Streetsblog Los Angeles

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.

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Last spring, Ray LaHood’s office approached Streetsblog seeking reader questions for the transportation secretary’s monthly video blog series, On the Go With Ray LaHood. His aides have repeatedly told me that of all the blogs and organizations that got a similar shot, Streetsblog readers were the most engaged and asked the most insightful questions. LaHood wrote a guest post for Streetsblog to accompany the video of his answers.

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.

Who suffers most from bad road design? Not surprisingly, the answer is poor people, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

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.

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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.

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This week, the House and Senate are expected to name the people they’ll send to conference to come up with a new transportation bill. The Senate will be bringing its bipartisan bill; the House is bringing a bunch of poison pills. The president says he will veto anything with a Keystone pipeline approval in it, giving both sides the chance to say they’re putting Keystone before a massive infrastructure/jobs bill.

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.

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In a brazen but expected display of defiance — both of the President and of bipartisan efforts in the Senate — the House voted today to extend transportation policy through the end of September with several contentious policy changes attached.

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.

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America’s streets are changing for the better. The signs are everywhere: Whether it’s bike sharing in Chattanooga, complete streets in New Orleans or bus rapid transit in Cleveland — cities across the country are trying new things and making impressive progress in the pursuit of safer streets and sustainable transportation.

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.

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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.

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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.

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House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee ranking member John Mica knew the value of good transit.

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).

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