Streetsblog Los Angeles

(Editors note: Gloria Ohland was on the team that completed the LA TOD study for LA Metro and the City of LA, and was also involved in the U.S. DOT study that compared the GHG emissions of TOD to other development.)

Homeowner associations worried about keeping development out of their precious single-family neighborhoods really don't have to worry about transit-oriented development, or TOD. Yes, LA Metro does have some 26 TOD joint development projects underway to support the public investment in rail by adding density and riders to stations. But the dirty little secret about TOD in LA is that there's very little land near stations that is vacant or underutilized and available for development.

LA is built out, as a recent Caltrans-funded TOD study for LA Metro and the City of LA points out. Metro owns some land near the city's 71 stations, typically sites used to stage rail or station construction - and that is mostly where Metro's TOD projects are going up. But rail lines tend to serve mature neighborhoods. So making stations perform better - in terms of reducing transportation costs for households, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and GHG emissions - isn't about actual development so much as it is about investing in better bike and pedestrian connections and in policies that promote a good mix of uses so people don't have to drive to every destination.

It's important to remember that the commute trip is just 18 percent of all trips made by households. So if at least some other trips - to daycare and school, shopping, the drug store, to go out to eat, etc. - can be made on foot or by bicycle or transit, then LA does indeed become a clean and green and more equitable city.

Transit-oriented LA would be more equitable because the American Public Transportation Association says owning, operating, insuring and parking a car in LA costs about $10,100 annually. And the study, the Los Angeles TOD Typology and Case Study Project, shows that while housing plus transportation costs (a household's two biggest investments) average 47 percent of area median income (AMI) nationally, housing plus transportation averages 54 percent of AMI in Los Angeles - but just 31 percent in transit-oriented neighborhoods like Koreatown and 26 percent in Boyle Heights.

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Repairs to the I-5 Near Sacramento

Sometimes, the news comes to you from several directions at once, and you have to pull the pieces together to see the bigger picture. Such a thing happened yesterday, when three seemingly unrelated story created the perfect tapestry of cause, symptom and effect.

First, the cause. The California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) released a report showing that California is amongst the nation's trailers when it comes to fixing and maintaining our highway system. The wretched state of our roads and bridges is hardly breaking news. Back in November Streetsblog noted that groups have complained about the failing state of California's roads since last century. But CALPIRG breaks down the extent of California's car addicted planning, by the numbers. From a press release:

A startling 13 percent of California's bridges are deemed to be "structurally deficient" by engineers - 3,228 in total. Measured as a percent of the state's bridge deck area, only two states are worse by this measure. Yet in recent years California has spent over a half billion federal dollars per year building new or wider highways. In fact, California spends on average of 2.3 times as many federal dollars on new roadway construction than on bridge repair or maintenance. Only four states spend less per square foot on repairing their backlog of structurally-deficient bridges.

"This report calls into question our nation's transportation priorities," said Erin Steva CALPIRG Transportation Advocate. "It is a waste of scarce resources to continue spending billions on new highways while existing roadways need repair. It's like adding a guest room on your home when the roof is leaking."

Ok, anyone still think that our Governor is "green?"

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Photo: Thomas Hawk

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.

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Image: Metro.net

I was somewhat heartened last week when coverage of the massive I-405 Sepulveda Pass Widening Project actually mentioned the amazing amount of highway vehicle congestion that will be created by the project over its estimated three year construction phase.  However, I waited to write about the press coverage because I was hopeful that some writer would actually make the connection that the this project could actually create more congestion over the course of the construction than will be "relieved"before induced demand helps fill those new travel lanes back up.  Unfortunately, there is no such luck.  The news coverage ranges from, "traffic is going to be awful but at least everything is going to be so much better when it’s done" to "traffic is going to be worse than they’re saying because the government is always wrong about these sort of thing."  Unfortunately, nobody is taking on the government’s claim that the project is going to permanently reduce congestion in the corridor.

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In an economic recovery report released
today by New York Gov. David Paterson (D), the state broke down its
plans for the estimated $31 billion it received as part of the Obama
administration’s first stimulus law.

New York spent more than half of its transport stimulus money on transit. (Photo: PlanetWare)

A chart of
New York’s stimulus spending shows that, out of a total of $2.4 billion
in expected transportation aid, the state plans to direct $1.12 billion
to highways and bridges and $1.22 to transit.

With the federal government still dividing
its transport funding along an 80-20 split that favors roads, New
York’s decision to spend $100 million more stimulus aid on transit
represents a welcome break from tradition. In California,
where San Francisco and Los Angeles maintain large transit networks,
roads received slightly more than double the amount of stimulus aid
going to rail and buses.

Directly comparing New York and
California’s transportation funding choices would be the epitome of the
old idiom about apples and oranges. But as the congressional jobs
debate sharpens its focus on infrastructure projects, it’s worth noting that the roads-transit split is only one chapter in a bigger story.

A federal "fix-it-first" mandate, which environmental groups and transportation reformers are urging
Congress to include in the new jobs bill, would help break down the
cultural divide between different transport modes by ensuring that
repairs of existing infrastructure come first. After all, crumbling and
pothole-ridden roads affect pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike.

California, incidentally, lacks a "fix-it-first" requirement despite ranking 49th out of 50 states in recent rankings of nationwide road quality.

Photo: Metblogs

How many people would be surprised to discover that California's roads were ranked as the third worst in the nation?  According to a recent survey of truckers by Overdrive Magazine who make cross-country trips, only two states have worse roads, and none have worse drivers.  Locally, the I-5 and I-10 were listed as "unspeakably bad" roads. 

The Daily News reports that these truckers, hardly a group known for environmental thinking, have called on Caltrans to embrace a "Fix-It-First" philosophy where they direct a dedicate a portion of the budget every year to maintaining highways.

Oh, wait.  That story was from 1999.

More recently, the Sierra Club released a report ranking the nation's highways, surface streets, and bridges according to the percent of which have been rated "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete."  California's freeways ranked last in the country, with 45% earning one of these "distinctions."  The Sierra Club recommends a "Fix-It-First" approach to planning to reverse this trend of failing roads.

That story is from 2005.

Yesterday, AASHTO, which is basically the highway builders lobby, released their own report on the state of our highways.  According to National Public Radio, California didn't fare too well.

California is known for its car culture. But it turns out those wheels are rolling over some of the worst roads in the nation. A recent study ranked California 49th out of the 50 states for the quality of its pavement. New Jersey came in last. But California has the distinction of having the nation's worst roads in urban areas.

And yet, in a time of limited transportation funding, our priority remains to build more and more highways while the ones we have continue to fall into a state of neglect.  The poor condition of our roads has led to more expensive commutes for car commuters.  Nationally, the poor condition of our roads costs drivers $335 a year.  In Los Angeles, that number is $746.

In the ten years since Overdrive Magazine ranked our roads the third worst in the country, California has responded by doing nothing to make our roads more safe.  Instead, the roads actually got worse as compared to the rest of the country.

Map of fault lines and recent earthquakes in Southern California. Map: USGS.gov

I wonder if it's still too soon to criticize the concept of digging a tunnel to connect the 710 Tunnel to the I-210.

To the absolute surprise of nobody that's ever dealt with a freeway agency, a study completed by Caltrans gives the green light, at least scientifically speaking, for California to have its very own big dig.  A geological study of the area determined that digging the tunnel is scientifically possible, although it does not give a recommendation on what of the five routes studied would be the best place to bury our taxpayer dollars in the ground.

The Times gives an overview of the problems with each zone. For example:

Zone 4 (San Marino/Pasadena): Active faults that cross the zone are the Raymond and Alhambra Wash faults.

There is one Superfund site in the southwestern end of the zone.

There are also six other sites with various levels of soil contamination.

Add in some public opposition and you have a challenge!  There's nothing that transportation agencies like more than dealing with a challenge!  So the project is an unpopular, environmental disaster that's going to require tunneling around some fault lines and super fund sites.  That's why we employ traffic engineers who know how to move cars.

Public hearings will be held early next year before the report is finalized.  Hopefully we'll get the word from Caltrans that it's ok to start criticizing the project sometime before then.

Image from The Fletcher Studio’s presentation to Sci-Arc via Urban Insights

I usually don’t pull story ideas directly from The Metro Library’s daily headlines page, but this one was just too good to pass up.

Urban Insights L.A. reports on Other New Urbanisms, a symposium held last week by the Southern California Institute’s School of Architecture’s (SCI-Arc) ”New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for LA” design competition.  Urban Insights focuses on the second place winner in the contest, who proposed building agricultural villages along freeway embankmnets throughout Southern California.

The Fletcher Studio, which won second place, proposed urban
agricultural villages that would convert freeway embankments into
terraced hillsides. Affiliated bungalow housing would be built
alongside. These developments would be a new source of “green” jobs,
employing farmers on a rotating, seasonal basis. Fletcher calculated
that along LA’s 527 miles of freeway, there are approximately 960 acres
of largely unused land that could be reclaimed as a productive
landscape.

Predictably, many on the panel scoffed at the thought of Caltrans giving up that much space.  Unspoken in the article, and perhaps in the panel, is that if freeway embankments became regional job centers it would be a lot harder, politically, for Caltrans to continue its destructive attempts to widen first and ask questions later.  But in the same way that cyclists are no longer focusing their reform efforts at LADOT and have moved on to elected leaders; perhaps the target audience for this idea shouldn’t be bureaucrats at Caltrans but the supposedly Green Governor to whom they report.

Oh, and Urban Insights, welcome to our blogroll.

For the record, this is what a 14 lane highway looks like. Photo:pankaj/Picasa

While environmentalists and smart growth advocates focus on the I-710 Tunnel Project, the one that would "complete" by closing the 4.5 mile gap between the current end of the freeway and the 210 Freeway; another massive expansion project for the I-170 is more quietly moving though environmental review.

A task force of agencies including California Air Resources Board, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, Caltrans, Gateway Cities Council of Governments, the Army Corp of Engineers, the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority and the City of Long Beach is sponsoring a project that seeks to expand the 710 from the Port to the I-60 Freeway. The City has been a part of an inter-agency task force with Caltrans that is seeking ways to alleviate congestion and improve air quality. Thanks to a report posted on Metro's website outlining the alternatives, we can see that unless they decide to go with the "no build" option, the 710 is going to be widened from eight lanes to at least 10, but probably 14 lanes. The four alternatives that will be evaluated in the environmental studies are:

• Alternative 1 - No Build
• Alternative 5a - Widen to 10 General Purpose Lanes
• Alternative 6a - Widen to 10 General Purpose Lanes Plus 4 Freight Movement Lanes (Conventional Trucks)
• Alternative 6b - Widen to 10 General Purpose Lanes Plus 4 Freight Movement Lanes (Zero Emission Trucks)

The task force states that their preference is Alternative 6a, which in the backwards world of California transportation planning is naturally the one that would increase traffic and air pollution the most and be the worst for the environment. The argument supporting such a massive widening is that congested highways cause more pollution than ones with traffic moving freely. While it's hard to argue against that point, this theory ignores the reality that wider highways attract more traffic and that new highway capacity on congested roads are filled to capacity within years of completion.

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