Steve Miller's Blog — II

“You can’t always get what you want,” sang the Rolling Stones, “but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”  One of the signs of maturity is recognizing that you’ve got to give in order to get, that the real discussion should be about the nature of the trade-off rather than the need to compromise.  Recent developments are forcing us to decide how to balance the benefits and costs of increased parking in downtown Boston.  At stake are not just the parking spaces but the future nature of Boston life – its physical shape and feel, its residential friendliness, its commercial prosperity, the quality of its environment and its population’s health.

Parks and people are good.  Cities thrive when there are lots of both.

More car traffic coming into Boston is bad.  It increases pollution (air, water, and noise), makes our streets less safe and inviting no matter how you are getting around, forces government to continue shaping the built environment around the needs of cars rather than people, and makes it hard to get public support for creating less destructive modes of movement.  When the car is king, people get run over.

Getting parked cars off the street into garages is good.  It reduces pollution-causing congestion and frees up street space for non-car use.

But encouraging more car traffic is bad.  And parking is one of the key factors influencing urban travel choices.  The belief that there is ample parking makes people much more likely to drive all the way downtown rather than use the T or bike.  Of course, the reality is that parking is tight – it is estimated that about 30 percent of the cars circling a city at any given time are looking for parking.

(The cheapness of on-street meters in comparison to off-street garages just makes matters worse, encouraging people to keep circling.  Several cities are now exploring Donald Shoup’s insight in The High Cost Of Free Parking that charging “market rates” for non-handicapped on-street parking will encourage drivers to use an off-street garage or park a little distance from their destination and then walk.)

Parking has such a huge impact on the amount of downtown driving that public officials seeking to improve the residential livability and commercial activity of their business districts, while reducing the flow of funds for cars and fuel out from their region, sometimes slowly reduce the overall amount of parking available in downtown areas, both on-street and in garages.  Tactics include removing on-street spots and reducing or eliminating minimum parking space requirements in new developments (particularly those near transit services) as well as imposing limits on new garages.  It works, promoting street life and business as Copenhagen and other cities have discovered.  (And it works even better when governments simultaneously invest in public transit and bicycling facilities to make non-car travel easier!)

Now the Mass Eye and Ear Institute (MEEI) wants to build a 1,000-car underground garage right next to the Longfellow Bridge.   They will invest about $173 million and want taxpayers to cover the $30 million cost of relocating Storrow Drive closer to the Charles River.  In exchange, they will build a park on top of the parking space.

Ignore for a minute that the land where the proposed garage will be built is already owned by the public and should never have been changed from the parkland it once was to the surface-level parking lots MEEI now uses.

But we can’t ignore that this proposal is not happening in isolation.  The Boston Redevelopment Authority is currently poised to give permission for the creation of another 1,000-space capacity garage just outside downtown on A Street in Southie – despite previous promises that the area would be used for a mixed-use neighborhood containing at least 11 acres of open space with at least one-third of the development being residential.   Parking is a major part of recent development proposals for the Kenmore area, the Kennedy Greenway, and other downtown locations.  A recent letter to the Boston Business Journal points out that the development of the Seaport area will remove a major source of low-cost parking and calls on the city to “thaw” its current “parking freeze.”  And a columnist just issued a rant about the “war on parking.”  Is this the beginning of a trend, an effort to make downtown – and perhaps the city – more car friendly?

It’s clear that each of the developers, from Mass Eye and Ear to Commonwealth Ventures to Don Chiofaro, will benefit by making their particular project more accessible to car-driving commuters and clients.  But will the city?  Will the general public?  Will taxpayers?

Given the reality of this country’s built environment – the residential sprawl and the lack of public transportation – cars will continue to be an important part of the travel mix for years to come and we will continue to need places to park them.   It is possible to use technology to improve the efficiency of parking space utilization. The International Parking Institute has shown that it is possible to build less damaging parking facilities – minimizing water runoff and pollution issues, running on solar energy, providing space for bikes and connections to transit, providing retail services and other activities beyond car storage. (For more on this, check the EPA’s Green Parking Lot Resource Guide, or the DC nonprofit Casey Trees short guide, or the San Mateo County, California, Sustainable Green Streets and Parking Lots Design Guidebook.)

But do we really want more parking spaces downtown?  Is the recapturing of a small amount of parkland that we, the public, should never have lost in the first place worth the price of thousands of more cars coming through already-dysfunctional Charles Circle every day? Do we really want to encourage more people to drive all the way into the core city rather than leave their vehicles further out?  Perhaps these projects are good candidates for application of a “health impact analysis” that will examine the impact of this kind of development on our well-being?

If the “car is no longer king in Boston” aren’t there better ways to manage transportation demand?

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Related previous posts:

>RECLAIMING THE LESSONS OF PAST VICTORIES: Traffic Is Not Inevitable

>GENERATING THE POWER TO SAVE THE “T”: The Business Community Needs To Move

>MOVING URBAN INNOVATION BACK TO THE FUTURE: Reclaiming the Village and the Street

>HEALTH IMPACT ASSESSMENTS (HIA) AND ADVOCACY: Useful Tool or Sophisticated Smoke Screen?

Streets were once the public space between buildings – available for any purpose that people wanted to use it for:  commerce, walking, horses, playing, standing, and anything else.  But over the past decades, one of the largest physical assets owned by the public was turned over for the exclusive use of “motordom.”  Streets became tubes for car traffic.  Transportation Engineers became road designers and developed a sophisticated hierarchy of street types – from Highways to Local Streets – intended to maximize the efficient movement of as many cars as fast as possible.

But what if street design was structured around functionality – not for cars but for people?  Instead of maximizing throughput volume they’d be designed to maximize the opportunity for people to participate in the full range of activity of the surrounding neighborhood.  It would require that the new road design slogan of being “context sensitive” began to be taken seriously, with the “context” being social and commercial interaction rather than vehicle access and mobility to the surrounding structures.

This would not require the elimination of the automobile, which (in the absence of viable alternatives) serves many vital needs for large segments of our population and businesses.  But it would require fitting car needs into a more balanced menu of human and commercial priorities.  And it might require transportation planners to work with – or even under – architects or other professions with deeper expertise in designing space for human activity.

In that case, perhaps the road design categories would include “mixed use” and “residential” and “Vulnerable Users” as well as “Connectors” and “Highways.”  And the key differentiation among the categories would be the way they facilitate non-motorized use of the public right of way at different times of day and year by controlling vehicular speed and parking.

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OUT OF BALANCE

As the new book Fighting Traffic points out, it took a concerted, expensive, and viciously fought campaigns spanning many decades for the automobile industry to transform our cultural assumptions about the proper purpose of roads.  The fact that cars were big, powerful, and dangerous gave an aggressive edge to their arguments that everyone else should stay out of their way.  Underpinning their success was the fact that this new technology opened powerful new economic opportunities for important groups and satisfied broad social desires.  (The triumph of “motordom” created enormous growth opportunity not just for car manufacturers but also for oil, steel, plastics, coal, rubber, real estate, construction, lumber, and other industries in nearly every part of the nation; while also giving people access to a wider world through increased personal mobility and freedom.)

Transportation engineers think of streets in terms of the amount and speed of the traffic they are designed to carry.  Over time, they developed a hierarchy ranging from highways, arterials, and collectors down to local streets and cul-de-sacs.  These categories are most appropriate for expanding sprawl suburbs with low-densities.  But this type of thinking came to dominate traffic engineering and was increasingly seen as the ideal for all situations — leading to the destruction of older urban neighborhoods in order to cram larger streets into the original small-block grid-layout.  Even a recent effort by the Congress of New Urbanism to come up with a more smart-growth friendly alternative set of categories ended up defining them by access and speed as much as surrounding context.  The new mantra of “context sensitive design” – about which the Massachusetts Department of Transportation was an early advocate – ends up primarily dealing with creating a “transportation facility that fits its physical setting” rather than social interaction. And the demand for “complete streets” – a concept emphasizing the need to include accommodations for “all users and all modes” – turns out in practice to usually mean fitting sidewalks and bike lanes into whatever space is left over after car needs are satisfied rather than truly “designing from the outside inwards” by prioritizing pedestrian and cyclist facilities before dealing with cars.

SPACE, SPEED, AND PARKING

Unless you are willing to start tearing down buildings – stores and homes – street width is a given, and limited.  So the amount of space allowed for different uses at different times is a key issue.  And cars and trucks – moving, parking, dropping off or picking up people and things – take up a lot of space as well as creating noise, pollution, and safety hazards for people without a metal armament.

But space is not the only issue.  Speed is also critical.  As many European cities have shown, cars and people and push carts and bicycles can share a plaza or street so long as everyone is moving slowly.  Many European residential and downtown areas now strictly enforce 20 Km/Hr limits – about 18 miles per hour!   Many US cities, Chicago is one example, have large “speed bumps” in residential areas – and despite fears that these bumps (as well as “raised intersections”) will hinder emergency access the city hasn’t burned down since O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern.

There are tools within the traditional Traffic Engineers kit to deal with these issues.  The problem isn’t coming up with solutions; the problem is that our various Transportation Departments haven’t been told to use them.

PEOPLE-ORIENTED STREET DESIGNS

Boston’s Transportation Department, as part of its Complete Streets planning process, has innovatively pushed ahead of traditional thinking by coming up with a set of alternative street categories including Downtown (Commercial, Mixed Use) and Neighborhood (Main Street, Connector, Residential) types as well as Boulevards, Parkways, Shared Streets, and Industrial Roads.  To a large degree, they are defining the categories by the types of activities that happen on and around the pavement.  For example, about Neighborhood Mainstreets the draft documents say, “Because these streets are a meeting ground for residents, they should be designed to support gathering and community events such as farmers’ markets, festivals, and local communi­ty events. In addition they are characterized by public facilities such as libraries, as well as community and health centers.”

The ultimate issue, of course, is how these definitions translate into road designs and then how the planned design actually gets implemented on the ground.  The push-back from people and interests unable to see anything beyond the uncertainty of changing what currently exists, or who profit from the car-centric status quo, will force compromises at every stage.  As we know from the Big Dig, there is a long stretch from idealistic concept to crumbling concrete.  There will be several opportunities for public input and comment as the Complete Street Guidelines are implemented in projects – it is vital that people in favor of this approach participate and speak up!

In the meantime, we need to continue to encourage creativity around this issue.  And in that spirit, here are some ideas about possible People-Activity-Based Street Design Categories. These are probably most relevant to urban areas, and obviously leave out many possible categories.  They may be applicable to some of the inner-ring and more developed suburbs.  In any case, they are simply meant to suggest an approach – and I welcome additional suggestions.

Densely Mixed Use — Think of Boston’s North End’s narrow and winding streets or even parts of Newbury Street: lots of people, so much traffic that it’s moving at a snail’s pace while people search for a parking spot.  What if these were treated as “shared space” – open plazas available during business hours and/or evenings to any person, non-commercial vehicle, or type of activity (within legal limits of noise, pollution, and other nuisances) in any part of the space – but with a speed limit of 5 mph.  Delivery trucks of more than mini-van size would be given priority from 5am to 9am, but otherwise forbidden.  Overnight residential parking would be allowed.  Garages for longer term parking and store employees would be on the “outside” of the block.

Residential – Think of those parts of Roslindale and Dorchester full of houses and smaller apartment buildings with a mix of families, elderly, and young people; car traffic is light and mostly composed of people arriving or leaving the neighborhood.  What if these were treated as “neighborways” – tree lined, with speed bumps, residential parking, bulb-out corners, and other traffic calming measures.  There would be no need for bike lanes or traffic lights – stop signs and raised intersections would control intersections.  The speed limit would be 20 mph.

Vulnerable People Areas – Think of schools and daycare centers, hospitals and health clinics, elderly housing and community centers, playgrounds and parks:  lots of slow-moving or distractible people running out from unexpected spots with parking mostly serving those people unable to walk or bike to those institutions and locations.  These would be treated as “special safety zones” with the full array of traffic calming features – 15 mph speed limit, speed bumps, curb extensions, wide zebra-marked pedestrian crossings in mid-block as well as at intersections, well-timed pedestrian signals, etc.  Garages for longer term parking and store employees would be on the “outside” of the block.

Boulevards and Parkways – Think of Commonwealth Avenue:  wide, tree lined winding streets with space for wide sidewalks and separated cycle tracks.

Commercial Districts – Think of Mass Avenue: lots of people coming and going for short-term stops; a place to switch modes, from bikes to subway, from car to train.  Where appropriate, streets would be one-way for cars but allow two-way pedestrian and bicycle traffic (with the “wrong way” bikes confined to a “contra-flow” lane on one side).

Throughways – These would be the connectors between areas; laid out as a Complete Street accessible to all modes but more evenly balancing priorities among transit, pedestrians, and bicycles than is typically done today.

Travel – Think of the Mass. Pike.  Eisenhower was right – there is a need to facilitate long-distance transportation of people and things between cities, and trains or buses don’t always fit the need.  But Eisenhower never envisioned that these monstrosities would extend into the cities, and neither should we.

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Related previous posts:

>RECLAIMING THE LESSONS OF PAST VICTORIES: Traffic Is Not Inevitable

Massachusetts’ difficulty in finding ways to sustainably support its public transportation system (and its still-stuttering efforts to improve pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure) – in other words, its continuing inability to move away from overwhelming dependence on cars – is simply a specific example of a national problem.  In Congress and in many states cars are still king, if only because most people have no other choice:  a 2003 Harvard study found that owning a dependable car was a better predictor of finding and maintaining a job than having a GED.

As in many other jurisdictions, Massachusetts’ MBTA’s budget crisis, temporarily settled by fare hikes and service cuts, will return again next year as an even bigger and more catastrophic problem.  The MBTA Board has just approved a FY13 budget that depends on $61 million in one-time and uncertain revenues – and still ends up with a $100 million funding gap in FY14. The rerun will wreak havoc not only on the 1.24 million people who use the MBTA every day but on the entire Metro-region economy.  A 10% drop in T ridership, within the range of possibility for the current reductions and probably an underestimate if future cuts are needed, will cost the state economy nearly $66 million a year simply dues to increased road congestion.  Even car drivers will suffer as more people are forced to get back into their cars and endure even higher levels of time-wasting congestion, injurious accidents, and greater air/water pollution.

But the Legislature doesn’t seem willing to save the T.  They seem to see it as a Boston problem, or at least an eastern Massachusetts problem.  Why should people in the rest of the state, or even people in the metro area who don’t use public transit, have to pay extra to help those who do?  Most Massachusetts residents use cars, not busses or trains, and they’ve got a whole lot of higher priority personal stresses.

We seem to be at a stalemate.  For the past several years, the opposition has hid behind the slogan of “reform before revenue” – demanding that the MBTA reduce waste, inefficiency, and favoritism before being considered “worthy” of any additional support.  And, in fact, the past three Secretaries of Transportation have taken this challenge seriously.  MassDOT in general, and the MBTA in specific, have found an estimated $125 million in annual savings. There isn’t much water left to squeeze from that stone.

But it’s not clear how to move forward from here.

Perhaps the best strategy is to stop focusing on the T itself.  Perhaps it would make more sense to accept that cars are still the most commonly used method of travel, and given our infrastructure and living patterns they are likely to remain dominant even while both gas prices and sea levels rise.  Perhaps it’s time to more directly acknowledge the public transportation needs of people living in the “mid-west” and “western” parts of the state – and even in parts of the Metro area that are poorly served by the T.  Perhaps we should stop talking about transportation as a separate issue and start framing discussions about public investment around a package of issues including economic development and personal health, children’s safety and neighborhood quality, access to jobs and availability of services.

We need to develop policies that accept the car-saturated current reality as the unavoidable starting point, while laying the foundation for movement towards a more balanced and (economically, environmentally, and medically) healthy future.  It’s true that the rising cost of car use and the collapsing value of outer fringe housing will slowly push people into denser and more mixed-use walkable neighborhoods.  But if the process is only driven by market forces, the pain and disruption of the transitions will fall disproportionately on those with the least power and resources.  The quicker, less costly, and more equitably we want the change to occur, the more we need to push for enabling zoning, building code, and transportation policies and projects. In short, perhaps we have to be bolder and more visionary in our goals while becoming more modest about our starting points.

The basic political fact is that the MBTA fiscal crisis will only be solved as part of a broader and visionary package to revitalize the state’s (and the nation’s) entire transportation system in a way that simultaneously incorporates goals related to issues traditionally seen as separate.

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Although it was nearly a half-century ago it was also the starting point for most of the transportation issues we face today.  The Interstate Highway System was poised to push into the Boston metropolitan area – crashing through Somerville, Cambridge, The Fenway, the South End, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain.  Thousands of families had already lost their homes, and thousands more were about to.

Yet, at the seemingly last minute, the destruction was stopped.  It took a combination of grass roots protest and elite power politics, but it won – stopping the highways and diverting funds to public transportation.  In the process, the anti-highway campaign transformed state and national transportation policy, pulling the War on Poverty’s citizen participation ethos into a whole new policy area, changed government’s priority from serving cars to preserving homes, and taught an entire generation of planners that traffic volume was created by public policy rather than an inevitable independent phenomena.

But the victory was short lived, or at least only thinly accepted.  Over the decades the culture and practice of road design forgot that the most important context was not the anticipated future volume of cars but the desired quality of life of the surrounding neighborhoods.  Traffic engineers forgot that the priority wasn’t to narrow the scope of their work in order to ensure success, but to broaden their concerns to incorporate a broad variety of non-transportation-related policy goals.

In recent years, some national and state leaders have tried to recapture the old lessons.  But the effort is still a work in progress, with the on-the-ground reality seldom as good as the high-level principals supposedly guiding it.

Still, there are some places – Cambridge’s Kendall Square being one – where the pressure of non-transportation policies forced decision-makers to relearn the lessons of the old anti-highway fight.  And it turns out that the resulting policies work – car volume can actually decrease without sacrificing economic and population growth.  The old lessons turn out to be true:  if you build roads, they will come by car; if you don’t build it, they  take transit, walk, or bike.

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There was a time when the very idea of using road space for bike lanes struck most Americans both absurd and an invitation to disaster.  While some reality-challenged people still hold on to that position most people seem to have moved on.  Most big cities now have at least some bike lanes.  It turns out that the presence of bike lanes makes roads feel and actually be statistically safer for both bikes and cars –attracting more cyclists on to the road which makes (most) drivers more aware and accepting of their presence, reducing speed (but not “through put” – the time it takes to get down the road), and keeping less-skilled cyclists and drivers out of each other’s way.

There was also a time when the idea of placing a separator between a bike lane and car traffic – using a painted buffer or bollards or parked cars or even a curb – seemed bizarre to most people, including many bike advocates!  And now even as established an organization as the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) includes cycle tracks as an accepted technique in its list of possible designs – including them in proposals for the River and Western Avenue bridges over the Charles and even (hopefully) on the Longfellow!  It turns out that having separate “paths” for bikes and cars, and finding ways to promote the separation of bikes and pedestrians on shared paths, also increases both the perception and reality of safety.

It’s all happened very quickly.  But now the fight seems to be over “contra-flow” lanes – a bike lane that allows cyclists to safely move against traffic on a one-way street.  (These are not physically separated cycle tracks or paths, on which the direction of travel isn’t an issue.)  Beyond simple fear of change, the emotional energy behind the opposition to on-road contra-flow seems to have three sources.  First, it’s another tweak at the cultural assumption that streets are for cars.  Second, it adds insult to injury by allowing bikes to do something that car drivers aren’t allowed to do, really annoying drivers who may be willing to tolerate bikes but believe that it’s not fair for cyclists to do anything that cars can’t.  Third, there are people who fear for their safety as pedestrians – it’s scary enough to them that bikes have been added to the street mix, but adding the possibility that racing cyclists might be coming from an atypical direction is simply too much.

The reality, of course, is that properly located and designed contra-flow lanes actually make the streets safer for everyone including pedestrians and car drivers.   In a situation where the “with traffic” detour requires cyclists to use a long, intimidating, or even dangerous route, they are very likely to prefer to go “against traffic” on the blocking one-way street. (For example, cars going from the Public Garden to the medical area have to use Storrow Drive to get around one-way Charles Street.  Is it surprising that bicyclists aren’t willing to follow?) Still, although contra-flow is not really a very new idea – examples have been around for many years – it is a relative newcomer to the mainstream discussion.  And, like the pool table in River City, as the latest new thing contra-flow lanes are a lightning rod for anxiety.

The strategy for advocates is to trace the electricity back to its source – to find ways to talk to people about the basis for their nervousness.  We can’t solve the existential apprehension of living in uncertain times, when so much seems unstable and insecure if not dangerous.  But we can address the specific concerns about bike lanes – in any direction.  There are, it turns out, tested and effective methods of ensuring that contra-flow bike lanes work – which implies that it is also possible to place one in an inappropriate location or to design it in an ineffective manner: something that we have to also acknowledge.  It’s our job to be clear about the difference.

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It’s totally understandable that Secretary of Transportation Richard Davey has been focusing on the MBTA fiscal crises.  Public transit – train, subway, trolley, bus, and ferry – is the backbone that supports the entire regional transportation system, and the region’s economic well-being.

But we can only hope that the MBTA crisis will not totally pull Secretary Davey away from the highway division.  A crucial test of his agency’s commitment to the GreenDOT, WeMove, Healthy Transportation Compact, and Mode Shift policies is now happening around the McGrath/O’Brien Highway Corridor – which MassDOT has designated as a key pilot project that will explore ways to embody these programs and values into transportation planning, including MassDOT’s first use of a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) process maximize the project’s positive impact on public health.

But it seems that without high level intervention, MassDOT is in danger of failing to live up to the Commonwealth’s transportation goals –ending up once again treating car traffic as the controlling priority rather than the larger issues of community well-being and sustainable transportation infrastructure.

The controversy about McGrath/O’Brien has two levels – whether or not to spend up to $11 million to repair the deteriorating McCarthy overpass’s car lanes, and what to recommend as the long-term design for the entire corridor’s roadway system.

Events on both of those levels are precipitating a flurry of advocacy.  First was the Highway Division’s request to the MassDOT Board to approve the Overpass repair contract – without going through any meaningful process of public review on the grounds that it is “merely” a short-term maintenance issue, even though the repairs are intended to keep the Highway in use as-is for up to 15 years.

Second was the presentation to the community of MassDOT’s range of options for consideration in the “Grounding McGrath” study to conceptually outline the corridor’s future design – a set of options that continues to prioritize through-travel by cars over reconnecting Somerville’s cut-apart neighborhoods or setting the foundation for local economic growth.

Together, the two events make people wonder if MassDOT is simply going to mouth the words and go through the motions but end up simply repeating its old “cars first” orientation.

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HIGHWAYS AND THE ECONOMY

Transportation shapes land use, which then shapes economic development and demographics.  When the automobile was the emerging transportation mode in the mid-twentieth century, building highways was seen as laying the foundation for prosperity – as well as the only way to avoid the congestion that comes with growth’s increased traffic.

But we’ve now learned some painful lessons.  Cars are no longer the driving force behind new jobs and increased tax revenues.  (Trucks are still important – but they constitute only 7.5% of AM peak traffic and 3.55 of PM peak traffic on the McGrath.)  There is a tipping point when continued construction of car-centric infrastructure simply amplifies congestion and depresses economic vitality.  In fact, around the US – and the world – cities are finding that getting rid of old highways does what building them used to do!

In a new report from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and EMBARQ entitled “The End of a Life Cycle,” the authors say:

“…numerous empirical studies and analysis of real world case studies have shown that new road capacity usually induces traffic in direct proportion to the amount of new road space; removing roadways similarly reduces traffic….After decades of building and maintaining urban highways, many cities are choosing to tear them down rather than repair or maintain them…These cities demonstrate the social, economic, and environmental benefits of removal or of reinvesting in other options and opportunities.”

They also note that “when cities took down or chose not to build urban highways, what they got instead was…” significant increases in adjacent property values” and tax revenue, “a sharp reduction in crime,” an addition of many acres of land into active use, “reconnecting” the area, and “a decrease in air and noise pollution.”

What happens to McGrath will shape what happens to Somerville – and lots of other cities and neighborhoods facing similar challenges.  See: HOW ROADS SHAPE ECONOMIES: Why What Happens to the McGrath/O’Brien Highway, Sullivan Station, and Rutherford Ave. Will Make – or Break – Local Job Opportunities and Community Well-Being In The Entire Metro Area for Decades to Come

THE “REPAIR” CONTRACT

Like so many old highways, the elevated structures on the McGrath/O’Brien are not in great shape.  In particular, the McCarthy overpass, running from near the Cambridge border over the Washington Street intersection to the Medford Street/Highland Avenue turn-off, is beginning to crumble.  It’s not yet dangerous for truck traffic, but its close and will require traffic restrictions in the near future.

MassDOT says that they need the repairs to avoid having to restrict truck and/or car traffic from the Highway.  But because I-93 provides a better alternative route into Boston, current traffic volumes have dropped over the past decade and are now well below the road’s capacity; it could easily fit within fewer lanes.  In addition, the repairs are intended to extend the overpass’s life by up to 15 years – meaning that any effort to replace the Highway with a more appropriate design is effectively put off for at least that long, making a mockery of the current “Grounding McGrath” community-input study that is supposedly planning for the future.  Finally, the repair work will do little to change the negative impact of the elevated highway to the health of residents living nearby, the area’s economic vitality and the dangerous lack of pedestrian, transit or bicycling accommodations in the corridor.

As a result, going forward with the repair work is opposed by nearly all the local stakeholders – community groups, business representatives, advocates, and even the city of Somerville.  LivableStreets Alliance sent the Secretary a formal letter requesting the money be used, instead, to further the long-term alternatives study, begin the demolition process, create short-term multi-modal alternatives, and begin the design process of the desired future corridor layout. So everyone was caught by surprise when the MassDOT Board of Directors was asked to approve of a Notice To Proceed to a contractor for the “repair” work.  Community advocates were not even informed by Mass DOT that an RFP had been issued to procure bids to repair the Overpass.  No one appeared to oppose the Mass DOT plans because no one knew it was happening!

THE “GROUNDING MCGRATH” STUDY ALTERNATIVES

Some single-occupancy vehicles (SOVs) do leave I-93 in Somerville just before the HOV lane reduces the number of lanes available to them, using McGrath/O’Brien Highway as an alternative.  And the Inner Belt/Brick Bottom/East Somerville area is likely to experience significant residential and commercial growth in future years – meaning more people will be moving in and out of the area.  However, it is not inevitable that this translates into more (single occupancy) car trips – the Green Line extension will eventually get built and if an adequate pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure is in place it is likely that a meaningful share of those trips will be non-motorized.  Furthermore, if MassDOT is to live up to its own sustainable values, should it design roads that pander to SOV travel?

Today, McGrath/O’Brien now carries about the same amount of traffic as Mass Avenue in north Cambridge.  Most of the cars are going relatively short distances, using the Highway to move within Somerville or from Somerville into Cambridge.  Why not create a road – and a surrounding business/residential environment – that mirrors that area?  Through traffic should be possible, but – as on Mass Ave – subject to the needs of the neighborhood-connecting cross-streets.

A quick glance at a street map shows that the McGrath/O’Brien Highway was shoved through what was once a series of city streets – Medford Street connecting with Somerville Avenue connecting with Cambridge Street – with a variety of intersecting streets.  The section of the corridor between the Medford/Highland intersection and Broadway runs through the kind of dense residential area that was disrupted and destroyed.  Local residents and advocates have urged MassDOT to return the corridor that that kind of layout.

But the “Grounding McGrath” study doesn’t seem open to even considering that option.  The staff’s clearly preferred option is a six-lane major arterial.  The only downsized alternative they are willing to study is a slightly smaller “boulevard” that still prioritizes speedy through traffic over local connections – although this would, at least, include some adjoining bike paths and trees.  And this is explicitly only being included in order to show that it won’t work – that it will result in “unacceptable” traffic delays or unwanted diversions into neighborhood streets given MassDOT’s estimates of car numbers in 2035.

Traffic models are notorious for over-estimating future car volumes.  Even assuming the accuracy of the estimation models being used, it’s not clear that today’s travel patterns will continue to control vehicle choices as gas prices rise and cultural values change.  In fact, real-world experience shows that if traffic volumes expend – and decrease – in response to the amount of infrastructure available.  Another international study on reductions of road capacity in 70 projects in 10 countries found that traffic was reduced by over 10% even accounting for the traffic on neighboring streets.  Many cities in the US have had similar experiences.  If you build a highway cars will flow into it until it is full.  If you remove – or don’t build – a highway, drivers will go away – or just not use their cars in the first place!  The same is true for bike lanes and bus routes and sidewalks.  Congestion is not solved by construction.

If MassDOT builds another highway, or even a robust “arterial”, it will eventually fill up.  But small amounts of mode change can have huge impacts.  Experience in Los Angeles shows that shifting only 3% of SOV drivers to other modes reduced congestion by nearly 15%.  If MassDOT fulfills its own goals of creating a transportation system that invites walking, bicycling, and transit and doesn’t try to anticipate future increases in car volume, it is likely that those future increases won’t happen.

Even better, the economic impact of a city street design could fuel Somerville prosperity for years to come.  For the past half century, the presence of the Highway has condemned much of the corridor to a limited set of development options – essentially, to car-dependent businesses.  A slower, more neighborhood-friendly layout could unleash a flood of small scale innovation that will bring jobs, cultural activity, and permanent residents to the area.

MOVING FORWARD OR FALLING BACK?

One of the most innovative parts of the 2009 Transportation Reform act was the Healthy Transportation Compact.  This section of the law establishing MassDOT requires the new agency to work towards the “the coordination of land use, transportation, and public health policy” to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve access to services for persons with mobility limitations, increase opportunities for physical activities” as well as “increase bicycle and pedestrian travel” and “implement the use of health impact assessments to determine the effect of transportation projects on public health and vulnerable populations.”

Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) are a powerful tool that allows planners to evaluate the impact of policies, programs, and construction projects on public health – and to build in ways to tilt that impact towards the positive.

But the Healthy Transportation Compact defines a way of thinking about, designing, and operating a transportation system that is extremely different from the “make it as much like a highway as possible” values that shaped our nation’s transportation agencies for the past century.  Understanding the complexity of such a radical cultural transformation, MassDOT chose the McGrath/O’Brien project as an opportunity to pilot the new approach.  Grounding McGrath is supposed to institutionalize the agency’s new approach (originally piloted with the Charles River bridge redesign work) of inviting public input starting with the conceptualization stages of a project.  It is also the first place that MassDOT will use a HIA to inform – and hopefully influence – its design.

But it seems that the McGrath/O’Brien effort will not be the transformative process that MassDOT leaders envisioned.  The rush to repair rather than replace the McCarthy Overpass and the car-centric priorities of the options being put on the table in the Grounding McGrath study makes a mockery of the public input process and drains the HIA of its potential.  If car travel level of service is the defining parameter of the project, then all the HIA can do is suggest ways to blow the resulting pollution upwards, like the giant smoke stacks on mid-western coal plants; to prevent the noise from penetrating too far into the surrounding neighborhoods, at best using trees rather than “highway walls”; to mitigate the economically depressing effect of a highway, or even of an “arterial boulevard”.   If a “given” of the project is to maximize car traffic “level of service” – in effect, simply moving the highway to ground level (even if it is called a “boulevard”) – then a HIA can’t really address the issues of community social fabric or family prosperity that a more “connect the neighborhoods” approach would provide.  A public health professional should be embarrassed to have their name on such a distorted analysis.

LEADERSHIP ATTENTION IS AN ORGANIZATION’S MOST VALUABLE ASSET

Secretary Davey, like his predecessor, Jeff Mullan, has a well-earned reputation for innovation, honesty, and concern for sustainability.  As the recent series of public hearings on the MBTA crisis shows, he is also politically smart.

It is apparent that now is a critical period for the Secretary to focus on developing long term financing for transportation solutions for the entire Commonwealth.   However, this should not obscure DOT’s commitment to the GreenDOT, WeMove, Healthy Transportation Compact, and Mode Shift policies – rather, it should be to enable these 21^st century transportation vision.  However, it’s unlikely that the T’s fiscal crisis will be solved unless done as part of creating a sustainable state-wide overall transportation financing strategy, including new revenue.  It is true that building public awareness of the catastrophic results of the MBTA fiscal crisis is a vital part of the effort.  But, unfortunately, that is not a short-term effort — even if all the currently proposed fare increases and cut backs are implemented there will be an even bigger shortfall next year!  So fiscal issues are likely to dominate the Secretary’s agenda for a long time.

We can only hope that he finds some time to refocus on the McGrath/O’Brien corridor.  It could be the start of a new era.  Or it could simply signal the continuation of the old one.

————————————-

Other relevant posts:

>THE THREE SISTERS – CASEY OVERPASS, McGRATH HIGHWAY, RUTHERFORD AVE: MassDOT’s Credibility Crisis and the Need to Work Together

>FIX THE PROBLEM, NOT THE BRIDGE: How MassDOT Can Avoid Wasting $14 Million on the McGrath Highway

>LEVERAGING PUBLIC SPENDING FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT: Do Multiple Goals Make Projects Better — or Unmanageable? HEALTH IMPACT ASSESSMENTS (HIA) AND ADVOCACY: Useful Tool or Sophisticated Smoke Screen?

>GREEN LINE EXTENSION: State Needs To Make The Trains Run On Time

It was pretty amazing that Boston Transportation Department (BTD) Commissioner Tom Tinlin came to the annual Boston Bike program update two weeks ago.  (Nichol Freedman once again won over the audience with It was also amazing that he stayed for the whole meeting taking notes on every suggestion and complaint – and that he intends to follow up and then let people know what was done.

It’s even more amazing because it’s actually the Department of Public Works (DPW) that is supposedly in charge of building and maintaining city roads, not the BTD!  DPW Commissioner Joanne Massaro chairs, and her staff provides the engineering support for, the Public Improvement Commission which has the responsibility “to lay out, widen, relocate, alter, discontinue or rename public highways, and to order the making of specific repairs.”

But in Boston, for all the unevenness and incompleteness and frustrations of the process, it’s clearly the Transportation Department that is moving us towards a different kind of road system – and a significant reason for that is their relationship with the bicycling community.

Bicyclists are a small minority of the city’s travelers.  But they play a vanguard role in helping move us towards the kind of transportation system our urban area needs to prosper, and perhaps simply to survive, in coming decades.  It was the bicycling community that led the way towards Boston’s current adoption of a Complete Streets policy.  It was the bicycling community that is pushing for the expansion of a “greenway system” that will extend park-like landscaping into our neighborhoods while creating safe “corridors” for non-motorized travel and family recreation.  It was only after he started bicycling and the Boston Bikes program took off that Mayor Menino said that “the car is no longer king in Boston.”

We’re unlikely to ever get rid of cars.  Individualized motor vehicles are too convenient and serve too many functions to disappear – although they are likely to become more fuel efficient and smaller. But the long-term trend towards more vehicles per family is likely to continue, putting more cars on the road.  And the same mega trends reshaping cars are also pulling people into more urban areas – meaning that localized population density will increase and with that will come ever greater traffic congestion.  Today’s city streets are crowded and cross-town trips take a long time.  In the future, it will be worse.

Adding bicycle facilities to our road system makes it safer and more inviting not merely to bike but also to walk.  The pressure to rethink street design also opens opportunity to make it easier to get on and off buses or into and out of transit stations, which are the most important large-scale urban alternatives to using a car.  And the need to share the road slows down car drivers significantly improving their own (and everyone else’s) safety without (assuming intersection traffic lights are properly timed) decreasing “through put” volume or increasing trip duration.

The City’s Chief of Policy and Planning, Michael Kineavy, who also came and stayed for the entire evening at this year’s Boston Bike update, pointed to the BTD’s “relationship with the bicycling community as a model for other city departments of respectful interaction back and forth with a constituency, learning what works and what doesn’t.….[When an issue comes up] we get on the phone, we set up meetings not only with our own people but with people from the community who might have a different point of view and have the data to support it….Moving forward is not just about what we in the city apparatus think is best but what WE, collectively, want and think is best.”

There are probably lots of back-room tensions – or at least discussions – within City Hall about which department should have what role in designing street plans, interacting with the public, or evaluating how well things are working.  Commissioner Massaro’s predecessor at  DPW, Dennis Royer, left his unit out of serious contention for leadership in these issues – among his first statements upon taking the job was that “traffic calming is an oxymoron” and “we’ll never have raised intersections while I’m here.”  He, along with many other city officials, was openly hostile to bicyclists.

But those days are gone, although some of the people who felt that way are probably still around.  From a citizen’s perspective, it isn’t important which city Department does what, so long as the result is increased community livability.  Perhaps the DPW can make a positive contribution to the transportation transformation Boston is beginning – there certainly is enough work to go around!  But to do that, she’ll have to find ways to copy the model of public interaction displayed by the Transportation Department – starting with the bicycling community!

Related Posts:

> Boston Bicycling: Five Changes To Move From Better To World Class

> Boston Needs Bureaucracy

> Making Boston A World Class WALKing City

It was pretty amazing that Boston Transportation Department (BTD) Commissioner Tom Tinlin came to the annual Boston Bike program update two weeks ago.  (Nichol Freedman once again won over the audience with It was also amazing that he stayed for the whole meeting taking notes on every suggestion and complaint – and that he intends to follow up and then let people know what was done.

It’s even more amazing because it’s actually the Department of Public Works (DPW) that is supposedly in charge of building and maintaining city roads, not the BTD!  DPW Commissioner Joanne Massaro chairs, and her staff provides the engineering support for, the Public Improvement Commission which has the responsibility “to lay out, widen, relocate, alter, discontinue or rename public highways, and to order the making of specific repairs.”

But in Boston, for all the unevenness and incompleteness and frustrations of the process, it’s clearly the Transportation Department that is moving us towards a different kind of road system – and a significant reason for that is their relationship with the bicycling community.

Bicyclists are a small minority of the city’s travelers.  But they play a vanguard role in helping move us towards the kind of transportation system our urban area needs to prosper, and perhaps simply to survive, in coming decades.  It was the bicycling community that led the way towards Boston’s current adoption of a Complete Streets policy.  It was the bicycling community that is pushing for the expansion of a “greenway system” that will extend park-like landscaping into our neighborhoods while creating safe “corridors” for non-motorized travel and family recreation.  It was only after he started bicycling and the Boston Bikes program took off that Mayor Menino said that “the car is no longer king in Boston.”

We’re unlikely to ever get rid of cars.  Individualized motor vehicles are too convenient and serve too many functions to disappear – although they are likely to become more fuel efficient and smaller. But the long-term trend towards more vehicles per family is likely to continue, putting more cars on the road.  And the same mega trends reshaping cars are also pulling people into more urban areas – meaning that localized population density will increase and with that will come ever greater traffic congestion.  Today’s city streets are crowded and cross-town trips take a long time.  In the future, it will be worse.

Adding bicycle facilities to our road system makes it safer and more inviting not merely to bike but also to walk.  The pressure to rethink street design also opens opportunity to make it easier to get on and off buses or into and out of transit stations, which are the most important large-scale urban alternatives to using a car.  And the need to share the road slows down car drivers significantly improving their own (and everyone else’s) safety without (assuming intersection traffic lights are properly timed) decreasing “through put” volume or increasing trip duration.

The City’s Chief of Policy and Planning, Michael Kineavy, who also came and stayed for the entire evening at this year’s Boston Bike update, pointed to the BTD’s “relationship with the bicycling community as a model for other city departments of respectful interaction back and forth with a constituency, learning what works and what doesn’t.….[When an issue comes up] we get on the phone, we set up meetings not only with our own people but with people from the community who might have a different point of view and have the data to support it….Moving forward is not just about what we in the city apparatus think is best but what WE, collectively, want and think is best.”

There are probably lots of back-room tensions – or at least discussions – within City Hall about which department should have what role in designing street plans, interacting with the public, or evaluating how well things are working.  Commissioner Massaro’s predecessor at  DPW, Dennis Royer, left his unit out of serious contention for leadership in these issues – among his first statements upon taking the job was that “traffic calming is an oxymoron” and “we’ll never have raised intersections while I’m here.”  He, along with many other city officials, was openly hostile to bicyclists.

But those days are gone, although some of the people who felt that way are probably still around.  From a citizen’s perspective, it isn’t important which city Department does what, so long as the result is increased community livability.  Perhaps the DPW can make a positive contribution to the transportation transformation Boston is beginning – there certainly is enough work to go around!  But to do that, she’ll have to find ways to copy the model of public interaction displayed by the Transportation Department – starting with the bicycling community!

Related Posts:

> Boston Bicycling: Five Changes To Move From Better To World Class

> Boston Needs Bureaucracy

> Making Boston A World Class WALKing City

It was only a few years ago that Bicycling Magazine called Boston the nation’s worst place for cyclists.  Senior city officials were openly hostile to bicycling.  The media portrayed cyclists as wild messengers cursing at everyone and running over pedestrians.

Then Hub On Wheels revealed that there was a mainstream constituency for bicycling.  The Mayor got a bike and discovered that bicycles were fun and cyclists were friendly.  LivableStreets Alliance started pulling the city’s advocacy groups together while pushing for the bike lanes and cycle tracks previously scorned by the “vehicular cyclists.”  Nicole Freedman was hired to create the Boston Bike program which has significantly improved road facilities, expanded access, and promoted skill training.  The Mayor proclaimed that “the car is no longer kind.”  And the Hubway bike share program made cycling part of the everyday routines of thousands of ordinary people.

Things are a lot better.  Boston has just been awarded Silver Status by the League of American Bicyclist’s “Bicycle Friendly City” program.  It’s simply amazing how many people are now out on the road – there are even bike traffic jams at certain intersections!  Who would have imagined we’d move so far in such a short time!

Of course, not everything was done perfectly and frustrating short comings abound.  Bicycling is not yet mainstream; we haven’t yet hit the tipping point.

So what would push Boston from being “better” to reaching the “world class” status the Mayor has proclaimed as our goal?  The “Six E’s” strategy includes Encouragement, Education, Enforcement, as well as Evaluation.  These are all important.  (I particularly love the Roll It Forward free-bike and the Youth Instruction programs focused on low-income kids.)  But I believe the strongest foundation for real progress comes from the fifth and sixth “Es” – Engineering and Equity.  Some percentage of the population will never get on a bicycle.  But there are a lot of people who would be happy to ride if they felt safe – primarily meaning safe from cars.  It’s true of baseball fields and bike facilities (and highways!) – if you build it, they will come.

The projects that will move us to the next level have to be safe and easy enough to make bicycling attractive even to cautious riders.  They have to serve both functional and recreational needs – as useful for commuting as for weekend family outings.  They have to make bicycling an even more visible part of our transportation mix.  And they have to be done well.

Here are five possibilities – I urge readers to suggest possible others:

• Expand Hubway
• Create the Bicycle Network
• Develop Open Streets Program
• Connect With The Regional Greenways
• Prioritize Bicycling, Walking, & Transit

————————————————

1)      Expand Hubway

In its first season, Hubway bikes were used for over 140,000 trips – at least 10% of which replaced a car ride.  Users, most of whom were not previously regular cyclists, overwhelmingly chose Hubway because it was a faster, more enjoyable, environmentally and personally healthy mode than the alternatives.  There were 61 Hubway stations last year and the city hopes to add another 20 or 30 this year, reaching outward from the current base.   As Hubway expands, so will the proportion of the population that sees – and does – bicycling as an “ordinary” activity.  The challenge is to not only increase the density of stations in existing areas but also speed up its expansion into areas of likely use – adjacent neighborhoods, along the rivers and harbor, and around our parks.  Do it properly, but do it – expand Hubway!

2)      Create the Bicycle Network

Boston is in the final stages of creating a 20-plus year Master Plan for bicycle facilities.  In the past five years, the city has gone from 150 feet to 50 miles of bike lanes.  Future plans are to create up to 417 miles of marked bike routes, including 95 miles of off-road shared paths (including lots of DCR park paths), 64 miles of traffic-separated buffered bike lanes, 95 miles of “regular” bike lanes, 86 miles of low-traffic “neighborways,” and 77 miles of sharrowed streets.  The challenge is to make sure that the Master Plan is actually implemented – moving from the first stage of opportunistically placing bike markings wherever streets were being repair to a second stage of deliberate installation of additional facilities to close gaps and create a highly useful network of connections within neighborhoods and from residential areas to commercial centers.

3)      Develop Open Streets Program

Bicycling is fun.  It’s healthy.  It brings people together.  It’s also a great business stimulus.  San Francisco has its monthly Sunday Streets festivals shutting down long roads in successive neighborhoods.  New York has Summer Streets program that shuts down nearly seven miles of Park Avenue on three Saturdays. And, of course, there is Bogotá, Columbia’s weekly ciclovia where about a third of the population (approximately 2 million people) walk, bike, dance, and play on over 75 miles of car-free streets.  In Boston, Circle The City – a partnership of LivableStreets Alliance, Emerald Necklace Conservancy, Boston Parks Advocates, the Boston Consortium for Food and Fitness, and the City of Boston – will have three Sunday events this coming summer, two based in Franklin Park and one on the Rose Kennedy Greenway.  The challenge is to expand these – perhaps by closing Storrow Drive early every Sunday morning, or getting neighborhood Main Street programs to successively sponsor them, or shutting some long roads like Dorchester Ave or Newberry Street.

4)      Connect With Regional Greenways

No city is an island.  Dealing with Boston’s traffic congestion, parking problems, and air pollution requires creating non-car alternatives for people commuting from the suburbs.  Rail and buses are the best, but bicycling is close behind.  We already have the Charles River paths and the Minuteman Bikeway – the nation’s first and the nation’s most heavily used bike paths.  But neither of these, nor the many other short stretches of park paths and other low-stress bikeways around the region, provides an uninterrupted route into the city.  There are too many gaps.  We need a connected web of routes suitable for both commuting and recreation by both experienced cyclists and families out for a weekend ride.   And they all need to converge on Boston, which therefore needs to play a central role in creating the regional system.  The challenge is getting agreement on which of the “missing links” provides the most leverage of existing resources and should be prioritized – and then making it happen!

5)      Prioritize Bicycling, Walking, & Transit

Boston, like MassDOT and many other municipalities in the metro area, now understand that bicycles have to be included in (most) road designs.  But, in too many cases, it is still seen as an “accommodation.”  However, our country has spent so many decades and so many billions of dollars prioritizing car facilities that creating a more balanced transportation system requires more than simply including bike (and pedestrian and transit) facilities.  They have to be prioritized.  The first concern of road design has to be “how can we maximize bicycle (and pedestrian) safety, convenience, and utility for all types of people?”  And only when that “best possible” design has been developed should attention turn to what can be done with the remaining space for cars.  Of course, there will have to be compromises along the way.  But the results are likely to be very different from what we now take for granted as a “normal” street – resulting not only in more bike-friendly and pedestrian-comfortable streets but also fewer and less serious car accidents!

——-

Other Related Posts:

> COMPLETE STREETS AS AN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY: The Green Beyond The Paint

> SMALL STEPS FORWARD: Improvements To Applaud, Improvements To Make

> Car-Free Sunday Streets; Night Light Follies; Priority Bus Lanes

> Making Boston A World Class WALKing City

It was only a few years ago that Bicycling Magazine called Boston the nation’s worst place for cyclists.  Senior city officials were openly hostile to bicycling.  The media portrayed cyclists as wild messengers cursing at everyone and running over pedestrians.

Then Hub On Wheels revealed that there was a mainstream constituency for bicycling.  The Mayor got a bike and discovered that bicycles were fun and cyclists were friendly.  LivableStreets Alliance started pulling the city’s advocacy groups together while pushing for the bike lanes and cycle tracks previously scorned by the “vehicular cyclists.”  Nicole Freedman was hired to create the Boston Bike program which has significantly improved road facilities, expanded access, and promoted skill training.  The Mayor proclaimed that “the car is no longer kind.”  And the Hubway bike share program made cycling part of the everyday routines of thousands of ordinary people.

Things are a lot better.  Boston has just been awarded Silver Status by the League of American Bicyclist’s “Bicycle Friendly City” program.  It’s simply amazing how many people are now out on the road – there are even bike traffic jams at certain intersections!  Who would have imagined we’d move so far in such a short time!

Of course, not everything was done perfectly and frustrating short comings abound.  Bicycling is not yet mainstream; we haven’t yet hit the tipping point.

So what would push Boston from being “better” to reaching the “world class” status the Mayor has proclaimed as our goal?  The “Six E’s” strategy includes Encouragement, Education, Enforcement, as well as Evaluation.  These are all important.  (I particularly love the Roll It Forward free-bike and the Youth Instruction programs focused on low-income kids.)  But I believe the strongest foundation for real progress comes from the fifth and sixth “Es” – Engineering and Equity.  Some percentage of the population will never get on a bicycle.  But there are a lot of people who would be happy to ride if they felt safe – primarily meaning safe from cars.  It’s true of baseball fields and bike facilities (and highways!) – if you build it, they will come.

The projects that will move us to the next level have to be safe and easy enough to make bicycling attractive even to cautious riders.  They have to serve both functional and recreational needs – as useful for commuting as for weekend family outings.  They have to make bicycling an even more visible part of our transportation mix.  And they have to be done well.

Here are five possibilities – I urge readers to suggest possible others:

• Expand Hubway
• Create the Bicycle Network
• Develop Open Streets Program
• Connect With The Regional Greenways
• Prioritize Bicycling, Walking, & Transit

————————————————

1)      Expand Hubway

In its first season, Hubway bikes were used for over 140,000 trips – at least 10% of which replaced a car ride.  Users, most of whom were not previously regular cyclists, overwhelmingly chose Hubway because it was a faster, more enjoyable, environmentally and personally healthy mode than the alternatives.  There were 61 Hubway stations last year and the city hopes to add another 20 or 30 this year, reaching outward from the current base.   As Hubway expands, so will the proportion of the population that sees – and does – bicycling as an “ordinary” activity.  The challenge is to not only increase the density of stations in existing areas but also speed up its expansion into areas of likely use – adjacent neighborhoods, along the rivers and harbor, and around our parks.  Do it properly, but do it – expand Hubway!

2)      Create the Bicycle Network

Boston is in the final stages of creating a 20-plus year Master Plan for bicycle facilities.  In the past five years, the city has gone from 150 feet to 50 miles of bike lanes.  Future plans are to create up to 417 miles of marked bike routes, including 95 miles of off-road shared paths (including lots of DCR park paths), 64 miles of traffic-separated buffered bike lanes, 95 miles of “regular” bike lanes, 86 miles of low-traffic “neighborways,” and 77 miles of sharrowed streets.  The challenge is to make sure that the Master Plan is actually implemented – moving from the first stage of opportunistically placing bike markings wherever streets were being repair to a second stage of deliberate installation of additional facilities to close gaps and create a highly useful network of connections within neighborhoods and from residential areas to commercial centers.

3)      Develop Open Streets Program

Bicycling is fun.  It’s healthy.  It brings people together.  It’s also a great business stimulus.  San Francisco has its monthly Sunday Streets festivals shutting down long roads in successive neighborhoods.  New York has Summer Streets program that shuts down nearly seven miles of Park Avenue on three Saturdays. And, of course, there is Bogotá, Columbia’s weekly ciclovia where about a third of the population (approximately 2 million people) walk, bike, dance, and play on over 75 miles of car-free streets.  In Boston, Circle The City – a partnership of LivableStreets Alliance, Emerald Necklace Conservancy, Boston Parks Advocates, the Boston Consortium for Food and Fitness, and the City of Boston – will have three Sunday events this coming summer, two based in Franklin Park and one on the Rose Kennedy Greenway.  The challenge is to expand these – perhaps by closing Storrow Drive early every Sunday morning, or getting neighborhood Main Street programs to successively sponsor them, or shutting some long roads like Dorchester Ave or Newberry Street.

4)      Connect With Regional Greenways

No city is an island.  Dealing with Boston’s traffic congestion, parking problems, and air pollution requires creating non-car alternatives for people commuting from the suburbs.  Rail and buses are the best, but bicycling is close behind.  We already have the Charles River paths and the Minuteman Bikeway – the nation’s first and the nation’s most heavily used bike paths.  But neither of these, nor the many other short stretches of park paths and other low-stress bikeways around the region, provides an uninterrupted route into the city.  There are too many gaps.  We need a connected web of routes suitable for both commuting and recreation by both experienced cyclists and families out for a weekend ride.   And they all need to converge on Boston, which therefore needs to play a central role in creating the regional system.  The challenge is getting agreement on which of the “missing links” provides the most leverage of existing resources and should be prioritized – and then making it happen!

5)      Prioritize Bicycling, Walking, & Transit

Boston, like MassDOT and many other municipalities in the metro area, now understand that bicycles have to be included in (most) road designs.  But, in too many cases, it is still seen as an “accommodation.”  However, our country has spent so many decades and so many billions of dollars prioritizing car facilities that creating a more balanced transportation system requires more than simply including bike (and pedestrian and transit) facilities.  They have to be prioritized.  The first concern of road design has to be “how can we maximize bicycle (and pedestrian) safety, convenience, and utility for all types of people?”  And only when that “best possible” design has been developed should attention turn to what can be done with the remaining space for cars.  Of course, there will have to be compromises along the way.  But the results are likely to be very different from what we now take for granted as a “normal” street – resulting not only in more bike-friendly and pedestrian-comfortable streets but also fewer and less serious car accidents!

——-

Other Related Posts:

> COMPLETE STREETS AS AN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY: The Green Beyond The Paint

> SMALL STEPS FORWARD: Improvements To Applaud, Improvements To Make

> Car-Free Sunday Streets; Night Light Follies; Priority Bus Lanes

> Making Boston A World Class WALKing City

I wear a bike helmet.  Always.  Every time I get on a bike.  I don’t think that the helmet will keep me from having an accident, just that it will protect me from serious head injury if I do.

It’s likely that people who cycle like I do – regular commuters with enough experience and confidence to ride within busy traffic – suffer the most severe injuries.  I don’t want to be one of those statistics.  As my daughter (the doctor!) says about helmetless speedsters, “I hope they’re carrying an organ donor card.”

But avoiding injury is not my main motivation for cycling.  In addition to being cheaper and often faster than any other mode of urban commuting (as well as less polluting and more energy efficient), it helps me control my weight, stay fit, sleep better at night, have more energy the rest of the day, almost always puts me in a better mood – and is simply fun to do.  It keeps me healthy – body and soul.  I think it would be good for society if more of us biked instead of drove for at least the 25% of daily trips that are less than a mile long, if not for the 40% that are less than two miles and the 50% of daily commutes of less than five miles.

Safety and health:  two goals – the issue is how to pursue both at the same time.  Safety usually is given first place – although it seems as much from fear of getting sued as anything else. And given the profit-driven insanity of both our health insurance and liability systems, I don’t blame bike clubs bike  or sponsors of cycling events for requiring that all participants wear helmets.

However, regardless of my personal proclivity, I don’t think it’s a good idea for governments to require that everyone wear a helmet.  Based on my own decades of bicycling around Boston, it seems that the biggest improvement in drivers’ acceptance of my presence – and therefore of my safety – happens when there are more cyclists on the road.  I’ve also seen the “numbers vs. accident rate” graphs from other cities, which reinforce the “safety comes from numbers” message.  And while it seems to be that a higher percentage of cyclists are wearing helmets these days than when I started, I’ve always assumed that requiring helmets would discourage some percentage of people from using a bike, which would both reduce safety and the public health benefits of physical activity.

“Assumed.”  “Thought.” “Felt.” “Experienced.”  – But I didn’t know.  Fortunately, it turns out that a lot of relevant research has been done on the topic.  With the help of Anne Lusk (Research Scientist, Harvard School of Public Health) and Price Armstrong (Program Manager, Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition/MassBike), we’ve pulled together 35 annotated citations, one of the most extensive lists I’ve found anywhere.   (The annotated links are visible by clicking on “Continue Reading…” below.)

The results are clear:  bike helmets reduce the severity of head injuries but not the frequency of accidents or the percentage of head injuries caused by those accidents.  Worse, the passage of mandatory helmet use laws have actually been associated with increased accident rates because they led to significant decreases in the overall number of bicyclists, undermining the “safety comes from numbers” reality, with particularly disastrous impact on bike share programs.

But simply opposing mandatory helmet laws is not enough.  Safety and health are both legitimate goals.  And we do not yet have enough evidence to fully evaluate strategies for pursuing them in mutually reinforcing ways.  However, it is time for the bicycling, public health, and public safety communities to move beyond traditional assumptions and find ways to further test and analyze the impact of the following:

1)      Stepping up efforts to create safer bicycle facilities that have been shown to increase the number of “traffic intolerant” bicyclists and reduce crashes, such as traffic-separated cycle tracks, buffered bike lanes, and low-traffic “neighborways.”

2)      Conducting a public relations campaign that highlights the health, environmental, economic, and travel-time benefits of bicycling for both car drivers and bicyclists.

3)      Conducting a campaign educating drivers about safer methods of interacting with bicyclists, and educating cyclists about safer ways of interacting with cars.  The cyclist component could be part of an effort to publicize the value, and increase the availability, of bicycling skill training workshops and classes – whose graduates are also more likely to wear helmets.  (Although such a campaign would draw on the principles of “Share the Road” programs, several people have suggested that the term “Share the Road”  not be used as it can increase the public perception of bicycling as dangerous and sometimes causes a backlash from car drivers who don’t think they should have to share the roads with bicyclists.  San Francisco messages around “co-existing.”)

4)      Conduct a public relations campaign to encourage voluntary helmet wearing – which has been shown to both increase the percentage of people using helmets but also discourage cycling (although not as much as a mandatory helmet requirement) because it reinforces the public perception of bicycling as dangerous.

Hopefully, we can accumulate enough data to make intelligent choices that encourage more “ordinary” and traffic-intolerant people to regularly bicycle (including children and the elderly) while reducing the likelihood of injury-causing accidents, and lowering the severity of head and other injuries if an accident occurs.

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(Note: I do support requiring and enforcing laws mandating front & back night lights since it reduces the risk of getting hit by a car by making it easier for drivers to see cyclists, and there is no evidence that their requirement will reduce the number of bicyclists.  Personally, I’m also fanatic about wearing shiny yellow jackets with as much reflective tape as will stick on.  It kills any hope of being a fashionista, but it makes me feel safer.)

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Keep It Simple.  Focus.  You can’t walk and tie your shoes at the same time.  Projects are much easier to manage, and it is easier to hold project managers accountable, if there is a single and explicit goal.  Transparency is vital to maintain public trust in government, and it is best accomplished when the line from spending to result is clear and straightforward.

On the other hand, life is complicated, everything is connected, and the need for improvement is enormous.  Every project impacts its audience, and the world, in complex and multiple ways.  Given the scarcity of funds and the magnitude of the problems facing us, doesn’t it make sense to leverage every opportunity to create as much positive change as possible – and to increase the odds of overall success by being explicit about each of the top priority goals even if they relate to different issues?

Furthermore, creating a coherent and effective solution to a problem often requires dealing with an enormous breath of complexity.  Creating a “one stop shopping” approval process capable of providing “rapid decisions” for business developers is a common government goal that requires enormous inter-organizational coordination behind the unified application form.  Boston’s office of “urban mechanics” is creating simple and direct methods for citizens to interact with local government, which is forcing significantly complex organizational changes in the internal operation of city hall.  And, as software developers seeking to create easy, self-explanatory user-interfaces have learned, the simpler the presentation the more complicated the programming that empowers it.  Maybe we need to accept that managing complexity, that having multiple explicit goals, is part of having effective public programs.

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What will save the MBTA – and our region – from the disastrous effects of proposed service reductions and price increases?  Over the past few years, in response to the demand for “reform before revenue,” innovative T leadership has significantly improved efficiency, squeezed more out of available resources, and improved communications with the public.

There now seems to be general agreement that the key issue is revenue both for capital and operating costs.  The T is not only saddled with the highest rate of debt of any major city transit system, it is also burdened with deteriorating old equipment that is costly to maintain.  At a minimum, the T needs debt relief, if not an infusion of capital for upgrading, as well as a replacement for the failed “piece of the sales tax” strategy for supplementing fares as a way to cover operating costs.

What will it take for the state’s political leadership to overcome their fear of provoking anti-tax backlash and provide the needed help?  Election year realities are that politicians are unlikely to do anything unless outside groups create enough political space to reduce the risk by fostering a public perception that the situation is a crises, that operations are now better managed, and that new revenues are the appropriate solution.  Even then, it will take some courage for Administration and state Legislative leaders to act – the Patrick Administration’s previous “trial balloon” discussion of a possible increase in the gas tax met with so much push back that most politicians became very wary.  And we need them to be bold – to call for taking over the T’s debt (as was done when the Turnpike Authority was rolled into the new Mass Department of Transportation several years ago), providing new capital for system upgrades, and creating an adequate flow of operating funds.

We know that the cutbacks and fare hikes will reduce ridership.  So it makes sense that the public has been vocally protesting at every one of the open meetings the T has held around the region in recent weeks.  Low-income and inner-city residents will be particularly hurt, and their advocates have also been speaking up.  Similarly, we know that transit is an essential component of a balanced regional transportation system.  So it makes sense that transportation advocates have been sending letters and mobilizing their members.  And some local political leaders, most notably Boston Mayor Menino, have been speaking out.

But we haven’t heard nearly enough from the environmental, climate protection, and medical communities about the increases in pollution, greenhouse gases, asthma, obesity, diabetes, and other costly health problems that will inevitably result from a decrease in transit ridership.

And most of all, we haven’t heard from the business community.  If cars are the only way for people to get to work or to shop the current levels of congestion will look like a golden age.  It will be harder to get employees to move (or stay) here, including the young professionals who are the backbone of our economy.  Wages of low- and mid-range workers, particularly important to a service-oriented economy such as Boston’s will have to go up.  Former senior T manager, Peter O’Conner says that reducing T service makes as much sense, and will have a similar economic impact, as shutting I-93 each weekend or leaving the snow on Rte. 128 all winter.

“Until we recognize in an explicit and consequential way that the T’s operation, maintenance, and expansion are as important to our economic well-being as our electric, water and sewer, and life-safety infrastructure, as well as the other parts of our transportation infrastructure such as our roads, bridges, and airports, we are doomed to go around and around in this debate about public transportation in an ever-accelerating ‘death spiral.’…we will have, sadly, been the agents of our own economic contraction.”  (from Commonwealth  Magazine)

Transit users and advocates for a variety of issues have to keep pushing.  Their work is absolutely necessary, but unfortunately insufficient.  It seems that creating the political climate for action requires the vocal presence of the region and state’s business leadership.  If they remain silent, or remain only willing to play a quiet background role, they will have only themselves to blame for the bottom line results of a bankrupt T.

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Related previous postings include:

> SAVING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: Safe Routes To The “T”

> GREEN LINE EXTENSION: State Needs To Make The Trains Run On Time

> THE COMPLEX INGREDIENTS OF LIVABLE CITIES: Complete Streets to Interior Design, Transit to City Planning, Art to Education

The Cambridge City Council recently passed a home rule petition (HB3852)  asking the state Legislature to give it the authority to significantly increase the penalties to be paid by pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists for a wide variety of road violations.  Jaywalking fines would increase from $1 to $75.  Cyclists could be fined up to $75 for any of several violations, from lacking appropriate night-time lights and reflectors to extending the front fork beyond its original length.  (See below for full list of bicycling prohibitions.*)  Any vehicle (truck, car, or bike) ignoring a yield or stop sign or a blinking or solid red light could be fined up to $250.

A local group called TROMP (Travel Responsibility Outreach & Mentoring Project) proposed the bill. The Cambridge Bicycle Committee opposes it.

Rumors are also flying that Mayor Menino will propose a helmet law with stiff penalties.  Some public health people support it; most bike advocates are opposed.

Are passing laws and increasing penalties the best way to improve street safety?  Maybe it is good strategy in some situations but not others.  Perhaps there are many situations in which changing the road’s infrastructure (e.g. creating “complete streets” or using traffic calming to lower speeds to no more than 20 mph) are more likely to change behavior and/or improve safety. It turns out that, in fact, we actually know a lot about this issue.

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A while ago, following the fatal collapse of some ceiling panels in the Big Dig tunnels, Commonwealth magazine published interviews with local pundits about what went wrong with the management and public relations aspects of the gargantuan, 30-year project.  Some of the issues they raise include the need for:

• A strong leader and management team within the appropriate state agency with sufficient independence, power and talent to manage the contractor as well as keep the project from becoming a patronage dumping ground.
• Regular and honest outreach to keep the public informed and supportive as the project, and its budget, evolve.
• An exit strategy with the contractor if the work doesn’t meet expectations and a “succession” plan in place for others to finish the job if needed.

But there is another perspective that is equally important – at least to those of us who have spent our lives working for progressive social change.  From that perspective, the key issue is not project management or contract oversight.  The issue is how to maximize the project’s positive contribution to the livability and viability of our communities, the quality of our air and water, the sustainability of our resource use patterns, and the equitable distribution of the project’s costs and benefits.

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“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.”   “I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost

The two most important things about relatives, my mother used to say, are that you don’t get to choose them and that they take care of each other.  Back in the day, when most families were extended, you had no choice about going to grandma’s for Sunday dinner and you simply accepted that Uncle Al was loud, that Aunt Sarah was obnoxious, that Cousin Bob told bad jokes, and that each of the other people in the room were just who they were.  There was no option – family was your world:  for some of us, a significant part of our social life was the regular meeting of our “cousins’ club.”  At family gatherings, you learned not only that everyone was different but that it was possible to tolerate those differences and still share a meal – one of the fundamental understandings that underpin both families and democracy.

Today, despite some trends to the contrary and some lucky anomalies, most of our families are smaller and more scattered.  Many of us have compensated by creating alternative families of close friends, often forming when everyone in the group is first having children.  And those children, as they grow up, are now using email and social networks to maintain those connections, staying close to childhood and college friends.  But these extended friendship circles are composed of people we’ve chosen to be with.  Wonderful as they are, they do not force us to accept the validity of random differences.

So where do we learn to accept the uncomfortable other – which is what people from different social networks or groups often feel like – as a legitimate part of our daily lives?  Where and how do we learn that we’re all in this together?

Schools, mass culture, and the workplace provide some social mixing.  But the space were we interact with the widest variety of others, the place most essential to fostering democratic respect in those interactions, is the public built environment  – the places where we walk, drive, shop, play, and hang out.  But space is not merely a physical phenomenon.  Government programs and policies are also a kind of space within which we function and interact with others.  In fact, the public sector is the most important space we have because it shapes both the built environment and the social context that shapes our lives.

There is a complete circle aspect of all this – acceptance of others is one of the bedrock cultural requirements for democracy; democracy is one of the drivers of good government; good government programs shape the spaces that influence our daily life and the cultural attitudes that emerge from it, including the acceptance of others.

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After years of effort, instead of holes in the sidewalk and pavement through which you could see the river below, the BU Bridge now has solid surfaces and (drum roll….) bike lanes!  It is a major victory for the Better Bridges campaign.

True: the bridge isn’t any wider than it was before, so the sidewalk is still too narrow.  There still isn’t a way to get from the Boston-side steps, over Storrow Drive, to the Charles River embankment.  On the Cambridge side, there still isn’t a way to safely walk under the bridge along the river bank rather than having to add to the confusion of the crazy Memorial Drive traffic circle.  The sudden incline on the curving entrance to the bridge from the stop-line on the Cambridge side is still dangerous for cyclists; and it would have been better if there were flexible bollards on the span separating the car and bike lanes.  Traffic congestion on the bridge isn’t significantly lower than before, but it’s clearly no worse despite there being only three car lanes instead of four – there is now one lane entering the bridge from either side, two lanes exiting on the other end.  (Advocates have been saying, for years, that the problem is in the intersections leading to the bridge, not the bridge itself – turns out we were right.)

But in many ways the area is both safer and more welcoming to a broader range of users than ever before – walkers, cyclists, people in wheelchairs, as well as those driving cars.  The extra right-turn lane off the bridge on to MIT-bound Memorial Drive is gone, no longer allowing cars to speed through a hidden crosswalk even when pedestrians thought it was safe to step out.  The lighting works, illuminating both the span and the river for the benefit of night-time rowers.  The view remains totally magnificent.  And the !bike lanes!  Amazing!! What an improvement!!!

Winning Campaigns

This victory didn’t happen by accident, or simply through the generosity of government officials.  Advocates fought long and hard to gain this “Better Bridge.”  How did it happen?  How did we win?  There are some key lessons from this phase of the multi-year “Better Bridges” campaign, both about how to fight and what we are fighting against.

As with most of life, successful advocacy requires balancing.  Advocates need to be involved with both movement building and organizational development.  They need to both mobilize public anger and channel it into support for negotiated partial-victory compromises.  The more urgent the issue they’re dealing with the more they need to demand immediate action while understanding how long it takes to push through significant reforms when the situation hasn’t yet reached crisis levels.  They need to work within coalitions while finding ways to build their own group.  They need enough technical expertise to critique official plans while developing trusting relationships with people inside the same agencies they are agitating against.

The following divides key BU Bridge Campaign lessons into three overlapping areas.  The first two discuss Advocacy strategy and the third examines the engineering assumptions that still underlie most transportation planning.

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It’s both a cliché and a powerful insight to remember that the solution you come up with depends on which problem you are trying to solve.  A road builder sees problems in terms of the need for movement – usually meaning car capacity – and comes up the road expansion solutions.  A transportation planner – as well as a livable communities developer – sees problems in terms of using the built environment as a way to improve peoples’ quality of life and comes up with solutions that stress human interaction.

The elevated section of the McGrath/O’Brien Highway from the Cambridge border to Somerville’s Highland Avenue is old and deteriorating.  Working with people from the more than 20 land development and road planning efforts already happening along the corridor,   LivableStreets Alliance coordinated discussions that endorsed five core value/vision statements for what should happen in this area:

• Reunite neighborhoods cut apart by the highway.
• Humanize the space by lowering traffic speeds, reducing noise and pollution, narrowing lane width, and reducing the current six (or more) lanes to four.
• Make traveling across and along the corridor safer and more inviting for pedestrians, bicyclists, and bus riders.
• Add more trees, grass, storm-water drainage, and other green features.
• Encourage local retail and job-creating businesses; including crafts-based and green-economy enterprises.

To its credit, MassDOT (through its consultants) is also involving the community in a detailed analysis to decide what to do.  Called “Grounding McGrath,” the study is trying to ground future plans in both facts and desires and potentially represents another sign of “the new MassDOT” evolution from a one-dimensional focus on increasing car capacity to an understanding – and practice – based on the interaction of transportation systems with community wellbeing.

Or not.

At the same time that it’s conducting the Grounding McGrath study, MassDOT is also about to spend million hiring a contractor to “repair” the overpass segment of the McGrath/O’Brien highway – a repair intended to keep the current road functional for another 10 to 20 years.   This significantly undercuts the value of the community-involving study process (and insults the citizens who are donating their time to work on it) by making it impossible to implement the study results using the currently-available Accelerated Bridge Program funding.  And if the repairs are actually just as “temporary” as MassDOT says, it is a waste of precious money that could be used to push the study forward and begin making some of the transformational improvements to the corridor’s roads that just about everyone agrees will be needed no matter what future alternatives are selected.  Worst of all, given the current  fiscal realities, it’s not clear if “kicking the problem down the road” will dump it into a period when there is insufficient money to do anything – and then we’ll really have to start dealing with falling concrete, if not falling cars.

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This post was meant to be about three of the old highways now falling down and the increasingly bitter policy disagreements within nearby communities over what to do about it.  But as I thought more about these debates, it became clear that a significant secondary theme is that so few people trust the traffic engineers or their organizations – starting with total lack of belief in the validity of the traffic prediction models being used by MassDOT.  The models feel like such opaque black boxes of unknown facts and hidden formulas that they simply feel like fantasy projections of agency desires – and there is little trust of those desires either.  Applauding the projections that support one’s position and denouncing the rest is neither useful, logical, nor fair. The problem is that without analysis it’s all guesswork and power plays, which is not likely to end up creating optimal outcomes either.

The distrust is so deep that people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater – refusing to accept that the models’ results have any usefulness, even in situations where they actually can help compare alternatives.  The three projects each involve analysis of comparisons, and in comparison situations it doesn’t matter if the numbers are wildly inaccurate – each alternative will be distorted in the same manner giving some legitimacy to the analysis of the differences, if any, between the options. Maybe it is a local result of public disgust at the Big Dig.  Maybe it’s that American culture is simply anti-government, a tendency the Tea Party car worshipers have successfully tapped. Maybe it’s that we’re in the middle of several levels of global transition from the automobile age into something else, and Transportation Departments around the world still represent so much of the archaic and destructive past practices.  Whatever…. The sad result is that MassDOT’s efforts to open up the public process all the way back to the conceptual stage – at least in locations where advocates are active and vocal – have degenerated into shouting matches between the already-convinced partisans.

The danger is that we become so divided that we seem to have lost our collective ability to push past those with a stake in maintaining the car-centric past; that we end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars – and ultimately billions of dollars – recreating the roads that we already know will not carry us into a better future.  Former Secretary of Transportation Jeff Mullan once said that in addition to creating one agency out of the five that were pushed together as part of transportation reform, one of MassDOT’s key challenges is regaining the trust of the public.  The merger has happened.  MassDOT has shown a new openness and ability to be innovative in both construction and operations, saving money while improving performance.  There is, of course, more to do – perhaps finding ways to open the black box of prediction and decision-making should be next.

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Q: Why do people live in cities?

A: Because that’s where all the other people are.

It’s really wonderful that Mayor Menino has a special group of “urban mechanics” finding ways to put new information technologies to work for the city.  Technology is very cool.  And fun.  And useful.  And has a huge impact.  I spent part of my life in high tech and even wrote a book ‘way back in 1996 called Civilizing Cyberspace:  Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway about how the emerging digital networks could be used to enhance or stifle democracy

But when it comes to the most important qualities of urban life, the future is behind us.  I don’t mean that we should return to the disease-ridden, economically brutal cities of the past.  Despite the Tea Party’s desire to dismantle our public safety nets and return to the competitive jungle of the pre-Progressive era, our world is much better because of the intervention of governments to provide clean water, require sewer systems, and to reduce the massacre of human wellbeing caused by unregulated markets.  But there are important aspects of past urban life that are worth preserving or recreating that emerge from the presence of both cohesive neighborhoods and unstructured diversity.

The basic fact is that we’re social beings.  We like being with each other; we need to be with each other – people kept in isolation go insane.  Although many people are eager to escape the social confines of small town stagnation, once in the city they seek community and alternative forms of extended family through friendship networks, church membership, or workplace social connections.

At the same time, because they are full of people from many different backgrounds, cities are where the action is…the new ideas, the jobs, economic opportunities, the chance to try new things and even re-invent yourself.  Cities are the engines of civilization, prosperity, and innovation.  Cities are where we bump into new people, people different from ourselves, and have our world’s expand; where new ideas emerge from the clash of differing opinions and facts; where capital and markets meet in the search for ways to profit from new needs.  Cities thrive on social friction – the sparks that emerge from the density of our interactions as we scrape against each other (a process hopefully softened by access to parks and other greenery).

Despite nearly a century of assumption that cities were dying and the more prosperous future lay in suburban growth, despite the horrendous urban destruction caused by the effort to make our landscape serve the needs of moving cars rather than socializing people, despite all the techno-stupid predictions that the Internet would make cities obsolete, urban populations continue to grow.  Cities are still where it’s at, in transportation as well as other fields.

And the cutting edge of urban innovation recaptures those qualities that make cities the center of civilization, the launching place for both personal growth and commercial profit.  Farmers’ markets that reconnect local agriculture with urban shoppers and that get expanded into kid-centered “play streets.” The spread of pedestrian malls and “shared space” with lots of benches to sit on and small shops that revitalize downtowns.  Bike sharing programs along with Community Greenways and bicycle boulevards that extend the tree canopy and parks deeper into neighborhoods, creating safe places for family recreation and everyday commuting.  Reforming parking space requirements.  Think of how the once-empty Kennedy Greenway began to fill with people when the emphasis changed from building edifices to food trucks, carousels, concerts, and play areas.  (Now, we need to get the city to make space for separated bike paths as well!)

Cities are the source of innovation partly because today’s problems are so multi-dimensional.  The location and type of housing and commercial development, shaped by zoning and building codes, impacts the ability of residents to access healthy foods and have daily opportunities to be physically active, which impacts their willingness to spend money in local stores as well as their family’s health and medical bills, as well as….  There is a complicated but incredibly powerful converging of issues – transportation, community development, education, environmental protection, public health, business promotion – and cities are both small enough to allow the cross-departmental interaction essential to addressing situations and large enough to have enough resources to begin doing something about it.

Cities (and states) are especially important these days because of the immobility of the federal government.  The rise of the radical right has ended the past century’s trend of moving innovation upward to centralized national authorities whose distance from local elites allowed for greater flexibility.  (Creating nationwide reforms also prevented business from playing states and cities against each other in a “race to the bottom” that Conservatives now seem to see as essential for competitive freedom.)  Today, once again left on their own, cities and states have once again turned into the laboratories of democracy, although within the increasingly tight limits allowed by the collapse of federal support.

It’s time to make lemon-aide from the sour fruit falling off the federal table.  It’s time to push forward — creatively, boldly, radically – at the local level.

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In the two weeks since I posted Part I, discussing the role of mass movement in creating the political space for issue-oriented advocacy, some of the Occupy Wall Street groups have begun digging in for the long haul by setting up systems and expelling troublemakers (something the New Left should have done before the FBI infiltrators led the way into violence).  At the same time, right wing commentators have begun trying to paint them as hooligans, if not agents of the devil.  (As usual, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby places himself at the bottom of the pig pen by asserting both – see “A Sinful ‘Occupation’” from 11/2/11.)

But no matter what happens to the Occupiers – whether they dribble out over the winter or explode into civil disobedience demonstrations – they have opened the door for more.  It may be less open-ended or idealistic, but the next phase will be translating the Occupy vision into a series of specific demands, then turning those into systemic reforms at both the policy and operational levels.  And accomplishing that will require sustained, organized effort – meaning strong, sophisticated organizations.

Advocacy requires developing the political will for government (or other key groups) to act in the desired manner, helping public agencies acquire the technical capacity to plan and implement the action, and then mobilizing public support behind the vision and program.  This doesn’t happen just because it ought to.  It takes slow, careful, exhausting work.

So this installment, Part II, describes the other two prime directives of social change – creating sustainable organizations and winning long-lasting, institutional reforms.

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(This was written in response to a challenge from MassDOT’s new chief, Transportation Secretary Richard Davey.  But it’s really about what all service, public sector, and non-profit organizations need to keep in mind when they begin a goal-setting process – and the types of goals that outside stakeholders and advocates should be insisting upon.)

A Sales VP in a high-tech firm I once worked at told his staff that “effort only counts in elementary school.  In the adult world, all that matters is results.”  Of course, the real issue is the nature of the results you are seeking in life, which I would maintain should include more than dollar-denominated bottom lines.  But the core idea, the value of numerically describing what you are trying to achieve, has a lot of merit.  Especially for organizations.

So I was very impressed when, during the Q&A session following his talk at the recent MassDOT “Moving Together” conference, newly appointed Secretary of Transportation, Richard Davey, boldly said that he wanted to move beyond general statements that MassDOT would “increase” or “promote” or “encourage” to explicit performance goals that his organization should aim for.  Setting specific performance targets is a powerful strategy – it focuses energy, prioritizes activity, and can prompt improved agency-wide collaboration.

It is also a courageous and risky move.  It can increase transparency and accountability – two things that most organizations do their best to avoid.  It forces you to be more honest and visible about your strengths and your weaknesses, your successes and your failures – there is less room to hide.  It creates a potentially more productive but a definitely more challenging managerial context – particularly because establishing the wrong types or targets can skew operations in extremely damaging ways.

Secretary Davey seemed not only willing to accept the challenge, but eager to raise the bar even further:  He then challenged the audience to help MassDOT define and set the goals it needs to reach.  If he is really serious about this, it is quite incredible – a huge statement about how far the state’s Department of Transportation has moved from the Big Dig era of incompetent arrogance since Governor Patrick was elected.

Of course, it’s easy to stand on the sidelines and give advice – including what follows, below.  But I’m sure that if Secretary Davey is open to it, the advocacy community would be very willing to partner with MassDOT to constructively help with the hard work needed to develop appropriate performance goals.

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Grass roots movements are the soil from which advocacy eventually grows.  As I write this, it’s not clear if the current wave of “Occupy Wall Street” groups will continue expanding to new cities, or if the arrests in NYC, Boston, and elsewhere have capped its growth.

For all my admiration of the Occupy movement, for all my hope that it grows and spreads, I have no illusions that it will amount to much in the short term. The movement is appealingly non-specific, although energized by enormous creativity and personal sacrifice.  At the same time, I have no doubt that it is the most important progressive political event of the past several years; the first major opening in left-of-center political space since post-Obama election disappointment sucked the life out of the remnants of the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, women’s, youth culture, and other movements that energized his campaign. It may be incoherent and ephemeral, but it is a significant crack in the ground underneath the marauding right-wing forces.

A true mass movement is amorphous, surprising, and uncontrolled.  It combines the deeply personal with the largest global.  It is a festive outpouring of popular feeling and creativity, combining hundreds of distinct threads of belief and demands into a temporarily beautiful flag that an unanticipatedly broad swath of the population begins to wave.  It exemplifies the collective self-organization of mutual support that anarchists dream about.  But its strengths are its undoing.  I sincerely hope the current Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow.  But at some point its lack of organization and focus, its existence at the fringe of most people’s daily lives no matter how supportive they may be, its inability to strategically formulate specific demands and negotiate acceptable compromises – not to mention the approaching winter – will cause it to lose steam.

No matter.  Now that the thick air of hopeless inertia has been dissipated, this upsurge will be followed by others.  As one of the early signs at Liberty Plaza in New York said, “The Beginning Is Near!”  The Occupy phenomena will energize other organizing efforts, such as the New Bottom Line coalition of unions, community groups, and progressive religious fighting the banking industry’s efforts to evict the homeowners they previously exploited.  Eventually, existing or new Advocacy groups will pick up the themes and translate them into well-defined goals, drawing on the participatory energy to give muscle to their own negotiations with decision-makers.  Politicians will shift their rhetoric and votes to accommodate the new constituency.  Artists will incorporate the look and feel of the movement into their work, and advertisers will use the images and words to attract customers.  What will be lost is the communal nature of the fun, the inclusiveness, the spontaneity, the individualized combination of personal and political, the open-ended promise of possible better futures.

These loses may be sad and their loss grieved, but they are inevitable.  Those of my generation who were fortunate enough to be involved with the movements of the 1960s and 1970s – civil rights (and the successor liberation) movements, anti-war (and the more complicated anti-imperialist) movements, the counter-culture (and more problematic sexual liberation) movements, the women’s and gay liberation movements, the anti-nuclear and deep ecology  movements – know that they transformed us both personally and politically.  For many of us, it was a permanent change that has shaped the course of our lives ever since.

But the dissipation of a movement’s personal transformative power is an inherent aspect of its growth, an unavoidable part of the process that moves dreams from hope to reality.  Movements, like waves, grow then subside as they hit the shore-line of the real world.  The nature of the post-upsurge reality – the degree to which it reflects the aspirations of the original movement – depends on the strength of that movement and the skill of the allied Advocates.  And their success depends on their ability to create sustainable organizations and win institutional reforms.

(This is Part I, discussing Movements and Movement Building.  Part II, to be posted in two weeks, will discuss Institutional Reform and Organizational Development.)

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We’ve all heard the argument: narrowing traffic lanes or removing parking will hurt local businesses.  And we’ve all read the research headlines that show the opposite is true:  widening sidewalks, adding trees, including bike lanes, expanding transit facilities, and making public space more multi-modal, people friendly, and environmentally rich increases the number of customers and the amounts they are willing to pay.  (WalkBoston has a wonderful tri-fold pamphlet called “Walking Is Good Business” that contains a treasure of statistics and citations, some of which I’ve used in this post.)  But we need to go beyond these generic arguments to focus attention on the three specific situations where Complete Streets provides significant support for economic development, and be able to articulate what those benefits may be.  The three are:

• Suburban Business and Adjoining Residential Areas
• Urban Neighborhoods
• First Generation, Inner-ring Highways

However, taking advantage of these opportunities requires that we also understand that Complete Streets is not a stand-alone strategy of including some combination of design elements in our transportation plans.   Complete Streets works for three reasons:

• added multi-modal facilities for users with all types of abilities using universal design techniques,
• improved aesthetics for a more inviting user experience, changing the “look and feel” of a space to be more inviting to come to and then linger within, and
• lower traffic speeds, not only through increased numbers of walkers and cyclists but also through the use of traffic calming techniques.

From a traffic engineering perspective, Complete Streets is simply inconceivable without at least some amount of Traffic Calming using road diets (reducing lane numbers and widths), tighter corners, bumps, chicanes, bulb-outs, intersection tables, and other self-enforcing structural features.  The point is that speed kills no matter if you are walking, cycling, or driving.  A recent  analysis in the British Medical Journal of 20 years of accident frequency on London roads using traffic calming to restrict speeds to 20 mph found an overall “41.9% reduction in road casualties….the percentage reduction was greatest in younger children …[with]no evidence of casualty migration to areas adjacent…Casualties of car occupants fell by half.”

In addition, Complete Streets is as much a community engagement and design process as a road layout result.  And it only works when complemented by appropriate parking, land use, environmental, resident stabilization, and other policies.

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We create ourselves and our society with what we’ve inherited from the past – from genes to hierarchies, from culture to social status.  Most important are the stories, the myths, we’ve been given that help give meaning to the physical world and prepare us for an unknowable future.  As those stories float between generations, among their anchors are the historic artifacts surrounding us in the built environment which embody our collective heritage and trigger our personal memories.

But obsessively preserving the past can be a barrier to dealing with today’s realities or preparing for tomorrow’s challenges.  While architects and preservationists seem to have come to some mutual understanding, it seems that the same is not true in the transportation sector.  As we begin dealing with the physical collapse of the infrastructure built for the passing automobile age, we face potentially damaging, and stupid, fights over what to do with its still-in-use artifacts.  To what extent can we change historic bridges and roadways so they can safely and efficiently serve pedestrians, bicyclists, and buses as well as the cars they were designed for?  To what extent can we acknowledge that the environment surrounding an old bridge has changed since it was constructed so that retaining walls that once served to hide polluted rivers can be changed to allow passers-by to see the now-beautiful water?

Some of these issues will need careful analysis and long discussions.  But for the bridges currently being rebuilt through the state’s Accelerated Bridge Program, the time is now.  It is going to be hard enough to create a 21^st century transportation system without fighting over the value of dysfunctional relics.  It is going to be important enough to remember where we’ve come from without mindlessly ripping things down.  We need to talk this through.  Soon.

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Compared with traffic engineers’ traditional focus on moving many cars as fast as possible, adoption of a “Complete Streets” policy at the state or local level is a huge improvement.  Designing streets to serve all modes and all types of users within those modes turns out to create a safer and more movement-efficient transportation system for everyone – including fewer car accidents and injuries!

(The key reason is that while a well-designed multi-modal road doesn’t significantly reduce car throughput – the number of cars passing through a stretch of pavement in a given time period – the presence of different kinds of users and the narrower lanes lead drivers to feel more comfortable going at lower speeds.  Meaning, as my mother used to say, that there is less “racing to the next red light.” And slower speeds equal fewer injuries – for everyone.)

But going from policy to reality requires several additional steps.  First, traffic engineers need to learn how to design a complete street – which requires an unsettling change from what they were once taught was best practice and what they’ve been required to do for their entire previous career.  Second, the design, approval, and construction processes need to be changed so that creating Complete Streets is the default approach in every project, with exceptions allowed only after high level approval for very limited and documented reasons.  Third, transportation agencies and governmental oversight groups need to set up meaningful accountability systems so that people at every level involved in road construction are held accountable for the final results.  Finally, in Massachusetts, where Complete Streets already is a state policy (as expressed in the 2009 Transportation Act that created MassDOT and in the state’s Highway Design Guidelines) the state needs to use all its leverage and power to get municipalities to move in the same direction despite their official exemption from Highway Design Guidelines for local projects funded under Chapter 90.

MassDOT has begun a Complete Streets training program for its own staff and, hopefully, municipal traffic officials.  But education is only the first step.  Next, MassDOT – like transportation agencies in every state trying to move into the 21^st century – has to find ways to move from knowledge to practice.

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“Health In Everything” is an important slogan, pointing out that personal and social well-being is impacted by every public policy and every aspect of our built and cultural environments.  Partly based on this insight, there is increasing interest in creating Health Impact Assessments (HIA) as part of the preparation for all kinds of policies and projects that don’t traditionally fall within the purview of public health – from transportation to commercial development, from agriculture to public safety.

For example, the 2009 enabling law creating the new Massachusetts Department of Transportation states that MassDOT “shall…institute and establish methods to implement the use of health impact assessments to determine the effect of transportation projects on public health and vulnerable populations for use by planners, transportation administrators, public health administrators and developers…”

The public health world has (for obvious reasons) happily embraced this trend, as have advocates in other fields looking to marshal the moral and police-power authority of public health to support their issues.  This enthusiasm is based on two assumptions:  that doing the “right thing” (meaning what the advocates are supporting) is also the “healthy thing.”  And that creating an HIA is a useful way for identifying, gain political traction for doing, and then making sure that the “healthy thing” is actually implemented.

The first assumption is usually true.  But the second needs a lot more discussion: the impact of an HIA depends on how a variety of questions get played out.

• What kind of HIA is being done?
• Why is the HIA being done?
• How formal and open is the evaluative process?
• What is being measured?
• How are things being measured?
• How will the HIA be used?

Depending on the answers, a Health Impact Assessment can be a powerful tool for collecting meaningful data that helps build support for positive decisions and actions, as well as provides a benchmark against which to measure how well the end result meets its stated goals. Or it can be a waste of time and energy, a bureaucratic way to defend decisions that were probably going to be made anyway, and that ends up diverting advocates limited resources from more useful strategies while providing cover for bad decisions and projects.

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The state has, once again, announced a multi-year delay in completing the Green Line Extension, from 2014 to 2018 or 2020 or even later.  Somerville is already mobilizing to fight.  But they should not be fighting alone.  All of us, around this entire region, have a deep stake in the outcome.  As national transportation policy gets warped by the Tea Party’s opposition to anything besides unregulated automobiles, and national transportation funding remains hostage to the right-wing goal of dismantling government, letting the Green Line Extension get “kicked down the road” will weaken our ability to push dozens of other pending transit projects to completion, whether they be rail road, subway/trolley, bus, and even off-road shared-up paths.  It will make our entire regional economy weaker, our environment dirtier, our options fewer.

We’re all in this together.  We need to unite to demand no more delays.  In fact, given that both construction and borrowing are cheaper now than they’ve been (or probably will be) for decades, it makes sense to speed up implementation and push all the way to Route 16 near Medford Square.  Putting construction off until only makes it more expensive – even the state estimates that a half-decade postponement will increase the estimated billion bill by at least 20% — about 0 million!

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Dear All:

To my surprise and pleasure, this blog has been selected as a finalist in the “Local Affairs” category of CBS Boston’s annual contest for “one of Boston’s most valuable blogs.”

But to get to the next step, I need people to vote for it.  You don’t have to be a Boston resident, or even a regular reader.  But according to the contest rules you can, and should, vote once every day!  Voting opened on 8/16 and runs through 9/9.

(Does this remind you of the Florida presidential election?)

Just go to:

http://boston.blogger.cbslocal.com/most-valuable-blogger/blog/1327-the-public-way-transportation-health-and-livable-communities/

And thanks.

Steve

It’s been fascinating and infuriating watching the Boston Herald try to conjure up anti-bicyclist hysteria.   Day after day, they throw out feelers, venomous outbursts testing the appeal of one angle after another: government waste, arrogant elites riding roughshod over ordinary people, preferential treatment of a minority group, discriminatory ticketing of car drivers while letting law-breaking cyclists get away with warnings, out-of-control youth treating the elderly with contempt….I’m sure that there is more to come.

Pandering to resentment is the Herald’s stock in trade.  Of course, it’s not them alone.  The modern model of nastiness was created by AM radio’s talk hate shows and spread to other media (and other countries) by Rupert’s Fox-media conglomerates.  They’re all anti-government, and jumping on the anti-immigrant bandwagon.  If this was any place beside Massachusetts we’d also be getting heavy doses of gay-bashing – but here the legalization of same-sex marriage has made it a non-issue.  (Has your marriage been having any extra trouble lately?  Has anyone you know suddenly woken up attracted to a different gender?)

My concern is not with the Herald itself – it’s been spewing garbage for years.  And I’m not even deeply concerned that its regressive views will significantly impact our state’s transportation agenda.  Unlike New York City, where anti-Bloomberg factions of the power elite are using opposition to bike lanes as a way to attack Mayor Mike, no important sectors of the local establishment see demonizing cyclists as a way to gain votes.  In fact, the importance of the health care industry in this area means that there is huge institutional support for the public health benefits of “active transportation” — which may be one reason why most area politicians and businesses are big bike supporters.  So far, only Congressman Capuano has publicly opposed road designs that divert unneeded road capacity into bike or pedestrian space.

(The lack of local elite opposition to active transportation may be why the Globe backed off from its own forays’ into anti-bicycling nonsense, which probably were just an effort by local editors to please their superiors in the New York Times which seems to be leaning towards the anti-Bloomberg faction in the Big Apple’s intra-elite faction-fights.)

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