network today: The Washington Area Bicyclists Association tells how they determined that DC-area police don’t know much about cycling and traffic law. Walk Bike Lee shares an expert’s advice that complete streets should be adapted to their surroundings, not shaped by a cookie cutter. And Mobilizing the Region reports that New Jersey’s Camden County is getting bike-share.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill