Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

At a hearing on lifting the three-year-old injunction on Monday, a judge instructed the City Attorney's office to produce a declaration of the city's plans for immediate bicycle network improvements once the injunction is lifted. Rob Anderson and Mary Miles have challenged the adequacy of the city's Bike Plan EIR, and Superior Court Judge Peter J. Busch is still pondering whether to let the city begin work on the bike network before a hearing sometime next spring. Based on Judge Busch's line of questioning Monday, reversibility could be key to his ruling on lifting the injunction before then.

Miles argued on Monday that the city would complete many of the planned bike improvements before then, and should be stopped from installing any bike lanes in the meantime. The document released today suggests that the city would complete only a third of the projects in the Bike Plan within the first year, and any of those projects would be reversible in the unlikely event that Busch finds the EIR inadequate.

Perhaps even more interesting for cyclists, however, are the details of the city's plans. According to the declaration, which is comprised of testimony from Bike Plan Acting Implementation Manager Damon Curtis, an MTA traffic engineer, the city can paint bike lanes on about one-and-a-half miles of street per month, on average. At most, the city could paint about 30 percent of the 20 miles of bike lanes approved by the MTA Board this summer before March 2010.

According to Curtis, the city can also paint approximately 20 sharrows per day, and can install about 5 bike racks per day. The city also plans to implement a bike sharing program and experiment with colored bicycle lanes and innovative design treatments once the injunction is lifted, the declaration said.

Any of these changes would be "completely reversible," Curtis wrote, which may make Judge Busch look more favorably on lifting the injunction before a 2010 hearing on the EIR.

The implementation schedule isn't set in stone, Curtis wrote, and is dependent upon five major factors: safety considerations, funding, coordination with DPW paving schedules, connectivity and importance to the bicycle network, and weather. Installing bike lanes or sharrows requires two rain-free days before they can be painted, though removing existing paint can be done under wet weather conditions.

On November 12, both parties must produce short briefs on whether they believe the court would have the legal authority to reverse any new bike infrastructure installed before the EIR hearing, if it finds the EIR is inadequate (which is seemingly unlikely.) Once Busch reviews today's declaration and the November 12 filings, he could make a decision on whether the lift the injunction before the lengthy EIR hearing process is complete.

Below is a complete list of the projects the MTA is prioritizing within the first year after the injunction is lifted, according to the declaration filed today.

Bike lane projects the city is prioritizing for the first year after the injunction is lifted:

• Beale Street southbound bicycle lane, Bryant Street to Folsom Street (Project 2-5)
• Howard Street westbound bicycle lane at 9th Street (Project 2-8)
• Scott Street, northbound left turn bicycle lane, Fell Street to Oak Street (Project 3-5)
• Illinois Street bicycle lanes from 16th Street to Cargo Way (Project 4-3)
• Mississippi Street bicycle lanes, 16th Street to Mariposa Street (Project 4-5)
• Kansas Street bicycle lanes, 23rd Street to 26th Street (Project 5-8)
• Clipper Street bicycle lanes from Douglass Street to Portola Drive (Project 6-2)
• Laguna Honda Boulevard bicycle lanes from Clarendon to Woodside Avenue, and from Portola Drive to Woodside Avenue (Projects 6-3 and 6-4)
• Portola Drive Bicycle Lanes, from Corbett Avenue to O'Shaughnessy Boulevard (Project 6-5)
• 7th Avenue bicycle lanes and sharrows from Lawton Street to Lincoln Way (Project 7-2)
• Kirkham Street bicycle lanes, 6th Avenue to The Great Highway (with sharrows only between 18th and 20th Avenues) (Project 7-5)
• John F. Kennedy Drive bicycle lanes, Kezar Drive to Transverse Drive (Project 7-4)
• North Point Street bicycle lanes, The Embarcadero to Van Ness Avenue (Project 1-3)
• Fremont Street southbound bicycle lane, Folsom Street to Harrison Street (Project 2-7)
• Otis Street westbound bicycle lane, Gough Street to South Van Ness Avenue (Project 2-15)
• Townsend Street bicycle lanes, 8th Street to The Embarcadero (Project 2-16)
• Alemany Boulevard bicycle lanes, Bayshore Boulevard to Rousseau Street (Project 5-2)
• Ocean Avenue bicycle lanes, Alemany Boulevard to Lee Avenue (Project 5-9)
• Potrero Avenue and Bayshore Boulevard bicycle lanes, 25th Street to Cesar Chavez Street (Project 5-11)
• Claremont Boulevard bicycle lanes, Dewey Boulevard to Portola Drive (Project 6-1)
• Sloat Boulevard bicycle lanes, The Great Highway to Skyline Boulevard (Project 8-5)

Projects that would have "minimal impacts to traffic flow and parking loss" according to the declaration:

• Beale Street bicycle lane from Bryant Street to Folsom Street (Project 2-5)
• Fremont Street bicycle lane from Folsom Street to Harrison Street (Project 2-7)
• Howard Street westbound bicycle lane at 9th Street (Project 2-8)
• Otis Street westbound bicycle lane, Gough Street to South Van Ness Avenue (Project 2-15)
• Scott Street, northbound left tum bicycle lane, Fell Street to Oak Street (Project 3-5)
• Mississippi Street bicycle lanes, 16th Street to Mariposa Street (Project 4-5)
• Kansas Street bicyclelanes, 23rd Street to 26th Street (Project 5-8)
• Claremont Boulevard bicycle lanes, Dewey Boulevard to Portola Drive (Project 6-1)
• Clipper Street bicycle lanes from Douglass Street to Portola Drive (Project 6-2)
• 7th Avenue bicycle lanes and sharrows from Lawton Street to Lincoln Way (Project 7-2)
• John F. Kennedy Drive bicycle lanes, Kezar Drive to Transverse Drive (Project 7-4)
• Kirkham Street bicycle lanes, 6th Avenue to The Great Highway (with sharrows only between 18th and 20th Avenues) (Project 727)
  
• Sloat Boulevard bicycle lanes, The Great Highway to Skyline Boulevard (Project 8-5)
  

City planners have been on the hook for some of the last century's greatest metropolitan mishaps: urban freeways and "slum clearance," arbitrary minimum parking requirements, and land use laws that have left little room for the mingling of uses. Understandably, today's planners are a bit humbled. But when planning directors from some of North America's most progressive cities spoke at City Hall this week about the political challenges that face urban planners, several of them said the field needs to move beyond worrying about past mistakes.

"Because of the failure of the planning profession in the past, we've gotten quiet, we've gotten a little too meek," said Brent Toderian, Vancouver's planning director. "We serve at the will of politicians, and are often unwilling to speak truth to power loudly and persuasively and in public. I think that's really been an absolving of our leadership responsibilities in the profession."

SPUR and the San Francisco Planning Department hosted the discussion with planning heads from SF, New York, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Minneapolis and San Diego, who were all in town for the Urban Land Institute's annual expo.

Minneapolis planning chief Barbara Sporlein echoed that concern. "So much of planning is making up for past mistakes," she said. "It just feels like every time something happens, [we say,] 'That can't happen again.'"

In Vancouver, planning directors do not serve at the will of the mayor, and are appointed through a selection committee process and approved by the city council. As a result, said Toderian, the discussion about planning is much more vigorous and productive.

"In the absence of that willingness to have those kinds of tough, tense conversations, sometimes the best answers, the best options, are never put on the table," he said. "If Planning's not putting those options and issues on the table, then it's our fault that politicians aren't making better decisions."

From left to right: SPUR Executive Director Gabriel Metcalf (standing), and planning directors from San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Vancouver, San Diego, Minneapolis, and Portland. Photo: Michael Rhodes

San Francisco's planning director, John Rahaim, said he thinks planning staff should be more up front with the public about their objectives. "We have to build some civility. I think the way to do that is, frankly, brutal honesty," said Rahaim. "We have to be absolutely up front and honest about what we're doing and what we're not doing."

Rahaim also described a vision to greatly expand the number of open spaces in the city.

New York's planning director, Amanda Burden, also argued strongly for expanding open spaces. "Great public open spaces - and that means public open spaces that are used intensively and are magnets for people - are the great mixing chambers of cities," said Burden. "It's where all classes, all ethnicities, all economic strata, come together and really create energy that makes the cities we want to be in."

"When you have a small amount of public resources, put them in great public open spaces, because they will trigger private investment."

Many of the directors cited Portland as their model for increasing bicycling (which, as Streetsblog's CNU summit coverage mentioned, is itself still dealing with the effects of Robert Moses-era planning.) Portland planning head Susan Anderson said the origin of her city's success extends beyond infrastructure. "In Portland now, seven to eight percent of the people are biking all the time to work, everywhere," she said. "That happened partly because of infrastructure, all of the good planning stuff, but what really made it jump in the last two years is because it became cool. It became cool because we did all of these different things about press, about working with kids and biking to school."

Photo: gwenturnerjuarez

Reforming the Transportation Bible

Another topic that has long been on CNU's radar for reform is AASHTO's "Green Book," the bible for traffic engineers. As we reported, CNU Chief John Norquist has been working with the Institute for Transportation Engineers (ITE) to add urban street concerns to the comprehensive roadway guidelines. Rick Hall, of Hall Planning and Engineering, in a plenary session yesterday elaborated on changes that would benefit pedestrians.

"There's not a single mention of pedestrians in the entire first chapter of the AASHTO's green book," said Hall. "It's all about cars." He argued that AASHTO's street classifications (arterials, collectors, locals) do not account for walkability inputs that make urban streets comfortable and livable. 

In Hall's opinion, MPOs and traffic engineers should start by indentifying cities that work for pedestrians, then use computer modeling and simulations to simulate urban forms in those cities, not just the travel and movement of motor vehicles.  For Hall, the most important walkability design parameters are, in order of importance:

• Small block size
• Buildings fronting the street
• Mixed-land uses
• Lower traffic speeds
• On-street parking (pedestrian buffer)
• Interconnected streets
• Narrow streets
• Quality Sidewalks
• Lower traffic volumes
• Street Trees
  

Hall called for a change to AASHTO's guidelines, including the creation of a new classification he called "compact urban," where speed limits would be lower and a number of pedestrian factors would be considered in conjunction to road characteristics.  In compact urban areas, he said, road design should not allow for speeds greater than 25 mph, versus AASHTO's current urban low-speed of 45 mph. MPOs could determine that they want to alter development patterns to add compact urban areas to suburbs and re-design streets accordingly.

CNU President Norquist told the audience he anticipated positive additions to the Green Book by 2010.

Throughout the day Friday, CNU participants have broken out into working groups to discuss the various proposals put forth in the conference and bring them together into the working document, Sustainable Transportation Network Principles [PDF], which the organization will take to policy makers in Washington D.C.

House transportation chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) (Photo: STLToday)

For weeks, we've heard senior Democrats and the transit industry make the case for more transportation spending as a potent job creator, but the lack of funding for a full six-year bill has kept the conversation stalled.

But two things have happened in the week since Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) floated the idea of a "front-loaded" infrastructure plan that would concentrate investment in the first two years:

• The defeat of two Democratic candidates in Tuesday's off-year elections reinforced that job creation and economic worries are the No. 1 concerns for voters.
• Gross domestic product may be rebounding, but unemployment decidedly is not.

This adds up to renewed interest in fast-tracking a new transportation bill, perhaps with a two-year window. As House transport committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) told David Rogers of Politico, "The concrete is cracking."

But even if the White House is prepared to abandon its insistence on an 18-month extension of current law, how to pay for new transportation legislation remains a very open question. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), for his part, told Rogers that he likes the sound of Rep. Pete DeFazio's (D-OR) proposed tax on Wall Street oil speculators:

There are some painless ways to fund the highway bill. Transaction taxes, that’s a painless way ... Where are the shared contributions to all this? If you’re sitting there on Wall Street, if you’re Goldman Sachs, if you’re making all this money, if you got all this federal money [in a] bailout, and you are paying all these big bonuses to your folks, where is your contribution to this recovery? That’s why it’s painless.

Clyburn's reference to the "highway" bill brings up another lingering mystery about the type of transportation spending being envisioned by senior Democrats. If the White House does agree to support a new infrastructure bill after health care is finished, will it include policy changes or just new money?

Because, as Clyburn inadvertently acknowledges, simply adding more money to the framework of the 2005 infrastructure law would help highways but do little to move the nation towards a more rational mix of transit and roads. Oberstar's pending six-year bill, by contrast, would institute an array of reforms, cutting 75 funding categories from the current system and allowing more "flex-ing" of road money for use on transit.

If a front-loaded bill is passed with some of the policy changes offered by Oberstar, job creation and a more accountable national transportation system could start moving hand-in-hand. If a front-loaded bill is passed but scrubbed of any substantive reform, jobs may be created but voters will still be sitting in traffic.

Stephen Box at SoapBox LA reports:

These kids from the West Side of LA were determined to let the city know what they think about bike commuting.

The FIRSTteamWestside (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a group of kids who prepared a presentation that they intended to give at the Bike Plan (draft) workshops.

Their mission was to develop a plan to improve local transportation. They did the research and they prepared and they discovered that the public workshops were not the robust public arena they desired, so they adapted.

Their coach reports, "The kids were hoping to give a presentation at one of the "public forums" but were badly disappointed when they found out that members of the public would not be allowed to speak so they posted it on YouTube and submitted the link at labikeplan.org."

The kids give an amazingly articulate and informed statement, recommending additional bike cars for the region's commuter rail system. The future is coming.

The Congress for the New Urbanism's Project for Transportation Reform summit in Portland, Oregon, has brought together transportation engineers, city planners, and transportation reform advocates to share best practice policies for reforming transportation metrics, funding mechanisms, and regional practices that isolate transportation planning from land-use and growth targets.  The highlight of the first day of the program was Portland itself, as councilors from Portland Metro, one of the only elected municipal planning organizations (MPOs) in the country, elaborated on their multi-disciplinary mission, which seeks to limit development within an urban growth boundary and coordinate transportation, parks and recreation, and solid waste management to achieve a more sustainable city.

It's quite a mandate, one that Metro's own councilors and representatives reminded the audience was a work in progress. Despite Portland's reputation among new urbanists and livable cities advocates as a national leader in promoting pedestrian safety and multi-modal accessibility, the region's municipal stewards said they have a long way to go.  

Metro Councilor Robert Liberty said, "I know this is the image many of you have of our region," while displaying a slide of Dorothy and her cohorts skipping along the yellow-brick road to Oz (Portland's green bike lanes do beg at least a chromatic comparison to the Emerald City). In reality, said Liberty, moving onto a photo of one of Portland's many crisscrossing freeways, the city is still fighting off the influence of Robert Moses (who visited in the 1940s and convinced city leaders they should build bigger and faster roads). 

Since 1973, with the passage of Oregon's Senate Bill 100, which led to the original urban growth boundary around Portland, the region has incrementally chipped away at the Moses paradigm of freeway expansion, instead funding light rail, robust bus service, extensive neighborhood traffic calming, and ever more impressive bicycle infrastructure. So thoroughly have Portlanders embraced the bicycle, in fact, St. Stephen's Episcopal Church recently unveiled a new bicycle shrine in its efforts to reach out to cyclists.

An abandoned spur from the planned Mt. Hood Freeway, plans for which were scrapped after the freeway revolts of the 1960s and 70s. Photo: Matthew Roth

Despite this effort to moderate the expectations of conference attendees, it was clear twenty minutes into the first presentation that Metro has so thoroughly incorporated new urbanist principles into their lexicon that they are essentially speaking a different language than any other MPO in the country. What's more, they are not merely drafting good plans that collect dust on a shelf, but funding the innovative policies and setting performance targets so the public, which has a remarkable opportunity to give direct feedback via the ballot box, can gauge their successes and failure.

When I asked the city engineer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, how receptive his peers, their MPO and the state DOT were to principles of network connectivity and human-scale transportation objectives, he gave me a bemused smirk. He explained that his city was moving closer to installing a 2-mile streetcar route, but that most efforts to convince Wisconsin DOT that it should consider transit projects are met with responses like, "we're in the highway business."

Two other conference presentations from the day were particularly interesting, the first from CNU President John Norquist, who explained the efforts his organization has been involved in to build support among fire and emergency service personnel for human-scale streets, traffic calming, and dense development. Norquist said the process has been slow but positive: they are hoping more states will adopt policies similar to Oregon's, where final authorization of traffic calming depends on traffic engineers, not the fire marshal.  

The other presentation, by University of Connecticut Engineering Professor Norman Garrick, bolstered Norquist's assertion that dense cities are safer cities, per capita. Garrick presented data from a yet-to-be-released study of cities all over California that measured the impact of street design on a range of safety factors, from emergency response times to bicycle injury collisions and pedestrian fatalities.

Garrick found that cities built on a grid network and cities built before 1950, which tended to have smaller streets not designed primarily for automobility, realized significantly better safety indicators. In grid cities, according to Garrick, one's chance of dying in a car was 50 percent lower than in suburban-style cities (branch street networks) and injury collisions were 30 percent lower in grid cities.  People living in grid cities were four times more likely than their suburban counterparts to walk and bike and two-to-three times more likely to take transit.

During the afternoon, attendees broke out into groups to take tours of Portland's various networks, from streetcars, to bicycles, to green streets (my post on the green streets tour will be forthcoming). Today's highlights will be  panels on MPO reform and analysis of the VMT reduction benefits of dense development along transit corridors. Tomorrow, attendees will hear from Representative Earl Blumenauer on his national transportation agenda.

You can get updates from the conference on Twitter by searching for #CNUtrans and be sure to check the CNU website for presentations and video. 

The first time I saw this ad I thought my eyes and ears were deceiving me. But no, there it is: a young woman holding a cellphone toward the camera as "nüvifone" maker Garmin beckons viewers to "communicate while navigating."

"With my nüvifone, I can take calls from my friends while I'm driving to them," she says as she's shown piloting an SUV with two passengers, one of whom accepts an incoming call on a phone mounted to the windshield. (Note to Garmin: Hands-free is not brain-free.)

Maybe the most egregious aspect is the "Do not drive while distracted" disclaimer -- which pops up as the young woman is depicted driving while distracted.

Crowding is just one indignity transit users have to face. Others include inadequate bus shelters, nonexistent or vandalized seating, blocked entrances -- you know the stuff.

Send us your pictures of crummy transit service and infrastructure where you live and we'll put together a new slide show. You can e-mail JPEGs to me at sarah [at] streetsblog [dot] org, or tag them with "streetsblog" and "transitfail" in Flickr. Get your submissions in by next Thursday.

Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) (Photo: AP)

While the bill reported out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee today is in some ways better than the bill that passed the House in June ... it remains a woefully disproportionate response to the tremendous economic, security and public health threats posed by global warming.

The bill’s backbone is a poorly regulated carbon trading scheme that entrusts the Wall Street bankers who brought us the current economic crisis with the responsibility to solve global warming. The bill showers polluting corporations with billions of dollars, but doesn’t require them to reduce pollution fast enough to avoid devastating climate change impacts. And it contains massive carbon offset loopholes that would allow U.S. polluters to keep polluting by paying for often-non-existent pollution reductions overseas. Other loopholes, such as excluding pollution from bioenergy, also undermine the bill’s intent.

Plenty of folks in the green advocacy world are more open to working within the Senate's framework -- the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, to name a few. But the lack of a unified front from environmental advocates, which reared its head during the House climate debate over the summer, risks amplifying the lack of a unified front among the very same Democrats who must help bring the bill over the finish line.

The Senate is a singularly cautious place that often seems tousled by the slightest shift in the political winds; witness Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who hails from coal country and mused yesterday that he doesn't "think people in my state are going to stand up and start cheering about Copenhagen," where global pollution reduction talks will open next month.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (Photo: AP)

The environment panel's chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) had offered Republicans several days to abandon their walkout, promising time to consider GOP amendments and a complete Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) modeling of the bill before it comes to the Senate floor.

But environment committee Republicans were unmoved, insisting on an immediate five-week delay for EPA analysis despite testimony from the EPA that such work would produce little new information. Boxer's GOP counterpart on the panel, Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), seemed to delight in forcing the chairman's hand as he labeled the no-amendments move the "nuclear option."

The question now becomes whether the specific proposals added by Boxer's panel -- including grant programs for transit and clean transportation that nearly triple the funding approved by the House -- can survive a long slog through as many as five other committees.

Boxer insisted this morning that "many things in this bill ... are going to be part of that comprehensive bill" that ultimately reaches a full Senate vote. But others on the committee acknowledged that the bill's one-party approval would not bode well for its political prospects.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), the chief sponsor of efforts to boost the climate bill's clean transportation provisions, described himself as "very, very, very disappointed," particularly given the loss of a chance to amend the legislation.

Carper submitted an amendment that would have added more than $400 million to the bill's annual set-aside of climate money for transit, inter-city rail, local land use planning and other projects.  "I don't like this process," Carper said this morning. "I don't think any of us do."

The question now becomes whether Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC), the lone Republican who has shown willingness to work with Democrats on the climate bill, can provide the momentum needed to overcome the Senate's molasses-slow pace.

Even if Graham's work produces an end result that can win over liberals and centrists, the billions of dollars that the environment committee devotes to transportation is not guaranteed to survive that process.

The lone vote against the environment committee's climate bill came from Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Finance Committee -- which has asserted jurisdiction over the apportionment of valuable climate "allowances" to various sectors of the economy, including transportation.

Late Update: While the environment panel was finishing up its work on the bill, Inhofe was giving an interview to Fox News (which mistakenly labeled it the "energy committee"). Inhofe called Baucus' no vote a sign that the bill is "dead" and claimed that this summer's conservative protests at town-hall meetings were driven as much by concern over the climate bill as over the health care bill. Check out the video below:

Portland Transport has a post on the connection between cul-de-sac development and safety for all street users, as discussed at the Congress for the New Urbanism Transportation Summit in Portland.

What are the dangers of cul-de-sac development? (Photo: TheMuuj via Flickr.)

For me the highlight presentation on opening day…was about the safety effects of different street network types.

The study was based on looking at all cities in California with population of 40,000 or greater. The surprising finding was that cities built before 1950 are safer (in terms of both serious injuries and fatalities for all classes of users: auto drivers/passengers, cyclists and pedestrians) than cities built after 1950.

The differences appears to be in the type of street network. Compact street grids seem to be safer, compared to the arterial-collector-local street 'tree' style of street network popular in post-war development.

No link to the study itself yet, but we're interested in hearing more.

Ingleside Captain David Lazar briefs officers and the media on Operation Safe Muni today. Photo: Michael Rhodes

"I think it's going to come as a very big surprise to people who get away with eating or fare evasion on a daily basis," Lazar said during a lunchtime briefing at Tenderloin Station. Immediately after the briefing, officers set out on a citywide sting to find violators of all types. It's all part of Operation Safe Muni, a program Lazar started in the Ingleside District in September after several high-profile attacks on Muni, and reports of widespread fare evasion and theft.

After two Operation Safe Muni stings in Ingleside were deemed successful, SFPD decided to launch today's citywide sting and evaluate the results. "It's a zero tolerance approach to crime on Muni," said Lazar, who recently became captain of Ingleside Station and made news earlier this year when he ordered stings on drivers who fail to yield to pedestrians.

Supervisor Bevan Dufty speaks outside Tenderloin Station after the briefing today. Photo: Michael Rhodes

Kristen Holland, a spokesperson for the MTA, said the agency welcomes the SFPD's efforts. "We're certainly very pleased to be working with them and seeing this cooperative, collaborative effort put in place. Hopefully it will be successful."

The question, of course, is whether one day of high-profile stings will make a difference. Supervisor Bevan Dufty said he'll be watching closely to see if SFPD follows up. "I think I can speak for Muni riders who are happy to hear today that police officers are in fact going to be riding the lines that are having the most problems. I think that's a smart way to focus resources," said Dufty. "But I'm going to continue to ask the public to let me know that they see these officers riding."

Dufty added, "My message to the new police chief is, the best thing you can do is have officers visibly riding the system. It helps prevent crime, it helps make it a more pleasant experience, and it's going to avoid fare evasions."

The MTA pays the SFPD for its officers to ride Muni regularly, but, at least until recently, the agency hasn't been getting its money worth. The SFPD's Bus Inspection Program requires each sergeant in a patrol division and each officer "assigned to a radio car" to make two transit inspections per shift, and officers on foot patrol are required to make at least four inspections per shift. In spite of that rule, Muni riders have reported rarely seeing officers on Muni vehicles. SFPD is now testing a program to track officers' Muni rides by requiring them to tag TransLink cards as they board and exit vehicles.

Dufty is holding a hearing on November 23 with the new SFPD deputy chief in charge of safety operations on Muni, John Murphy, which he hopes will provide insight into how that program is going. "We've had commitments made before and I have not seen officers visible on Muni," Dufty noted.

After a day of riding buses and writing citations, officers involved in Operation Safe Muni will meet later in the evening to debrief, according to Sgt. Wilfred Williams, an SFPD spokesperson. By tomorrow morning, said Williams, SFPD will provide an update on how the operation went, and then determine whether more stings will be carried out.

SFPD plans to announce each operation, but will broadcasting it in advance undermine the department's efforts?

As Lazar told Streetsblog about his station's pedestrian sting this summer, probably not. "You could do a big announcement right now and we're still going to write a hundred citations," Lazar said at the time. He was referring to drivers not stopping for pedestrians, but the same may prove equally true for bad behavior on Muni, where a police officer is still the last thing most riders expect to see.

Chicago's earliest rail transit line, pictured here, was run by a private company. (Photo: Franzosenbusch Project)

Although Amtrak based its challenge on Keolis' inexperience operating American rail lines, the latter company maintains a sizable transit presence as a subsidiary of SNCF, the French national high-speed railway.

Moreover, Keolis submitted a markedly lower bid to take over VRE operations, undercutting Amtrak by $500,000 on first-year transition costs and $300,000 in annual operating costs. The French-owned company's winning bid totaled $85 million for five years, offering VRE workers the option of shifting to another Amtrak line or staying on under the new management.

Looking beyond the local implications of VRE's switch to Keolis, the new contract is part of a larger trend toward transit privatization that has seen recent deals struck in New Orleans, Savannah, and Phoenix. The Obama administration is encouraging greater use of public-private partnerships to help fund and operate transport networks, making these agreements something of a portent.

But substantial hurdles remain to the effective participation of private companies in the business of transit. Independent auditors at the Government Accountability Office submitted a report [PDF] to Congress last week after taking a yearlong look at how the federal transit funding process affects the ability of local officials to join forces with the private sector.

And what the GAO found was a whole lot of hurdles, many of them unique to the cumbersome rules of Washington's New Starts transit program. From the report (emphasis mine):

Consultants to the Dulles Silver Line project sponsor told us that through the New Starts process, [the Federal Transit Administration] has complete control over a project’s schedule, and project sponsors have to put project work on hold while waiting for FTA’s approval to advance into the next project phase. They also told us that construction activities on the Dulles Silver Line could not begin until the approval of a full funding grant agreement — as design and construction activities cannot be completed at the same time — and so some of the time-saving benefits of the design-build approach were lost.

Dulles Silver Line sponsors also nearly lost the tax-increment financing that was intended to fund the project, according to the GAO, when a full funding agreement under New Starts took five years instead of the estimated two or three. A similar situation arose in Houston, where a public-private partnership on a local light rail network told auditors "that FTA required them to submit and resubmit entire project documents to FTA multiple times, which led to delays."

By contrast, private participation in new transit projects on the international level has included equity financing in addition to operations and maintenance of the new lines. Citing World Bank data, the GAO found international public-private transit projects in the United Kingdom, Thailand, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, France, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Given the already considerable obstacles to successful public-private partnerships in U.S. transit -- the need for private companies to cede the right to hike fares, for one -- it would seem grievously counter-productive to keep a system in place that impedes the use of the same "creative" financing methods being urged by President Obama.

The chief sponsor of the Senate climate change bill acknowledged today that there is a narrow window for Republican cooperation on the legislation, thanks to GOP resistance to its central goal -- putting a price on CO2 emissions.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), at right, with climate bill co-author Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (Photo: NWF via Flickr)

"If there's a pricing of carbon ... there are some people that just aren't going to come along," Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) told attendees at a National Journal energy policy event. "I don't think there's an enormous universe [of Republicans open to the bill], but it's enough to get us over the top."

Kerry's remarks came as his co-author on the climate bill, Senate environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA), continues to contend with a GOP walkout of her panel's first meeting on the measure.

Kerry and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are slated to meet with senior Obama administration advisers today to discuss the framework for a bipartisan climate deal that the duo first unveiled in a New York Times op-ed last month. Kerry, Graham, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) also plan to tout the potential for a pro-business climate deal at a press conference this afternoon.

Kerry said today that the White House is "very much" open to the general principles of that op-ed, which include a strengthening of the climate bill's investment in nuclear power and expanded offshore drilling for oil and gas. "Nuclear is part of the solution," he added.

But even as Kerry and Boxer seek to make peace with resistant Senate Republicans, touting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's announcement yesterday of its (cautious) support for the Kerry-Graham framework, the prospects for political movement from the minority remain unclear.

Speaking to the Capitol newspaper Roll Call, Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), the environment panel's senior Republican, charged Boxer with "destroying the integrity of the committee system" and suggested that his members had little will to show up for today's second day of climate meetings.

The Senate climate bill contains significant investments in clean transportation, including billions in annual transit and sustainable development grants. Inhofe was careful to distinguish his clash with Boxer on climate from his close ties with her on infrastructure:

When asked if the spat would hurt their efforts to pass a new transportation bill, Inhofe said “no.” “I don’t think so. We’re on the same side on that. ... You guys [in the press] don’t believe it, but we have a good relationship.”

GOP senators considered less conservative than Inhofe have been equally uncertain about the prospects for a climate compromise. Lisa Murkowski (AK), the energy committee's senior Republican, told National Journal attendees that "the closer to the election you get, the more political this issue will be," but she added that passage of a climate bill would be necessary before Election Day 2010 only "if it's [a] good [bill]."

Adding more subsidies for nuclear development is a high priority, Murkowski said, as is re-opening the incendiary debate over drilling in her state's Arctic National Wildlfe Refuge. "It's time to be talking about what we have up north," she stated.

Elly Blue writes:

Multi-use paths like the
Hawthorne Bridge have the
highest injury potential. Photo: Jonathan Maus

There’s a constant chorus -- sometimes soft, sometimes overpoweringly loud -- in every conversation about bike infrastructure in America. Its refrain: You’re safer without any bike lanes, separated lanes, cycle tracks, bike boulevards, off-road paths. Just take the lane, follow the rules, wear your helmet, and you’ll be fine.

A group of scholars at the University of British Columbia have found otherwise. They conducted a literature review, looking at all available studies linking bicycle safety with infrastructure. Their conclusions will be counterintuitive for some.

“Results to date suggest that sidewalks and multi-use trails pose the highest risk, major roads are more hazardous than minor roads, and the presence of bicycle facilities (e.g. on-road bike routes, on-road marked bike lanes, and off-road bike paths) was associated with the lowest risk.”

“One of the major advantages of infrastructure-based improvements, compared to personal protective devices such as helmets, is that safe infrastructure provides population-wide protection for all cyclists,” study co-author Meghan Winters said in a press release.

The study's abstract draws these conclusions:

Evidence is beginning to accumulate that purpose-built bicycle-specific facilities reduce crashes and injuries among cyclists, providing the basis for initial transportation engineering guidelines for cyclist safety. Street lighting, paved surfaces, and low-angled grades are additional factors that appear to improve cyclist safety. Future research examining a greater variety of infrastructure would allow development of more detailed guidelines.

I'm sure that many of our network members will want to dig deeper into this one. 

• SF Voters Reject Plan for Billboards on Mid-Market (SF Examiner)
• The Examiner Reports on the MTA's Mid-Year Budget Deficit
• "DriveCam" System Installed on Muni Vehicles (SF Examiner), SF Appeal Confused by Press Release
• Urban Land Institute Study Finds Transpo Costs Far Less for SF Residents than Suburbanites (SFGate)
• Examiner Finds Some City Workers Are Abusing Parking Perks
  
• Permanent Bay Bridge Fix Will Likely Require Another Closure (SFGate)
• Judge Confirms Ruling in Peninsula NIMBYs vs. CA High-Speed Rail Case (CAHSR Blog)
• SF Bay Guardian: City's Three-Year-Old Bike Injunction "Has Gotten Downright Surreal"
  
• Marin Supes Hold Hearing on Solving Trail Conflicts (Marin Independent Journal)
  
• Tom Vanderbilt: "Jaywalking" Bans Won't Make Pedestrians Safer (Slate)
• CNU Transportation Summit Kicks Off in Portland Today. We're there! Follow us on Twitter.
  

The previous budget crisis, in May, brought Muni fare hikes and service cuts. Flickr photo: Steve Rhodes

The shortfall resulted from the confluence of a delayed taxi medallion plan, numerous unanticipated expenses, and delay to the SFPark variable-rate meter program because Caltrans awarded a grant six months late. A broad package of Muni service changes going into effect December 5 also netted less savings than the MTA originally anticipated, as $13.4 in service cuts were offset by $8.3 million in service enhancements and delayed modifications.

Bike Plan EIR expenses also set the MTA back by $1.5 million more than the agency anticipated in consultant expenses. The agency also spent $800,000 in unbudgeted money on repairing video equipment, after multiple high-profile incidents highlighted widespread issues with Muni's on-vehicle cameras.

MTA proposed $25.5 million in additional cuts and adjustments to try to dent the deficit. Half that saving comes from eliminating 250 positions, which haven't been finalized yet, though MTA Executive Director Nat Ford said about 80 of them are likely to be currently unfilled jobs. "They are all categories, with the exception of operators," said Ford told the MTA Board today.

"We are still reviewing those positions to see what positions are clearly necessary for us to have a safe, reliable Muni system as well as the rest of our operation," said Ford. "We have identified 250 positions. However we still need to continue reviewing those positions to make sure they are the right ones. We have more vacant positions in the organization, but we want to make sure when we talk about eliminating positions, we are eliminating the correct ones."

Ford noted that while the MTA cut 370 positions during the spring budget crisis, those positions were mostly managerial and executive. The new position cuts would include maintenance workers, support functions, and custodians.

Another $5 million in savings comes from reducing "Regular Day Off" and special events coverage, which also could impact service.

The agency will transfer $6.7 million in federal stimulus funds from capital projects to operating expenses, effectively canceling out the economy-related losses, and will squeeze $1.5 million for the half-year by optimizing Muni operators' schedules.

While the MTA has plenty of company nationally in facing a large mid-year deficit, closing the final $19.6 million gap, and finding 250 positions to cut, could be deeply painful. The deficit also places extra pressure on the MTA Board to extend parking meter hours, in spite of opposition from the mayor's office and some business owners. That could bring in over $8 million annually, though the board may be inclined to pilot the program first, so that revenue may not arrive in time to deal with the current deficit.

MTA Board Chairman Tom Nolan reiterated his support for extending meter hours instead of cutting service. "It comes down to revenue increases and union concessions or service cuts," said Nolan. "I think it's very important to make it very clear what the options are, what the consequences are."

Director Malcolm Heinicke noted that, though he's previously said policy should lead budget concerns, the budget gap puts more pressure on the board to complete a taxi medallion reform plan. The delay to that program contributed $7.5 million to the shortfall.

Heinicke also pushed for the agency to avoid making "de facto service cuts" by cutting positions that would impact service in unpredictable ways. "I'd rather not cut any more routes," said Heinicke. "But if I have to cut the 36, which is in my neighborhood, on a Sunday morning, as opposed to cutting the 14 on a Monday morning [through unplanned missed runs], it's an easy decision."

During the public comment session, Tom Radulovich, Executive Director of Livable City, also said he'd like to avoid de facto service cuts. "It's important to note the de facto service cuts that happened in past years," said Radulovich. "Routinely, just a few years ago, Muni would miss 5 or 6 percent of its runs. It was the service equivalent of rolling blackouts."

"We really don't want to see MTA sliding back. Keeping the transit staffing whole has obviously got to be number one."