Administration priorities for the conference bill came down from headquarters. Photo: Wikipedia

Everyone from the petrochemical industry to environmental and equity groups [PDF] to state DOT officials [PDF] are penning their missives to committee members, asking for everything from expedited project delivery to fix-it-first to automatic approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

U.S. DOT got in on the letter-writing campaign last week too, expressing the Obama administration’s priorities for the bill [PDF].

The letter, signed by Secretary Ray LaHood, started off reiterating the promise to veto any bill mandating automatic approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. The administration opposes the GOP’s bid for coal ash deregulation but doesn’t threaten a veto over that issue. It also opposes some of the streamlining proposals made by the House, saying they “would radically change the application of environmental laws” and would undermine the National Environmental Policy Act.

The administration says it “strongly supports local decision-making and boosting the capacity of agencies that perform statewide, metropolitan, and rural transportation planning” — staying agnostic in the battle between state and city power. It supports the Senate’s Buy America language, which the House has instructed its conferees to accept. New Starts, high-speed rail, and TIGER all get a shout-out too.

U.S. DOT supports transit operations funding in times of high unemployment and in the wake of a disaster, and it reminds conferees that the administration’s 2013 budget included $3.2 billion for for transit maintenance. It mentions CMAQ only to oppose a House change to the program that never passed but does not weigh in on the changes to CMAQ in the Senate bill.

Portland rules in Bicycling Magazine's 2012 bike-friendly city rankings. Photo: Cycloculture

Today, Pacific coast sustainability standard bearer Portland topped Midwestern standout Minneapolis in Bicycling Magazine’s bike-friendly city rankings, bi-annual source of bragging rights or shame, depending on your locale.

The top-two results were a reversal of the 2010 rankings. Bicycling Magazine did not explain what boosted Portland but did mention the city’s stature as the only large city to receive the League of American Bicyclists’ “Platinum-Level” Bike Friendly City Award, as well as its tendency to be the earliest of early adopters when it comes to innovations like bike boxes (Portland had the nation’s first).

Meanwhile, Minneapolis recently snagged national bragging rights with its Bike Score — the new bikeability scoring system that the creators of Walk Score unveiled last week.

Overall, big cities enjoy a growing prominence in Bicycling’s top ten, reflecting a trend in bike-friendly political leadership in America’s major metropolises.

While tiny Boulder, Colorado took the bronze, Washington, DC came in an impressive fourth place, boosted by its enviable bike-sharing system.

“There is no clearer evidence of the urban-cycling revolution sweeping the United States than in the nation’s capital,” wrote Bicycling’s Ian Dille, “where ridership jumped 80 percent from 2007 to 2010.”

Also surging ahead was Chicago, taking fifth place. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan for 100 miles of protected bike lanes was cited as a big factor, along with the popular Bike-the-Drive open streets event.

New York City, which will be launching the nation’s largest bike-share system this summer, ratcheted up one spot to seventh place, on the strength of the bike infrastructure built on the watch of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. San Francisco dropped a few places to eighth. And Seattle rounded out the top ten.

Smaller trailblazers Madison, Wisconsin and Eugene, Oregon slotted into sixth and ninth place, respectively.

Bicycling Magazine’s rankings are based on data from the League of American Bicyclists and the Alliance for Biking and Walking along with input from local advocates. Fifty cities are ranked this year, from De Moines, Iowa to Miami, Florida. To qualify, each city “must possess both a robust cycling infrastructure and a vibrant bike culture,” according to the magazine.

Members of the Google robocar team. Photo: Inhabitat

Writer Michael Lind argued that the “case for infrastructure investment has suffered from the lack of a plausible vision of the next American infrastructure.” Things that are not “plausible,” according to Lind, include “renewable energy and mass transit.” He wrote:

The idea that the U.S. could transition quickly from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind power and solar power inspired many liberals to support artificially rigging markets in favor of renewable energy by methods like cap-and-trade and renewable energy standards that force working-class consumers, via utility, to buy expensive power from uneconomical wind, solar or biofuel sources. And for a brief moment in time, the center-left in the United States was entranced by the mirage of a continental high-speed rail system.

Okay, we’ll give you a second to consider that this was printed in one of the country’s leading, left-leaning online magazines.

“Rigging markets” is some pretty debatable rhetoric to describe renewable energy standards and cap-and-trade — a policy that is supported by the overwhelming majority of economists. (Billions of dollars in tax breaks for gas companies and subsidies for road building – some people might describe that as “rigging markets” in the opposite direction, but we digress.)

Unlike “uncritical,” “unrealistic” and “entranced” proponents of rail, Lind has a vision for the future that is very much like the present, or even the past. Brace yourself, readers: In the future, the U.S. will have an endless supply of fossil fuel thanks to “environmentally responsible” shale gas exploration. Plus, in the future, rail and bus transit of all kinds will never be able to complete with Google’s self-driving cars.

Lind is a big fan of Google robocars. He goes on about their many benefits:

Robocars may be fatal for fixed-rail transportation, at least for passengers rather than freight. Google has been test driving self-driving cars in California and Nevada has become the first state to legalize driverless vehicles. No doubt it will take several decades for safety issues and legal arrangements to be worked out. But high-speed trains might find competition in high-speed convoys of robot cars on smart highways, allowed higher speeds once human error has been eliminated. And the price advantage of subway tickets over taxi fares in cities may vanish, when the taxis drive themselves. Point-to-point travel, within cities or between them, is inherently more convenient than train or subway journeys which require changing modes of transit in the course of a journey. Thanks to robocars, much cheaper point-to-point travel everywhere may eventually be cheap enough to relegate light rail and inter-city rail to the museum, along with the horse-drawn omnibus and the trans-atlantic blimp.

What Lind — and Salon — fail to mention is that his professional interests are very much entangled with the producer of those cars.

Lind works for the New America Foundation — a nonprofit think tank whose board chairman is Google executive chair and former CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt holds company stock worth billions, and both Schmidt and Google Inc. are among the think tank’s largest financial supporters. According to the New America Foundation, Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, gave between $250,000 and $1 million to the organization in 2010. (Its annual budget was about $15 million in 2010, according to IRS data.) Google itself funded the organization at between $100,000 and $249,999.

In a 2010 article for the New Yorker, reporter Jane Mayer — writing about fossil fuel industry titans the Koch brothers — warned of think tanks with close links to the economic sectors affected by their policy recommendations:

You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank which hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.

Google has surely made a significant investment its self-driven car technology. Now that this economic behemoth has a stake in robocars and robocar infrastructure, let’s hope we won’t see a rash of Koch-esque intellectual posturing in favor of auto-oriented transportation policies.

The New America Foundation does some good work, which we’ve occasionally highlighted on Streetsblog, with funding from a diverse array of sources. The organization is a far cry from transparently self-interested groups like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. It would be a shame if it started drifting in that direction.

Source: RAND Corporation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: AmericaBikes

At a press conference outside the Capitol this morning, where gusty winds nearly carried off the visual aids (if it weren’t for a few diligent supporters), bicycle advocates joined members of Congress to unveil the results of a new survey about federal funding for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. The telephone poll of 1,003 Americans, commissioned by the advocacy group America Bikes and conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, was unequivocal: 83 percent said that federal bike-ped funding should increase, or at the very least be maintained.

“Even we were surprised,” said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. “From this day forward, we can say with total confidence that this issue has bipartisan support and is in the national interest.”

The poll is timely, coming the day after the first official meeting of the House-Senate conference committee charged with hammering out a compromise transportation bill before policy expires on June 30. The Senate bill includes some protections for bike-ped programs and devolves certain funding decisions to cities and local governments, while early drafts of the House bill eliminated those programs altogether.

Even more notable than the overwhelming support for current funding levels (and “increasing” had the edge over “maintaining,” 47 percent to 36) was the constant level of support across geographic, demographic, economic, and — perhaps most surprisingly — political boundaries. Among self-identified Republicans, 80 percent still favored maintaining or increasing bike-ped funding, compared to 88 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Independents.

“Every way you cut the numbers, it makes it all the more perverse that a few members of Congress would be opposed to this,” Clarke told Streetsblog.

Mount Bikemore: Reps. Petri and Blumenauer, Sens. Cardin and Durbin. Photo: Ben Goldman

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Congressmen Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Tom Petri (R-WI) were on hand to tout the survey’s results and defend the importance of bicycle and pedestrian programs.

“Some people fight crime, some people fight terrorism,” said Durbin, enumerating just a few reasons to enter public service. “The Tea Party came to fight bikes.” Durbin, who sits on the transportation bill conference committee, said that even his suburban and rural constituents are incredibly proud of their bicycle infrastructure and want to see continued federal support.

It’s unusual for conferences to meet in public, and leaders have indicated that this won’t be the only meeting they have in front of television cameras. Still, the sausage-making always happens behind closed doors. Here’s what we’re looking for today:

Could the transportation bill be Rep. John Mica's downfall? Photo: Roll Call

Will anything come of it? “The first day will tell you exactly nothing,” Scott Slesinger, NRDC’s director of legislative affairs, told reporters last week. “You’ll walk out of there convinced that there’s no way they’re going to do a bill.”

In fact, the conventional wisdom right now is that this whole process will end in yet another extension, probably until the lame-duck session after the November election. But this conference committee could lay the groundwork for that bill. Both parties want to get a bill done, but Republican leaders are worried that their base will revolt at the sight of them negotiating with Democrats. So, in public they’ll be all hard-line rhetoric and uncompromising conservatism, and when the cameras are off they’ll horse-trade.

How strong is the Senate’s hand? The House has pretty limited leverage in this process because they didn’t pass a real transportation bill. The Senate is bringing to conference a bill that got a remarkable vote of confidence from senators across the political spectrum, and “the House sent over beach ball,” according to NRDC’s David Goldston.

“The House can’t figure out how to get even its own members together so they send these partial things over to the Senate to cause trouble,” said Goldston, “while the Senate has a bill that’s been passed by about three-quarters of the members of the Senate and was written by [Senators Barbara] Boxer and [James] Inhofe. The fact that Boxer and Inhofe were able to write a bill together is one of the least-appreciated stories of this Congress. So, peace breaks out but people say, ‘We’d rather continue to have war.’ That’s unfortunate.”

Los Angeles' Gold Line's ridership is still growing, two years after its opening -- blowing a huge hole in new "research" by the Reason Foundation. Photo: Stop and Move

The Reason Foundation’s “research” on high-speed rail is pretty predictable. We know what this oil industry-backed think tank is going to say before they’ve said it: Ridership will be lower than expected; costs will be higher.

What’s more interesting than the conclusions, to us anyway, is the methodological contortion needed to draw them. So with some nose-holding, today we’ll examine Reason’s latest report on LA’s Exposition line.

The group claims the $930 million line will take 60 to 170 years to pay for its construction costs. (Never mind that nobody expects the line to pay for its construction costs, just like nobody expects roads to pay for themselves. Moving on.)

Here’s how the Reason folks reached their specious conclusion: They stood at the station on two of the first several days this rail line was open and counted passengers. Too bad that’s a nonsensical way to judge how many people will be riding the line a year from now, much less 60 years into the future, says James Sinclair at Network blog Stop and Move:

It’s easy to point out that ridership in week 1 of a transit line is meaningless. For example, this excellent ridership chart of the Gold Line in LA [above] shows that after opening an extension (which was almost like a brand new line), after 2 years ridership still has not stabilized and continues to increase as people become aware of the line and have time to adapt their patterns to take advantage of it.

If after 2 years ridership is still growing as people get exposed to the line, how on earth could you make 100+ year claims on 2 days of data on the first week of service? … oh no, I’m doing it. I’ve wasted valuable seconds of my time trying to point out mistakes in the article.

That’s time wasted that would have been just as effectively been spent questioning the “all natural” claims on bottles of soda, or the ludicrous lies sent out by Pizza Hut when they say you can get ANY pizza with ANY crust for $10 (and then charge extra for stuffed crust).

Instead of wasting time on the article, it’s best to simply understand how something so ridiculous can be written. It’s simple. The article is an ad by an oil company, and as such, should be held to the same standard as health claims on bottles of soda and the word “any” in fast food advertisements.

Elsewhere on the Network today: A View From the Cycle Path explains how the Dutch make maintaining safe cycleways a top priority even when roads are under construction. Burning the Midnight Oil reports that plans are moving forward for the Omaha-to-Chicago rail line. And Urban Review STL explains how, after decades of population loss in St. Louis, patterns are shifting.

The characters of The West Wing were known, in their heyday, for walking down long hallways and talking a mile a minute without stumbling. Now, six years after the show went off the air, the cast is back — with this tribute to the health benefits of walking. It’s a promotion for EveryBody Walk, a campaign about the benefits of walking 30 minutes a day.

Before and after: Sidewalk on Marshall Avenue, St. Paul. Source: Bike Walk Twin Cities

If you ever doubted whether a small investment in biking and walking could have a large impact, here is your proof.

The last transportation law, SAFETEA-LU, provided four communities with four years of funding to build an infrastructure network for nonmotorized transportation (a fancy way of saying “sidewalks and bike paths”). It wasn’t a lot of money — $25 million each to Columbia, Missouri; Marin County, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Sheboygan County, Wisconsin.

The program built 333 miles of on-street biking and walking routes, 23 of off-street facilities, and 5,727 bike parking spaces in the four municipalities — not to mention some outreach and education. Not bad, especially when you consider that $100 million would only buy about five miles of new four-lane highway in an urbanized area [PDF].

Total two-hour bicycling and walking counts for all pilot communities, fall 2007 and fall 2010. Source: FHWA Report to the U.S. Congress on the Outcomes of the Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program

FHWA summed up the results in its report on the outcomes of the pilot program [PDF]:

• An estimated 32 million driving miles were averted between 2007 and 2010. It appears that the numbers keep climbing — half of that savings happened just in 2010, the last year of the pilot, when an estimated 16 million miles were walked or bicycled that would have otherwise been driven.
• The four pilot areas saw an average increase of 49 percent in the number of bicyclists and a 22 percent increase in the number of pedestrians between 2007 and 2010.
• In each community, a greater percentage of pedestrian and bicycling trips included transit in 2010 than in 2007.
• Despite increases in biking and walking, fatal bike/ped crashes held steady or decreased in all of the communities.
• The pilot communities saved an estimated 22 pounds of CO2 in 2010 per person or a total of 7,701 tons — the equivalent of saving over a gallon of gas per person.
• Many people tried bicycling for the first time in their adults lives or ever.

Interestingly, average one-way trip distances by foot and by bicycle fell in some places, probably since more people were taking more trips without cars, instead of only walking and biking for exercise. And bike/ped trips including transit went way up.

Percentage of pedestrian and bicyclist trips that included transit for Columbia and Marin County.

The pilot results were released today, the first day of National Bike Month. (Though Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood notes that when he was a kid, “every month was bike month.”)

The FHWA report is full of data showing how a small down payment on active transportation can lead — quickly — to dramatic improvements in air quality, traffic levels, and public health.

The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a major supporter of the pilot program, called it a “raging success.”

“These are not all typical, bike-friendly cities,” said Marianne Fowler, RTC’s senior vice president of federal relations. ”These four communities represent a solid cross-section of America. Even in places like Sheboygan, which doesn’t have urban density, has cold winters, and has had almost no experience with biking and walking initiatives in the past, locals have rapidly become champions because they have seen the real-time effects, the actual benefits to their community.”

Fowler went on to say that with the evidence now in black and white before them, Congressional representatives must now recognize that continued investment in walking in biking represents terrific value for American taxpayers.

“The incongruous thing is that Congress, with a simple, low-cost solution to so many transportation problems right here in front of them, can’t see the people for the cars,” she said.

Image: Operation Lifesaver

The Federal Railroad Administration doesn’t call people walking near railroad tracks “pedestrians.” It calls them “trespassers.”

True, a person walking on railroad tracks is often, by definition, breaking the law, since the tracks are private property. But the nomenclature gives the impression that the agency might be somewhat less sympathetic than they should be about the 427 people who lost their lives last year walking on or near railroad tracks. And last year was a good year – the FRA estimates the average to be about 500 deaths annually [PDF].

The FRA just issued Guidance on Pedestrian Crossing Safety At or Near Passenger Stations [PDF]. This document deals with “pedestrians,” not  “trespassers,” because it deals only with officially sanctioned crossings, and only those at or near stations. “It’s a guide to best practices in crossing engineering, warning devices, markings, signage, that kind of thing,” FRA spokesperson Rob Kulat told me.

The document was released in compliance with the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which mandated that such guidance be issued within a year of enactment.

OK, so it’s two and a half years late. It’s still a useful resource for the municipalities and states that want to build or improve rail crossings at or near stations – after all, according to Kulat, the FRA isn’t the one responsible for these crossings.

What the document doesn’t do is give guidance about when and where crossings should be added to prevent injury and increase mobility. In a 2008 fact sheet [PDF], the agency explicitly says, “The FRA’s focus is on preventing rail trespassing, not enabling it by making the behavior safe.” The safety document released this month features a wide range of recommendations for enabling safe crossings, but only where they’re currently sanctioned. The people who cross the tracks to get to school or their aunt’s house or the post office are still just trespassers whose injuries are their own fault.

The FRA, along with several major rail companies and Amtrak, are partners of Operating Lifesaver, a 40-year-old nonprofit dedicated to rail safety education. On the Operation Lifesaver website, under the headline “Dumb Move,” is a video of two teenaged boys listening to iPods and walking along a train track, apparently unaware that “it takes a mile to stop a train.” And it features the story of Shawn Potter, a 15-year-old who died playing “chicken” on train tracks, “waiting for a train to come through so they could have the thrill of jumping off seconds before it roared past.”

Those stories castigate the dead for being “dumb” and playing with fire. But considering that rail tracks often bisect cities and even neighborhoods, dividing people from services and other community amenities, it’s not fair to treat all illegal crossings as irresponsible trespasses.

Last year, a Michigan man’s arm was severed as he tried — not just to cross train tracks — but to actually climb over a stopped train that was in his way. His two-year-old son was on his shoulders. One shudders to think what could have happened. But the police lieutenant didn’t call him dumb or reckless, even for doing something so dangerous with a toddler. “The only way you can get to anything in that area — the store, the post office, City Hall, the pharmacy — you have to cross those tracks,” the officer said.

It would make sense for rail entities to pay attention to where people are “trespassing” on railroad tracks and figure out how to accommodate them safely. Rather than blame the victims, planners could see these illegal crossings as a sort of “desire line,” like the dirt paths that get carved into grass over years of use because it’s the most direct way to walk, even if there’s no sanctioned path there.

That’s how it went in Encinitas, California, where beachgoers lugging surfboards regularly crossed train tracks to reach the Swamis surfing spot. More than 50 trains a day went by, making the crossing a dangerous undertaking, but the closest legal crosswalk was more than a mile away. Rather than reprimand the “trespassers,” however, the city did something far more productive: build a grade-separated walkway.

The FRA’s guidance is a good resource, but it risks missing the forest for the trees. Pedestrian injuries near train tracks are as much an urban design problem as they are a behavior issue. Maybe the next document can issue guidance to municipalities, helping them pinpoint where crossings should be located to improve mobility and access. Once they do that, it’ll be great to have this latest document, helping them design effective audible and visual signaling, bright yellow markings, swing gates, and eye-catching signs.

So, less than a year later, the secretary is knocking at our door again, asking for your thoughts and questions. Pull no punches, people.

You can submit your questions as a comment to this post. Or you can post them on the secretary’s Facebook page, using the #q4ray hashtag on Twitter, or by leaving a comment on the Fast Lane blog. Whichever method you choose, do it by May 10, when the question period ends.

LaHood will select a few questions to answer in the video, and a few more that he’ll address in a guest blog post here.

Poor people are much more likely to live near wide, high-traffic streets and are thus much more likely to be injured by a car, according to a new study. Photo: Naples News

Researchers examined injury rates for pedestrians, drivers and cyclists over a five-year period in Montreal. They found pedestrians living in low-income neighborhoods were more than six times more likely to be injured by a moving vehicle than those from high-income neighborhoods.

Motorists and cyclists in low-income neighborhoods didn’t fare much better. These drivers were 4.3 times more likely to be injured. For cyclists the ratio was 3.9 to 1.

The reason, researchers said, was “exposure to traffic.” The study found that low-income neighborhoods were more likely to contain major arterials and four-way intersections — two of the biggest risk factors for those traveling by any mode. The study also found low-income neighborhoods were subject to traffic volumes 2.4 times greater than high-income — one of the best predictors of injury.

“Traffic volume at intersections increased significantly with poverty,” the authors wrote. “If the average daily traffic at intersections in the poorest census tracts were equal to that in wealthiest census tracts, … there would be 21% fewer pedestrians, 19% fewer cyclists, and 25% fewer motor vehicle occupants injured at intersections in those areas.”

Low-income residents also faced additional risk factors. They were much more likely to rely on walking or transit to get around. They tended to live in higher-density areas, a factor that was associated with high traffic volumes.

So what’s the best way to reduce injury? Study authors say promoting alternatives to driving is an important strategy.

They recommended “a paradigm shift in favor of more sustainable transportation that would reduce traffic volumes and prioritize public transit.” Adding, “recently, large reductions in road fatalities in the United States have been attributed to reductions in distances driven.”

Researchers also recommended complete streets and traffic control measures like the UK’s 20-mile-per-hour zones.

Former Transportation Secretaries Mary Peters, James Burnley, Rodney Slater, Samuel Skinner, and Norman Mineta participated in the conference that produced a report and communications strategy. Photo from Miller Center.

If 80 percent of the American people agree that federal infrastructure investment will create jobs, and two-thirds say better infrastructure is important, why is the call for a robust transportation bill being made in whispers? And why is Congress already two and a half years late in producing one?

There are many political reasons — from the earmark ban to wariness of “Bridge to Nowhere” projects to the anti-spending frenzy that’s taken over the House — that it’s been a tough time to pass a transportation bill. But five former U.S. Secretaries of Transportation have said that the voice for change has to be louder. They released a report yesterday, with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, calling for a new communications strategy. (See “Is Transpo Funding Fundamentally a PR Problem? Five Ex-DOT Chiefs Discuss,” Dec. 2, 2011, for more on the conference the report is based on.)

The communications strategy is both visionary and tactical. Its more nuts-and-bolts elements include social networking campaigns and election-year news hooks to bring attention to the issue and make candidates talk about infrastructure.

The strategy is aimed at both leaders and the public. After all, both say they want better transportation infrastructure (and the jobs that will be created to build it), but no one wants to pay for it. The American people haven’t woken up to that contradiction. “Seventy-one percent of voters oppose an increase in the federal gas tax,” the Miller Center report says, “with majorities likewise opposing a tax on foreign oil, the replacement of the gas tax with a per-mile-traveled fee, and the imposition of new tolls to increase federal transportation funding.”

That’s a pretty comprehensive list of funding mechanisms, and the public has rejected them all. Part of a communications strategy, therefore, has to explain to the American people – not just about transportation but about all government services – that you can’t get something for nothing.

In a surprising shift, House Republicans declined an opportunity to try to axe bike/ped funding. Photo by Steven Faust

There are also amendments to deregulate coal ash and protect the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund from poaching to fund surface transportation. Probably the amendment that has reform-minded folks most riled up (aside from the Keystone provision) is the one to tack on H.R. 7’s “streamlining” provisions, which nine environmental groups have said “would eviscerate our nation’s bedrock environmental laws [NEPA] and stifle public participation in the environmental review process.” All Democratic amendments — and one Republican amendment to “devolve transportation authority back to the states” – were rejected.

Notably, no one even proposed language to strip out Transportation Enhancements or the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program (CMAQ). TE, especially, with its “set-aside” funding for things like bike/ped safety, has been the target of a special brand of Republican loathing. The Senate bill makes changes to the programs that bike/ped advocates have fought hard against, but it doesn’t just eliminate TE, as H.R. 7 would have.

Senate conferees will try to strike down these amendments and force passage of S. 1813 without these add-ons. But the House has had its opportunity to pass the Senate bill without amendments and rejected it. So, the stage is set for more of the bitter gridlock we’ve come to expect. A recent (non-scientific) poll by our friends at Politico’s Morning Transportation found 46 percent believing that Congress will approve a transportation bill before the current extension expires June 30, with almost the same number – 42 percent – believing it’ll be nothing but extensions till 2013.

And remember, even if they do manage to pass a bill by June 30, it’ll only be a 15-month bill. We will have had 33 months of extensions by then.

In related news: the Senate Transportation and HUD Appropriations Committee passed a 2013 budget last week [PDF], allocating $53.4 billion, down from $57.3 billion this year. Don’t be alarmed, though: as David Burwell at the Carnegie Endowment points out, it “includes a $5.4 billion increase over 2012 in unscored, offsetting receipts from HUD housing programs which, when added to the $53.4 billion comes to $58.8 billion.” The Senate budget includes $50 million to the Partnership for Sustainable Communities Regional Planning and Challenge Grant programs, which many fear the Republicans want to dismantle altogether, and $100 million for non-high-speed inter-city rail improvements, mostly for track upgrading. The rail appropriation is still a pittance compared to the Obama administration’s big dreams of bringing high-speed rail to 80 percent of the country, but it’s better than the big fat zero being proposed by the House.

The Senate also continues the TIGER grant program at half a billion dollars – same as 2012. Highway and transit get the same dose they did this year too.

The budget goes to the full Appropriations Committee next, but a vote doesn’t seem to be scheduled yet. Just as well – Majority Leader Harry Reid has made it clear that he doesn’t plan to pass a 2013 budget before the election.

The bill, whose name (The Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2012, Part II) reads like the most boring action movie sequel of all time, passed by a vote of 293 to 127. Unlike the extension passed in March, which was a “clean” extension, this one is “dirty,” muddled by non-transportation-related language requiring, among other things, speedy approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

If signed into law, Part II would actually be the tenth extension of SAFETEA-LU since it first expired in 2009. But folding the pipeline back into the mix could make a needlessly drawn-out exercise in futility last even longer. President Obama had threatened to veto the House’s original transportation bill, H.R. 7, over its inclusion of the Keystone pipeline, and he has renewed the threat for the current piece of legislation.

This new extension is simply an excuse to start the conference process with the Senate, and all the bells and whistles attached to it are just bargaining chips for the conference table. The bill carries two popular programs — harbor maintenance and the RESTORE Act — and a few unpopular ones — Keystone XL, coal ash, and environmental streamlining  – into the conference room, while the Senate brings program consolidation and a longer timetable.

“The need for a transportation bill has been hijacked for political purposes,” said Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) from the House floor.

The conditions under which the extension was written and amended were just as contentious as the policy changes it contains. Only three amendments (out of nine) were allowed a vote by yesterday’s Rules Committee hearing, all submitted by Republican congressmen, and all three were approved by the full House today.

A few of those amendments have significant environmental implications. Rep. Reed Ribble’s (R-WI) amendment, which carries over measures from HR 7 gutting environmental review rules, drew the ire of environmental groups and many House Democrats. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) pointed out that some language in Ribble’s amendment could be construed as allowing all highway projects to bypass federal environmental review altogether. Ribble’s amendment passed with only 18 Democratic votes; one solitary Republican voted against it. (Two other amendments, requiring ports to spend more money on dredging and preventing the federal government from regulating toxic coal ash, passed without a recorded vote.)

Democrats on the House floor were clearly torn whether to support the bill. On one hand, finally appointing conferees would represent the first real sign of progress in a long time for this stop-and-go reauthorization fight. On the other hand, going to conference will almost certainly mean swallowing a poison pill planted by House leadership. In his remarks from the floor, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) said that his desire to go to conference is outweighed by the riders weighing down the House bill, and that he would be voting “no.”

President Obama, too, could be placed in an uncomfortable position if he is handed something that looks exactly like the Senate bill — which he supports — with the Keystone pipeline attached.

The Senate bill would expire at the end of September 2013, so House Democrats will want to go to conference as quickly as possible. (We wrote a little while ago about how every extension hurts the Senate bill.) “We’re ready to go to conference later today,” offered top transportation Democrat Nick Rahall.

The ball, for the first time since MAP-21 passed on March 14, is in the Senate’s court.

It’s all thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of people — advocates, elected officials, and a new breed of policy maker you might call the visionary bureaucrat. This series is about those bureaucrats — the people who are transforming transportation and planning agencies from public sector backwaters into centers of bold innovation and change.

Every day this week, Streetsblog will be highlighting well-known and not-so-well-known transportation officials who are working to put new ideas into action. They’re overcoming bureaucratic and political obstacles, building coalitions, and demonstrating how American transportation systems should adapt for the 21st century.

We compiled this list with help from the Congress for the New Urbanism, Smart Growth America, Transportation for America, Project for Public Spaces, and the State Smart Transportation Initiative. Recognizing that a truly comprehensive list of innovators would be impossible, we aimed to put together a broad cross-section of officials working at different levels of local government, from city agencies to state DOTs. Everyone here is deserving, but not everyone who’s deserving is on the list.

Here’s the first of our five installments.

Janette Sadik-Khan

Commissioner, New York City Department of Transportation

Photo: Brad Aaron

What new superlatives can one use to describe Janette Sadik-Khan? At a time when progressive transportation policy is gaining momentum in many American cities, her tenure as commissioner of New York City DOT has set the standard for innovation. This list had to start with her.

Sadik-Khan is in sort of a unique position for a working transportation official, says John Norquist at the Congress for New Urbanism. Most visionary bureaucrats toil away in obscurity, often pushed out of office in a political shuffle before they can see their plans realized. Sadik-Khan has shown remarkable creativity in cutting through the red tape.

Sadik-Khan’s DOT installed 250 miles of bikeways in New York City in just four years, including the first physically protected on-street bike lanes in the United States — an important design innovation that more American cities are adopting. The agency worked with the MTA to launch the city’s first rapid bus routes with off-board fare collection. DOT’s plaza program has reclaimed acres of asphalt for pedestrians, most famously in Times Square, but also in all sorts of corners tucked away in different NYC neighborhoods. And though it’s not the subject of many headlines, Sadik-Khan has overseen the massive, ongoing effort to keep the city’s streets and bridges in a state of good repair.

Through it all Sadik-Khan has faced political hurdles and overcome them. It helps when the results of your work become apparent for all to see. The city’s traffic fatalities have dropped to their lowest level in 100 years. Bus speeds are increasing and ridership is up on the lines that DOT and the MTA have upgraded. The number of cyclists riding into the Manhattan CBD doubled in four years. And that’s before New York launches the nation’s largest bike-share program this summer.

A lot has changed in five years, and it wouldn’t have happened without Sadik-Khan’s leadership.

Gabe Klein

Commissioner, Chicago Department of Transportation

Klein posing in front of a DC streetcar. Photo: Gabeklein.com

Once Rahm Emanuel selected Gabe Klein to run the Chicago Department of Transportation, it was only a matter of time before Streetsblog put together this list of transportation personalities. Hiring Klein was a significant moment — since he was already a known innovator, it showed that there’s demand for top transportation policy talent in top tier American cities.

Klein made his name in the transportation reform movement as head of the District of Columbia’s transportation department. In Washington, he launched the wildly successful Capital Bikeshare and set in motion plans for a not yet constructed streetcar (which, by the way, is expected to be a huge financial boon for the city).

In Chicago, it appears Klein will be no less transformative. With the backing of Emanuel, who campaigned on a strong transit and cycling platform, Klein has already gotten started on implementing a network of protected bike lanes. The first one — on Kinzie Street — is already thrilling city cyclists and attracting enough bike traffic to outnumber cars during the morning rush.

Bus improvements are also moving ahead apace. Chicago has committed to a package of enhancements for major bus corridors in the central city. And expectations are high that Klein and Emanuel will raise the bar for American bus rapid transit when they implement the city’s first BRT corridors, currently in the works.

Klein has taken a special interest in making it safer to walk in Chicago. He’s proposed instituting “pedestrian shuffles,” a.k.a. Barnes dances, which give pedestrians an exclusive signal phase and enable people to cross the street in any direction without conflicts with motorists. And he has introduced a bold public awareness campaign, installing mannequins around the city wearing T-shirts that display pedestrian traffic fatality statistics.

Klein’s influence extends beyond the nation’s third-largest city, as well. He’s the treasurer of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, a coalition that is bringing innovative bicycle infrastructure treatments, once found only in Europe, into the mainstream of American transportation planning. He is also a prolific presence on Twitter, cranking out an entertaining stream of thought that reaches transportation wonks all over the country.

Richard Hall

Secretary of Planning, State of Maryland

Richard Hall has led Maryland to the forefront of state-level smart growth planning. Photo: Flickr

Politically, you can’t give enough credit to Governor Martin O’Malley for Maryland’s new state-level smart growth plan, PlanMaryland. O’Malley stood up to rural opposition and muscled legislation through late last year to put in place what may be the most progressive state-level land use planning in the country.

But you also can’t separate the governor’s successes from the man behind the scenes, turning policy positions into reality: Richard Hall. With Hall’s help, for decades Maryland has been laying the groundwork to be a national leader in smart growth.

Hall started at Maryland’s Department of Planning in 1992. He worked his way from principal planner to director of land use planning to head of the agency, a title he has held for five years.

All the while he was helping move the state toward this moment. Hall’s work contributed to the state’s Smart Growth Act in 1997, which established “priority growth areas” for the state and set the stage for PlanMaryland.

Now, under Hall’s leadership, Maryland will decide which areas of the state will be prioritized for development. The process, by its nature, divides places into winners and losers and is sure to be a thorny undertaking, full of political hurdles. But the work of PlanMaryland has always been thorny.

Hall doesn’t shy away from facing the critics head on. “Some lawmakers contend they want to ‘save rural Maryland’ from PlanMaryland,” he said in a local forum recently. “But their aim seems to be to ‘pave rural Maryland.’”

Hall and O’Malley both recognize that for too long Maryland’s system was already dividing the state into winners and losers, as the interests of cities and existing communities were supplanted by unplanned, sprawling development. It will take strong leadership to change the dynamic. But these two are up to the task.

Stay tuned for the second installment in our series on visionary transportation bureaucrats tomorrow.

Photo: Familypedia

In another desperate attempt to push forward their fossil fuel agenda, House Republicans have indicated that even though they’ve been incapable of passing a transportation bill, they’re willing to go to conference committee and pass the Senate bill. All the Senate Democrats have to do in return is approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

Our sources had predicted the House GOP would pull something like this. This is the “shell” bill that the House was expected to present as a sort of placeholder to conference with the Senate bill, just to get something moving.

The House doesn’t have a prayer of passing a real bill to conference with the Senate bill, so they’re bringing an extension. That’s right — they’re bringing a 90-day extension to the Senate and saying, now we have to reconcile the differences between these bills. One of those bills is real legislation that includes real policy changes, and one is just a shell. But Republicans still hope they can negotiate changes in conference, even though they don’t have a bill showing the will of the House.

The Transportation Committee is drafting the extension/pipeline bill now. Sources say it will come to the floor the week of April 23.

It’s a mix of the best case scenario — getting to conference, one way or another, with the Senate bill — and the worst case scenario – holding the transportation program as ransom to get the pipeline rammed through. It’s the sort of nasty politics this Congress is known for.

Clearly, the House GOP leadership now wishes this whole transportation thing would just go away. They have egg on their faces from repeated failures to get even their own caucus on board with their drilling-and-driving plan, and they still have no idea about how to deal with it.

The House hasn’t been able to pass anything dealing with infrastructure, but they have passed three — count ‘em, three — bills to expand oil drilling. If there’s one thing Republicans can come together on, it’s oil drilling. Those bills don’t actually say anything about transportation (even though they were supposedly the foundation of the GOP transportation agenda).

It’s somewhat surprising that the House wouldn’t conference those bills with the Senate bill, instead of an extension. From what I hear, there’s no rule stopping them; it’s just that the Senate likely wouldn’t tolerate it. Experts say the House wouldn’t want to go to conference with no position on the transportation policies laid out in the Senate bill — but that’s exactly what they’re doing now.

One way or another, the next move on transportation will be close to no move at all. It will be some form of extending current law, perhaps with a few adjustments, until after the election. With any luck Congress will figure out a way to deal with the impending insolvency of the Highway Trust Fund, which will hit before the election, but it’s anyone’s guess whether or how they’ll do that.

Even though they just solemnly swore to attend to the transportation reauthorization in the next 90 days (and no more extensions!), the House is about to pretend to be way too busy with the budget to pass a real bill. It’s all for show, because really, if they had a game plan for transportation, they’d act on it. But there’s still too much infighting within the Republican Party to present a united front.

If the two houses do go to conference, it will still be a mess. With no House bill to work with, the two sides will have to negotiate everything from scratch. House Republicans won’t accept the bipartisan Senate bill without some face-saving policy changes. And even the Senate bill at this point is practically just an extension: If it becomes law June 30, it will only be in effect 15 months before a new law is necessary.

June 30 is the deadline, when the ninth extension expires. And with the two Houses wrangling in conference, it could easily go down to the wire again with both sides of the aisle accusing each other of jeopardizing 1.8 million jobs and strangling the transportation industry. It will seem as if there is no way to avoid such an outcome in the face of such monumental intransigence and political cat-fighting, but somehow they always figure out something.

And then there’s the budget Congress is so busy not passing. Sometimes Congress passes one, sometimes they don’t. The conventional wisdom is that this is going to be one of those years where they don’t. The Senate Budget Committee will pass one, against the wishes of Majority Leader Harry Reid, who won’t bring it up on the floor. They’ll just ignore House Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s budget, which would have cut transportation by 36 percent and would have almost certainly left nothing for high-speed rail, livability initiatives, or other reform priorities. Pretty much the only purpose the Ryan budget now serves is as an election-year talking point for Democrats to say what heartless monsters the deficit hawks on the other side of the aisle are.

In my conversations about the budget, speculation arose that the Supreme Court decision on the health care law could have some impact, as deficit projections would change if the law is struck down. It’s hard to say what that would mean for transportation, and it probably wouldn’t have much impact at all in 2013. But it’s a good reminder that in Washington, all things are connected.

Even if Congress never passes a real 2013 budget, they still need to decide on appropriations, which is essentially the same thing. The House will work on that for the next few months. The Senate probably won’t work very hard on it. No one expects spending to be decided until after Election Day.

See you next week.

Source: William Frey, Brookings Institution

Last week, the New York Times and USA Today reported that Census numbers had confirmed the death of the outer ring suburbs, or exurbs. The latest numbers, capturing the year (actually 15 months, April 2010 to July 2011) since the last Census, showed a major shift away from the settlement patterns from 2000 to 2010.

That’s not exactly how it happened. The shift didn’t suddenly happen in 2010. The 2000-2010 numbers encompass a decade whose first two-thirds were the heyday of an economic boom that buoyed greenfield development. The real break was in 2007, when the housing bubble burst and the artificially inflated value of the outer suburbs crashed. After all, those houses weren’t near any employment centers or amenities, and the price of gas was creeping terrifyingly upward, forcing exurbanites to pay top dollar to get to work, if they still had a job to go to.

The whole last third of the decade showed a populace flinching back from what was quickly proving itself to be a toxic development pattern. Last year’s numbers are a continuation of what’s been happening since 2007, not a sudden year-over-year change.

What has emerged from the analysis of this year’s Census data, though, is a complicated picture of stalled-out growth in distant suburbs that had developed at a breakneck pace during the housing boom, fueled by overzealous marketing and easy mortgages. Cities have re-absorbed some of those people, but the biggest metros chalked up only modest population increases. And the cities that grew the most were relatively sprawling southern and western cities, like Dallas and Miami, that defy the urbanism of old eastern cities like Boston or Philadelphia.

Fleeing the Exurbs

The Census Bureau itself didn’t actually say anything about exurbs. It focused on the dramatic shift in development patterns over the last decade, highlighting in its press release that the fastest growing areas between 2000 and 2010 were not the same ones that grew the fastest from 2010 to 2011.

So where are the Times and USA Today getting this “exurbs are dying” thing? They’re getting it from William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. He’s been talking about the flagging energy for exurban growth for years, most recently in a report released two weeks ago on the population shift away from outer suburbs and toward metros with diversified, knowledge-based economies.

A foreclosed home in Kendall County, Illinois, a poster child of exurban growth. Photo: Foreclosure Resource Place

Frey’s own analysis looked past which metro areas won or lost in the last year to the finer-grained county data. The Census noted, “The three fastest-growing counties from 2000 to 2010 were Kendall, Ill.; Pinal, Ariz.; and Flagler, Fla. Between 2010 and 2011, they ranked 236th, 171st and 207th, respectively.” And Frey’s analysis showed that it wasn’t just those flagship exurban communities that were losing favor.

Frey found that population in the country’s outer suburbs grew at just 0.4 percent in the year that ended last July, down from 1 percent in the previous year and a 2006 peak of more than 2 percent.

Rural counties last year grew at one-quarter of their rate of growth between 2000 and 2010, but some grew by leaps and bounds. North Dakota, one of the most rural states in the nation, experienced some of the greatest growth in the last year due to major oil and gas development.

Forty-seven micro areas now have populations of 100,000 or more, with the most populous, Seaford, Delaware, now housing 200,000 residents. Considering that a micropolitan area is defined by having no more than 50,000 people in its largest city, a micro area that big is inherently sprawling.

What About the Major Metros?

After the newspapers had already run headlines using his findings, Frey released his own analysis on the Brookings blog. He noted that it’s not as simple as saying that big cities grew while exurbs flailed. Many cities, like Las Vegas and Orlando, experienced a major crash in population and housing values as well. And some of last year’s fastest growers, by percent population gain, were hardly the country’s most booming urban centers: Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, Washington and Hinesville-Fort Stewart, Georgia, for example.

A diversified, knowledge-based economy is one key element of the cities that have fared well, Frey said. Houston, New York and D.C. gained more than 100,000 people each.

Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic drew out some of the finer points in his story yesterday, focusing on growth in the core counties of some of the most important metro areas. “Whereas just 3.8 percent of the Washington region’s population growth between 2000 and 2010 occurred in the District of Columbia itself, 13.4 percent of the same region’s growth between 2010 and 2010 occurred in the central city,” wrote Freemark. “Most extreme, perhaps, was the situation in Cook County (the central county for the Chicago region), which took in 51.3 percent of the region’s population growth between 2010 and 2011, while the county had declined significantly in population between 2000 and 2010.”

Freemark added that the core of the core – the downtowns – were already experiencing a renaissance in the 2000s, and this new data shows that that growth is spreading to other neighborhoods within the most urban county. Of course, in some cases, county boundaries match up precisely with city limits (New York City or New Orleans, for example), and in others (Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland) the city population is a small percentage of the population of the entire county. And he was careful to note that growth in the core county only outpaced growth in surrounding areas about half the time.

Delayed Reaction

Another factor complicating this demographic data is the fact that people move less during periods of economic uncertainty. And if they move, it might not be to their ideal location. We can’t assume that the migration patterns we’re seeing in the latest Census data reflect people’s preferences.

“The reason you see so much clustering of people in these close-in suburbs and urban areas is that a lot of these are young people – you might call them windfall stayers,” Frey told Streetsblog in an interview. “They would have moved out if they could, but for the meantime they’re staying where they are, with parents or friends. In Washington, D.C., for example, you see somewhat higher growth than normal in Arlington, Alexandria and the close-in suburbs than earlier in the decade, when people were moving out to the exurbs more.”

He said that young people who seek out outer suburbs for the lower housing prices, especially those starting families, are “biding their time while they’re waiting to make the move.” So when the economy bounces back a little more, there might be a lot of latent demand for those exurbs.

But, Frey said, when these people do find the means to make their move, they might think twice about going back to subdivisions that are still struggling with massive waves of foreclosures. “The exurbs may be a little toxic for a while,” Frey said, “both for people who want to move there, people who want to provide loans for people who want to move there, and people who want to develop there.”

As chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, John Mica hasn't looked like much of a "transit fan." Photo: C-SPAN

“I became a mass transit fan because it’s so much more cost effective than building a highway,” he told PBS in 2009. “Also, it’s good for energy, it’s good for the environment – and that’s why I like it.”

Flash forward to February 2012. Mica is now chair of the committee, and he and his colleagues in the House have delivered a transportation bill that is bad for the environment and very bad for transit. Instead of receiving a dedicated share of the federal gas tax, as has been the case for three decades, transit would be expected to survive with an infusion from the treasury — with no guarantee of anything after that.

Mica defended the proposal vigorously. “The transit community, who has no source of revenue, is demanding that they stay and get a share of the trust fund, which, one, they don’t contribute to, and two, the trust fund is not going anywhere,” Mica told reporters. “If anything, it’s going to go down in its revenue as vehicles switch out to alternative fuels.”

Sure doesn’t sound like the words of a “transit fan.”

Mica used to be the premier pro-transit Republican in the House. Not anymore. That title now belongs to Ohio’s Steve LaTourette or Illinois’s Robert Dold, who have voiced the most resistance within their party to anti-transit measures in the House transportation bill. So how did ranking member Mica, who was one of his Democratic Chairman’s closest allies and biggest supporters, turn into Chairman Mica, enemy of transit?

We approached Mica’s office for this story and have yet to hear back. But it’s easy to see how the shifting landscape of transportation politics would affect a pro-transit Republican in a leadership position, like Mica. The T & I chair is now stuck between a rock (the intransigent GOP base) and a hard place (the declining power of the federal gas tax).

Taking a charitable view, H.R. 7′s attack on transit could be seen as an attempt to compromise on Mica’s part. He knew that gas tax revenues would be insufficient to fund transportation programs at current levels for much more than two years. But he also knew that the conservative wing of his own party would block any new taxes or expanded tolling.

In the end, the product that came out of Mica’s committee — funding transit from general taxes — spent too much to win over the Tea Party, and wreaked too much havoc with transit systems to win over moderates in his own party (not to mention every Democrat and plenty of influential lobbies).

That pro-transit positions are apparently now untenable for a Republican T&I chair is troubling, to say the least. Even as more Americans come to rely on transit, agencies are struggling to hold the line on fares and service even without the threat of funding disruptions from Washington. They are already hurting for cash, and transit riders are suffering from cutbacks and fare hikes.

Larry Hanley, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, put it well when he told Politico this week that this is simply a tax increase by another name, handed down from a supposedly tax-averse Congress: ”We have this one beleaguered group of taxpayers called transit riders who have been held exempt from the no tax increase promises in Washington.”