Streetsblog Los Angeles

The Guardian reports that SNCF, France's national rail company, is taking advantage of a boom in ridership to make aggressive plans for expansion. While SNCF positions itself to help ease the impact of high fuel prices on the French public, what are American leaders preparing to do? Drilling offshore and taking a few hits from the strategic petroleum reserve aren't going to cut it.

Over in France, all the new riders have SNCF chairman Guillaume Pepy thinking big:

The state-owned SNCF delivered a net €1.1bn (£875m) profit last year and first-half figures, due next week, are said to be sparkling. Pepy envisages up to 80m extra passenger trips this year or an increase of around 8%.

"This change will speed up because we are facing a twin energy and environment crisis," he says, pointing to surging fuel costs and growing personal worries about carbon footprints. "People want sustainable mobility and, in France, more trains and more SNCF."

The growing number of passengers is maxing out the current system, which Pepy sees as an opportunity, especially in a time of escalating fuel prices. He wants to double the size of SNCF's high-speed network by 2015, make rail stations into multi-modal hubs, and capture market share from energy-intensive air and road travel.

Read more...

From Dick Locher of the Chicago Tribune comes a cartoon complement to Judith Warner’s essay in the New York Times last Friday, declaring that SUVs have outlived any "utility" owners may once have derived from them.

The Tribune reports that the Chicago Transit Authority is studying Cleveland’s new Bus Rapid Transit service, called the Health Line, as it prepares to launch its own BRT lines next year.

Four miles of the Health Line are currently operational along Euclid Avenue, a major downtown thoroughfare that was once packed with streetcars, buses and pedestrians. The route will stretch nearly ten miles when completed this October. With its sleek articulated buses, new stations, and improved trip times, the service aims to woo commuters out of their cars and onto transit:

The transit corridor is geared toward
attracting professionals, many of them doctors and other health-care
workers who commute to a medical district anchored by the renowned Cleveland Clinic. Medical companies are paying the city’s transit authority $12 million for the naming rights.

The challenge facing Cleveland — and ultimately Chicago — is how to set the
new service apart from the stereotype of bus travel as slow, outdated
and used mostly by society’s have-nots.

"In Cleveland, suits don’t ride buses. We are out to change that," Joseph Calabrese, chief executive officer and general manager of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transportation Authority, said last week.

In addition to being a full-featured service with pre-payment, dedicated lanes, signal prioritization, and yes, enforcement cameras on every bus, what makes the Health Line worth studying is the smart planning behind it. The new bus lanes take advantage of excess capacity on wide streets, and the route not only provides direct connections to an employment center, it is also a critical component of efforts to lure businesses and residents to Cleveland’s urban core:

Read more…

Since we launched the Livable Streets Network one month ago, our community-created reference site, StreetsWiki, has steadily grown. There are now 132 articles contributed and maintained by LSN users. Knowing Streetsblog's audience, however, there's a lot of expertise among our readers still waiting to be tapped.

Anyone with a Livable Streets account can contribute to StreetsWiki. Once you sign up, contributing is easy. You can either begin a new article, or edit an existing one. Say you want to add something -- a case study, for instance -- to the article on road diets. You would call up that page, then click "edit this article." This opens an editor, pictured below, with an interface similar to standard word-processing programs. Knowledge of HTML not required.

 

We'll be featuring StreetsWiki articles regularly on Streetsblog. To get the juices flowing, here are a couple of suggestions for new content, given recent events we've covered: An update of the Public Bike-Sharing entry is in order, and a new entry for Select Bus Service would be a welcome addition.

The more we build this resource, developing a knowledge base that is both wide and deep, the more it will help livable streets advocates everywhere convey their ideas and refine their arguments.

As metropolises like New York and Philadelphia consider the benefits of bike sharing, and with Washington DC already off and riding, smaller cities are getting in on the action as well, often through the initiative of major local employers.

Last year, health care giant Humana started a bike-share for employees at its Louisville, Kentucky headquarters. As of this May, some 2,500 of Humana's 8,500 Louisville-based workers had enrolled in the "Freewheelin" program, which, as the name implies, is offered at no charge. Humana is bringing 1,000 Freewheelin bikes to Minneapolis-St. Paul for the Republican National Convention in September, and will leave behind 70 of them, along with checkout kiosks, for use in the Twin Cities' own fledgling bike-share program. Humana is also providing bikes for the Democratic convention in Denver, which plans to put them to use in a new city program of its own.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Saint Francis Health System launched "Tulsa Townies" last August. The Tulsa program is also free, and bikes are available to the public at four checkout stations, all located in parks along the Arkansas River.

Across the Canadian border, credit union Vancity last year loaned out close to 50 bikes to residents of Vancouver, British Columbia, to ride free of charge for three weeks before passing them on to other users. The bikes were eventually collected and distributed to low-income would-be cyclists. Vancity complemented its program with a web site encouraging users to blog about their bike-share experience.

And back down in Portland, Oregon, whose municipal program seems to have hit a snag, a homegrown company has put its own twist on the bike-share concept. Rejuvenation, which manufactures and sells "new old stock" vintage home hardware, is raffling off one bike per month, complete with gear, to its employees. Winners must commit to riding their bikes to work an average of at least once a week, or else they must give the bike a co-worker. Rejuvenation also gives out bus passes, along with up to $30 per month to any employee who walks, bikes, or takes transit to work.

Photo: Tulsa Townies

London Mayor Boris Johnson may scale back the congestion pricing plan put in place by Ken Livingstone, whom Johnson defeated in May. The Times is reporting that the current 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. flat rate charge could be altered in a number of ways, including a reduction in the hours during which the fee is applied and reversing an extension of the zone, which was implemented last year.

Johnson’s director of transport, Kulveer Ranger, told the Times that Johnson is looking to the proposed Manchester pricing model, which charges for fewer hours per day.

Mr Ranger said: "Flexibility around hours of operation, flexibility around how it is charged; all of those things are options we’re looking to consider.

"The mayor has been absolutely clear that he wants to make it fairer for people, not so much as a blunt tool, but something that’s a bit more well managed and gives people a bit more flexibility in terms of how it’s operated."

The Times, which opposes pricing, relies exclusively on sources from "motoring groups" — who also speak of "making the system fairer," etc. — to fill out the story. But in the comments, reader "Barry" recalls how candidate Johnson professed an interest in improving conditions for those who don’t or can’t drive.

We certainly need more sophisticated road charging, where payment is related to time of day and distance travelled. But to rule out extending the scheme shows that Boris’s pre-election claim to support cyclists, pedestrians and bus users over the selfish minority of self-drivers was a sham.

Photo:
Guardian Unlimited

From the Australian Bicycling Council comes word of a new amenity for bicycling commuters In Brisbane, Australia. Called cycle2city, it provides secure weekday parking and showers for up to 420 members, who will pay between $5 and $7 a day for the privilege of using the facility (that and other figures quoted here are Australian dollars, which are close to even in value with the US dollar these days).

The $7-million bike center in Brisbane's central business district was funded by the Queensland government and the Brisbane City Council, and is operated by a private company. The first of its kind in Australia, it offers swipe-card access and some pretty swank-looking accommodations. The cost of membership is roughly comparable to the local transit fare, depending on what type of ticket one uses.

Local government officials, quoted on OurBrisbane.com, see it as one element in an overall strategy:

State Government and Brisbane City Council have welcomed the centre as part of the battle against traffic congestion. Brisbane City Councillor Jane Prentice said the people of Brisbane now had the perfect reason to ditch the car in favour of more active, healthy and sustainable travel options.

"King George Square Cycle Centre demonstrates our commitment to encouraging people to live a more active, healthy and sustainable lifestyle," said Cr Prentice.

"The more people we get travelling on two wheels or two legs, the more cars we take off the road enabling us to live healthier and greener lifestyles that will contribute to ensuring Brisbane's long-term sustainability."

Transport Minister John Mickel said that, by using the King George Square Cycle Centre, the average commuter could save more than $25 dollars per day.

"The average car commuter can spend up to $33 per day on off-street parking alone when travelling into the CBD," Mr Mickel said.

Think a paid bike commuter facility like this one could fly here in New York, say in Midtown or the Financial District?

Why have Danes again been named the happiest people on the planet? Early this year ABC News cited bikes as "perhaps … the best symbol of Danish happiness," and in this clip from "Contested Streets" it isn’t hard to see why. Here, livable streets guru Jan Gehl and others explain the many ways an increase in bike traffic (now one-third of all commutes) has improved life in the capital city of Copenhagen.

But it didn’t happen overnight. Rather, it took four decades of gradual change to make Copenhagen the place it is today. As for replicating that success elsewhere, says Gehl: "if you don’t have enough nice spaces, you can see these [become] overcrowded spaces. Then you should just make more spaces."

The $1.7 billion in public transportation funding promised by the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act would be a step in the right direction, but it pales in comparison to what might have been. The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act — the cap-and-trade bill that died in the Senate last month — would have brought 100 times that much in federal transit investment, thanks in large part to Senator Ben Cardin. In a recent interview with Grist, the Maryland Democrat offers a refreshing perspective on the future of US transportation policy.

We are in desperate need of significant transit improvements. We’ve got to have the facilities and we don’t today, and then we need the fare-box and economic policies that reward people for taking public transportation. Some try to say that it should be "self-sufficient" or have a certain percentage return through the fare-box. We don’t do that on our roads, and public transportation is much better for so many reasons — not just the environment or the quality of life. We should be providing much stronger incentives for people to use public transportation, but first you need to have the facilities.

I’m a big, big supporter of dramatic change in public transportation. It includes more than just the bus and rail systems in our urban areas. It includes a commuter rail and inner-city rail — the whole gamut of services that get people out of their personal vehicles. I don’t want people driving their personal vehicles the way they are today.

Even in the era of $4/gal gasoline, not many elected officials would go on record with such heresies. But that may be changing. Gas tax "holiday" talk has all but evaporated over the past few weeks as pols promote transit as an answer to higher gas prices. And a column in today’s Boston Globe predicts that Senator John McCain’s dogged and sustained effort to undermine Amtrak could create an opening for transit-friendly Barack Obama heading into November.