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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t always this way.

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

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

So the military hired him to rewrite its planning rules.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overtown has never recovered. Image: Transit Miami

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

Well there’s nothing but a big overpass now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the rest of SPUR’s analysis here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AAA’s recommendations include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Photo: Matt Haze Kaftor

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

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

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

Fourth Street. Photo: San Francisco in 15 Weeks

The Central Subway is coming, like it or not, and that means Fourth Street will get Muni Metro service starting in 2019. With that in mind, the SF Planning Department recently released the draft Central Corridor Plan, which sets the stage for upzoned transit-oriented development near new stations and street improvements to accommodate a growing population in a rapidly changing section of SoMa.

“The idea is to support development here because it’s a transit-rich area,” said Amnon Ben-Pazi of the Planning Department’s City Design Group. “Between BART, Caltrain, and the new light-rail, you have as much city and regional transit as you can get.”

The Central Corridor Plan, which encompasses one section of the broader Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, is aimed at creating a more people-friendly SoMa — a district which was primarily industrial until recent years. Streets that have served as car traffic funnels since the mid-20th century would be overhauled with improvements like protected bike lanes, new crosswalks, wider sidewalks, transit-only lanes, and two-way traffic conversions.

The Central Subway route along Fourth Street. Image: SFMTA

SoMa’s streets “were designed in a really specific way to accommodate large volumes of very fast traffic and trucks,” said Ben-Pazi. “While that may have been appropriate when this was an industrial area, it’s certainly not appropriate now with what we know about pedestrian safety and how the design of streets really affects the behavior of drivers.”

“If we’re going to go in the direction of having more people live and work here,” he added, “relying on the streets for their everyday circulation, we really need to address what these streets are designed as.”

Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich said the plan seems to be mostly on the right track, though it should include greater restrictions on new car parking that are more in line with the plan for the adjacent Transbay District adopted last year. “With as much development as is planned, and with a desire to reclaim SoMa’s mean, traffic-sewer streets for people and sustainable transportation, the plan has to be truly transit-oriented,” he said.

The plan calls for reducing traffic lanes and on-street car parking to make room for improvements to transit, biking, and walking. Ben-Pazi said the environmental review process for all of those projects would be completed as part of the plan, which is currently set to be adopted in late 2014.

An overview of proposed street re-configurations in the Central Corridor Plan. Image: Planning Department

Planners propose installing raised, protected bike lanes on Howard, Folsom, Brannan, Third and Fourth Streets. Howard and Folsom could also be converted to two-way traffic flow, but in that case, Howard would receive part-time, un-protected curbside bike lanes instead. The Fourth Street protected bike lanes, however, would only run between Market and Harrison Streets, Ben-Pazi said, since south of Harrison, the Central Subway would run above ground, with fewer traffic lanes and calmer conditions. The plan says other nearby streets are to be addressed in other projects like the Muni Transit Effectiveness Project and the SF Bike Plan.

“It is good to see plans for pedestrian, cycling, and transit-friendly Folsom and Howard,” said Radulovich. “Fixing these streets have been talked about for over a decade, but none of the prior efforts generated an actual project, or completed environmental review.”

Transit-only lanes would also be added, extended or “upgraded” on Harrison, Bryant, Third, and Fourth. Third and Fourth would each get a colored transit lane separated from car traffic by a raised barrier on the road.

All of the streets named above would get sidewalk widenings under the plan, as well as numerous new mid-block crossings with traffic signals throughout the area. Three closed crosswalks would be re-opened at Third and Byant, Third and Folsom, and at a freeway offramp at Fifth and Harrison.

The ramps that touch down along highway 80, Ben-Pazi noted, make for “horrible intersections,” and appear “much more frequently” than today’s Caltrans guidelines would allow.

Image: Planning Department

“They’re not something that would be built today,” he said. “We’ve learned a lot since.”

Though the prospect of removing SoMa freeway ramps is beyond the Central Corridor Plan’s scope, Ben-Pazi said it calls on the city to study the issue further.

The Central Corridor Plan also calls for turning several alleyways into pedestrianized public spaces, creating new parks, as well as adding more alleyways required as part of new development.

Ben-Pazi said the Planning Department expects the impact fees from increased development to fund most of the street improvements called for in the plan.

In a blog post, Sarah Karlinsky, deputy director of the SF Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), praised the plan overall, but said it should allow for more high-rise office and residential development than is currently proposed. Radulovich, however, doubts the Central Subway will provide enough of an increase in transit service for the level of intensive development SPUR would like to see.

“The name ‘Central Subway’ invokes high-capacity mass transit, but the reality will be more like N-Judah service — two-car trains with several miles of on-street operations,” said Radulovich. “The planned development in Mission Bay, Pier 70, the Central Waterfront, and the Bayview will make additional demands on Central Subway capacity, and generate additional traffic congestion.”

“As the amount of development in the corridor increases, a commensurate increase in transit capacity needs to be planned for – and paid for.”

Proposed new crosswalks. Image: Planning Department

A conceptual proposal for Third and upper Fourth Street. Image: Planning Department

Two proposed options for Folsom. Image: Planning Department

Two options for Howard.

The proposed design for Brannan.

Imagine if these treatments became standard for every U.S. city looking to improve water quality by reducing sewer overflows.

It’s not quite as brilliant as Al Madrigal’s segment on the Daily Show last week, but Stephen Colbert’s riff on Dorothy Rabinowitz at the end of this clip is totally worth your time this morning.

Far from constituting a war on cars, protected bike lanes are a big relief for drivers. Streetsblog SF

Rebecca Sanders is a doctoral candidate in transportation planning and urban design at the University of California-Berkeley. She’s spent a lot of time asking people — drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians — what kinds of street treatments would make them feel safer, giving them a list of safety improvements to choose from. Most drivers said their top priority was bike lanes. (In Los Angeles, the top choice was for improved pedestrian crossings, but bike lanes were a close second.)

Sanders began this research under the sponsorship of the state department of transportation (Caltrans), interviewing drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists on major corridors in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. She asked drivers why they picked the mode they did, and asked everyone how they perceived safety issues, especially for biking. Then she asked what kinds of street treatments would make the street safer for them.

“What was interesting about that study was that in the San Francisco Bay Area, the most requested item, across the board, was a bicycle lane on the corridor,” Sanders told Streetsblog. “It was the most requested item by drivers, it was the most requested item by pedestrians, and it was the most requested item by bicyclists. That was quite surprising to us.”

It’s no shock that cyclists asked for dedicated street space in overwhelming numbers, and it stands to reason that pedestrians want bicycles off the sidewalk. Perhaps it should be just as obvious that drivers would welcome dedicated bike infrastructure, too. They find that bike lanes help them be aware of cyclists and make cyclists’ behavior more predictable, according to Sanders’ research. In general, there’s less potential for conflict between drivers and cyclists when they each have their own space.

“We have not done a good job of recognizing and validating the concerns of drivers about predictability,” Sanders said. “For a long time, cyclists have been defensive; they’ve been fighting for space, and legitimately so. But in the process, some areas where we could really work together, I think, have fallen to the wayside. Everybody wants predictability on the roadway. Nobody wants to feel like they’re going to get hit or hit someone else and it’s going to be beyond their control.”

The results of Sanders’ San Francisco-area research are due to be published soon in the Transportation Research Record and are available now on the Berkeley website. Meanwhile, Sanders has continued to look into drivers’ attitudes toward bike lanes, making it the topic of her (as yet unpublished) dissertation. She has conducted focus groups and internet surveys to shed light on what drivers and cyclists need to feel safe.

The more protected bicyclists are, the more comfortable drivers feel. Here, drivers were asked how comfortable they feel driving with various kinds of infrastructure, and their answers are categorized by how often they bike. Image courtesy of Rebecca Sanders.

In her surveys, Sanders distinguished between drivers who also often ride bicycles and those who ride infrequently or not at all. Drivers who bike can better predict other cyclists’ actions when they are behind the wheel. But drivers who don’t ride find cyclist behavior erratic and unpredictable, and prefer not to share road space with them. That doesn’t mean they just want cyclists to go away — many want cyclists to have their own dedicated space, separated from motorized traffic.

Sanders also distinguished between various types of cycling infrastructure. She found that motorists felt most comfortable driving on streets with a higher level of separation between bicycles and cars.

Drivers who don’t bike said they would rather have no treatment at all than sharrows, which they find confusing, while drivers who bike daily would rather have something than nothing, but only narrowly prefer sharrows over nothing at all.

By and large, support grows with increased separation. Drivers prefer protected bike lanes to painted bike lanes, and painted bike lanes to sharrows. And they don’t want those bike lanes to be in the door zone of a line of parked cars.

“They would rather drive on a street with just a bicycle lane and no parking than on a street with a bicycle lane and parking,” Sanders said. “Because they know that if someone opens their car door that could send the bicyclist into their lane.”

Of course, drivers have other concerns about removing parking, but they do acknowledge that placing cyclists in the door zone makes bike lanes less effective.

“I don’t claim my study solved that [tension] at all,” Sanders said. “I’m just saying the debate should be broader. When we focus on tradeoffs only, and we talk about taking away parking to put in a bike lane for bicyclists, people perceive it as a war on cars. What we haven’t done is talk about how that also actually benefits drivers, because it improves predictability for them. Which is huge, because everybody wants to be safe.”