Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

(Editor’s note – If you don’t read Streetsblog San Francisco, you’ll be saddened to hear that our friend Matthew Roth, our sister site’s Deputy Editor, is leaving to pursue other ambitions. This is his last post. Matt, you’ll be missed. – DN)

The California Department of Insurance has approved a pay-as-you-drive insurance program encouraged by environmental advocates and transportation planners because it provides an incentive to drive less by reducing premiums for low-mileage drivers. Widespread adoption of similar insurance policies could reduce driving in the U.S. by as much as eight percent, according to a Brookings Institution study.

“The voluntary pay-as-you-drive initiative is an innovative program that will allow insurers to offer plans based on more accurate mileage, so that people who choose to drive less will pay less for auto insurance,” California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said recently when he announced the program with the participation of State Farm Insurance and the Automobile Club of Southern California.

Though other insurance companies, notably Progressive Insurance, have experimented with pay-as-you-drive policies, because of the large number of drivers in California and the scale of the program, it could have national significance.

State Farm — the state’s largest automobile insurance company with 3.3 million policy holders and premiums of $2.5 billion — had previously required mileage to be self-reported by customers, who then got a small discount if they drove less than 7,500 miles in a year. Starting in late February, State Farm will offer an initial 5 percent discount for the first policy term to drivers who opt-in to the Drive Safe and Save program and agree to self-report their odometer readings at the beginning and end of each policy period. Policy holders with an active On Star system, which comes with many vehicles made by General Motors, can agree to allow State Farm to access their mileage data automatically.

Customers who opt-in under the program will have their policies adjusted based on 500-mile segments up to 19,000 miles per year. For those who rarely drive, State Farm expects their premiums will be reduced by up to 45 percent. Assuming State Farm achieves its target of convincing one quarter of its policy holders to switch to pay-as-you-drive, the resulting savings would be $31 million a year.

“From our perspective it’s an opportunity to help our customer have more options when pricing their policy,” said Sevag Sarkissian, a spokesperson for State Farm. “An exciting positive that goes along with this is the potential impact this has on the environment.”

State Farm and OnStar partnered in 2009 for a small pilot in Ohio, though both companies believe Californians will embrace the program in large numbers, given the state’s reputation for environmental advocacy.

“Both OnStar and State Farm are trying to be leaders. We’re trying to work with California consumers to get lower rates,” said Mark DuBois, manager of strategic alliances at OnStar. DuBois said the program is primarily about saving drivers money, but he noted the incentive to drive less would help the environment. “We’re all trying to look at how to make green initiatives and look at ways to reduce that carbon footprint. We look at it as a potential to change consumer behavior.”

The environmental impact would be substantial, as the Brookings Institution study noted. If every driver in the state switched to pay-as-you-drive, the eight percent reduction in driving would translate to 24 billion fewer miles driven, 1.2 billion fewer gallons of gasoline and a seven to nine percent reduction in carbon dioxide.

According to a Victoria Transport Policy Institute study, widespread adoption of pay-as-you-drive would also reduce traffic crashes, lowering medical bills and saving lives. “Mileage reductions reduce traffic density (vehicles per lane-mile), which reduces crash rates,” the study noted.

Another potential benefit of the program is the gradual public acceptance of reporting vehicle miles traveled (VMT). For Robert Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and former chair of the National Commission on Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing at the U.S. Department of Transportation, this could make it easier to transition to a distance-based VMT tax to pay for roads.

This is particularly important as cars get increasingly better mileage and the gas tax now pays for barely half the cost of highways. Given that raising the gas-tax has been a political third rail, a shift to another funding mechanism will be crucial to pay for infrastructure, according to Atkinson.

“People will get marginally used to the notion of paying by the mile. Then it’s less of a big emotional or intellectual shift,” said Atkinson about moving to a distance-based tax.

“If it works in California, then they talk about it elsewhere. Eventually these innovations will permeate to other states,” he said.

I would put this up there with China’s proposal for huge buses that allow cars to drive under them, but it’s still worth a good laugh. Who needs shoulders on highways anyway?!

The new design of the California High Speed Rail Authority website.

As California’s high speed rail project continues to gain attention, both positive and negative, the makeup of visitors to the official website has been shifting, with an increasing number of general public who know very little about the project, according to the California High Speed Rail Authority (CAHSRA). In response to this trend and based on thousands of user surveys and feedback from 13 focus groups, the CAHSRA redesigned its website as a portal it hopes will be more user friendly, intuitive and useful to a wide range of interested public.

“A user-friendly Web site is a key way to reach millions of people both in California and around the world,” said Curt Pringle, Chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority Board, in a statement. “We took our cues from the people in the online community and revamped our Web site so that it not only provides current and in-depth information, but does it in an easily accessible way.”

In addition to creating a cleaner aesthetic and updated navigation bar, CAHSRA indexed and tagged its documents so the search function is more effective, which CAHSRA spokesperson Rachel Wall admitted was a big improvement over the previous iteration. “The previous site wasn’t serving people’s needs statewide. It had a ton information but it wasn’t navigable,” said Wall.

In a teleconference with media, Wall demonstrated the site’s new functionality, including the new search options that can be geographically narrowed with a simple click for localized data. Wall said this better functionality and tools like the new glossary of terms would enable “every Californian [to] get in touch with the project and understand what’s happening.”

According to the CAHSRA, current website traffic is about 40,000 monthly visitors, depending on the visibility of the project in the press. The most trafficked page on the site behind the home page was the trip planner, then news and facts, followed by the video and image library, which was redesigned to be more user-friendly.

The new website also coincides with an effort by the CAHSRA to increase its profile on social networks, notably Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook group page has yet to gain a significant following, especially when compared to groups like Californian’s for High Speed Rail, which counts nearly 35,000 members, but Wall said the CAHSRA hoped to do better at reaching the public through these channels.

Jeff Barker, the CAHSRA’s Deputy Executive Officer, explained the agency only had 17 full-time staff at present and it needed to maintain a balance on certain issues while in environmental review. “Of course we support high speed rail in California,” he said, but he noted there were no plans to start a CAHSRA blog or a more intensive outreach strategy. “In environmental review, we’re required to be objective. There is an advocacy line that we don’t cross.”

While some meetings are currently webcast on the site, Barker said they were at the mercy of the facilities where they held their meetings, which often don’t have good enough connectivity to meet their needs.

Our goal to hit every meeting,” he said, but he admitted, “with the state budget the way it is, we don’t have the funds.”

Barker admitted in the past they hadn’t had the capacity to respond to feedback in a timely manner, but the new website is part of the effort to improve communication between the CAHSRA and its future customers. Readers are encouraged to give the CAHSRA feedback on the new website, both in our comments below and through their feedback form.

Will you be sharing your Mini? Photo: City CarShare

As more teens wait to get their licenses and young adults drive fewer miles annually, advertisers have begun to point to advances in digital technology to explain the trend. Many younger adults use digital media to connect to their friends virtually, the argument goes, and technological innovations will likely reduce the incentive to own and operate a car.

Now, with the passage of a new law in California that allows current car owners to share their personal vehicles in a car sharing service and make money without voiding their personal insurance policy, the age of owning a car as a rite of American adulthood may be ceding to a new vision of vehicles as a social service.

Because your car spends on average more than 90 percent of the time parked and idle, proponents of personal vehicle sharing argue, why not make money instead of sitting by as your investment depreciates in a garage?

“We feel like this is a historic moment. This legislation basically revolutionizes the idea of the automobile into being a shared service,” said Sunil Paul, CEO of Spride Inc, a personal car-sharing start-up company. “We think it can have a huge impact over the next many years about the way we think about the automobile.”

On the heels of the announcement that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 1871 into law yesterday, Spride and City Carshare, the San Francisco non-profit that helped pioneer car sharing, announced a partnership to facilitate personal car sharing in the Bay Area. Once AB 1871 takes effect January 1st, the new Spride Share pilot program will allow car owners to loan their vehicles to the more than 13,000 screened and qualified members of City CarShare, offsetting the costs and environmental impact of private car ownership while providing City CarShare members with access to a greater variety of vehicles.

Car owners who choose to participate in the program will outfit their cars with City Carshare’s key and lock technology and designate the hours their vehicle will be free through CitycarShare’s website. Very little will change for existing City CarShare members, except they will have a wider selection of vehicles, some of them owned by individuals instead of the non-profit. Paul announced he would be signing up his own Toyota Hylander Hybrid as the first personal vehicle in the fleet.

City CarShare’s mission has always been in part to mitigate environmental damage caused by excessive driving and they saw the new partnership as one that will expand their reach beyond San Francisco. “By adding Spride Share vehicles to our fleet, we can extend our service to more people in more locations through better utilization of existing vehicles,” said Rick Hutchinson, CEO of City CarShare. “Spride’s new model brings us one step closer to achieving our mission by helping our communities become transit-oriented while mitigating carbon emissions.”

Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento), who wrote the law and guided it through the legislative process this year, said the bill had enjoyed bipartisan support because it was both an incentive to business entrepreneurs and because it promised to reduce the environmental impacts of driving. Jones, who is the Democratic nominee for California Insurance Commissioner in this November’s election, worked with car insurance companies from the beginning to craft a solution amenable to them. With the passage of AB 1871, he expected a rush of new for-profit and non-profit companies to join Spride and other start-ups in personal vehicle sharing.

“The insurance impediment had really frozen entrepreneurs from getting into the market,” said Jones. “I think it could have a very revolutionary impact. It will potentially reduce the need for as many personal vehicles, with concurrent reductions in traffic and parking impacts.”

Jones, who said he would sign his own vehicle up to a personal sharing service, was impressed with how personalized vehicle sharing could be as social networking becomes more sophisticated. The stigma of letting a stranger use your car, he argued, could be mitigated by limiting use of your vehicle to a designated circle of Facebook friends, for instance. “The potential to define the social network within which you would share your car based on some of the social media applications is fascinating,” said Jones.

Zipcar, the nation’s largest car-sharing company, has yet to make an announcement indicating it would add personal vehicles to its fleet and Jessica Scorpio, a co-founder of the personal car-sharing company Getaround, doesn’t imagine they will any time soon.

She noted the traditional car-sharing business model flourishes in dense urban areas, but doesn’t pencil out as well in suburban markets, where personal vehicle sharing companies see the greatest potential to entice new customers.

Getaround started as a thesis project by Scorpio and several classmates at Singularity University, an interdisciplinary school based at the NASA Ames facility whose mission is to “assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.” Scorpio said reducing personal car ownership and limiting the impact driving has on the planet were two challenges that Getaround hoped to tackle.

The company has been operating for a year and a half in the admittedly gray area of insurance liability that had prevailed until the new law was passed. Though Scorpio declined to provide membership statistics, she said car owners who participated in Getaround were covered by the company’s insurance during the rental period. She also noted there could have potentially been questions from insurance companies in the event of an accident, but none had occurred.

“[AB 1871] makes it more black and white. It ensures that insurance companies cannot penalize people who share their vehicles,” said Scorpio, who doesn’t own a car but occasionally rents one from Getaround. She also thought advances in technology would continue to chip away at car ownership.

“We see smart phones as a huge enabling factor in the whole thing,” she said, pointing to the inefficiency of leaving a private vehicle idle for so much of its life as an incentive to switch from owning to sharing. She even imagined a scenario where city governments and car-sharing companies provided a fleet with taxpayer money that would complement more traditional public transportation. “People are hopefully going to use cars much smarter. Having them sit around more than 90 percent of the time doesn’t seem smart.”

As for those car owners who are too attached to their own car and protest at the thought of sharing it, Scorpio wasn’t too concerned. She said there was an enormous market of drivers who would give up their cars if they could reliably use a shared vehicle to meet their mobility needs.

“More and more people are going to access a car when they need it for an activity, rather than owning a car,” she said.

Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr

Climate change is a national security risk that will be exacerbated if Californians pass Proposition 23, the voter initiative on the ballot this November that would suspend California’s AB 32 climate change law, say opponents of the measure, such as former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz.

Shultz and financier Thomas Steyer, co-chairs of the No on Propostion 23 campaign, held a media briefing today on what they described as the threats to America’s energy security and economy if California’s landmark 2006 climate change law was suspended.

“The issue of climate, the issue of economics, the issue of national security all point us in the same direction. We need to get control of our use of energy and the way we produce it, the way we use it,” said Shultz, a former marine who fought in World War II and later served as Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan.

Steyer said Prop 23 would continue to mire America in an unstable energy policy. “Our energy use, our approach to climate, the health of our economy, our ability to develop new technologies and build new businesses, all of these factor into our national security,” he said, adding that “dismantling rules that foster innovation and that make us more energy secure doesn’t make sense.”

Shultz tied American energy policy to the threat of terrorism and rogue states just days before the anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks.

“The security implications of our energy situation are compounded greatly by the fact that the revenues that are generated by our use of oil and that of others go, in part, to countries that don’t wish us well,” said Shultz. “Undoubtedly some of this money is slopping over into the hands of terrorists, the 9/11 people. I think the security side of this is very important to recognize.”

Shultz said AB 32 has resulted in “a virtual explosion” of venture capital and research and development in clean energy and “it has convinced a lot of people that sooner or later there is going to be a price on carbon.”

Several military analysts joined Steyer and Shultz on the briefing to emphasize the military’s growing focus on climate change and national security concerns.

“America’s energy posture constitutes a serious and urgent threat to our national security, militarily, economically and diplomatically,” said retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, a private security and energy consultant volunteering his time with No on Prop 23.

McGinn said every president since Richard Nixon has stated America should reduce its dependence on foreign energy and “it’s more true now than it has been in the past.” Despite being in one of the “deepest recessions of our lifetime,” he added, America still sends “a billion dollars out of our economy every day simply to pay for our oil addiction.”

Referring to a report released last year by the Center for Naval Analysis, a non-profit institution, McGinn said the oil price shocks from a number of geopolitical scenarios or further natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina would far exceed any increased costs associated with implementing AB 32 and reducing our dependence on petroleum for energy.

In response to the media event, Anita Mangels, a spokesperson for the Yes on 23 campaign, released a scathing broadsheet impugning Steyer and questioning Shultz’s support for increasing the cost of fossil fuels, though not his patriotism, which she wrote was “beyond reproach.”

Mangels told Streetsblog today’s discussion of AB 32 and national security was a “cynical, distracting tactic to divert voters attention from the fact that Yes on 23 will save California families billions of dollars in higher energy costs and prevent the loss of a million jobs.”

“I would submit to you under the current plan we will probably wind up being more reliant on foreign oil because [the California Air Resources Board] is making it impossible to use conventional fuels.” said Mangels. “If they insist on reducing the production of conventional fuels in California, we’ll have to import more.”

Mangels characterized Steyer as a hypocrite and said he had made some of his fortune with Farallon Capital Management by investing in oil, including Valero and Tesoro, the two oil companies that have largely bankrolled the Yes on 23 campaign to date.

“The fact remains that if you are going to hold yourself up as a crusader against oil, you should look at your own house, at how many shares you have in oil and gas that is making you quite rich,” she said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

A spokesperson for No on 23, Steve Maviglio, defended Steyer, saying, “He doesn’t object to private enterprise or oil and gas, he just wants them to be fairly and properly regulated.”

Maviglio and the No on 23 campaign have recently escalated their calls for a public debate of the issue between Steyer and Valero’s CEO Bill Kleese, who declined the challenge. Steyer also assailed Assemblymember Dan Logue, sponsor of Prop 23, for pulling out of a debate scheduled next Tuesday at the Sacramento Press Club.

Reached this evening, Logue told Streetsblog he was indeed debating Steyer at the Press Club event, that news to the contrary was a misunderstanding. Logue also argued the biggest threat to America’s national security was California’s unemployment and economic woes, which he argued were only compounded by AB 32.

“It’s a scare tactic and that’s what the Left and the anti-23 people are using,” he said. “The greatest threat to our national security is our collapsed economy.”

Flickr photo: jovino

The FTA probe stemmed from a complaint by Public Advocates, a civil rights law
firm in San Francisco, over BART’s failure to properly analyize
the equity impacts of its fare policy for the controversial
Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) as required under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As a result of the
complaint, the FTA denied BART $70 million in federal stimulus funds
for the project. Because the MTC channels significant federal funds to
BART and because it continually approved motions to send stimulus funds
to an agency that ultimately failed its responsibility to comply with
Title VI, the FTA turned its eye on MTC.

According to Thomas Sanchez, chair of the Urban Affairs and
Planning Department
at Virginia Tech and
a Brookings Institution fellow, the FTA’s action against BART was
unprecedented and perked up the ears of transportation policymakers
around the country.

On the other hand, Sanchez said he wasn’t necessarily surprised
with the action at the MTC because of a previous lawsuit by Public
Advocates, Darensburg v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission,
which provided significant evidence in his mind that the MPO wasn’t
fulfilling its Title VI requirements. Sanchez said the commission had
been asked numerous times by advocates like Urban Habitat to conduct an equity analysis of its funding practices in general, and had grown quite vocal with OAC complaints.

"I personally think it’s a positive from a standpoint of
accountability and transparency and holding these organizations
accountable for a fair amount of federal money they are getting," said
Sanchez.

While Sanchez said the BART OAC case was significant because the
FTA withheld money rather than merely exchanging pointed letters, the
MTC should have had better mechanisms in place to monitor BART and
should have acted on the advocates’ complaints of improper equity
analysis.

"It’s their responsibility, not only that the subcontractor follows through with the work, but the letter of the law," he said.

An FTA official in Washington confirmed to Streetsblog that no
other MPO was currently under similar scrutiny and that the complaint by
Public Advocates against BART had led to the request of documents from
the MTC. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the
the first step is always to help the grantee come into voluntary
compliance, and that in this particular situation the agency was
obligated to follow up to see what the MPO was doing to monitor its
subrecipients.

The FTA official also noted that while it might have appeared that
withholding the money from BART for the OAC was a sanction, the issue
was more about the tight timeline for allocating stimulus funds. The FTA
did not believe BART would be compliant with Title VI by the time the
money had to be obligated, so it denied the funding request.

The MTC subsequently distributed the money to transit operators throughout the region in accordance with its Tier II spending contingency.

MTC spokesperson John Goodwin told Streetsblog last week the
organization would "work with the FTA to meet their deadlines." When
contacted for this story he said he had nothing new to add to his
comments from last week. Neither MTC Commission Chair Scott Haggerty nor
Vice-Chair Adrienne Tissier replied to Streetsblog’s requests for
comment.

Wynn Hausser, a spokesperson for Public Advocates, said he doesn’t
believe the MTC has the proper procedural requirements in place to
monitor Title VI compliance of subrecipients and the probe will
ultimately demonstrate the shortcoming. 

MTC Commissioners Question Governance and Projects

Perhaps surprisingly, several MTC commissioners interviewed by
Streetsblog agreed with the advocates and argued the FTA probe could
compel the Bay Area to reconsider how it spends billions in federal
funds, including past allocations for projects they contend never went
through proper equity analysis.

"I
think it would be fair to say that was a red flag, that it was
alarming," said Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, an MTC
commissioner representing the Association of Bay Area Governments
(ABAG). Cortese listed numerous concerns with MTC procedure and
representation and called into question several funding decisions in the
region, which to his knowledge sailed through the commission without
equity analysis.

"I do think there is a lot the MTC should be concerned about," said
Cortese. "If the FTA knows the half of it, they should be concerned."

Cortese said he hoped the OAC wouldn’t become the only poster child
for the region’s failure to comply with Title VI and argued there were
programmatic issues throughout the region. Cortese listed several other
projects where the MTC had moved hundreds of millions of dollars without
conducting equity analysis. He said the Valley Transportation Authority
(VTA) had de-prioritized the Capitol Expressway
light rail project, which had undergone equity analysis and would have
served low income communities of color, in favor of BART to San Jose.

"[The VTA] defunded a project that their own equity criteria said
was needed. That’s a $300 million example," said Cortese. "At what point
does MTC have an obligation to say
that’s not right? To what extent does MTC have the tools to do something

about it?"

He also noted MTC had moved money from the Dunbarton Bridge rail
project to BART’s Warm Springs extension without an equity analysis. "I
don’t remember anyone ever doing that analysis," he said.

"Lots of money gets moved around politically without a lot of analysis on civil rights and equity," added Cortese.

San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, who sits on the commission and
has been an outspoken critic of the current OAC project, said fellow
commissioners didn’t want to consider anything but the nearly $500
million tramway. He said the commission never seriously pushed BART to
study other options, such as the bus rapid transit proposal by the
transit non-profit TransForm.

"Although the Oakland political machine was able to turn out a large number of people saying build the project, it seemed
pretty clear the benefits were not there on the OAC," said Daly. "I
think TransForm has done a really good job of debunking that. If your
real concern was the economic vitality to the airport, you would run a BRT
or other transit option that serves the people of the area."

Daly also complained that MTC Executive Director Steve Heminger had recently supported a $20 million funding swap
at the California Transportation Commission (CTC) to make up for the
gap that resulted when the FTA didn’t give BART the $70 million in
stimulus funds it expected. Daly said he wasn’t supposed to catch the
funding swap issue and when he did, MTC staff was not pleased.

"Obviously
Heminger and MTC are moving ahead with trying to figure out how to fund
the OAC without all this and that’s fine. But to do it under the
darkness of night, I thought that was pretty low," said Daly.

Urban Habitat’s Bob Allen questioned the funding swap as well. "The
level of effort and coordination the CTC is doing with the MTC
because this is a pet project is embarrassing," he said. "Where was the
level of
effort when the operators were bleeding jobs?"

"When a
capital project goes over budget by $100 million, there’s always an
explanation. When a transit operator like AC Transit encounters health
care cost increases, they say it’s mismanagement. They don’t go out of their way
to do crap for the operators," said Allen.

Supervisor Cortese also expressed concerns about the
representational structure of the commission itself. Despite having 25
percent of the population in the Bay Area, Santa Clara
County is not proportionately represented, and East San Jose, which has
a strong people of color and low income community population, doesn’t
have a
significant voice on MTC, said Cortese.

Cortese’s appointment by ABAG created temporary parity, but when
his
term ends, he said, Santa Clara County will only have two permanent
appointees and neither of them would represent the half million people
of East San Jose. "That’s a permanent structural failure," he said. 

Impact of the Probe

Source: Tom Sanchez.

The potential problems at MTC are not necessarily novel among MPOs around the country, as Sanchez noted in a paper
on democratic governance and demographics in transportation planning.
In the paper, he wrote that 88 percent of MPOs are governed by whites,
while the regions represented by MPOs are only 61 percent white. He also
indicated MPO boards are over-represented by suburban interests because
of "one area, one vote" governance structures.

Without better representation by communities that are supposed to
be protected by Title VI, Sanchez argued MPOs would not really engage
the public and fulfill their responsibility to the law. MPOs should do
more than pay lip service to public involvement in decision making:

Community-based groups that assist transportation agencies should be
encouraged to improve outreach processes and strategies to identify
culturally diverse groups and facilitate their involvement. Such efforts
are greatly needed to support information dissemination about
transportation and related land-use impacts. Mechanisms are needed that
allow formal recognition of coalitions of community representatives on
MPO advisory committees and decision-making boards.

"That’s really who they answer to, that’s who pays the bills, the
public," Sanchez told Streetsblog. Sanchez said the MPOs are ultimately
public bodies and should be responsive to complaints raised by the
public, not just "blow them off," as he said MTC had done previously
with concerns raised by advocates like Urban Habitat.

"If the public isn’t happy, then your customers aren’t happy. What
do you do, tell them too bad?" he said. "From a public relations
standpoint and a good practices standpoint, that doesn’t seem like a
good way to do business."

Urban Habitat’s Allen hoped the FTA action would ultimately lead
the MTC to reconsider how it conducts business in the region, including
its adherence to the letter of civil rights law and a reconsideration of
its representational governance.

"Changing the structure of MTC would change the investment
outcomes," Allen said. He argued transit operators should be directly
represented on the commission and it should better reflect geographic
equity.

Allen said since the FTA investigation of BART, the staff there has
had an open line of communication with the advocates about their
overall equity analysis, though he said Urban Habitat disagreed with the
sufficiency of BART’s OAC equity analysis (the FTA recently sent BART
notice that it had complied with the necessary requisites for its OAC
fare analysis).

Looking forward, Allen hoped the FTA’s probe into the MTC would
compel commissioners to take civil rights seriously and not just lead
them to "check off the boxes" required by the law. "We want to make sure
they’re going as far as we think they need to go to comply with federal
civil rights compliance."

Beyond the Bay Area

Advocates for transit and social justice are
taking cues from the MTC action to influence their regional MPOs beyond the Bay Area. The
Los Angeles Bus Riders Union (BRU), which made history in 1996 with a
successful Title VI challenge against the Los Angeles Metropolitan
Transportation Authority, has been closely watching the BART and MTC
cases.

"I
feel like this is a historic move for those of us who advocate on
behalf of the transit dependent, working class communities, and
communities of color," said Esperanza Martinez, lead organizer for the
BRU. Referring to President Obama and FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff,
she added, "It
speaks to the real possibilities and opportunities that have been
created through the new administration."

"It sets a precedent for
agencies like the MTC to tread more carefully in terms of how they make
choices on how they spend local, state and federal funding to build
projects that have discriminatory impacts," she added.

Esperanza pointed to the 30/10 transit plan promoted by LA Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa as an example of a project that had been pushed
forward without equity analysis. She said it would decimate bus service
by shifting operating resources to light rail, very little of which will
serve transit-dependent communities.

According to Esperanza,
the work of reforming transportation inequity has to start with the
federal transportation act and work through the states to the local
municipalities. "The level
of discrimination is embedded in the fibers of the funding formulas and
in the agencies. We’re trying to shift those priorities," she said.

The holy grail for many urbanists contemplating long-term development and growth trends is the transit village. Adding growth adjacent to functional transit has the benefit of making it easier for the new population there to drive less and use transit for a multitude of trips. Likewise, transit villages can add to ridership on the transit lines, no small matter for operators seeking to maintain a consistent customer base.

Mobilizing the Region (MTR) reports New Jersey has added its 21st and 22nd transit villages in Somerville and Montclair. By designating the developments there as transit villages, Somerville and Montclair will get $100,000 planning and technical assistance grants and will move to the front of the line for other state grants the towns may seek.

The newly designated communities are each implementing transit-oriented development in their own way. Montclair is looking to develop around the Bay Street station by adding a commuter parking deck, seven residential developments with 163 units, a municipal fire station headquarters and a day care center. Somerville’s redevelopment efforts include plans to build a performing arts center, residential housing and parking decks near its station, and transform 40 acres of remediated landfill into recreation space with bike and foot trails and fields for residents.

The new grants also got the state’s chief executive on the record touting transit-oriented development. "The Transit Village program encourages local officials to surround nearby transit facilities with a vibrant mix of residential, retail and commercial uses," said New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in a statement. "This type of development spurs sustainable economic growth, maximizes the value of our transit investments and benefits the environment."

As California’s big four metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)
run models to determine how much they can influence California’s growth
and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, significant questions remain. The
state’s Senate Bill 375, typically referred to as the Anti-Sprawl Bill,
requires that planners and policy makers develop meaningful solutions
to reduce sprawl, reduce vehicle miles traveled and promote growth in
areas that will have the least impact on the environment.

As Amanda Eaken from the Natural Resources Defense Council writes on the Switchboard,
the predictions are encouraging. By bringing Californians closer to
their jobs and providing better transportation choices, by 2050 SB 375
could:

• Help Californians drive 3.7 trillion fewer miles
• Help Californians save $6,400 per year on transportation and other household costs
• Save the state $194 billion in infrastructure costs with smarter planning
• Save 140 billion gallons of gasoline
• Save more open space than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined

But the models won’t mean much, she argues, if policy makers don’t
invest money in projects that can bring about the needed change.
Without programming funds away from destructive development and
transportation projects, you will only have plans.

Eakan writes:

In every case there are certain ambitious policies and there are
certain areas where we know the MPOs can do more. For example, in every
case, we fail to see a shift of transportation funding to support the
improved land use patterns every MPO is calling for. This is the thrust
of SB 375 – to align regional investments to support a more sustainable
land use pattern. The MPOs make assumptions – in certain cases very
ambitious and laudable assumptions about the increase in walkable,
transit oriented development, but then fail to shift their
transportation investments to make sure we realize these better futures.

The challenge for advocates like the NRDC lies in pressuring MPOs to
revise their long-term transportation plans to better reflect the
targets set by SB 375. Adding capacity to freeways or permitting
greenfield development now will only make the laudable targets more
difficult to realize in the future.

Elsewhere on the Network, sprawl apologist Wendell Cox argues
on New Geography that the chorus of pundits and thinkers talking about
the end of suburbia isn’t looking at certain data, and in fact the
population in suburbs hasn’t decreased. Richard Florida analyzes a new report on attracting the "creative class" to rural areas. And finally The Dirt has a good post describing some of the finalists in the Build a Better Burb design competition.

Though California Secretary of State Debra Bowen yesterday certified a November ballot measure asking voters to suspend AB 32, a landmark state law requiring a significant cut in greenhouse gas emissions, AB 32 supporters have been organizing for months and have formed a significant coalition to fight the initiative.

In a move usually associated with congressional Republicans, they've also honed their message to clarion simplicity: Support a clean energy future or support Big Oil.

Californians for Clean Energy Jobs, the coalition supporting AB 32, argues the paradigm is no longer about jobs versus the environment, but supporting an innovative economy that benefits the environment .

"It's not a battle between tree huggers and business," said Steve Maviglio, the spokesperson for Californians for Clean Energy Jobs. Maviglio said he was impressed that over 350 supporters had already stepped up, including heavy political hitters like the Association of American Retired Persons (AARP), the American Lung Association, the California Teachers Association, the California League of Women's Voters and the California Nurses Association.

"These are groups the American people trust and they don't trust oil companies," he said.

The poison pill in the ballot measure, according to Maviglio, is the provision that would suspend AB32 until California's unemployment rate falls below 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters, something that has only happened three times in the last 30 years. California's jobless rate is currently at 12.3 percent.

While the bulk of support for the coalition comes from the clean energy sector, Maviglio said Virgin America, deeply reliant on traditional petroleum fuels, was a member because they wanted to be on the right side of the issue. He also noted that Chevron and the California Chamber of Commerce were staying out of the fight because of the significance of AB 32.

San Francisco Mayor Newsom clearly got the memo and stayed on message in an impassioned speech at a press conference yesterday that also showed that he's in full-stride in his campaign for Lt. Governor.

"This is an outrage. As a Californian, I'm offended that these big oil companies have come into our state and are trying to buy a roll-back to an old dirtier and darker economy," he said. "This is a fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves about what kind of state we are, what kind of people we are, and what we want to represent to the rest of this world."

Sierra Club National Chair Carl Pope at yesterday's press conference, flanked by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and other AB 32 supporters. Photo: Matthew Roth.

"They don't want you to know this suspends clean air laws, they don't want you to know this is another big oil bailout for polluters and they don't want you to know who's behind this at all," said Pope, who noted Valero and Tesoro are two of California's biggest polluters and personally stand to gain significantly if AB 32 goes away.

He noted that front groups for the oil companies, such as the California Jobs Initiative, couldn't be pleased with the wording of the initiative as it will be written on the ballot because it so pointedly depicts the effort to repeal the pollution controls in AB 32.

"There's one piece of really good news about this ballot measure," said Pope. "You don't need to read the fine print."

The initiative "suspends air pollution control laws requiring major polluters to report and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming until unemployment drops below specified level for full year," reads the full text as it will appear on the ballot.

Many opponents of the measure see the action by the oil companies as a maneuver to outflank national carbon reduction standards, given California's leadership on environmental standard from fuel efficiency to building regulations

"The fossil fuel companies are being cynical but probably pretty strategic in saying, 'listen, if we can drive the stake through the heart of environmental policy in California, just imagine the chilling effect it's going to have in the country,'" Wade Crowfoot of the Environmental Defense Fund told Streetsblog. "[Oil companies] are making a bet that they can actually stop the progress toward equaling the playing field for renewable energy."

Crowfoot and Mayor Newsom both highlighted the enormous investment in cleantech companies that has resulted from the passage of AB 32. California is host to 12,000 cleantech companies with over 500,000 employees and more of these companies are relocating their worldwide headquarters to California than any other state by an enormous margin, said Newsom. Since 2006, when AB 32 was passed, $9 billion has poured into California's cleantech sector, $2.1 billion alone last year.

"Investment buys jobs," said Crowfoot. As to criticism that cleantech only represents a small portion of jobs in California, Crowfoot said: "So was the computer, so was the micro-processor, but are you going to defend the typewriter factory?"

Despite a wide majority of Californians telling pollsters they support AB 32, political adepts like Crowfoot and Maviglio clearly understand the power and reach of big money in politics. Though no one knows exactly how much the oil companies will spend on the campaign, estimates range from between $50-100 million.

If the oil companies harp enough on the jobs angle and the economy doesn't improve much by November, AB 32 supporters are worried voters might be convinced by their argument.

"The facts are on our side, but the name of the game is being able to have the resources to beat back their arguments and be able to tell the truth," said Crowfoot. "Political advertising can greatly impact the election. If you have $80 million spent by oil companies going up on TV saying this is a jobs killer, we need to be there to counter the message."

Maviglio acknowledged the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was great PR to help them beat back the message by Valero and Tesoro, but he said, "In 90 percent of campaigns, whoever spends the most money wins."

Though he expected to be outspent significantly, Maviglio said they would rely on traditional political campaigning and intelligent messaging to get the facts to the public.

"It's going to be a full-scale battle with every component of the campaign," he said.

Bamboo Bicycle Studio
bike. Photos: Matthew Roth.

On the way to a local caffeination recharging station near Mint
Plaza last week, I locked my bicycle next to two very odd rides: The
frames were bamboo and the bamboo tubes were connected with fiberglass.
The frames looked solid, but seeing a bike that wasn’t made of steel or
some alloy was striking in its singularity.

Sitting outside Blue Bottle were two young men who fit the bicycle
courier profile quite well, so I took a chance that the bikes might be
theirs and asked about them.

The two cyclists were part of the Bamboo Bike Studio in
Brooklyn, NY, where they teach weekend bamboo bike building workshops.
Josh Rovner, one of the founders of the Bamboo Bike Studio, explained
their workshops as an opportunity to teach do-it-yourself bicycle
building skills while promoting bamboo as a sustainable design
alternative to other bicycle frame materials. Over the course of a
weekend, they teach participants how to
build their bikes from scratch and send them off on the bike they just
built.

Rovner, originally a student of film, turned to building bamboo
bikes after volunteering for Columbia University’s Bamboo Bike Project,
where he caught the bug and now makes his living in part by teaching the
workshops.

Their studio has been featured in numerous media outlets in the two
years they’ve been teaching classes, which has resulted in tremendous
interest in the bikes. Their four-person workshops are booked through
September and they have a waiting list approximately 400-people long.

San Francisco was less a business trip than an opportunity to ride
the city and Rovner said their next destination for new workshops was
Ghana. They will be taking a trip in July to try to establish themselves
there and begin teaching frame-building classes.

Asked how they were different from handmade frame builders or
bamboo frame specialists like Calfee Design, which has marketed a bamboo bike that can
be used for racing, Rovner said, "We don’t build these as
performance bikes, we build them to be strong."

As
testament to their strength, Rovner, a part-time bicycle courier, has
put nearly 4,000 miles on his bike and has found no problems with frame
durability.

Though they have experimented with bamboo from various locations in
the U.S., Rovner said the bamboo in the frames they currently use is
from the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico.

Besides the bamboo frame and the fiberglass joints, the frame
builders use stainless steel tubing in the seat and to anchor the step
to the steering column. They also use factory parts for the
transmission, the bottom bracket shell, the front fork and the
handlebars.

The cost of the workshop depends on what you build:
If you only build a frame, it’s $632; if you build a complete bike, it’s
$948. Rovner admitted they make just enough "to keep playing and keep
engineering," though he’d like to scale up and bring costs down.

He also acknowledged "it’s a bit of a novel purchase, I think, for
someone who
just wants to learn how to build something like this," but he said the
interest in learning about bike building is as much the purpose of the
classes as making a living doing it.

"I don’t want to build you a bike. I don’t want to sell you a
bike," he said. "I
want to teach you how to build your own and as a consequence I want you
to teach three of your buddies to build their own."

The car sharing model, however, is predicated on operating in dense urban areas where there is good transit and a large pool of prospective customers who don't want to own a car. On the other hand, it doesn't make financial sense for car sharing companies to operate in suburbs or rural areas. Not yet, at least.

City CarShare is trying to pioneer personal vehicle sharing, where car owners would make their vehicles available to a pre-screened pool of personal vehicle sharing participants during the periods of the day when their car is not in use, which for many vehicles is upwards of 90 percent of the time.

If you drove to work in San Francisco and left your car idle from 8 am to 6 pm, for instance, you could allow a pool of prospective vehicle share participants to use your car, for which you would make enough money to cover the cost of usage. If you consider the cost of owning and insuring your car to already be a sunken expense, this could be a way to "make" money for a commodity that is otherwise depreciating in value.

Of the many challenges to expanding car sharing to privately owned vehicles, the first obstacle is current insurance law. In most states, unless you are commercially licensed or you operate a livery service, receiving compensation from others for using your vehicle voids your personal car insurance coverage.

To this end, City CarShare has been working with California State Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) and Spride Share, a new company started by cleantech financier Sunil Paul of Spring Ventures, to draft Assembly Bill 1871, which would change insurance law to permit remuneration for personal vehicle sharing.

"The idea is to make it possible for people to participate in car-sharing programs," said Assemblymember Jones. "This is part of a package of approaches that look at ways we can engage insurance companies in a positive way to encourage better environmental behavior."

If successful, personal vehicle sharing could expand the car share model to regions poorly served by transit, offering those who don't want to own a car or those who can't afford a car the ability to be mobile. It might even alter the national narrative of personal car ownership, say proponents, shifting the way consumers view cars, so that vehicles are less extensions of one's personality and more about getting from place to place.

"Personally owned vehicles, especially in America, are highly identified with status," said Rick Huthinson, City CarShare CEO. "We're hoping that the perspective of cars as an aspect of status, as something you have to have, is becoming less of an issue."

Personal vehicle sharing services could be administered through an established car-sharing service like City CarShare, or it could eventually be done through personal and professional networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. Participants would be screened by the DMV to assure a good driving record, just like they are for current car-sharing businesses.

Assemblymember Jones echoed Hutchinson's sentiment about the significance of the initiative, saying "I think it's revolutionary. If we can move to a place where people are able and are encouraged to share their vehicles, we will reduce the number of vehicles necessary and will provide for more efficient vehicle use."

Getting to the point where the public accepts the idea of sharing their private cars with the wider community, however, will be a challenge, one Spride Share CEO Sunil Paul thinks can be surmounted with the technology we already have.

"We believe there is a way to dismantle the idea of personal car ownership and turn it into a shared resource," he said. "Our overall vision is to replace private automobiles with private cell phones."

Paul said he hopes the public eventually sees cars as a service and not a commodity and he drew analogies to cloud computing or commercial building leases.

Paul, who made a fortune in anti-spam software, became interested in personal vehicle sharing after completing research for the Gigaton Throwdown, a project that asked whether the U.S. could scale up clean energy solutions and reduce one gigaton of CO2 by 2020.

According to Paul, the Gigaton Throwdown study showed that replacing the entire fleet of gasoline vehicles in the U.S. with electric vehicles was "practically impossible" within a reasonable time frame.  "It's very difficult to scale up solutions to transportation problems around climate and energy security," said Paul. "We started looking for opportunities that could deal with transportation problems without building entirely new cars."

While the current bill introduced in the California Assembly would only allow vehicle owners to cover the costs of sharing the vehicle, including insurance and depreciation, Paul hopes the legislature will alter the language so that vehicle owners could actually make more money out of the venture.

According to Jones, the bill will go before the Insurance Committee on May 5th and then to the full Assembly shortly thereafter. He said he has been working with insurance companies to draft the bill and doesn't believe there will be significant resistance.

Safe
streets advocates often ruefully say, "if you want to kill someone and
get away with it, do it in a car." In fact, unless alcohol is involved,
very few
motorists who kill vulnerable road users — like pedestrians and
cyclists — are charged with a crime, even when they break traffic laws
in the process.

Even the word "accident"
drives traffic justice advocates to distraction, since it implies a
lack of agency, as though drivers who fail to yield to pedestrians in
crosswalks and mow them down aren’t culpable for their actions.

Despite the fact that more people in America die from car crashes than
from handguns, few policy makers or law enforcement officials are willing to equate the danger of car death with gun death.

Now, that hesitance has stalled a bill that could make California’s streets safer.

In an attempt to deter dangerous driving, California Assembly Bill 1951,
introduced by San Francisco Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, would
significantly bolster penalties for dangerous driving and would give
district attorneys greater discretion in pursuing traffic justice
cases. Currently, unsafe operation of a motor vehicle carries a fine of
$70 if it results in bodily injury, and $95 for "great bodily injury."

Under
Ammiano’s bill, DAs could charge unsafe driving as either an infraction
or a misdemeanor for bodily or great bodily injury and could seek
"imprisonment in a county jail for not less than 5 days and not more
than 90 days, or by a fine of not less than $145 and not more than
$1,000, or by both a fine and imprisonment."

But Ammiano
couldn’t get the bill out of committee yesterday, where, perhaps
ironically, the California District Attorneys Association (CDAA) voiced
its opposition. That gave committee members an easy out, said the
bill’s supporters.

Ammiano’s
spokesperson Quintin Mecke said opposition from the CDAA was
disappointing, particularly because the bill doesn’t mandate penalties
but would have given DAs more leverage in cases where they felt drivers
were dangerous. He also contended that the CDAA’s position didn’t
reflect the stance of many individual DAs, especially in cities, where
there are proportionally more pedestrians and cyclists.

"I
bet if we went around to county DAs, we’d find support from a lot of
them," said Mecke. "The disconnect is with the lobbying arm."

Mecke
said Ammiano’s office was committed to pushing forward and organizing
support among lawmakers and law enforcement officials around the danger
of unsafe driving. According to Mecke, committee members said they were
hesitant to criminalize driving, and one member of the committee said
about collisions, "Well, isn’t that why we have insurance?"

"We need to move beyond this
notion that ‘accidents’ are a neutral value occurrence," said Mecke.
"That is such an ingrained notion"

Bicycle groups had
pushed hard for the legislation, arguing that other potentially
dangerous activities tend to come with greater expectations of caution.

"When
you put the key in the ignition, you accept a lot of responsibility to
make sure this two-ton vehicle doesn’t hurt someone," said California
Bicycle Coalition spokesperson Jim Brown. "If you’re picking up your
registered, loaded handgun, you know that you have the responsibility
to protect the public."

Corrinne Winter,
Executive Director of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, said the
bill would be a step in the right right direction for road safety.
"Motor vehicle crashes kill more than 40,000 people and injure several
million in the United States each year — this is a social problem of
epidemic proportions," she said.

A study [PDF]
by the San Francisco Injury Center for Research and Prevention at SF
General Hospital found that injuries are costly, too. Between 2004 and
2008, pedestrian injuries in San Francisco cost a total of $74.3
million. Less than a quarter of that cost was covered by private
insurers; the rest fell on public funding and patients themselves. In one
case, an uninsured patient was billed $505,952.

Though
it may seem esoteric, one of the biggest impediments to designing
streets for people is the over-reliance on design standards that have
long privileged movement of vehicles over any other consideration on
the streets. That’s why advocates cheered when U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood published a policy paper recently that, at least in word, placed bicycles and pedestrians on equal footing with motorists.

"Every
transportation agency, including DOT, has the responsibility to improve
conditions and opportunities for walking and bicycling and to integrate
walking and bicycling into their transportation systems," read one line
of the statement.

Yet, an advisory policy paper won’t change the
streets overnight and that’s where reforming the design manuals and
guidelines at state departments of transportation is imperative, work
that groups like Congress for New Urbanism have made a priority at the national level.

Various
cities in California that have tried to rebuild their streets to be
safer for pedestrians and bicycle riders have often been met with
resistance from traffic engineers and city attorneys who rely on
Caltrans manuals and standards that are good for moving traffic, not
always for protecting vulnerable users.

"The Caltrans Highway
Design Manual [HDM] has been the bible for highway engineers for the
past half century and has guided the development of California’s
freeway system," said Hans Larsen, Acting Director of San Jose’s
Department of Transportation. "Unfortunately, the HDM has also become
the default gospel for designing local streets by many city engineers."

Larsen said the standards that make freeways good for carrying
large quantities of vehicles at high speeds are not context appropriate
on most streets in urban areas. "Even today, the Caltrans HDM continues
to promote such commandments as ‘a design speed as high as feasible
should be used’ and ‘the basic lane width shall be 12 feet,’" he said.

All this may be slowly changing, however, as Caltrans has adopted a Complete Streets policy and has recently set out a timeline for reforming its standards to better reflect the needs of urban areas.

Caltrans
spokesperson Matt Rocco explained that the agency has adopted a long
checklist of reforms, the Complete Streets Implementation Action Plan [PDF],
including the number one item, a revision to the HDM to incorporate
multi-modal design and safety standards. Rocco said he would be
surprised if the revisions to the HDM weren’t presented to the public
for review before the end of the year.

One
proposal for Van Ness BRT lanes, designs that are not standards in the
Caltrans HDM. Image: San Francisco County Transportation Authority.

Some
Bay Area congestion mitigation agencies that have been repeatedly
rebuffed by Caltrans engineers over Bus Rapid Transit or pedestrian and
bicycle projects are skeptical of the pace of change.

Tilly Chang, Deputy Director for Planning at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA),
the local congestion mitigation agency (CMA) and a major funder of
innovative transportation projects in the county, said that just
formulating general policy documents and checklists won’t lead to
change.

"It doesn’t influence anything," said Chang, unless it leads to a meaningful revision to the HDM.

Chang
referred to the Van Ness BRT project and 19th Avenue as examples of
recent struggles with Caltrans over design standards. Both are
state-controlled highways, even thought they cut through the center of
a dense city. On 19th Avenue the TA belabored a plan to stripe a parking line so that drivers would stop parking on the sidewalk;
on Van Ness, Caltrans compelled the TA to compile research that
demonstrates the safety and feasibility of BRT treatments like bus
bulbs.

"I think they just don’t have a lot of pedestrian safety
research. They are not a transit organization," said Chang. Chang and
her team have had to apply for design exemptions, a rigorous process of
approvals for treatments that aren’t standard in the HDM.  

"When they look at safety, they look at vehicles," she said.

In San Jose, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA),
the local CMA, had to fight tooth and nail to convince Caltrans to
allow them to narrow vehicular lanes and widen bike lanes and sidewalks
on an overpass at Tully Road and Interstate 101. Everywhere else along
the length of Tully Road, lanes are 11 feet wide, but at the overpass,
Caltrans told VTA it was unsafe to have lanes narrower than 12 feet.

"In
order to accommodate wider sidewalks and wider bike lanes, we had to
take away other real estate," said Casey Emoto, Deputy Director for
Project Development at the VTA. Emoto explained that the VTA and the
City of San Jose had to indemnify Caltrans against liability [PDF] before the agency would consent to the changes.

"I
think the thing that hasn’t caught up to all this is the design
standards," said Emoto. "Until the design standards catch up to these,
we’ll continue to have these kinds of problems.

Dave Campbell of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition
said the biggest concern for cities is liability, which city attorneys
attempt to minimize by relying on the accepted state standards from the
HDM. "If [cities] do things that aren’t in the Caltrans manuals,
they’ll be liable," said Campbell. "Cities need to know that
improvements they make for bike and pedestrian safety will be supported
and endorsed by Caltrans."

Change will take time, as Caltrans’ own documents readily admit.
Simply writing complete streets guidelines into the HDM won’t result in
green bike lanes sprouting up everywhere or bus bulbs and chicanes on
state-controlled roads.

"The implementation of this action plan
will face challenges, including changing the corporate culture, limited
resources, and more," conceded the authors of the Action Plan.

In
addition, the issue of liability is one that Caltrans admitted won’t go
away with the new HDM. "There’s always going to be tension between
liability and providing a safe facility that is used by trucks and all
vehicles," said Rocco.

In the end, VTA and San Jose pushed hard
enough for Caltrans to relent. The Tully Road overpass reconstruction
will be advertised in April and likely be built by the end of summer,
with 11 foot travel lanes, 6 foot bike lanes, and 10 foot sidewalks.

"We
have local leaders being innovative and they are being thwarted by
Caltrans, whose design manual is out of date," said Corinne Winter,
Executive Director of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition
and a supporter of the changes at the Tully Road overpass. Winter said
that San Jose was fortunate because the city and the VTA never relented
on their plans for narrower lanes, but smaller cities don’t often have
the planning staff or budget and default to Caltrans standards.

To
deal with liability, some cities have asked Caltrans to relinquish
control of shared state roads, which allows a municipality to make the
final call on safety and design, but means they need to foot the bill.
Assemblymember Jim Beall recently introduced a bill
that would grant San Jose the control and maintenance of portions of
Caltrans routes so the city could reduce lane widths, traffic calm the
street, or widen sidewalks.

Larsen explained that relinquishment
of the routes would allow the city to cast the problems and potential
of the streets in a new light. By presenting his engineers with new
problems to solve, like improving safety for pedestrians and cyclists,
he expected his department could create safer streets and a more
livable city.

"Don’t blame the engineers, just fix the direction they are given," said Larsen. "That’s why modernizing the HDM is important."

I've railed on General Motors and Segway in the past for the myriad impracticalities of their tandem Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility (P.U.M.A.) prototype. Now they're at it again, making headlines today by unveiling the first three models in their new Electric Networked Vehicle (EN-V, pronounced "envy") line, including the Jiao, which is Chinese for "Pride."

Someone please tell their marketing department to come up with a new name for the next iteration of this concept vehicle. Seriously, pinning the hopes for resuscitating the image of your flailing car company on the deadly sins? If I may, here's a suggestion for the hybrid-electric Suburban you may or may not be considering in the future: The Chevy "Glut-ton-E."

The product launch comes complete with dubious claims about the vehicles. They don't pollute! They're small enough to get through traffic!

But until we get electricity production to be non-polluting, these vehicles will effectively still have tailpipes, albeit much further from your city, where you don't have to worry so much about those unregulated coal ash sumps giving someone else cancer. And how exactly will they bypass traffic -- bike lanes?

Snide commentary aside, I think GM is missing a link in the evolution of mobility. How do these things fill a need? They take all the convenience of cars, reduce carrying capacity, and limit the maximum speed to 25 mph. Of course, I'm not arguing that slower speeds in cities are bad, I just don't understand who's supposed to be the target market. Someone help me out. Do these products have a practical function?

"This was something that was an oversight from the initial enactment from 2006, which took effect in 2008," Simitian explained in an interview with Streetsblog. He said he waited a year after the law took effect to make changes, which include the increased fines, adding a point to a driver's record for the infraction, and using a portion of the fine to create an education fund for the dangers of distracted driving. Simitian also said the motivation for adding cyclists to the bill did not come from a dramatic incident nor a trend of increased cycling collisions due to cell phone use.

"Common sense tells us it’s not a safe habit, given all the risks that cyclists have to contend with," said Simitian.

The California Bicycle Coalition (CBC), which was an early supporter of the original distracted driving legislation, was not thrilled about the inclusion of cyclists in the bill. CBC Communications Director Jim Brown said that he was confused about the motivation for extending the same level of fines to cyclists, particularly absent data showing distracted cycling as a public safety hazard.

"The consequences of a distracted driver are considerably more serious than the consequences of distracted cycling," said Brown, adding that safe riding should be encouraged at all times and that talking on a cell phone or any other practice that distracted a cyclist from riding would not be advisable.

As for the actual danger to the public of distracted cycling, Brown said the data didn’t support the presumption of risk the law seeks to redress. "There are theoretical risks and there are actual risks," he said. "As far as I’m aware, there is no accident evidence that points to a problem. In the absence of any evidence against bicyclists, this law seems premature."

Tom Rice, Research Epidemiologist at UC Berkeley's Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, said the issue could be one of data and the definition of a collision. "Unless there is also a motorized vehicle involved, it won't make it into traffic collision reports," he said. The traditional databases, such as the CHP's Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS), don't capture bicycle-pedestrian injury collisions or fatalities. "The data are hard to come by. It's not a nice, easy reliable data set," said Rice.

Photo: Bryan Goebel

Simitian defended his record of support for cyclists, citing his work as mayor of Palo Alto to build that city's bicycle boulevard and numerous initiatives that improved cycling conditions. He also said he would be open to reviewing the fine structure in committee if that was a significant issue.

"I’ve been an advocate for cyclists for 25 years for full rights to the road, but with those rights come a certain degree of responsibility," he said.

If those agencies haven't already formatted their data in the Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), the industry standard, they are likely rushing to do so now. How Google's specification became the common language for transit data is an interesting story and, as with many tales of transit innovation, it begins in Portland, Oregon.

After traveling internationally in the summer of 2005, Bibiana McHugh, an IT Manager at Portland's TriMet transit agency, was frustrated that she couldn't access transit information on a mapping program like Mapquest and certainly couldn't plan a trip by transit with the same ease as a driving trip. When she returned stateside, she sent inquiries to Mapquest, Yahoo!, and Google, asking each if they had plans to incorporate transit data into their mapping services and if TriMet could partner in the endeavor.

Of the three, only Google replied. As it happened, software engineer Chris Harrelson had been using his 20 percent time to interface transit data with Google Maps, what became the Google Transit Trip Planner. TriMet worked with Google to prepare TriMet's data set in a format that would work for Google Maps, a difficult task, according to McHugh.

"Transit data is extremely complex," she said. "There is a temporal element and spacial element and it takes a relational database in order to manage all of that information."

She added, "A lot of agencies have this fear that it will be misrepresented or won’t be used accurately."

Because TriMet was proactive with its data, the subsequent GTFS very closely resembled the operator's data feed. Google Transit Trip Planner launched on December 7th, 2005, and for most of the first year, TriMet was the only operator available on Google Maps. In September, 2006, five more cities got on board: Eugene, OR; Honolulu, HI; Pittsburgh, PA; Seattle, WA; and Tampa, FL.

In addition to fears by some operators about misrepresentation of the data, many operators were simply reluctant to open data for fear of bad publicity, according to Joe Hughes, a Google Transit software engineer.

"Transit agencies are used to being beat up in the press. Public transit has been the underdog since the 1950s and I think it's made the agencies pretty conservative," he said.

Hughes, who began his transit mapping career in Pittsburgh in 2002, several years before joining Google, said that prior to GTFS, many software engineers had to "data scrape" operator websites or submit Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data. Often times that data was mailed on a CD and could be out-of-date by the time it was turned over.

With the exception of Tri-Met and the other early adopters, "It's been a slow and painful process to open this stuff up," said Hughes. "At first there was no infrastructure available to do this."

McHugh echoed the sentiment, suggesting that many agencies had outdated assumptions about data and were reluctant to provide it for free. "For some agencies, they are used to making money off it. When they asked why we aren't charging for our data, the answer is that the taxpayers have already paid for it and the benefits are so big for openness."

In the past few years the process has sped up tremendously, according to Hughes. "If you told me even a few years ago that every significant transit agency in the country would open its data, it would have been pretty hard to believe. The U.S. is now ahead of much of the world in releasing data."

Despite this optimism, there are still obstacles to full data transparency, particularly for those software developers not named Google. A number of transit operators, particularly those in the New York Metropolitan Area, like the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (NYMTA) and New Jersey Transit, have licensed their data with Google, but no one else. Though Google won't pay for data, their caché and the ubiquity of their mapping service on personal computers and mobile devices has led agencies to provide GTFS only to them.

"What Google has is a clearly useful product, PR value, and name recognition," said Hughes of the situation, arguing the fact that these agencies have released info to them is a step toward openness. "At least they're sharing it with one developer, but that's not the end state. Ideally that data is available to any developer to use."

Matt Lerner, Chief Technology Officer for City-Go-Round, said that sharing with Google alone does not make the data open. Pointing to the GTFS Data Exchange and City-Go-Round's top-ten list of transit operators that don't open their data, he said millions of people in metropolitan regions don't have access to open data, though they easily could.

"All the operators have to do is provide a URL where someone can download the feed. They already have the data, all they have to do is let the data be downloaded. It's not open until they give that URL."

Lerner also lauded Google for its impact, "The agencies wouldn't have ever put their data into a standard format if it weren't for Google. It took a really big company to get the agencies to have a standard format at all."

Now that GTFS is the baseline, Google is considering dropping it's name from the title and changing it to the "General Transit Feed Specification." Hughes proposed the changes on several transit developer listservs and said the renaming could come as early as next week.

"The name Google Transit Feed Specification is a non-name," said Hughes. "We didn't want to be presumptuous by saying this would become the standard when we started. Having Google in there doesn't really reflect all the different apps that are being used with the format." 

Hughes reiterated that the goal from the beginning was to make transit directions and maps as commonplace and simple as driving directions.