Trolling Twitter - Transportation Research Board Greatest Bits

Fellow transportation nerds.  Another massive Transportation research Board (TRB) has come and gone.  For those of us who were not among the 11,000 attendees, Twitter allows a small backstage pass.  Here are some tidbits, though presentations and reports sure to follow. 

General Statistics:

Study: One hour spent driving results in a 20-minute loss in your life expectancy http://ow.ly/1EFKQx

@AurashKhawarzad On 350 calories, a bicyclist can go 10 miles, a pedestrian 3.5 miles, and a car 100 feet.

@Lloydbrown: Smartphones are democratizing the Internet. @aashtospeaks 

@RayLaHood... He told TRB crowd he does not expect new transpo bill to move fwd this year

Bike

Rep. Blumenauer (OR) says: Nationally bike & ped accounts for roughly 13% of mode share, 16% of injuries, and only 2% of investment

MT @PhxDowntowner: 39 cities in China have started public bike sharing programs in just the past two years.

Parking

San Francisco won an award for parking - http://thecityfix.com/blog/san-francisco-and-medellin-win-2012-sustainable-transport-award/

A stat worth repeating: up to 30% of San Fran traffic at any one time are drivers looking for parking.

State of ITS: Guess what. Smart Parking is the fastest growing segment in the transportation industry CC:@laurenwang

Are we building parking or just not putting it in the right places? Come to the Getting the Supply Right session.

4 on-street parking spaces cost each suburban homebuyer an invisible $15,000 in construction and maintenance.

Bus Rapid Transit

Wow! 12+ million #BRT passengers per day worldwide  

Articles

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting: Intersection of Health and Transportation

Reports

CNU Sustainable Streets

http://www.cnu.org/cnu-news/2012/01/cnus-sustainable-street-networks-principles

Alliance for Biking & Walking = Bicycling and Walking in the United States: 2012 Benchmarking Report – Highlights from the report include:

• In 2009, 40% of trips in the United States were shorter than 2 miles, yet 87% of these trips are by car. Twenty-seven percent of trips were shorter than 1 mile. Still, Americans use their cars for 62% of these trips.

• While bicycling and walking fell 66% between 1960 and 2009, obesity levels increased 156%.

• Seniors are the most vulnerable bicyclists and pedestrians. Adults over 65 make up 10% of walking trips, yet comprise 19% of pedestrian fatalities. This age group accounts for 6% of bicycling trips, yet 10% of bicyclist fatalities.

• Bicycling and walking projects create 11-14 jobs per $1 million spent, compared to just 7 jobs created per $1 million spent on highway projects. Cost benefit analysis show that up to $11.80 in benefits can be gained for every $1 invested in bicycling and walking.

• On average, the largest 51 U.S. cities show a 29% increase in bicycle facilities since the 2010 report. Cities report that 20,908 miles of bicycle facilities and 7,079 miles of pedestrian facilities are planned for the coming years (much of this contingent upon funding).

Smart Growth's Biggest Ally is a Guy Named Dan in Colorado

Over the past three months, I’ve attended several webinars on messaging for smart growth.  These presentations have an urgent feel to them given the growing, organized pressure on sustainability.   One of key themes among slides hit particularly close to home:  offer something to the suburbs and explain the return on investment. 

The menu of offerings for suburbs typically comes in terms of retrofitting or fixing sprawl.  While valuable, these solutions seem out of reach for several reasons:

• Investment for real estate is still largely absent.  Even if the market began to pick up tomorrow, there are so many permitted, ready-to-go greenfield sites that pose a lucrative path of least resistance. 
• The collective skill set in suburbs was built on single-owner projects – such as master planned communities or the redevelopment of an entire mall.  Asking multiple owners to think of planning areas instead of individual corners of an intersection or parcels is uncharted territory.  Yet our best corridors and intersections were subdivided long ago.
• As other great planning minds have pointed out, many denizens of suburbs would rather see a strip mall languish than face the agonizing decisions related to density, traffic, impact fees and incentives.  

Enter Dan Sturges.  Dan is a wildly creative inventor and thinker.  He has faith in people’s desire to be a part of change, and created Wheelchange to help people visualize better transportation and quality of life.  Most of all, he knows that land use changes will come, but are not likely to be the first catalyzing step.  Instead, station cars, neighborhood electric vehicles, bike share and other technologies form the “first domino” for re-making suburbs.  Check out this video (pay special attention at minute 3:30 and how the transformation takes place).

New Wheels for Joe from Dan Sturges on Vimeo.

Based on our experience here in Sarasota, here are the main benefits of embracing Dan and his ideas:

1. The first best changes will not be development-related.  They will be vehicle+ technology changes that will happen sooner than waiting for the land development market to recognize retrofit.
2. For whatever reason, new vehicle and transportation technology are extremely popular here in the ‘burbs.   Perhaps new low impact vehicles are easier to relate to than bikes or transit.  Perhaps transportation technology taps into deeply held beliefs related to promise and freedom.   
3. The costs are attainable.  The Tea Party messages on how we don’t have the money are strong here, so reframing smart growth away from a land use driven movement to one that is centered on technology and market driven solutions is key.      
4. It’s about the suburbs.  Articles on bike and car sharing are overwhelmingly set in cities like Washington and New York.  Dan has the foresight to talk about these facilities as they appear in areas surrounded by cul-de-sacs and strip malls. 
5. He tells a story.  All too often smart growth is presented in “menus” or best practices as if you pluck it off a list and run with it.  But he knows how to make it fit together in a way people can relate to and even picture themselves in.
6. Finally, he always starts with the pedestrian and the bike.  His vision is not one of having everyone swap out a gas car for an electric one, but rather fundamental shifts to mobility-on-demand without the cost and burden of owning a car.   

 Dan’s work is on display at the Wheelchange website, or on Twitter at @DNAsturges. 

Moving Past Land Use + Transportation

Twenty years ago (when I got started in community planning), the thought of thinking about land use and transportation together was a revelation.  Considering both together is now commonplace, and adopted in some shape, form or fashion at all levels of infrastructure planning.  But a critical look at the equation is needed, especially here in the suburbs.  To whit:

• Land use is just that.  You can plop down unrelated buildings that check the "mixed use" box and still have land use.
• Transportation investments also have a "check the box" feel.  Florida planning, like many other places, still pays more attention to the existence of a facility, rather than the user experience.  Think about all those crazy bike lanes painted on arterials.
• Transportaton is all about how people move from Point A to Point B.  But trace the roots of how communities determine transportation needs, and it rests heavily on "trip generation."  It's based on the building - not on the person.  There's also an obsession (at least in Florida) on "internal capture."  This is intended to describe the number of trips that can be satisfied within a development area.  While internal capture is - in essence - what cities do, in suburbs success can be claimed by placing a deli in an isolated office park.  Internal capture is also - in essence - what prisons do.
• Innovation in transportation is stuck.  Look at the set of modes we have and most gracious way to describe activity is sideways evolution.  Bus Rapid Transit is hailed as a brand new force, but it's really a fancier bus with its own lane.
• We don't have a building boom anymore.  The land use and transportation exemplars from the past decade or so have been big ticket.   The "Best Practices" from the early naughts kind of feel like a luxury item.

So where does that leave us?  How about a new equation?  Instead of land use+ transportation, it seems like we are moving more to a placemaking+mobility+technology world.  To another whit:

• Organizations like Placemakers, Project for Public Spaces, Center for Neighborhood Technology, and others have been building the case for making places, not just an assortment of stuff that "the market" congers up.   In the past, concrete and steel were the focal points of land use and transportation.  While they are necessary components, our landscape is littered with places that simply don't work because we never considered how people fit in.  Placemaking adds the human algorithm to the new equation.
• Mobility helps break through the arguments that car based travel is supreme.  Mobility implies movement and traffic congestion, by definition, is not movement.  Mobility provides a nice platform for talking about all kinds of options which can include cars, buses, bikes and feet.  Actually getting from Point A to Point B, and having an enjoyable experience along the way, is what is supreme.
• Technology is emerging as the bridge to make the place+ mobility work no matter the setting.  Bike and car sharing are examples of this technology bridge,  but there is so much more waiting to happen, especially for suburbs.  Technology will be the fix, not land development, at least in the short run.  This blog will spend a lot of time looking into those technologies, how they fit, and how, politically, those technologies are one of the most important factors for the smart growth movement going forward.

Stay tuned.