Over at Minnesota Monitor, I saw something that reminded me of my college years. As a University of Minnesota alum, I remember getting around Minneapolis (and St. Paul) with my U-Pass. Even if I had one I both didn't know the history or really understand how beneficial they could be:
Each year, sales of the bus/light rail pass have steadily climbed. In its first fall semester -- the system's busiest time of the year -- 8,250 U-Passes were purchased. The following fall saw 11,628. In general, the numbers have continued to jump; 20,439 U-Passes were bought in the first semester of 2007.
Some university officials are touting the milestone and its environmental benefits. Originally, the U-Pass was supported through a $5.5 million federal grant for Congestion Mitigation Air Quality, "aimed at improving air quality and reducing congestion on Twin Cities roadways," a U of M statement reads. Since then, the program has become self-sustaining. Some university officials claim it has led to an estimated reduction of 114,000 vehicle miles a day, while 1,500 tons of carbon monoxide emissions has been eliminated.
Minneapolis/St.Paul, like a lot of other second-tier cities, really struggles with public transportation. It's just not realistic to not have a car if you live there (although I know a few people who get by without one). The bus system is okay, but it's hard for non-residents to figure out, the only train mass transit goes from the Mall of America to downtown, and the sprawl has gotten to the point where a 45 minute driving commute is considered good. But the one thing they've done well is giving students the opportunity to take advantage of the bus system. This is in part because they had to.
Parking around the University of Minnesota, unless you're on the St. Paul campus, is expensive and hard to find. Because the school is so large and located right in the city, it also has a big commuter student contingent. The U-Pass is a good step toward reducing emissions, but the twin cities area also has to work on some serious investment in public transit.
On a separate angle of the demise of congestion pricing, suburban triumphalist blogger Brian Beutler is crowing about New York's minor, and hopefully temporary, environmental setback. He sneers, "Mark my words, California, land of big cars and suburbs beyond the horizon, will someday have a more impressive environmental record on a per capita basis than your precious, much vaunted boroughs."
That's cute. But that doesn't make it so. While California has every right to brag about its smart steps on raising auto emissions standards, New York, by virtue of its density, walkabiilty, and extensive mass transit system, will stay way below California in emissions per capita, whether or not New York ever passes Bloomberg's congestion pricing proposal. And do you think congestion pricing is coming to L.A. any time soon? Somehow I doubt it.
I've long thought of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg as his predecessor's doppelganger. While Rudy Giuliani notoriously politicized policy-making by appointing cronies and polarized the city with his vindictive attitude, Bloomberg has appointed capable civil servants and pushed mostly technocratic, if sometimes ill-conceived, plans.
But Bloomberg shares Giuliani's megalomaniacal streak. (I mean who titles their autobiography Bloomberg on Bloomberg?)
Case in point: Bloomberg failed to marshal support in the New York State Senate to pass his congestion pricing plan. And The New York Timesreports that his high-handed attitude in meeting with legislators only decreased the chances of it passing:
In a tense meeting on Monday, testy exchanges erupted between the mayor and the Democratic state senators he was trying to win over. At one point, according to several people present, Mr. Bloomberg told the senators that his administration had sent plenty of information about his plan in the mail, and that it was not his fault if they had not read it.
“If the mayor came in with one vote, he left with none,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat.
“His posture was not ingratiating,” he said. “He says he doesn’t know politics, and he certainly bore that out by the way he behaved.”
It's too bad that Bloomberg let his ego get in the way of passing his sensible proposal.
A neat little story from The Washington Post today points to an alarming phenomenon: the lack of sidewalks throughout growing American communities. The Post focuses on Loudon County, Virginia, a D.C. exurb that is one of the fastest growing counties in the country. The Post reports that,
A survey of 840 miles of roads in Loudoun found that 14 percent had sidewalks.... The result is a piecemeal network of sidewalks and trails that begin and end haphazardly, influenced by the date or parameters of developers' contracts. Many times, there are no formal paths between neighborhoods and nearby shopping centers, parks or schools.
Consequently pedestrians find themselves undertaking perilous journeys across six-lane roads without the benefit of a crosswalk, traipsing along narrow road shoulders and other dangerous endeavors to go even the shortest of distances. Although many local governments have begun to address this issue (Loudon started requiring sidewalks or bike trails in new developments in the 1990s), it shouldn't be left to the whims of local officials. The necessity of reducing the auto-dependence built into our landscape for safety reasons (in addition to environmental concerns, among others) is a national issue. Just as the federal government has used its considerable spending power over highway budgets to impose other rules on states, like raising the drinking age to 21, it should make pedestrian-friendly requirements for all developments (including retrofitting older ones) a requirement of receiving federal transportation funding.
Matt provides a useful addition to my post on congestion pricing. He notes, "It's absolutely impossible to discuss transportation or planning issues in the Greater Washington area without pointing out that it would be a really, really good idea to facilitate higher-density construction in the District." Absolutely. While increasing density would not necessarily mitigate congestion on its own, it would make mass transit a more viable alternative. And, for a variety of reasons, higher density is more energy efficent and causes less environmental damage. It also seems to be good for economic development (hence all the high-rises springing up across the river in Arlington.) While not every city is bound by D.C.'s height restrictions, many have zoned for lower-density by instituting parking requirements and such. Changing this would be at least as valuable in reducing harmful emissions and the stress of long drives as introducing congestion pricing.
After New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg released a forward-thinking proposal to counter global warming that included congestion pricing for Manhattan below 86th Street, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty raised the possibility of doing the same for Washington, but has not actually endorsed it. Marc Fisher, in his washingtonpost.com blog, argues vociferously in favor:
The need in Washington is clear: The D.C. suburbs have the second-longest average commuting time in the nation, after New York.... Unlike London or New York, a congestion tax here would serve more than one purpose; it would not only control the flow of traffic, but it would also be an answer to the single greatest fiscal frustration facing the District: its inability to impose a commuter tax on suburbanites who earn their living in the city.
I couldn't agree more, and would only add that I would like to see congestion pricing introduced far and wide. As Nick Paumgarten's wonderful recent piece on commuting in the New Yorker illustrated, Americans are losing their time, money and sanity to ever longer commutes. The environmental impact is obvious as well (especially because cars emit more pollution in stop-and-go traffic.) The policy has worked wonders in London, with traffic down and the fees collected going to improving bus service. We need multi-pronged strategies to reduce driving at every level of government, and at the local level congestion pricing seems like a very sound policy to include.
Time, to their great credit, has put out a special double issue this week on global warming and what you can do to prevent it. But their exhaustive list (it includes 25 items) contains some rather curiously small suggestions and omits one crucial big one. While they had room to encourage their readers to create a "green wedding," Time did not discuss the role of urban planning.
It is certainly wise to suggest, as Time does, that Americans move into apartment buildings and take mass transit. But Americans cannot live an eco-friendly, auto-independent lifestyle under current zoning restrictions. Right now, it is illegal to build dense apartment buildings or row houses in much of the country, illegal to build mixed-use commercial and residential districts, and all new shopping centers take the form of strip mall development because of the minimum parking requirements. Making the very life choices that Time correctly recommends will also require that citizens agitate on the local and state level for zoning and transit funding policy changes to make those choices feasible for the majority of Americans.
Brad Plumer has an enlightening addition to my recent argument on this website for a shift in federal transit funding from highways to mass transit. He writes,
Under federal rules, transit projects have to undergo far more scrutiny. Before Congress hands out money for transit, they demand a cost-benefit analysis of the system, an analysis of its effects on land use, an environmental analysis, and often a comparison among various alternatives. Now, that all sounds perfectly reasonable, except that highway projects don't have to undergo most of these procedures—except for a looser environmental analysis. Federal oversight is rather minimal.... Not surprisingly, many of those communities find it far easier to build new highways than to set up, say, a light-rail system, no matter how popular the latter may be.
He goes on to mention Milwaukee as an example of a city that has buckled to all the perverse incentives and built more highways instead of mass transit. This just goes to prove that the righwing myth about suburban sprawl (its what Americans want, the free market at work etc.) is totally unfounded. Rather, these rules Brad cites, and correctly argues need changing, demonstrate what James McElfish of the Environmental Law Institute recently told me in an interview, "sprawl represents the interaction of the marketplace with a lot of rules that encourage market failure." Progressives should lobby the new Congress to re-write a lot of these rules governing transit funding, as well as demanding more funding for mass transit.
The Center for the Advancement of Health recently announced the results of a study of walking patterns. It found, "People are more likely to go for a walk in areas with four-way intersections and a large number of shops and businesses as possible destinations." The study is published in the April issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
This is a crucial health issue, not merely one for regional economic planners, because Americans have continuously walked less and driven more in recent years, and that has contributed to America's obesity epidemic. The four way intersections and business density of traditional town and city design has now been scientifically proven to facilitate more walking, and thus better public health, than the arterial cul-de-sacs and spread out strip mall shopping districts of suburban sprawl. Hopefully policymakers will take notice and write zoning codes accordingly. But, given America's sick automobile obsession, I'm not holding my breath.
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