Should bicyclists subsidize automobiles even more than they do already?

The Seattle Times has an opinion column, "When economic times are tough, cyclists could pitch in by paying a small fee," suggesting that in these tough economic times, bicyclists ought to donate money to maintaining roads. From the article:

I continue to be stumped by the hackles raised by cyclists who want clean, well-maintained trails and bridges as part of their city and region but refuse to negotiate from a position of political strength. The sales tax on bicycles is collected, sure, as it is on dishes and limousines. The issue becomes not about a penalty but about participation in the upkeep of the environment.

In the best green cities of the West, including Vancouver, B.C., Portland and Seattle, the case for infrastructure improvement remains strong. In the opinion piece (below) on this page, you can find evidence of the unequivocal public interest in improvements to roads, bridges, viaducts and the like.

Similarly, if a tax to support cycling were proposed, only the users would fight it. (Scratch a devoted bicyclist and find a saint). That's the case with most fees, and why government by necessity taxes us all for parks, traffic, schools and even the recreational use of boats and RVs. It's about maintaining the trails beneath us.

This is tricky. I suppose if vehicle users paid for 100% of the cost of roads, it would be reasonable for bicyclists to pay for bicycling infrastructure, even though mobility should be seen also as a right, not just a privilege of income, and people should still be able to have access to streets, sidewalks, and paths regardless of income.

But anyone who pays taxes, including bicyclists, already pays for roads.

Probably the biggest most persistent urban myth around is that through gasoline excise taxes and car registration fees, automobilists pay for the entire cost of roads.

It's not true. Taxes and fees cover about 59% of the cost of roads, according to Martin Wachs a UC Berkeley professor, in a report published by Brookings (Improving Efficiency and Equity in Transportation Finance), and discussed in a 2003 column by Neal Peirce, a columnist carried by the Seattle Times. And in fact, the column ran in the Seattle Times printed paper, according to the database, see "Perilous gas-tax hikes aren't the only way."

So bicyclists are paying for roads, since 41% of the cost of building and maintaining roads comes from general funds, which bicyclists contribute to as payers of income, property, and sales taxes.

People who don't drive and don't bike are paying for roads too. Partly, that's ok because nondrivers benefit from roads--for the movement of goods and services as well as transit, etc.--but until the costs of providing the road-based mobility network are more evenly distributed, I think it's unfair to ask bicyclists to bear more of the proportionate cost of providing this network than is asked of automobile owners.

E.g., in DC automobile owners who pay for a residential parking permit (some areas of the city don't have restrictions and therefore don't require such a permit) are charged $15/year, for a space that Donald Shoup estimates is worth $1,800/year (see The High Cost of Free Parking).

In Seattle, the cost of a residential parking permit is $35 for two years...

Planning for complete places means planning for people, not just cars

Yajaira Rivera is forced by snow to walk her baby in the street in Lawrence. Joanne Rathe, Boston Globe.

The Boston Globe ran this article, "Uncleared sidewalks imperil pedestrians," which discusses the death of pedestrians forced to walk on the street, because of snowy, icy sidewalks. From the article:

From the way sidewalks are plowed, it may seem that local governments assume the only people who walk outdoors in the winter are children on their way to school. But Oleg Kotlyarevskiy, 47, wasn't going to school on Dec. 23. It was 6:39 a.m., just starting to get light, when he was hit by a Volkswagen traveling north on Main Street in Acton. He got off the commuter rail train 14 minutes earlier and was probably walking in the road because, as police Lieutenant Robert Parisi said, the sidewalk was on the other side of the street behind a large snowbank. He was on his way to work, but he never got there. He was pronounced dead at the hospital that morning.

Bruce Stamski, director of public works in Acton, would not say whether the sidewalk on Main Street had been plowed. He said the town's first priority as far as snow on sidewalks is concerned has to do with schools - not commuter rail stations. ...

In Tewksbury, the superintendent of public works, Brian Gilbert, said the town plows less than half of sidewalks, focusing on those around schools. The town does not put sand or salt on sidewalks. DPW employees are not allowed to work overtime to plow pedestrian ways nor do they even begin sidewalk operations until after all the roads and parking lots have been dealt with, he said. ...

In Plymouth, where an 80-year-old woman who was taking her morning walk lost her life in January of 2000, her neighbor Alan Rogers, said the impassible sidewalk was to blame. The town began plowing the sidewalk for a couple of years after Iria Albertini was killed, but no longer does so, Rogers said. This winter, people are once again walking in the road, and it's another accident waiting to happen, he said. "We have housing for the elderly on the street and they often don't own cars and they often have to walk to 7-11," he said. "Even today, the same place where she was killed people still don't clean sidewalks."

It's fair to say that in most cities, snow removal on sidewalks is an afterthought. Most have laws requiring homeowners and businesses to shovel snow within 24 hours. But it's clear that routes to transit, areas around public facilities such as schools, recreation centers, and libraries don't get cleared immediately. And commercial districts without business improvement districts show inconsistent clearing as well.

The MinnPost ran a piece on how Minneapolis is considering the creation of a business improvement district, in part to handle snow removal from the sidewalks of the commercial district. According to "Improvement district would target downtown's snowbank menace" a three foot iced snowbank typically forms at the end of the sidewalk abutting the curb, over the course of winter.

MinnPost photo by Steve Berg. A driver trying to feed a parking meter on First Avenue last winter.

Washcycle also writes about the need for clearing snow from bicycle lanes. See "TheWashCycle: Winter plowing of Bike lanes." And the Minuteman Trail in the Boston region is now regularly cleared when it snows. See "Snow plowing planned for popular Minuteman Bikeway " from the Boston Globe. (Of course, it took the threat of a lawsuit on ADA grounds to do so. See the letter to the editor from the Globe, "Working together to improve Arlington trail.")

According to Lexington Selectman Hank Manz:

the bikeway has outgrown its description as a recreational path and has really become "an integral part of the way people get from place to place" ...

And the stupendous Bus Chick, Transit Authority blog in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer brings up icy sidewalks at bus stops in "No, no, no" and "Slippery sidewalks."

Westbound 14 stop at 23rd & Jackson, 11 AM, Seattle, December 20th, 2008.

Transportation planning around mobility rather than automobility means that snow removal planning needs to be more expansive than is typical.

The funny thing is as a child, for a time I lived in the nice Detroit neighborhood of Rosedale Park. Maybe it was because our Congresswoman lived two blocks down, but a snowplow unit with a twirling brush to remove snow from sidewalks used to run through the neighborhood sidewalks after snowfalls. How hard would it be to do that today, especially on routes to transit stations?

According to this press release, "Photo essay: Snow Day," from The University of Wisconsin, their snow removal plans include a program for clearing the many sidewalks crossing the campus. Makes sense, because students, faculty, and staff mostly get around the campus on foot.

Among the first pieces of equipment to hit the streets after a snowfall are the five broom tractors that brush off the miles of campus sidewalks. Image: Jeff Miller, University of Wisconsin.

Another take on municipal capital improvement planning

(for facilities that serve the public)

A couple years ago during the DC Public Library Master Planning process, many residents suggested that in part the libraries look to the bookstore-places like Barnes and Noble and Borders as examples of how to order their spaces.

Last summer, in "Prototyping and municipal capital improvement programs," I commented how under the Williams Administration, DC entered into a massive rehabilitation and expansion of recreation centers, but that the program of offerings was never really evaluated, meaning that each center is the same, and an evaluation of the recreation centers comprehensively as a set of offerings on a city-wide and sub-city "regional" basis wasn't performed, so needed facilities on a city-wide basis (i.e., indoor track, exposition center, etc.) were neither considered nor built, so a lot of money was spent but while better facilities were achieved, a significantly improved array of recreation programs weren't obtained.

Seeing this article from the Boston Globe, albeit about a private facility, the YMCA in Marblehead, Massachusetts, makes me think about these examples again. See "New YMCA dazzles and delights with bells, whistles, and ballet." The new YMCA has a climbing wall, a wi-fi cafe, and ballet studios, among other facilities--making the point again about the need for expansive consideration when embarking on the construction of municipal facilities that serve the public directly.

Most capital improvement projects are generational--designed to last at least 30 years without significant change. So having the right planning process upfront is crucial to doing it right. It's a shame that we spend so much money on facilities such as libraries, schools, recreation centers, and senior wellness centers, and don't achieve nearly what could be achieved, if we had more expansive and visionary thinking about what these facilities could accomplish for both the neighborhoods and the city as a whole.

End of starchitecture?

2008 05 05 - 0816 - Baltimore - I-695 beneath I-70
Originally uploaded by thisisbossi

Flickr image, Baltimore - I-695 beneath I-70, by thisisbossi.

While I think not, there is no question that there isn't going to be so much money sloshing around the American economy that image over context and function will be all that affordable.

The architecture critic wrote about it in the Boston Globe a couple months ago, in "For architects, 'The Bilbao Decade' is over." Now, Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize winning architecture writer for the Chicago Tribune, discusses the topic as well, in "Obama puts spotlight on nation's infrastructure."

Mr. Kamin discusses the debate that has occurred over the "stimulus" and the concern by many, especially those of us in the planning-transit blogospher, there what is happening right now is more of the same.

I think it's tough to expect "transformation" at the start of the Obama Administration. It might even be that the President Obama isn't as transformational as people's hopes and dreams made him out to be.

The one thing is that all the interest groups, especially the traditional groups, were prepared to lobby for their interests, and these interests all got rolled up into the stimulus bill.

What is clear is that the planning-compact development-transit-true sustainability organizations have to get just as organized, and clear, about the way forward. If that can be accomplished, and changes made in response to how the government is organized over the next 8 years, that would be a major accomplishment.

A counter example is the "Green Economy" stimulus proposal put forward by Canadian interest groups. See this op-ed "Canada needs a green stimulus plan" from the Toronto Star and this article from The Tyee, "In Canada, a Push for Obama-style Green Stimulus."

This reiterates the points made in this entry, about how "chance favors the prepared city (or interest group)":

-- How will Obama relate to the District?
-- "Chance" continues to favor the prepared road builders

I happened to write a bit about this today in email, here's my urban agenda for the Obama Administration...

Obama lived in a city, but he's more of a professor, and not nececessarily a transformational person yet, at least in terms of planning policy as it relates to land use, even if he's read Jane Jacobs.

In my opinion, the idea of the "Office of Urban Policy" looks at cities more in terms of poverty and poverty reduction, rather than cities as engines of knowledge and innovation (along the lines of Jacobs in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, + follow on work ranging from Richard Florida to the Brookings Institution).

1. That we need to redesign HUD and Ag, the first as a Dept. of Cities, Regions, and Sustainability, the latter as a Dept. of Ag., Rural Dev., and Sustainability, and merge certain functions such as EPA Smart Growth and DOE Smart Growth into HUD, etc.

2. That as in the same way that the Dept. of Commerce produced model legislation for Comprehensive Land Use Planning and for model Zoning regulations in the 1920s, the Federal Govt., in this case HUD, needs to produce national "Planning Policy Statements" comparable to those produced in the UK, to shape how local governments organize transportation and land use planning.

3. The first Planning Policy Statement should outline a linked land use and transportation planning paradigm. The second one should probably outline a framework for transportation planning at the national, regional, metropolitan, and local levels (along the lines of the transportation network planning framework that I espouse). The third probably on urban growth boundaries and compact development. Etc.

4. And US DOT and HUD funding should be reordered accordingly. Including transportation reauthorization, excise tax policy, etc.

5. Similar to how the States of Maryland (under Gov. Glendening) and Massachusetts (under Gov. Romney) provided incentives to local jurisdictions to move towards smart growth planning and affordable housing production.

If we could achieve this kind of agenda in 8 years of an Obama Adminstration, we would be well served.

The impolitic side of me...

BUILDINGS AT 907-911 N.Y. AVE. HABS, 1979.


Flickr photo of Eden Center parking lot sign, Fairfax County (this is Vietnamese) by mj*laflaca.

sometimes says, let's recognize the urban sociological concept of "ecological succession" (also called invasion-succession theory) and move on...

From Dictionary of Sociology Date: 1998 Author: GORDON MARSHALL

Invasion–succession model: A theoretical construct, setting out the sequence of competitive social actions by which a human group or social activity comes to occupy and dominate a territory, formerly dominated by another group or activity. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY; ECOLOGY; HUMAN ECOLOGY; URBAN ECOLOGY.

Is it really possible to retain a community's ethnic heritage when for the most part people representing that heritage no longer live there? Or shouldn't we have been concerned about this when outmigration was happening, rather than long after it is too late?

I ask this about Chinatown in DC. See "The Shrinking of Chinatown," subtitled "Group Is Working on a Strategy to Restore Neighborhood's Asian Identity" from yesterday's Post, which discusses a community planning effort.

Contrast it to this article, "Chinatown’s staying power: A neighborhood grows without losing its immigrant population," about Chinatown in Chicago, from a 2006 issue of the Chicago Journal. Chicago has been able to maintain its Chinatown in the face of development pressures.

At Chinatown's "100 %" intersection of 7th and H Streets NE, none of the businesses on the four corners of the intersection are Asian. Few of the businesses on 7th Street, from G Street to Massachusetts Avenue are Asian. Only a handful of Asian businesses exist on H Street from 6th to 8th Streets. Photo by Kennedy Smith.

But when you lose your critical mass of residents, you have no advocates and institutions able to maintain a neighborhood's identity and authenticity. A bunch of Chinese restaurants (plus one senior home) and Chinese lettering on the signs of chain retail do not make a Chinatown.

In the DC region, Asian energy has moved to the suburbs, particularly in Annandale and Fairfax County. Partly this was due to the high cost of land in the center city as well as the continued reduction in size of "Chinatown" (which at one time was also a Greek neighborhood, if you can believe George Pelecanos, and before that it was German-American), especially the construction of the Old Convention Center, which destroyed four blocks of "Chinatown."

600 Block H Street, N.W. MAIN ELEVATIONS HABS DC,WASH, 548-4. 1980

But it was also due to outmigration. As people improve economically, they tend to move out of the center to "better" neighborhoods. This happened with DC's Asians, especially given the riots, and as critical mass was developed in Arlington County and Fairfax County, later immigrants moved there directly without stopping first to live in the center city. (A similar phenomenon has occurred with Langley Park and Latinos. Also see this piece from the Gazette, "Destroy the Langley Park neighborhood?" about the same process, and fears that the light rail will lead to the reproduction of Langley Park away from Latinos.)

This is an interesting question because of the success at the maintenance of Chinatowns in Manhattan and Flushing, Queens, to some extent Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and of course, San Francisco. In New York City, Little Italy is in fact endangered by the growth of a thriving Chinatown.

I think it is pretty clear that without residents, you can't have a "Chinatown." If you want a more authentic Asian ethnic experience in the DC region, I think it's pretty clear you have to go to Annandale.

Chinatown, Flushing, Queens. Photo: Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao from "In the Shadow of the No. 7 Line" in the New York Times.

Urban Paradoxes e-zine

From Frank Mills:

I thought you might be interested in checking out the newest endeavor from Urban Paradoxes, the URBAN PARADOXES E-ZINE. Revitalizing our urban neighborhoods takes a community effort.

There is also a new local magazine for Philadelphia devoted to sustainability, see Grid Magazine and "Get on the Grid" from the Philadelphia City Paper.

Sheikh Zayed Road in fog, Dubai

Sheikh Zayed Road in fog, Dubai
Originally uploaded by rllayman

I remember seeing something similar, flying out of SFO in the late 1980s. The entire San Francisco Bay was enveloped in fog, and all that was visible was the tops of the spans of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Photo by Andrew Martschenko.


Same street, not in fog. Photographer unknown.

Rebuilding the manufacturing expertise for streetcars in the United States

When DC first proposed a big streetcar initiative, I suggested that like the joint venture in New Orleans which produced the cars for the Canal Street streetcar line in New Orleans, DC could work to do the same thing, perhaps in the vicinity of the Ivy City railyard that is used by Amtrak and WMATA. (The BET television building on the north side of the tracks would be a good building to convert. Likely most of its operations have decamped to NYC, since the BET cable television network is no longer based in DC.)

I wrote about it in this blog entry, "DC as a center of streetcar manufacturing excellence?," which was mentioned in a column in the Washington Examiner at the time, but first in this entry, "Use it or lose it or you have to recreate it (U.S. streetcar technology and expertise)."

Meanwhile, the Oregon Iron Works, with the support of Rep. Earl Blumenaur, has received federal dollars to set up streetcar manufacturing capabilities, their having already acquired a license from Inekon to reproduce their streetcar model, the one already used in Portland, Oregon.

The Overhead Wire calls our attention to the Portland Transport blogmention and photos of the first streetcar under construction by Oregon Iron Works. See "Streetcars Start Rolling Off Assembly Line at Oregon Iron Works."

Transit and economic development

An indirect example of the link between transit and economic development and the link between population density and economic development comes from Baltimore, and the soon to be closed Baltimore Examiner.

Plans for closure of the paper in a couple weeks has been reported by the Baltimore Business Journal, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Examiner. Since the search function for the Washington Examiner is pretty weak, I can't find the article from today's paper in the online edition. Here's the article from the Sun, "The Examiner in Baltimore to close Feb. 15."

The phenomenon of free daily newspaper tabloids in North America has occurred in cities with strong transit systems and population density, because rather than spend money on home delivery systems, the papers are distributed through vending racks and at transit stations, allowing for a fair number of copies to be distributed at a relatively low cost.

Baltimore has a pretty lousy fixed rail transit system. Washington and San Francisco, the home of the other two Examiner newspapers, does not.

Now there were other problems with the expansion to Baltimore. In the current environment, newspapers are reliant on local advertising. There were few synergies from the standpoint of selling advertising between Washington and Baltimore, because the base of potential advertisers is different, and there is little value from cross-over sales--people from DC aren't likely to go buy products from Baltimore businesses advertising in the DC edition and vice versa. The closure of Boscov's Department stores, and the loss of a large advertising account was another, etc.

(Note that the Current Newspapers, with a variety of editions in Northwest DC + Capitol Hill, and the Capital Community Newspapers, with three editions covering most of the city, do cross-sell ads, although my sense is that people in NW aren't likely to patronize businesses in other parts of the city, and vice versa.)

Transit systems + newspapers = good business.

Note that in the 1990s, I wrote something somewhere suggesting that the Washington Times should convert to tabloid format and focus more attention on marketing through the transit system.

Don't forget that the Growth Machine also includes nonprofit organizations

Harvey Molotch's Growth Machine thesis ("City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place") states that local economic and political elites are united around a growth agenda focused on an intensification of land use and increase in the value of property. And we see how the government's resources get used to aid profitable for-profit development.

But universities and hospitals, among other nonprofits, are key to the growth agenda too, providing steady employment and construction projects. Today's Post has two pieces, inc luding one by business columnist Steven Pearlstein, "A Last Shot At Hospital Competition" about nonprofit Inova Hospital System, which dominates Northern Virginia health care services, and how they are fighting the entry of possible competitors.

The way this article "Inova Not Giving Up Fight Against Plan for Competing Hospita " describes how the hospital has set up front "citizens" groups to push its agenda is no different from how for profit developers do the same thing. In fact, it reminded me of pieces from the Washington City Paper from the 1990s about how developers, aided by the lawyers, would bus people into hearings to have a good group of proponents, without disclosing the meal money and other inducements. (The proponents of the Florida Market urban renewal project did the same thing--bused seniors in from Fort Lincoln, people who lived miles away from the project--while fundamentally excluding people who lived across the street from the project, but in Ward 6, not Ward 5.)

Seattle to install on-street bicycle parking lots in neighborhoods

Why should automobile owners be exclusively privileged with parking access on the public space of the city's streets?

From the blog entry "Capitol Hill getting first bicycle parking" from the Capitol Hill Blog, Seattle:

Taking the place of one to two motor vehicle parking spaces, on-street bike parking will be filled with bicycle racks and surrounded by a raised curb. Bicyclists can enter the parking area from the sidewalk and each car-sized space will accommodate up to eight bikes.

They will be testing this in 3 locations.

Greening, sustainability, and historic windows

Co-op America, the sponsor of the Green Festivals, has done two very smart things. This past year, they decided that every paid attendee would get one year's free membership. The second thing they just did is relaunch/reposition as Green America, focused on sustainability, not just being glibly green.

One of the benefits of membership is a quarterly newsletter called "Real Green" (formerly called "Real Money") in addition to the quarterly magazine "Green American" (formerly called Co-op America Quarterly).

Since I just hung up the phone on a sales call wanting to sell us vinyl windows, it reminds me that there is a totally great article in "Real Green" on "Three Steps to Super-Efficient Windows."

The story makes the point that:

1. Modern replacement windows last 15 to 20 years and therefore have a "payback period" of 40.5 years, which means that they aren't cost effective.

2. Properly maintained and rehabilitated "old wood windows" can last another 100 years or more.

But to get this excellent article, you'll have to join... from the article:

Consider hiring contractors with historic preservation experience, even if your home isn't in a historic district--they are more likely not to pressure you to replace your windows intead.

I thought about that last weekend when Home Depot ran full page ads in the major newspapers across the country about their new working capital program for contractors, so that contractors can do renovation work. And how with historic preservation projects, typically 70% of the total project is spent on labor, and only 30% on materials, many local, while typical renovation and new construction projects spend 50% on labor, and 50% on materials, with most of the materials coming from out of the local area.



These resources are made available by the City of Albany, Oregon webpage on Historic Windows:

• Secretary of Interiors Standards on Windows
• Preservation Brief # 9, The Repair of Historic Wooden Windows
• Tips on Window Repair
• Energy Efficiency Study (pdf)
• Window Parts Diagram (jpg)
• Constructing Wood Storm Windows (pdf)
• Why Say No to Vinyl Windows (pdf)
• The Real Cost of Replacing Windows (pdf)

DC's publication is being updated, but is available here: Windows and Doors for Historic Buildings.

Accessory dwelling units

The Baltimore Sun has an op-ed on adding housing units to extant places, "Not just for mother-in-law."

For me, it's particularly interesting because the lead author is Patrick Hare. A former planner for Montgomery County, Pat lived in Brookland for many years. An op-ed he wrote for the Washington Post in the late 1980s set the stage for what is now finally close to fruition, the Metropolitan Branch Trail, a bicycle and walking trail that will parallel the Metropolitan Branch railroad tracks from Silver Spring (but not exactly through Takoma due to some DC nimbyism there) to Union Station.

Pat wrote another op-ed in the early 1990s, which espoused that DC should adopt HOV-2 requirements during rush hours on arterial streets used as commuting routes--streets such as Michigan Avenue or Rhode Island Avenue or Monroe Street NE or North Capitol Street--in order to encourage more optimal mobility and reduce congestion. What this means is that cars would have to have at least two occupants in order to use the road as a through street.

While the Met Branch Trail is close to completion, there has been limited to no consideration of the adoption of HOV requirements on non-highway streets within Washington, DC. (After reading the op-ed while doing some research, I wrote about it and added it to my 2008 Transportation wish list, and it will be in the forthcoming 2009 version as well.)

Locally, Alexandria has an HOV-2 requirement during rush hour on Washington Blvd. (going north, in the morning) and on Route 1 (going south, in the evening).

Anyway, adding housing units to extant places, either as English basements, accessory apartments, and units in carriage houses/alley dwellings needs to be considered as a way to maintain a greater diversity of housing types, allowing for a greater economic diversity of residents, more tax revenue for localities, and more residents able to support local business districts, transit systems, and to provide more positive activity and eyes on the streets (especially in the interiors of blocks).

Note that it has taken 20+ years for the Met Branch Trail...

Second iteration, idealized national network for high speed railpassenger service

This map is updated some, and includes a link from Chicago across Illinois to Des Moines, Iowa, and then to Omaha, Nebraska.

-------
Update: See the far more impressive consideration of the recreation of a national passenger railroad system in Transport Politic, in this entry "Envisioning a Future Interstate Rail Network."
---------

Based on comments from the previous blog entry. It's not perfect, but it attempts to incorporate all the good comments but based on my drawing. Now, not just for pork barrell reasons, it provides service to almost every state--I suppose if a Chicago to Omaha link were added, it would provide service to Iowa too...

The blue states are members of the States for Passenger Rail Coalition, the gray states are not members but have other high speed rail plans. The base graphic comes from S4PRC but in this version, I took off specific mention of that organization because they have no connection to this mapping exercise.

-----

Speaking of exercise, this is based on thinking about transportation networks in five overarching dimensions:

1. International -- connections between countries. (The map above shows a couple connections between the U.S. and Canada, and one connection from San Antonio to Monterrey, Mexico through Laredo.)

2. National -- anchors of a national transportation system, current anchors are the Interstate Highway system, the freight railroad system, and airplane travel. We do not have a national passenger railroad network presently.

3. Regional -- multi-state connections -- for the most part these don't exist for transit, but do for freight railroad, airplane travel, and the Interstate highway system. The Northeast Corridor railroad passenger service offered by Amtrak is an example of such a transit network.

4. Metropolitan -- transit systems like the WMATA subway and bus system, the combined railroad, subway, bus, and waterborne transit services in the NYC or Boston regions.

5. Sub-metropolitan transit systems (in the DC region, locally provided services such as RideOn in Montgomery County Maryland or the Downtown Circulator in DC are examples of services within the subnetwork category of the Metropolitan Transit Network).

Modified high speed railroad map

Modified high speed railroad map
Originally uploaded by rllayman

I modified the map of the proposed set of "national" high speed railroad corridors to create a more "national" system of connections. (This map from the States for Passenger Rail Coalition is based on a US DOT map.)

It calls for a continuous railroad along both the east and west coasts, going north south, and for three east-west routes between the coasts. I also put in a connection between Louisville and Atlanta. In theory you could create another north-south line going north from Louisville which would ultimately connect to Detroit. (Maybe there would be reasons to have additional north-south service in the Western interior. Even if it couldn't be fully justified for revenue reasons, reasons of redundancy and national security likely would justify such service, even as the Interstate Highway system connects all states as a matter of national interest.

The upper transcontinental route would provide service from Minneapolis to Seattle, the middle route would continue west from Kansas City to Denver, and from there further west to San Francisco, and the lower route would continue west from San Antonio with a likely termination point in San Diego.

The system forsees extensions north from Albany to connect to Montreal, Quebec, and south from San Antonio for service to Laredo, and then to Monterrey, Mexico.

Additionally, a high speed rail route could go west from Boston, picking up the red leg show going from NYC to Buffalo, and then continuing through Canada to Detroit.

Biodiversity and the Future of Cities (Lecture)

From the Harvard Museum of Natural History:

New Directions in EcoPlanning Lecture Series Established at Harvard Museum of Natural History: Kristina Hill to Present Inaugural Lecture on March 18, 2009

Kristina Hill, Director of the Program in Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia will be the inaugural speaker in a new annual lecture series New Directions in EcoPlanning at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Dr. Hill’s lecture, “Designing the Urban Ark: Biodiversity and the Future of Cities" will take place on Wednesday, March 18th at 6 pm. in the museum’s Geological Lecture Hall at 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History’s new lecture series will honor an individual who is making outstanding contributions to the integration of biology, conservation biology and ecology and the fields of land-use and environmental planning, architecture, and related sectors.

New Directions in EcoPlanning is supported by a generous gift from Michael V. Dyett, Harvard Class of 1968, who received his Masters in Regional Planning from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1972, and his wife architect Heidi Richardson. Mr. Dyett is a principal of Dyett & Bhatia, urban and regional planners in San Francisco, and one of the country's leading experts in general plans, growth management, and transit-oriented land use planning.

“In the face of environmental challenges, integrating ecological principles is increasingly critical to sustainable planning in both urban and rural settings.” commented Elisabeth Werby, Executive Director of the Harvard Museum of Natural History. “We are so pleased that Michael Dyett and Heidi Richardson have the commitment and foresight to enable the museum to bring attention to those working at the forefront of these issues.”

Dr. Hill’s lecture, Designing the Urban Ark, will explore the future relationship between human cities and the diversity of life. In the past, cities have generally caused a decrease in native species diversity while increasing the overall species richness of a region. Evidence from both growing cities in the Pacific Northwest and shrinking cities in the Great Lakes region suggests that future cities could support pre-urban regional biodiversity while also supporting healthy human populations. However, the need to adapt to climate change will alter the context for our relationships with non-human species. Dr. Hill’s lecture will present the case for future cities to support biodiversity based on human self-interest, actual development conditions, current urban plans for climate adaptation, and lessons learned elsewhere in the United States.

Dr. Kristina Hill joined the University of Virginia faculty as an associate professor and director of the Program in Landscape Architecture in 2007. Previously, she was associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, where her primary research interest was urban ecological design. Her book on the subject, Water, Ecology and the Design of Cities: Landscape Urbanism in the Pacific Northwest, will be published by the University of Washington Press later this year.

Hill co-edited the book Ecology and Design: A Framework for Learning published by Island Press in 2002, and has authored a number of articles on the use of ecological theory in urban design strategies, the role of design in mediating the effects of urbanization on aquatic systems, and strategies for adapting American cities to climate change, particularly in the area of infrastructure investments and coastal ecosystems. Her article Design for Rising Sea Levels appeared in Harvard Design Magazine (winter 2008).

As one of few scholars with advanced training in both ecology and design, Hill has brought depth and rigor to the synthesis of these two disciplines. Hill holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in landscape architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design as well as a bachelor’s in Geology from Tufts University . She was a Fulbright Scholar in 1990 and was appointed a Fellow of the Urban Design Institute in 2003 In addition to her academic service, Hill has engaged in public service as a consultant for numerous public design projects in Seattle; Washington, D.C; Dallas, Texas; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Brandenburg, Germany.

The New Directions in EcoPlanning lecture will be included as part of Harvard Museum of Natural History’s longstanding and successful public lecture series. These lectures, on a range of topics, including climate change, conservation, evolution, and the origin of life on earth, are attended by over 3,000 annually. Recent lecturers have included Edward O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, and Spencer Wells, as well as numerous members of the Harvard faculty.

With a mission to enhance public understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the human place in it, the Harvard Museum of Natural History draws on the University’s collections and research to present a historic and interdisciplinary exploration of science and nature. More than 165,000 visitors annually make it the University’s most-visited museum.

The most basic missed point about urban school reform

My School Desk
Originally uploaded by Xochiquetzal-Sil:)

Comes from one of the letters to the editor ("Charter Schools, or Some of Their Methods, Offer Hope") written in response to an op-ed by Rev. Sharpton and NYC Chancellor Joel Klein ("Charter Schools Can Close the Education Gap,") in the Wall Street Journal. Written by Kathleen Merseth, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, it says :

Chancellor Klein and Rev. Sharpton's op-ed completely misleads readers. The piece really isn't about charter schools, and it suggests that any school with "charter" in its title can close the student-achievement gap. Gaining ground on student achievement is a far more complex matter than the name or status of a school. Indeed, charter schools produce very mixed academic results.

All schools can achieve academic success for all students by adopting similar practices found in successful charter schools. What is missing is not the charter designation but rather the widespread community support and the will of the adults -- union and nonunion alike -- working in schools to adopt these best practices.

This is absolutely true. The issue is about curriculum, teaching, professional development and support systems for schools, principals, teachers, and families, and additional support systems, when necessary, for students, and about how this system is managed, for real outcomes.

Any talk of vouchers or charter schools misses this most basic point. While I recognize that some people will favor vouchers and/or charter schools or "competition" because they believe that otherwise there is no hope that traditional public school systems will change--instead the systems are content to wallow in mediocrity--and they don't want to consign children to such a system, what is needed is not competition per se, but excellent public schools.

(Elementary classroom teacher's desk, image from Flickr by Xochiquetzal-Sil:).)

What I mean about the government impulse...

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updated with new content at the end
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A compassionate government-owned utility company probably would cease utility shutoffs during the winter. And many places have regulations preventing utility shutoffs in winter anyway. Not Michigan's municipally-owned Bay City Electric Light-Power. See the AP story, "93-year-old froze to death, owed big utility bill." From the article:

A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home just days after the municipal power company restricted his use of electricity because of unpaid bills, officials said. ... Schur owed Bay City Electric Light & Power more than $1,000 in unpaid electric bills, Bay City Manager Robert Belleman told The Associated Press on Monday.

A city utility worker had installed a "limiter" device to restrict the use of electricity at Schur's home on Jan. 13, Belleman said. The device limits power reaching a home and blows out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset. ...

Schur's body was discovered by neighbor George Pauwels Jr. "His furnace was not running, the insides of his windows were full of ice the morning we found him," Pauwels told the newspaper.

Belleman said city workers keep the limiter on houses for 10 days, then shut off power entirely if the homeowner hasn't paid utility bills or arranged to do so. He said Bay City Electric Light & Power's policies will be reviewed, but he didn't believe the city did anything wrong.

"I've said this before and some of my colleagues have said this: Neighbors need to keep an eye on neighbors," Belleman said. "When they think there's something wrong, they should contact the appropriate agency or city department."

In a different National Journal article there is this quote, about presidents, but it is no less apt about government at all levels, but people in power generally:

Presidents make two kinds of mistakes: diagnosing the wrong illness and prescribing the wrong medicine.

I don't think I'm up for working for the city manager of Bay City, Michigan.
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Not that utilities are expected to be social workers, but a $1,000 unpaid bill, for an older person, can also be thought of as an indicator of a need for more careful and nuanced intervention--remember those old Dominion Power television commercials about their program for alerting relatives about unpaid utility bills?

I remember reading a piece in the New York Times, it might have been this, "Catching Seniors Before They Fall - The New Old Age Blog," that said that the "common occurrence" of falls by older people should be considered a potential indicator of other medical issues:

What the experts do know is that effective fall prevention requires three elements, which the Southern California research consortium is attempting to evaluate more closely: a physical examination and risk assessment conducted by a doctor or other medical professional, a progressive exercise regime implemented by a physical therapist, and an analysis and remediation of potential hazards in the home conducted by an occupational therapist.

The medical exam is designed to check risk factors like poor vision, overmedication, muscle weakness, gait or balance problems, and a history of earlier falls. The exercise piece aims to improve muscle strength and endurance in the legs, hips and trunk, which affect postural alignment and stability while walking. Home modification may include grab bars in the bathroom, handrails or ramps near stairways, wider doorways for walkers or wheelchairs, and the removal of stray power cords or throw rugs.

So much for an unpaid utility bill being seen as an indicator of the need for more nuanced intervention. The Dominion Power commercial ended showing the parents driving in an RV with a bumper sticker something like "we're spending our kids inheiritance." Unfortunately, that's not what happened with Mr. Schur.

Also see "Serenity In Emergencies: A Silver Spring ER Aims to Serve Older Patients " from today's Post about extra training in geriatric care for personnel at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring and "Friendship Heights in Front Ranks of Senior Care" also from the Post.

The stimulus, planning, and the American Economy

Andy Singer's No Exit comic.

Being a skeptic, I think that we are entering a "correction" of massive proportions where consumer spending could decrease somewhat significantly, reducing the overall size of the economy--people buying fewer cars, fewer clothes, making fewer discretionary purchases, saving more money, etc. will have an impact on the economy in many ways.

If you believe this, today's full page ad in the Washington Post by the American Automobile Association, calling for continued economic support of automobility seems to be asking to continue to "invest" limited federal monies in ways that look backward, rather than forward towards a new paradigm that links transportation and land use planning, and one that focuses on optimal mobility rather than automobility.

There is an article in National Journal about the failure of the finance industry and how it supports Hamiltonian-like industrial policy and heavier government involvement in the economy ("Washington's Sad Triumph"). I am torn about this because while I favor planning, at the same time i think that government, especially federal government tends toward stagnation, because the bureaucratic impulse is for system maintenance, not system improvement, and as special interest groups work to shape federal legislation in their favor.

What we need with government involvement is innovation and transformation. Sometimes we get it--the Internet is one example--but much of the time it is business as usual. (The "Growth Machine" theory about local political and economic elites focused on a joint agenda of local economic growth is easily extended to how industrial and other business sectors work in a similar fashion to shape national policy.)

The "stimulus" proposal gets me down because like most government "stimulus" plans, more than anything, it's a grab bag of programs, elements, and policies du jour. Meanwhile, for the first time in a long time, Americans support spending on infrastructure, and even spending more money in taxes on infrastructure, according to this op-ed, "Rebuilding effort" in yesterday's Baltimore Sun. From the op-ed:

Right now, 78 percent of Americans polled say government is responsible for the failure of America's infrastructure. They don't think the problems can be solved in the first 100 days of a new administration in Washington. Rather, they want ongoing strategic investments to improve America's standard of living and our individual quality of life. When more than 98 percent of Americans believe they have "the right to demand" that America's infrastructure is "efficient, convenient and modern," Washington better not fail.

Despite record transit ridership, virtually every system in the country, except maybe for Rochester, NY (see "Creativity Helps Rochester’s Transit System Turn a Profit" from the New York Times) faces big deficits, service cuts, layoffs, and/or fare increases. See "A mass transit dilemma: Ridership up, funds down" from the Los Angeles Times for a round up on this. (Of course, when the economy is in recession, tax receipts decline, and state and local governments, required to have balanced budgets, must cut services and staff, which is a policy that only deepens a recession.)

So the reason I get skeptical of government planning is because it often promotes stagnation, many government programs don't build value or increase return on investment. And building long term value is what I think government should be about, first and foremost.

So thinking about how Spain is reformulating its national transportation policy around high speed rail, makes me sad that the U.S. doesn't have a national transportation policy built around high speed rail in the corridors where it makes the most sense.

For example, in the Midwest, where Wisconsin State Governor Jim Doyle suggested that

Federal economic stimulus money could be used to build a Midwestern high-speed passenger rail system that would link Chicago to Minneapolis with stops at Milwaukee, Madison and even Green Bay

according to "Gov. Doyle pushes high-speed rail for stimulus funds" from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Just as the U.S. built (through economic subsidy or stimulus) a national railroad system in the 1860s, why not begin rebuilding our economy around reduction in oil use by doing the same for the 21st Century. A north-south east coast high speed rail corridor, along with the same along the west coast, and a upper and lower transcontinental high speed rail corridor would be the way to do this. Rebuilding U.S. railroad technology capacity would be a way to employ the hundreds of thousands of unemployed manufacturing workers, and would be a far better use of stimulus money that $80 million for new loading docks for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The gaps in this map from the States for Passenger Rail Coalition shows the need for a national policy and plan...

Small windmills as applications in public places

See "Windmills planned for New Orleans' riverfront park" from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, "Utility poles offer small-scale wind power" from the Boston Globe, and this New York Times podcast, "Blowin’ in the Wind - City Room Blog."

Image from the Boston Globe.

(I saw a wind energy farm along the Pennsylvania Turnpike last week, but I was unable to take a photo.)

Without having a national U.S. transportation policy, we miss many opportunities

fast and superfast
Originally uploaded by Marlis1

Flickr photo by Marlis1 of Ave and Avant trains at the Zaragosa railroad station, She writes:

The Madrid-Zaragoza-Barcelona line was inaugurated on 20 February 2008, after parts of the line had operated since 2003 (Madrid-Zaragoza-Lleida) and 2006 (Lleida-Taragona). Seventeen trains run now every day between 6:00 and 21:00 hrs. This line is currently one of the world's fastest long-distance trains in commercial operation, with non stop trains covering the 621 km (386 mi) between the two cities in just 2 hours 38 minutes, and those stopping at all stations in 3 hours 23 minutes.


The Guardian has an article about the success of Spain's new system of high speed passenger railroad services. See "Spain's high-speed trains steal passengers from airlines." From the article:

SPAIN’S SLEEK new high-speed trains have stolen hundreds of thousands of passengers from airlines over the past year, slashing carbon emissions and marking a radical change in the way Spaniards travel.

Passenger numbers on domestic flights fell 20 per cent in the year to November as commuters and tourists swapped cramped airline seats for the space and convenience of the train, according to figures released yesterday.

High-speed rail travel – boosted by the opening of a line that slashed the journey time from Madrid to Barcelona to two hours 35 minutes in February – grew 28 per cent over the same period, with about 400,000 travellers switching from air travel to the 340km/h (220mph) AVE trains...

Two routes, from Barcelona to Malaga and Seville, opened last week. Lines are also being built to link Madrid with Valencia, Alicante, the Basque country and Galicia. The government has promised to lay 10,000km of high-speed track by 2020 to ensure that 90% of Spaniards live within 30 miles of a station. The prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, boasts it will be Europe's most extensive high-speed network.

High-speed rail tickets are often cheaper. The lowest one-way price on the 410-mile Barcelona-Madrid route this month is €44 (£40). Rail operator Renfe says 99% of trains on the route arrive on time.

A national transportation policy would look at oil usage, carbon emissions, cost, and efficiency and make optimal transportation decisions accordingly.

I am about to start reading the Earthscan book Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight without Oil, and given all the hullaballoo about the "stimulus" and its focus on road building rather than transit, the experience in Spain in repatterning their transportation system is particularly interesting.

As light rail nears in Norfolk, Virginia Beach begins to reconsider previous decisions to not participate

See "Beach council leans toward referendum on light rail" and from2008, "Righting a wrong on light rail" from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. The Hampton Roads Transit organization went ahead with planning and building light rail for Norfolk, figuring that as the system was being constructed, the kind of people who need to be able to kick tires in places like Virginia Beach would come around and begin to favor transit. Still, it's an expensive way to have to go about things.

This is an interesting comparison given the spirited discussion locally about whether or not to have light rail or bus rapid transit for the "Purple Line" transit system in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland. This is an especially important decision because theoretically, the "Purple Line" idea (at least the first time I ever read about it as first expressed--I think--by Mark Jenkins in a Washington City Paper article around 1990) is supposed to be circumferential and connect at each end of each subway line.

Sierra Club image.

This means that ideally, this is the beginning of the Purple Line, not the end, and likely a light rail system would be far more likely to be used than bus services, unless those bus services were truly configured as bus rapid transit in the Curitiba manner, with dedicated busways, passing lanes at stops, and no sharing of laneways with other vehicles, and maybe with 80 foot articulated buses, although this length of bus isn't legal in the U.S. on public streets.

An 80 foot long Van Hool articulated bus.

European Union urban mobility policy

Is controversial. Just as in the U.S., there is competition and crankiness between local jurisdictions and states, and local and state jurisdictions and the federal government, while in Europe there is tension between individual nations and the European Commission and the European Parliament.

The European Commission has suggested addressing urban mobility issues in a more pan-European fashion, which doesn't sit well with certain countries and politicians, so the proposals of the European Commission have been tabled, only to be taken up by members of the European Parliament.

See "Urban mobility: Parliament takes 'unusual' initiative ," from EurActiv, the information portal on European Union (EU) affairs. Also see this sum up page on EU Urban Transport issues.

It's a good summary of the basic issue in urban transport generally--that cars are preferred for status, comfort, and class reasons, but that transit (+ walking and bicycling) are more efficient modes for moving far greater numbers of people.

Hopefully this won't be too scary: DC Public Art Master Plan

It'd be nice to have a real cultural plan for the city first (I have a vision paper about the basic need here: Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king). There are a number of quality plans and resources for cultural planning out there. Some cities and states have programs that designate and support arts and cultural districts.

The Arts and Culture element of the DC Comprehensive Plan is pretty weak, more a collection of items, rather than a comprehensive plan.

From email:

Public Art Community Open House led by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities is conducting a city-wide Public Art Master Plan. We invite you to an Open House to participate and share your thoughts on Public Art in your neighborhood, which will be included in the overall DC Creates Public Art Program Vision in the District of Columbia.

Date: Tuesday February 10, 2009
Time: 5pm to 7pm
Location: Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library 901 G Street, NW

The DC Creates Public Art Program will preserve the cultural health, reflect the diverse fabric and promote creative innovation in Washington, DC by reinforcing urban places that become the heart of every community.

Also see my entry: You Gotta Have Community Building from January 2007.

A real issue is art and public art vs. art as a community building and affirmation exercise. Now, a lot of community based public art isn't that great. Artists also make the point that if you want to have an art community, pay artists to produce art.

And a "public art" master plan could be interpreted as to be about engaging the public in art, not just about "public art" which Wikipedia defines as:

works of art in any media that has been planned and executed with the specific intention of being sited or staged in the public domain, usually outside and accessible to all.

As we discuss in the blog from time to time, DC is more a community that consumes art, and the public institutions are oriented to providing art for consumption of art generally produced elsewhere, rather than a community that supports the production of art (the engravers at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, who produce the dies for stamps, money, and other documents).

Earlier in the week, I went to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and it's a great place to ponder many issues related to the production, mass production, and consumption of art.

Sadly, I don't know much about art history and cultural studies... In the summer, at the Hyattsville branch of the PG County Library, I picked up a bunch of discarded copies of the National Geographic Magazine from the 1960s. One issue included a paean to Walt Disney and Disneyland (I don't have the citation at my fingertips). Imagine my surprise a couple months later to find a copy of an issue of National Geographic from March 2007, albeit published about 40 years later, containing a much more dystopic cultural studies oriented view of DisneyWorld and its impact on Orlando, "Disney World, Orlando Beyond Disney."

This gave rise to the idea that it would be fun to write an essay on the consumption of the museum experience in DC and how the narrative focuses on promoting and maintaining prevalent and predominant American myth(ology).

Museums elsewhere, but I don't know about the major museums in other countries, tend to offer exhibits that are much more critical of prevailing ideas and present the latest in scholarship.

I think one of the reasons that the National Museum of the American Indian is criticized so much is that it questions, by using different reference points, this myth. Similarly, it will be interesting to see what happens with the narrative at the Smithsonian National African-American History and Art Museum.

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Relatedly, check out this old entry, "How to Think about Public Art" from the Aesthetic Grounds blog from ArtsJournal, which starts out with this:

How to think about public art? Do you just keep doing the same thing? Big art? Architectural intimacy? Site-specific narrative? Locally responsive?

Internationally, public art has been institutionalized as the founder's dreamed in the 1960 and 1970s. Big - intimate - narrative - responsive. Most importantly, appreciated by a small, but growing group, and accepted by most. Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" would NEVER be removed today.

What was not anticipated was 1.) public art as a defined field separate from museum art and 2.) global uniformity. They could not have imagined 1.) daily Internet access to any public artwork and 2.) participation in public art through cell phones and Internet.

What has not materialized in the USA is 1.) respect for the individual artistic career and 2.) pride (or tolerance) in a culture that sponsors artworks of political and social content. Respect continues to expand for artists in the corporate or spectacular arts - movies, music videos, concerts, advertising, fireworks, theme parks, architecture (and some urban space or landscapes). For time being, the Internet provides the public venue for creative public works in politics and social observation.

Were we a more organized local populace, perhaps the "public art master plan" could become the process where we could grapple with some of these questions, including having a museum culture that it oriented nationally and internationally rather than locally.

25 Examples of Good Urban Design

Come from Monocle Magazine back in 2007, as reprinted in the International Herald Tribune. Monocle is edited by Tyler Brule, who also writes a column for the Weekend edition of the Financial Times.

-- 25 Examples of Good Urban Design
-- Urban Manifesto: Factors that make a city great

Both articles include links to the top 20 cities for livability, according to Monocle Magazine (as of 2007).

Expansive, interdisciplinary thinking at the municipal level... in Paris

Denis Baupin, deputy mayor for the environment, spearheaded the creation of the city's bicycle-sharing program. (Pierre-Emmanuel Weck)

Apparently, Denis Baupin, Paris' Deputy Mayor for the Environment, is the person behind many of the mobility improvements there, from new trams to Velib. Now he is responsible for the city's response to climate change. See "A driving force to change Paris" from the International Herald-Tribune. From the article:

As the transportation chief of the French capital for seven years, Baupin, who has written a book called "All Cars, No Future," was the force behind the development of Paris's hugely successful bicycle-sharing program, Vélib'. He introduced a tramway, minibuses, rider subsidies, more bus lanes and faster bus speeds. He reduced auto speed limits to 30 kilometers an hour, or just under 19 miles an hour, from 50 kilometers an hour on 1,000 streets and closed many to cars altogether. In short, Baupin has changed the face of mobility in Paris, making it, by most accounts, easier for users of public transportation, pedestrians and bikers, and less accessible to car drivers.

Congressman Oberstar on Transportation Appropriations

Congressman Oberstar at Pro Walk-Pro Bike-4.jpg
Originally uploaded by BikePortland.org

Congressman James Oberstar from Minnesota is the chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Froggie sends us notice of this entry, "Oberstar at the pinnacle: Minnesota congressman expects to put his imprint on the recovery — and on America's livability" from the MinnPost online newspaper.

From the piece:

Everyone wants Oberstar's ear: road contractors, shipping companies, airlines, state officials, environmentalists, unions, manufacturers, traffic engineers, realtors and urban designers all have ideas for how best to spend the public's money.

Asked to summarize what he hopes to accomplish in the new transportation law, Oberstar said, "It comes down to one word: livability."

Seeking more efficiency in moving people, goods

The nation, he said, needs to reconfigure its transportation and land uses in ways that provide more efficiency in moving people and goods, more opportunity to compete for global prosperity, and more chances for people to live healthy, convenient lives that are more compatible with nature.

Minnesota Congressman Jim Oberstar gave the closing address at the 2008 Pro Walk/Pro Bike conference in Seattle. Image from BikePortland.org

Whatever happened to the Purple Line? Now, we probably know.

Whatever happened to the Purple Line?
Originally uploaded by rllayman

Maryland Politics Watch reports that Ike Leggett, Montgomery County Executive, has issued his verdict, of support for the light rail option, for the Purple Line in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties in Maryland. See "Leggett Supports Light Rail for the Purple Line (Updated)." MPW reprints Mr. Leggett's full letter, which is interesting reading.

The photo is from 2005, and depicts a Washington Post advertising campaign. At that time, for all intents and purposes, the Purple Line, under the Republican Ehrlich Administration in Maryland, was dead, at least as far as fixed rail was concerned.

Here come the streetcars!

Pickup coils, Bombardier PRIMOVE underground power system

Transport Politic reports (via a press release) that Bombardier, the Canadian rail vehicle (built in part on the assets of the former Budd Company) and airplane manufacturer, has introduced reliable underground "third rail" powering for outside use for streetcar and light rail systems. (The Alstom system used in Bordeaux hasn't proved to be reliable or easily used in snowy climates.) See "Bombardier Presents New Catenary-Free Streetcar."


The L'Enfant City

In the old days, underground powering of streetcars was not uncommon. However, "modern" safety standards would not allow the installation and use of similar systems today. DC has a law banning overhead wires in the original "City of Washington" which we commonly call the "L'Enfant City" as well as Georgetown. This has been one of the many holdups over moving forward with streetcar planning in DC.

Streetcar at Union Station, Washington, DC. Photographer unknown.

From the Bombardier website, PRIMOVE Catenary-Free Operation:

The PRIMOVE system’s outstanding feature is its safe and contactless power transfer. Its electric supply components are invisible, hidden under the vehicle and beneath the track. This is a key benefit in historic or environmentally protected areas of cities. With its contactless power transfer, our unique PRIMOVE technology:

• Eliminates overhead wires and increases a city’s attractiveness
• Safely transfers inductive power
• Eliminates wear on parts and components
• Operates in all weather and ground conditions

The only thing with this, unless Bombardier is willing to license the technology to other manufacturers, such as those producing the Inekon Trio vehicles used in cities like Portland, Seattle, and eventually DC, DC will need to switch to the Flexity tram vehicle produced by Bombardier, in order to get a streetcar system up and running in the L'Enfant City (the historic core) which has to operate under the strictures of the law banning overhead wires on the city streets. (And it means that DC should hold off installing rail track on H Street NE, because likely the installation of a PRIMOVE-capable railbed requires more than steel rails and ties.)

Bombardier Flexity streetcar (tram), Valencia, Spain

The Flexity light rail vehicle is used in Minneapolis.

Metropolitan Council photo of the Hiawatha Light rail Line, Minneapolis

Hilton Hotels Corporation relocation to the Washington "region"

Hilton is looking at headquarters sites in suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia. (By Reed Saxon -- Associated Press)

Will asks "why not DC," in response to the article "Hilton to Move Headquarters to D.C. Area: Region Will Gain Hundreds of Jobs, Be Home to 3 of Top 6 Hotel Firms" in the Washington Post, which says that Hilton is considering relocating to suburban Maryland or Virginia.

I thought they probably needed tons of space, like a corporate campus on the scale of Marriott, but according to this article "Hilton Hotels to leave Beverly Hills headquarters," from today's Los Angeles Times, we are talking about 500 employees. And they plan to downsize a bit from that anyway.

Using the standard metric of 200 s.f./employee, this amount of space Hilton requires is relatively miniscule--one office building, and they could be easily accommodated in some of the empty buildings in NoMa (there are two separate buildings on 1st St. NE that have close to this amount of space). (Although companies tend to like campuses where they have room to grow.) Or attracting Hilton could be a way to jump start dead-in-the-water projects such as at the Armed Forces Retirement Home.

(Although for one, I can see the Potomac Yards or space in Crystal City in Arlington or other areas in Alexandria being tough competitors.)

The kind of people likely to work for a company like Hilton may well be interested in living in the city rather than the suburbs, and a location at NoMA, convenient to the subway at New York Avenue and Union Stations, as well as to commuter railroad service, would be useful in any case from a transportation demand management perspective.

The city as well as the DC Economic Partnership and the NoMA Business Improvement District should get on top of this forthwith.

ESPECIALLY BECAUSE COMPANIES BASED IN DC PAY INCOME TAXES IN DC.