Category Archives: car berater

spend and tax

by

The federal “free parking” subsidy makes the front page of NYT.com with an article by William Neuman. The new spin on this: many of his interviewees are HR folks, who despite not being transportation geeks also seem to understand the silliness of this tax break.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” [Gerard Bridi, president of WiredCommute, a corporate benefits provider in Wellesley Hills, Mass.] said. “On the one hand you want to reduce congestion by encouraging people to take public transportation. On the other hand you give people who drive” a tax break… while the [tax-free] transit program is used by more than two million people nationally, according to estimates by benefit providers, the benefit is capped at $110 a month, giving transit riders a lower tax savings.

And no savings for those who walk or bike, of course — and, since it works like an income tax deduction, it (like all deductions) favors those in higher brackets who least need tax breaks. Wonderful!

“In general the efforts in this regard are at cross purposes,” said Jon Kessler, the chairman of WageWorks, a corporate benefits company in California. He said that while the tax break for parking helps promote jobs in cities by making it cheaper to get to work, it does nothing to reduce traffic. “People,” he said, “are trying to accomplish different things…” He estimated that because parking costs vary across the country and not everyone uses the full amount, the tax savings nationwide from the parking benefit add up to about $150 million each year.

On another topic, the last city of Chicago budget I read thoroughly was the 2004 proposed budget. Just out of curiosity, I compared that document’s 2003 figures to the new 2008 projections:

2003 actual: $4.719B total, $2.550B corporate fund
2003 inflated to 2007 using CPI: $5.342B total, $2.887B corporate
2007: $5.669B total (budgeted), $3.080B corporate (projected as of 30 July)
(2008 corporate fund expenditures are forecast at 6% above 2007)

The total budget is growing at a rate 52.5% above inflation and the corporate budget at a rate 57.3% above inflation. It might be interesting to compare these numbers to other large, slow-growth cities.

It’s too bad that the property tax figures are reported so poorly on both tax bills and in the budget books, although perhaps the county treasurer would have overall figures. I know that pension and health costs, which are the biggest users of the property tax, have increased substantially, but it’s hard to justify such a sustained increase over the general inflation rate when services have not appreciably improved.

Everyone’s Fault

by

Wonkette‘s Anonymous Lobbyist, though not an ISTEA junkie like yours truly, kind of nails it on the head:

The current transportation funding mechanism is called SAFETEA-LU, which stands for “Safe Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users,” but the “Lu” is actually former Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young’s wife’s name, so he made his staff come up with a fucking acronym that used that because that’s how stupid and parochial transportation policy is… everyone gets to more or less keep ignoring our crumbling current infrastructure in favor of new roads (which are way more popular with constituents, since they don’t tie up traffic as much as that nasty roadwork). So, everyone won, sorta, and everyone lost, like usual.

In fact, a smart guy* presented a paper at TRB this year called “SAFETEA-LU Earmarks in Minnesota, a Rural Advantage: Minnesota’s Other Growing Pork Industry.” Among his conclusions: “the earmarking process is optimized for political stability, and not for public utility… earmarks are inefficient allocators of resources, in that they… do not explicitly consider long-range national transportation, social, economic, and environmental objectives.”

The paper goes into detail over Oberstar’s earmarks; one which I like is the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program, a $25M fund for bicycling and walking projects around the Twin Cities. (It mostly funded new bike lanes around Mpls in its first year.)

Not that the I-35W’s bridge “50 score… structurally deficient” means anything, really. A bridge scoring in the single digits on the same scale — Hillsborough Street over the CSX tracks, about a mile west of the Capitol — was part of my routine in Raleigh years ago. The last time someone was carried away from CCM in an ambulance was apparently from a fall on the 31st bridge over the IC tracks, which rates a 22; the famously awfully paved Chicago Ave bridge over the river gets an 11; and, perhaps most shockingly, Congress’s bridge over the river (as it emerges from under the Old PO) rates 2. Yes, two, on a 1-100 scale (apparently, Illinois uses 100, other states 120.)

* Michael Smart from UCLA, ha ha

Walking, biking

by

A few posts made to Sightline, first on Alan Durning’s post about “bicycle shame” (and counterpart “bicycle respect“) debunking notions that bicycling isn’t to be taken “seriously” by government — notably about biking’s split social-class personality.

Thanks for the statistics on commuters’ earnings [bicycle commuters have middling incomes]. While biking to work today, a driver who “didn’t see” me yelled some “cheap-[obscenity]” insult — and it honestly puzzled me, since his used car and ragged T-shirt fairly screamed “proletarian.”

That said, I know that I spend well over 10c a mile on bicycling — tooling around town on a shiny steed doesn’t rack up that many miles, but costs a good many shiny pennies. All told, my “extravagant” non-car lifestyle amounts to getting around town on <$150/mo., including transit, sturdy walking shoes, and flashy bike gear.

@Arie: Sadly, the really big money’s still on driving. Just GM’s advertising budget is bigger than the entire American bicycling industry! That said, I read a business-mag article about how Shimano (one of bicycling’s biggest companies) did thorough market research into promoting bicycling in general in creating the Coasting marketing campaign. And smart but slick (and maybe cheap) ad campaigns actually attract city-dwellers’ attention better than carmakers’ airwave saturation strategy.

Durning writes that “a Bicycle-Respecting community is more equitable than a Bicycle Neglecting one… Like such democratizing social guarantees as public schools and unemployment insurance, Social Security and national parks, safe, separate, continuous facilities for cycling and walking put a common foundation under us. Such guarantees bind us together as one people, among whom—while many things are distributed by the competitive logic of the marketplace—certain necessities are available to all. We provide these things because we are not simply a collection of consumers who share a currency and a string of freeway exits. We are a community.” (emphasis added) Another response:

We, as a community, also provide public space within our cities for enjoyment and for circulation. “Sweet modes” (as the French say) like walking, cycling, and transit are incredibly space efficient: we could shrink our roads 80%+ overnight if everyone used them. It’s cars and trucks, those space hogs, who demand not only giant public expenditures but also the lion’s share of the public-space commons.

Since urban space is by definition an expensive and scarce resource, it makes perfect sense to charge those who waste (and lay waste to) it, while granting free access to those who use it wisely and graciously.

We already ration, price, and regulate urban transportation’s use of public space via like parking meters, residential parking permits, drivers’ licenses, and now congestion pricing — but we usually don’t think of it that way. Instead, we’ve been trained by decades of car-think to see “roads” as conveyances [or storage facilities] for private vehicles, rather than as shared community assets.

and on WalkScore.com:

89 at home in Wicker Park, Chicago; 98 at work in the Loop. (I’ve plugged a few Manhattan addresses in, and they max out at 98 as well.) My first upgrade would be to consider the street network. If my circa-2000 PalmPilot’s Vindigo software could calculate walking distances over the grid, then it shouldn’t be that hard to program.

A good bikeability map is a bit more complicated, since it involves adding data layers that aren’t already in GMaps. The routes I bike, even more so than the routes I walk, are often indirect and subject to more “quality of movement” factors. GoBikeBoulder includes off-street paths, signed on-street routes, and elevation in its calculations.

One of CNU’s members, Eliot Allen from Criterion Planners in Portland, has developed some really fantastically complex software that models and analyzes walkability, bikeability, transit, and driving in the context of land use and urban design conditions, like street network, use balance, and intersection safety. I still don’t quite understand everything about it, but J,M,& M might want to give it a look.

Morsels

by

* I feel sick. Why? Earlier today, I was hit (no damage, at midday, in the middle of the Loop) by a driver who was clearly in the wrong — double parked, no signals, suddenly backing up without looking (through an illegally black-tinted rear window) — and suddenly found myself with four cagers all simultaneously screaming obscenity-laced insults at me. (None asked if I was all right.) One person on the sidewalk, a woman smoking, seemed to care, and told me to take down details for the cops. Of course, the cops arrived 22 minutes later, moments after the driver finished his business and pulled away, and there being no blood, there was no way to press charges.

Yet when there is blood, as with architect Steven O’Rourke (evidently a friend of a friend) — his body dragged for one mile through the streets of Jefferson Park, knocked out of his shoes just steps from the home where his wife and three small children were sound asleep — it’s too late. Your best witness is dead.

Not one week later, a child riding in the middle of Critical Mass was violently struck by a car fleeing the scene of a crash; his bike was dragged under the car for six blocks. Not just any kid, either, but a regular, an eager boy whom I’d seen graduate from trail-a-bike to his own two wheels, whom I’d fed cookies to. He’s shaken and bruised, but the gall!

Soon, I won’t be able to count the number of people I know — or have known — struck by hit-and-run drivers with mere single digits. This fact, and the utterly nonchalant attitude that countless drivers and the authorities have towards this most soulless, evil-hearted cowardice, fills me with toxic rage.

* A text ad on that O’Rourke story directs readers to the Campaign for Global Road Safety, which points out that worldwide, road deaths kill more people than malaria and diabetes, and as many as either of two lung diseases (tuberculosis and lung cancers) — and that every minute, a child is killed or maimed on the world’s roads. Worldwide, most of these deaths are of pedestrians. This is beginning to get attention from the UN, with a General Assembly session on road safety set for this fall.

* How to end our long national nightmare. [Wonkette]

* At a recent event, new alderman Brendan O’Reilly mentioned one idea worth grabbing from NYC: camera enforcement of Gridlock Sam’s “Don’t Block the Box” directive. Between these, the Natarus sound cameras, and various anti-terrorist cameras, downtown could have a pretty thick network of cameras — pretty useful for also ticketing double-parkers, or for London style cordon pricing.

* Recently viewed and highly recommended: the Criterion Collection release of Tati’s Play Time. No plot whatsoever, but the views of oppressively modernist, traffic-choked “Tativille” alternating with his gentle physical humor made for an enjoyable (if long winded) viewing.

* Speaking of oppressive modernism, I was amused to see that an “urban quarter” (named Quartier sur le Fleuve, but that name currently generates no Google hits) at the northeast corner of Montréal’s Île-des-Soeurs was submitted for the LEED-ND Pilot. The place really looked like a Tati nightmare. [PDF from earlier planning process]

* Québec also passed a “carbon tax” last month, amounting to 0.8c per liter. Curiously, part of Illinois’ gas tax is really an “environmental impact fee” (415 ILCS 125/310). I’d be curious to see what kind of interesting local projects could be funded under a CMAQ-like regional grant program to cut carbon emissions: car sharing, bike sharing, hybrid cabs, beater car trade-ins, electric peak load conservation, whatever.

* “Airplane security seems to forever be looking backwards.” So, billions of dollars in America’s most valuable workers’ time is wasted stuffing “Freedom baggies” and pulling off shoes, all to CYA over yesterday’s threats. [Schneier on Security]

* Pithy comment by Carrington Ward on the Obama-arugula flub:

It’s an interesting point about the price of arugula. One of the problems Iowa farmers face is a dependence on monocrop agriculture — corn, corn, corn.

It is a flipside of the problem that many urban neighborhoods face: bodies sculpted by corn syrup, corn syrup, corn syrup.

We’d be better off as a nation if Iowa farmers were paying attention to the price of Arugula (or apples) in Chicago.

* Portland has a Courtyard Housing Design Competition underway. I’ll be curious to see how they reconcile this type (among my favorites, as you probably already know) with parking. The jury is pretty solid; my sense is that they’ll tend towards the traditional, though.

Hummerdingers

by

[sent to CCM list, after someone brought up the discredited “hybrid worse than hummer” meme.]

The true costs of such a vehicle to society do not stop and end at
fuel consumption and/or battery manufacture (note that all cars have
poisonous batteries). An H2 weighs three times as much as a Prius, and
the manufacture and transport of those 2.5 additional tons of steel
(etc.) have a tremendous environmental cost as well.

As I’ve said in previous listserv discussions on similar subjects,
large SUVs tax our society in many other disastrous ways. Their heavy
weight exacts a tremendous toll on the roads we all pay to maintain:
an H2 puts 81 times more wear and tear on a road than a Prius. Their
ponderous heft further adds to maddening traffic congestion: a large
SUV takes up as much road space-time as 2.5 small cars, while probably
not carrying any more people. Their larger size requires more pavement
for parking; “van” parking spaces are 52% larger than “compact car”
spaces. Their huge engines run dirtier, spewing out more
lung-deadening particulate matter and requiring vastly greater
quantities of toxins like antifreeze. Their higher fuel consumption
doesn’t just emit carbon, it contributes that much more to the global
human and ecological calamities that accompany every single stage of
the petroleum “production” process, from “Cancer Alley” to drowned
seals in Prudhoe Bay to low-grade civil wars in Ogoniland and Basra.
Large SUVs have much higher “kill rates”: a single Chevy Tahoes will
kill as many people (per 1M vehicles) as six Honda Accords; they lack
basic safety features like bumpers, have exponentially larger blind
spots, and block visibility for other road users.

I find it particularly astonishing that a bicyclist would make excuses
on behalf of Hummers, since the high, flat, rigid fronts, heavy
weight, and powerful engines of these menaces make them nearly ideal
weapons for murdering pedestrians and bicyclists: at the same impact
speed, a large SUV is almost three times more likely to kill a
pedestrian upon impact than a regular car.

And then there’s the unquantifiable cost to our society’s bonds levied
by the sheer antisocial (nay, sociopathic) nature of the Hummer: its
cheap trivializing of this “war” thing, its coarse celebration of
vainglorious overconsumption, and the disturbing desire to market to
drivers seeking to strike (rightly deserved, given the “kill rate”)
fear into the hearts of those with whom s/he is supposedly “sharing
the road.”

(Let me interrupt this narrative to say that no one need doubt my
dislike of all cars, be they big, small, short, tall, whatever. I have
never driven a car, nor even learned how. However, I reserve greater
scorn for large SUVs — proportional, one might say, to the size and
the social cost of the car itself.)

On 5/15/06, T.C. O’Rourke wrote:
While young, idealistic Americans die in the process
of killing non-Americans to secure a dwindling
resource, Hummer drivers choose to squander said
resource needlessly.

…while simultaneously mocking said bravery, dressing up civilian
playthings (in this case, a Chevy Tahoe) as battlefield equipment,
even while hundreds of troops have died inside their Humvees for want
of adequate armor and equipment

A Hummer on its way to Vegas or the Hamptons “honors the troops” the
same way Marie Antoinette “honored” the starving peasants by playing a
shepherdess for the afternoon, then retired to a supper of foie gras
and cake.

“The distance between the war in Iraq and the absence of any trace of
it at home, which owning a Humvee is somehow meant to close, is in
fact epitomized by it. It is only in a nation that has been completely
insulated from war’s effects that a vehicle of war could become a
trophy for the rich. It’s not enough that those who most enjoy the
benefits and freedoms of this country serve it the least. Now they’ve
made leisure rides of the war machines used by those who serve. The
reluctance to abide any measure that might constrain personal
autonomy, the conflation of rights and duties — it’s all there in one
vehicle.” — Lawrence Kaplan, The New Republic, 22 Feb 2006

For Athletes, an Invisible Traffic Hazard – New York Times

by

Gretchen Reynolds in the Times reports on new research showing fine particulate matter (PM) to be a significant cardiac hazard to athletes.

“Be sensible and try to cut back” on your exposure to particles, Dr. Rundell advised, but don’t use pollution as an excuse to cut back on exercise… “The bottom line is that running and cycling are healthy and, over all, good for the heart,” Dr. Newby said. With proper care, he said, outdoor exercise does not have to be harmful — and, done en masse, could even ease pollution.

The best part, though? One doc, taking the long view and putting this “Your Health” article back into the realm of policy:

“I ride my bike back and forth to work every day,” [David Newby, a cardiology professor at the University of Edinburgh] said. “If everyone else did that, too, we wouldn’t be having this problem at all, would we?”

Green city bites

by
  • The current (July) issue of Builder has a fantastic cover package of articles on affordability — about two-thirds of which is New Urbanism. It addresses both design and policy (finance, finance, transportation, inclusionary, and more) solutions, without any right-wing NAHB complaining.
  • PARK(ing) Day — a day to reclaim curbside parking back for the public realm — will be a national observation this September 21 (following on last September’s observation). My quick idea: perhaps some donated floorcoverings (carpet?* turf?) and a communal table, around which we will discuss The High Cost of Free Parking, perhaps not coincidentally APA’s Planners Book Club selection for August. I can think of a few sponsoring groups who could get behind that. Or perhaps two dozen kick stand-ed bicycles parked (and locked), plus work stands for two mechanics.
  • Mike Davis has a heartwarming article in Sierra about the last time Americans banded together to collectively fight a mighty foe — and downshifted the whole economy in the process.

    Would Americans ever voluntarily give up their SUVs, McMansions, McDonald’s, and lawns?

    The surprisingly hopeful answer lies in living memory. In the 1940s, Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption and waste. The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation, called on Americans “to change from an economy of waste–and this country has been notorious for waste–to an economy of conservation.” A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others enthusiastically, answered the call…

    Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national “Food Fights for Freedom” campaign. By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables–freeing the nation’s farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia… Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if that concept didn’t yet exist) and self-reliance…

    With recreational driving curtailed by rationing, families toured and vacationed by bike. In June 1942, park officials reported that “never has bicycling been so popular in Yosemite Valley as it is this season.” Public health officials praised the dual contributions of victory gardening and bike riding to enhanced civilian vigor and well-being, even predicting that it might reduce the already ominously increasing cancer rate…

    The total mobilization of the time was dubbed the “People’s War,” and while it had no lack of conservative critics, there was remarkable consistency in the observation of journalists and visitors (as well as in later memoirs) that the combination of a world crisis, full employment, and mild austerity seemed to be a tonic for the American character. New York Times columnist Samuel Williamson… pointed out that American life had been revolutionized in a single generation and many good things seemingly lost forever; the war and the emphasis on conservation were now resurrecting some of the old values. “One of these,” he wrote, “may be the rediscovery of the home–not as a dormitory, but as a place where people live. Friendships will count for more.”

* Did you know that Interface FLOR is based in Chicago?

We can too give up our cars

by

The high-profile launch of Paris’ Vélib’ [French] program (actually, one of several such schemes in Europe, but certainly the highest-profile implementation of a turnkey free bike-sharing system to date) has put mayor Delanoë’s strategy of reducing urban traffic — no, not reducing its supposedly inevitable growth, but actually getting people who currently drive to drop the keys and step away from the steering wheel — into the spotlight. Delanoë has promised to cut traffic by 40%, and making bicycling as easy as walking — first with bicycle facilities, now with bicycles — is a big part of that.

First, some info gleaned from Vélo’v, the pioneering bike share in Lyon. JCDecaux will launch seven new city-bike schemes [French] over the next year, with over 25,000 bicycles in Paris, Seville, Marseille, Dublin, Aix-en-Provence, Besançon, and Mulhouse. Barcelona has also launched an independent bike share company, Bicing [Spanish]. Bicycle traffic grew 44% from 2005-06. So far, Vélo’v customers [French] mostly fit the profile of bicyclists; nearly half are twentysomething, 60% are male, a full third are students. 85% of daytime trips are for work or school. More than one-third of Vélo’v users drive (even occasionally) in the city; over half of them drive less since the program’s start. 10% of Vélo’v’d trips would otherwise have been in cars. (You’ve got to love the French term for non-motorized transport: “déplacements doux.” Sweet, indeed. And the newsletter’s welcome is written by the municipal “vice-president in charge of new ways of using public space.” Now, that’s a title fit for me.)



Vélo’v Station, Lyon Uploaded to Flickr by laughtonb

Pasadena recently commissioned a report on traffic reduction strategies; the draft report and the appendices (with many case studies of municipalities that have lowered VMT or trips) are available online.

The July/August issue of New Urban News points out the tremendous success of transit oriented development in Arlington, Va. I recently had dinner in a smart new restaurant a few blocks from the Clarendon Metro, at the heart of Arlington’s booming Wilson Blvd./Orange Line corridor. In my lifetime, the three-mile corridor has added 19,000 DUs, 15 million sq. ft. of offices, and 1.9 million sq. ft. of retail, worth tens of billions of dollars — yet traffic on Wilson (at Clarendon) has fallen 16% since 1996. Over the same time, transit use grew 37.5%, with Metrorail ridership growing 43% and local ART bus ridership growing 926%. Of course, Arlington has an aggressive, holistic TDM strategy.

And then, there’s that most obvious way of dissuading driving: taxes. Another Tribune editorial endorsing a high gas tax, instead of those clunky CAFE standards:

The most efficient and straightforward way to persuade Americans to conserve gasoline would be to raise gas prices. A gas tax increase of, say, 50 cents per gallon would persuade people to drive fewer miles, without limiting their car-buying options. That’s preferable to the fix approved by the U.S. Senate: a mandated rise in fuel economy standards for automobiles.

Update 23 July: it appears that Steve Chapman wrote that one. From a 22 July opinion piece, a crisp distillation of how CAFE is not just poor policy, but it backloads economic costs and increases the social costs of driving:

Higher fuel economy standards, likewise, would have results that are not quite what we envision. The first is that they won’t reduce gasoline consumption much anytime soon. The reason is simple: The only vehicles affected by the change would be new ones…

The second is that among those people who buy the new, improved vehicles, higher mileage requirements won’t actually discourage driving. Just the opposite… A 2002 study by the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies found that if Congress raised the fuel mandate to 35 m.p.g, the average new light truck “would log about 1,080 more miles per year.”

The result will be more congestion and more accidents. The more people drive, the worse the traffic jams. The higher the number of cars on the road at any given moment, the likelier it is that one of them will run into yours.

Economists almost unanimously agree that if you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions by curbing gasoline consumption, the sensible way to do it is not by dictating the design of cars but by influencing the behavior of drivers. If you want less of something, such as pollution from cars, the surest way is to charge people more for it.

A carbon tax or a higher gasoline tax would encourage every motorist, not just those with new vehicles, to burn less fuel — by taking the bus, carpooling, telecommuting, resorting to that free mode of transit known as walking, or buying a Prius.

Many people are inclined to resist a higher gas tax because it would cost them money. What they overlook is that a law requiring cars and trucks to be more fuel-efficient would not come free, either. You wouldn’t pay more for each visit to the pump. But you would pay more for a car. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over time, a gas tax would cost 27 percent less than a higher fuel-economy mandate.

None of these inconvenient truths, however, got much attention from the Senate. Raising mileage standards has great allure in Washington because the price inflicted on consumers is hidden from view, assuring that no blame will fall on our elected leaders.

P.S. two snarky phrases in my head lately: “gizmo green” and “tapas-based economy.”

Modest proposals dept.

by

Wow, and I thought I was militant:

But I have a suggestion that would raise money for the city, reduce vehicular traffic in the Loop and not require a huge collection apparatus.

Every week we could have a pedestrian lottery. Those of us who are always on foot could send a ten-dollar check to City Hall. On Sunday night, one of our alderpersons would don a blindfold and pick a lucky pedestrian.

The winner would get no money. That would go to the City, the Park District, the CTA, whatever.

Instead of cash, though, the winning pedestrian would get a Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol and a license to kill (like James Bond).

For one week he or she could prowl our Loop streets looking for the most flagrant violators of pedestrian rights and blast away a no questions, no jail time, just a loud Ka-Pow and the guys from Streets and San would show up to haul away the mess.

Public transportation would never be more appealing.

Jack Zimmerman, one of the downtown Chicago Journal’s columnists, had that modest proposal for cutting traffic and improving pedestrian safety downtown.

And here’s a little gem about how there’s no romance to driving, at least not around here:

If I wanted interesting driving, I’d buy one of those nifty little Ferraris, some genuine kid driving gloves and pick up a skinny-ankled woman named Marcella who would sit beside me and look gorgeous as I tooled around the Italian Alps.

But this is Illinois, Land of Lincoln, a state full of flat land, straight roads and thick ankles. Marcella doesn’t live here.

I will say that even [despite having never learned to drive] I have experienced lovely moments in cars, mostly involving, yes, small cars hugging curves along winding roads in the countryside (and sometimes someone sitting beside me, looking gorgeous). That’s the romantic ideal of “driving as freedom,” not the grinding daily reality of bumper-to-bumper — but yet the caged masses soldier on. Sigh.

Yield

by

This fascinating video from NYC Streets Renaissance demonstrates what must be among the most satisfying jobs I’ve ever seen: a city staffer in Portland whose job is to be a decoy, nabbing drivers who roll through crosswalks. The sometimes maddeningly deferential Northwestern driving culture didn’t just arise out of thin air; it owes at least something to strong enforcement of the existing laws.

NYCSR/Transalt also has this amusing flowchart of the positive feedback loops one can expect with congestion pricing:

Congestion pricing pilots

by

…move forward without Chicago, of course. Over $1B in federal funding will be allocated to five cities nationwide to launch or expand congestion pricing projects under the Urban Partnerships Program. One of those five will probably be NYC; Ray Rivera in the Times writes that “Ms. Peters heaped lavish praise on the mayor’s [cordon toll] plan, calling it brave, bold and long overdue.” (The NY Academy of Sciences has a terrific briefing on the London congestion charge and Bloomberg’s proposal.) So yes, the feds are heaping money on cities so that they can access a new/expanded revenue stream of tolls. This is absolutely a no-brainer.

Denver’s proposal would extend I-25’s existing HOT lanes up US36/Boulder Pike and use the revenue to expedite BRT improvements to RTD’s existing B route; this expands on a concept introduced to local commuters with HOT express lanes on I-25.

Of course, the Kennedy Expressway has a nearly identical situation to I-25; simply adding a few I-PASS transponders and cameras would reduce congestion and generate millions of dollars in revenue for Blue Line repairs. (CMAP’s ultimate proposal included $100M in Blue Line repairs [“upgraded to eliminate slow zones caused by deteriorating infrastructure… {it} has experienced a degradation in service in recent years”], but only increases tolls on the ISTHA and Skyway portions of I-90 without adding new tolls on the Kennedy or Dan Ryan despite the existence of significant congestion and barrier separated facilities. Similarly, it references raising Chicago’s existing paid off-street parking tax, but not anything about street parking prices. Buried on the last page is a reference to a $1.6M bike rental station, too; I’ll have to find out more about that.)

“We’re asking cities to try something different, innovative and daring when it comes to fighting traffic,” said Secretary Peters.

“Different, innovative and daring” — nope, not Chicago.

FWIW, other cities’ proposal documents:
The Twin Cities would expand an existing network of HOT lanes using shoulder lanes, significantly accelerate implementation of proposed suburban BRT corridors, and explore parking pricing.

In the Bay Area, several existing HOT pilot schemes, the 511 system, and parking re-pricing in San Francisco and Berkeley.

Summer driving

by

(slightly less edited version sent to Gristmill)

Gasoline supplies right now are plumbing historic lows, just as May and the “summer driving season” are about to roll around. This fact has the industry types at the WSJ’s Energy Roundup abuzz with predictions of $4/gallon gasoline, should the inevitable disruption (refinery fire, hurricane, Iran war) occur. As in years past, areas with higher cost gasoline, mostly the blue states along the oceans and Great Lakes, will see the highest prices.

Some hope that record margins (known as “crack spread,” heh heh) will lead refineries to crank up gas production, but in any case, there’s perilously little slack in America’s already-taut gasoline supply chain. Blogger Robert Rapier points out that gasoline supplies right now are lower than they’ve ever been (at least since current records began, in 1991), besides a few Labor Day weekends when supplies are drawn down after all that summer driving.

I never quite understood the concept of a “summer driving season,” anyways. Why waste a glorious summer day cooped up inside a car stuck in traffic? This summer, let’s all escape gloomy gas prices (and the inevitable media moaning about such) and have a Summer Walking Season instead.