Category Archives: Uncategorized

I sold my car

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Today we sold our family’s second car. Since taking a new job last year, my car mostly sat in the driveway. I can get to work really easy on the bus or on a bike (and the same for my wife, to a slightly lesser degree) and parking costs made me think twice when I considered driving to work.

The sale was an emotional experience. I loved driving the car, and I’ve always liked driving. I got my learners permit when I was fourteen (Iowa let ‘em drive early) and as with most teenagers (at least back then) , the car signaled freedom to me. My feelings about driving have moderated some since, but I’ve retained much of the original nostalgia and excitement, especially when starting a road trip. I’ve learned a lot about the impacts on our cities and climate reliance on the car creates since that initial love affair, but in the end, the strongest reason we had to ditch the second car was cost.  Hundreds of dollars a week is a strong motivator.

But this wasn’t a simple matter of deciding to ride the bus more. A large number of factors has to converge to make it possible for a family of three with two jobs outside the home to make do with one (private) vehicle.

  • Working in the hub of a hub-and-spoke transit network. We have lots of bus routes that are fairly competitive with a car because my wife and I both work in or near downtown. This wouldn’t be the case if we worked in the suburbs, inner ring or outer.
  • We found a great daycare nine blocks from our house.  You can walk there easily in most weather from our house or take the bus/bike.  The location and density of daycare centers should not be overlooked if your goal is to encourage alternative modes.
  • Minneapolis is walkable and fairly bikeable.  The city does a pretty good job making it feel safe and easy to walk and bike places.  Destination density (stores, food, etc) is tolerably high in some neighborhoods, although it could definitely be better.
  • New technologies.  We feel better with one car knowing their is a car-sharing service that parks a car a few blocks from our house.
  • We have the resources to rent a car when we need it.  Even if we do this once a month for a week, we still save a lot versus owning.

We really depend on automobiles a lot.  If we want to change that for whatever reason, or if we want to be sensitive to the needs of those who can’t afford a car, then it’s about way more than providing transit.

The look

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I’ve been playing around with theming of the site a lot lately, but I think I’ve settled on something I like.  Legibility and simplicity were the main goals, and I’m satisfied I’ve gotten there.  Many of my readers use feedreaders, so this was a little self-indulgent, but I love to tinker.

If you’re curious, the theme is a heavily modified version of Twenty Eleven.

Should local transit just be built by the states?

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One of my new favorite snarks, Lisa Schweitzer at Sustainable Cities and Transport, discusses whether local transit funding shouldn’t just “devolve” to the states.

Federal involvement in transit also has led to a heavy capital bias in transit investment, prompting local and regional agencies to build transit projects, again and again, that they can’t afford to run with any frequency. This leads to a wider geographic coverage for transit–which probably still isn’t wide enough to deal with spreading regions–and with lower frequencies than really make for high service quality. (And sprawl is bad, bad, bad, evil and terrible! The worst thing ever! There? Will that sentence keep some of you land-use people outta my grill for the purposes of this post? Can I talk about something else now? Thanks.)

Transit has been on the teeter-tottery edge of those issues and criticisms for a long time. Why can’t New York pay for its own subways? Or Los Angeles? Or anywhere? That’s why we have local taxes and general funds, right? If you want transit, don’t go holler at the feds. Make it happen if you want it. Perhaps there would be a greater chance of that self-helping if leaders know that the buck really began and stopped with them, and they might instead be much more careful to match investments to operations.

The US Congress is overly dominated by rural interests, and many of us for years have argued that this creates a hostile environment for transit funding in the first place, as many rural senators wonder: “what’s in it for my constituents?” and the ineffectual spreading of scarce resources around to systems that aren’t particularly viable or worth investing in. Porky McPorktown.

The key drawback to devolution? Locals might not have the stomach for a local gas tax to replace the federal one.

So if places like California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota were running their own budgetary shop, they could keep the revenues they are currently sending to Portland and Memphis and Charlotte.

Here’s the glitch: these donor state are only fiscally better off with Federal gas tax elimination or erosion if those donor states prove capable of passing a gas tax on its residents equal to or better than the 18 cents a gallon [- whatever the Feds give away to other jurisdictions]. And I’m not seeing that happen, at least not in California. Maybe in Minnesota. Maybe in New York, or Massachusetts. Maybe.

Watch “Liquid Assets”, help raise awareness of Minnesota’s critical infrastructure needs

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Along with BluePrint Minnesota, Minnesota APA is working to increase awareness about our State’s infrastructure needs.  They are raising funds to produce a local version of “Liquid Assets”, the trailer for which can be seen above.

The full documentary explores the history and challenges of our water infrastructure, and is a great reminder of the importance of systems we usually take for granted.  So watch the trailer, head over to BluePrint Minnesota and help out if you can.

NYC DOT Commissioner in Minneapolis March 30th

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New York City is becoming well known for it’s emphasis on improving pedestrian and bicycle mobility and accessibility, as well as innovative transit projects.  Just search Streetsblog.org for any transportation-related term, and you’ll find a wealth of projects and forward-looking thinking.

On March 30th, the Twin Cities will get some access to a decision-maker behind some of those improvements.  NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan will be giving a presentation at Open Book at 3:30 pm on March 30th.  From the TLC website:

For Elected Officials, Transportation Professionals, and ULI Members:

Please accept our invitation to a presentation by New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

NYC is increasing mobility and reinventing urban streetscape at express speed. Once car-clogged Times and Harold Squares are now interactive plazas. Innovative cycling designs traverse all boroughs and the goal is to double bicycle commuting by 2015. Bus shelters, bicycle parking, traffic calming, Summer Streets, new parking policies, bicycle wayfinding, bus rapid transit, Safe Streets for Seniors, the landmark Street Design Manual…NYC is on fire to improve the quality of life through sustainable streets.

Come to engage with Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and your local colleagues.

Co-sponsored by Transit for Livable Communities and the Urban Land Institute

Registration is required for the event.

NYC gets first separated busway, why not Southwest Minneapolis?

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Image: NYCDOT

Streetsblog seems pretty excited about the proposed new busway on 34th Street in New York City.  Rightly so as it is the city’s first separated busway, and would cut travel times across the city by 35%, according to the Transport Politic.  It’s not bus rapid transit (BRT), since it is still slow according to Freemark, but it does bring a number of welcome improvements.  Bus travel lanes are separated from normal traffic, pedestrians should be safer thanks to refuges and wider sidewalks, and the middle of the route includes a block-long pedestrian plaza.

I written here before and even entertained a guest who talked about what it would take to improve transit in the crowded Hennepin/Nicollet transit corridors of Minneapolis.  The key improvement of the NYC proposal, mode separation, would be a major boost to travel time, rider experience and a market signal on par with LRT or a streetcar.  So could it work?

Hennepin Ave with a crude busway model

There seems to be enough right of way.  Including parking, there are 6 lanes along most of Hennepin between Franklin and Lake Street.  This looks to be similar to the situation in New York City.  The key difference is that in NYC, the street is a one way.  Two lanes of traffic travel in the same direction, with a third lane mid block for parking and deliveries.  So if you kept Hennepin two-way, that would mean one lane of travel in each direction, with three lanes at the intersections (I suppose for turn lanes).  Much of the on-street parking would be lost, but some would be retained mid-block, perhaps one third of what currently exists.

So could Hennepin survive with a single travel lane in each direction?  The traffic engineers would have to weigh in on that.  If you highlighted Hennepin as a transit corridor, you could potentially reduce car trips and move cars to alternate routes.  This highlights a weakness of Minneapolis.  New York City is still a highly connected grid.  In Minneapolis, many of the connections to downtown and beyond have been severed by the I-94 corridor, so any attempt to reduce the access by car on one of the few remaining connections is bound to be met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

But that’s not to say it wouldn’t be possible.  Perhaps Lyndale becomes the main north-south car route through the area, and Hennepin is reconfigured to focus on transit and bicycles.  Car space would just be reduced, not eliminated, and the busway would only really need to go to Lake Street.  Drivers would soon adapt, and maybe even ride the bus a little bit more.

Cities prepare for the electric car, but are they thinking about the roads?

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Potholes - courtesy flickr user MSVG

The New York Times describes a number of cities, mostly in California, that are preparing their communities for the adoption of more electric vehicles. Primarily this means installing charging stations in public places and addressing code issues related to charging stations at single family homes. According to the article, San Francisco will soon have a new ordinance that requires new structures have the wiring to accommodate charging stations.

The article doesn’t address the other half of the auto infrastructure: the roads. To “prepare” for the electric car, and probably even an efficient system that doesn’t include the electric car, road funding needs to change. We already know that users now only pay about half of the cost of roads, which means there are no market signals for road users to choose the most efficient mode or “consume” an appropriate amount of transportation service (miles traveled). We also have some serious deferred maintenance issues.  If electric vehicles are adopted in large numbers funding for roads, which comes in large part from the gas tax, will continue to dry up.

So besides building charging stations and beefing up transmission infrastructure, cities, counties and states (and users, if they want good roads) should be advocating for a mileage-based fee, similar to what has been studied in Oregon and implemented in the Netherlands, to pay for road building and maintenance. The gas tax would probably have to stay, but as a way to put a price on carbon pollution rather than fund transportation.

This new mileage fee could be tacked unto your home electricity bill if you had a charging station, but that would probably mean a lot of creative solutions would pop up (solar panels) to avoid the fee. While this would have it’s environmental benefits, it wouldn’t solve the transportation funding problem. So the fee should be based purely on mileage, not the fuel used. Existing technology is adequate to provide a method to assess the fee, including addressing privacy concerns. The Oregon pilot has shown that this can work, it’s only a matter of political will to implement it.

Minneapolis to build 35 miles of new bikeways in 2010

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A bike boulevard in Berkeley, CA. CC licensed by flickr user Elly Blue

The Jacobean at the City of Lakes Urbanism blog has a good summary:

2010 will bring about several new bicycle projects in Minneapolis. Thanks in large part to funding from the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program (NTP), the city will fund the construction of 35 new miles of bikeways this year, most of which will come in the form of bicycle boulevards. Bicycle boulevards are a fairly low-cost form of bikeway which mostly involve improving existing low-traffic streets for use by cyclists. Common bike boulevard treatments include traffic-calming measures, improved crossing safety measures at high-traffic intersections, way-finding signs, and pavement markings to indicate to motorists that the space is intended for frequent use by bicyclists. The city has a nice two-pager explaining the bicycle boulevard concept (check it out here).

The city has a map of proposed improvements here.  In terms of my backyard, I applaud the improvements to Bryant, but I’m somewhat confused about the reason for not including the section between the Greenway and 49th in the bike boulevard plans.  I believe this area sees significantly more bicycle traffic than south of 49th.  My guess as to why it isn’t included is a political issue that starts with “p” and ends with “arking”.

Freedom isn’t free, and neither is transportation

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“Freedom’s not free. You have to pay for it.  So if that’s what you want to do, that lifestyle, you want that, it’ll cost money to do that. That’s plain and simple.”

That’s a quote from Carver County Commissioner Maluchnik from a recent MPR story on the deficit between Minnesota’s transportation wants and the state’s funding ability.  The lifestyle I assume he is referring to is living in far-flung areas of the metro and commuting long distances.  The state’s transportation plan is under review, and many projects are being pushed way back, or into non-existence because of the lack of funding.  The Commissioner is reflecting the fact that people may be starting to realize that living with the country’s 5th largest road network may require additional resources.

Of course, it’s not exactly clear from the article that they are, since meeting all the needs would require a $2 increase in the gas tax (according to a representative of the Metropolitan Council), which they don’t seem to be proposing.  So while people may currently be starting to understand the costs of this road network by seeing (and feeling) it’s state of disrepair, it’s not evident that anyone wants to pay more for it.  And while some of these new projects may in fact have questionable benefits (or may not be deemed important enough to raise additional revenue for), its my opinion that maintenance definitely is worth it.

That brings us to another good conversation, this one at the Strong Towns blog.  Strong Towns is currently running a great series of point-counterpoint posts with (in)famous anti-planner Randal O’Toole.  Yesterday on the blog, O’Toole gave us bike-loving radicals a history lesson, positing that low-density suburbs would still exist without government “subsidies”.  While I generally agree with most of his points (even though he neglects to mention the massive subsidies that are the mortgage interest deduction and federal loan guarantees: land use is the other half of transportation), his post is at best a good history lesson, and not necessarily any indication of where we are headed. Strong Towns has a good rebuttal to O’Toole (although user fees only pay around 50% of the costs of highways now, not 70%), looking to the future and reminding us that a full-cost accounting would definitely make built form different.

So I’d say the evidence (in Minnesota at least), supports the Strong Towns point of view: the construction of the transportation system is at a cross-roads.  More of the costs of the system are evident (not hidden), and less of them are being paid for by users.  The benefits of sole reliance on auto transportation and low-density land use begin to look questionable.  As Strong Towns points out, “desire” does not equal reality.  While O’Toole pegs planners as favoring nineteenth-century development patterns, I’d say most of us are more open-minded, and perfectly willing to let the market work, as long as decisions are made with a full knowledge of all the costs.