Back on July 8 I mentioned a 2004 paper, “Quantifying the Benefits of Non-Motorized Transportation for Achieving Mobility Management Objectives,” by Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. I decided to read the paper more closely in preparation for a session on July 28 with our local city council to discuss the work plan for our task force on nonmotorized transportation.

The article provides an excellent summary of the many benefits of nonmotorized transportation, and it attempts to quantify some of them. Litman conservatively estimates that trips shifted from motor vehicles to walking or biking can yield a benefit of about 50 cents to about 5 or 6 dollars, and probably the benefits are much greater than this. Presumably some of these benefits accrue to an individual, while others accrue to a government or society in general.

Here are the main benefits that I would mention to decision makers in terms of how nonmotorized transportation can be an economic benefit to my city:

• Roadway cost savings: walking and biking do less damage to roads and lead to lower road maintenance costs
• Vehicle cost savings: driving a motorized vehicle is more expensive than walking or biking; money spent on vehicles and fuel typically leaves a community
• Air pollution reductions: these have a positive impact on health
• Health benefits from exercise

Here are some excerpts from the paper:

Read the rest of this entry »

Two Minnesota organizations have released an important document, the Statewide Conservation and Preservation Plan. Created by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR), the new plan makes policy and research recommendations that are intended to preserve the state’s natural resources in the face of increasing demands and impacts from our society, including climate change. Carbon emission reductions are one of the important goals of the plan.

I haven’t yet had time to do more than a cursory reading of the report’s executive summary and its transportation chapter. Here are a few excerpts from the executive summary:

The Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) funded a unique partnership among the University of Minnesota and the consulting firms of Bonestroo and CR Planning to evaluate the state’s natural resources, identify key issues affecting those resources, and make recommendations for improving and protecting them. More than 125 experts, including University scientists and public and private natural resource planners and professionals, participated in the 18-month effort. …

• The key issues for which recommendations are made in this report are:
• Land and water habitat fragmentation, degradation, loss, and conversion
• Land-use practices
• Transportation
• Energy production and use, and mercury as a toxic contaminant related to energy production

Here are the three recommendations from the Transportation chapter:

• Transportation Recommendation 1: Align transportation planning across state agencies and integrate transportation project development and review across state, regional, metropolitan and county/local transportation, land use and conservation programs.
• Transportation Recommendation 2: Reduce per capita vehicle miles of travel (VMT) through compact mixed-use development and multi- and intermodal transportation systems.
• Transportation Recommendation 3: Develop and implement sustainable transportation research, design, planning, and construction practices, regulations, and competitive incentive funding that minimize impacts on natural resources, especially habitat fragmentation and non-point source water pollution.

The report clearly deserves closer reading and the attention of state leaders. Note especially the involvement of leading state scientists and planners.

For more information, see the official press release and a Star Tribune article.

From time to time Neal Peirce, a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group, writes on the topic of bicycles and public policy. On March 3, he published an excellent column, “Year of the Bicycle?,” that summarizes some of the developments in cycling policy worldwide over the last year. These include the Velib bike rental program in Paris, rental programs elsewhere, bicycle boulevards in Portland, and developments in the U.S. Congress.

Peirce’s column coincided with the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC, March 4-6, about which I hope to hear more.

Here’s an excerpt from Peirce’s column:

First the trends: Oil costs are surpassing $100 a barrel, global warming alarm calls are mounting, polluting autos and trucks increasingly clog city streets, and health concerns about a sedentary and fattening society are mounting.

And now the developments: Handy bike-for-hire stations are proving instant hits in Paris and other European cities, and seem poised to invade urban America. Moves to add painted bike lanes along city roadways are being eclipsed by proposals for entire networks of �bike boulevards� — roadways altered radically to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. And a companion �Complete Streets� movement — making roadway space for cyclists and pedestrians, not just cars and trucks — is gaining traction nationwide.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., founder of the Congressional Bike Caucus (now 160 bipartisan members strong), claims a new pro-bike politics is forming, that it can mobilize a 1-million-plus national constituency and force clear recognition of the role of bicycles in the next (2009) federal transportation bill. He and the Bike Summit will be pushing for a sense of Congress resolution recognizing the potential of bikes to undergird a greener, healthier and more efficient national future.

Cycling, nationwide, still counts for tiny portions of commuting and shopping trips. But Portland�s experience shows the potential, Blumenauer insists: Since that city�s bike program began in the 1990s, the �modal split� for bikes has quadrupled and a $100 million bike industry has emerged, accounting for 1,000 jobs.

Paris� Velib bike rental program — the name combines velo (bicycle) and liberte (freedom) — opened last July and registered an astounding 2 million trips in its first 40 days. Twenty-thousand bikes are available at 1,450 cycling stations across the city. Insert a credit card to sign up ($1.50 a day to $43 a year) and you can drop your bike off at any other station, the first 30 minutes free.

An e-mail from the League of American Bicyclists recently educated me about how Davis, California, became the “bicycle city.” It contained an obituary notice for Frank C. Child, former chair of the economics department at the University of California-Davis, who was a key player in the development of the bicycle network in that city.

Mr. Child’s story, summarized below in an obituary from the Sacramento Bee, is a testament to the role that citizens can play in transforming their communities:

Mr. Child joined UC Davis in 1962 and became the second chairman of the economics department the following year…. [He] arrived in Davis after living for four months in the Netherlands, where bicycles were the dominant transportation mode. Eyeing the city’s flat terrain, he and his wife, Eve, launched a grass-roots effort in 1964 to establish a system of bicycle lanes on Davis streets.

The couple organized a core group of citizens who lobbied, collected petition signatures and backed successful City Council candidates who supported bike lanes. In 1966, the Davis council voted to create the city’s first bike lane, spawning a national transportation movement.

“All the bike lanes in the United States today are descendants of what started in Davis,” said Ted Buehler, a graduate student at the UC Davis Institute for Transportation Studies.

The action delighted Mr. Child, who sold his second car and bought six bicycles for his family to get around Davis. He also helped persuade UC Davis Chancellor Emil Mrak to close large portions of the campus to automobile traffic to promote cycling.

“My father had a three-speed Raleigh with a wire basket for his briefcase on the handlebars that he rode for years,” Bill Child said.

In its December 2007 issue, Scientific American Body published one of the best articles I’ve read on the topic of the relationship between the “built environment” - our roads, buildings, etc. - and our health. The article, by Kathryn Brown, presents some of the relevant statistics; describes efforts by “built-environment advocates” in communities such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Columbia, Missouri; and examines the scientific debate on how best to build communities that foster physical activity.

I was especially interested in the paragraphs below (emphasis added), which describe research that shows the positive influence of densely populated, mixed-use communities on physical activity. (Mixed-use communities mix different land uses together - residential, commercial, recreational, public, etc. - to give people shorter distances between different destinations.) Just to show that I’m interested in an open inquiry, I’ve included the author’s brief discussion of a Heritage Foundation editorial that questions the role of the built environment in determining a condition such as obesity. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago I learned about the book The High Cost of Free Parking, by UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup. The book was published by the American Planning Association in 2005. Shoup’s ideas seem to be slowly percolating into the national and global consciousness, as evidenced by recent coverage of them on NPR, in Time magazine, and elsewhere.

I recently checked the book out from a local college library and my wife and I read it - or I should say my remarkable wife read it while I read parts of it. It’s an extremely well-researched book, quite scholarly and somewhat repetitive, but readable nonetheless. This is an important book that will likely have a lasting impact on our planet.

My wife and I made the following list of main ideas from the book in order to make them more accessible:

� Minimum off-street parking requirements have fostered sprawl and skewed transportation choices toward automobiles and have made urban areas less pedestrian-friendly.

� The cost of parking has been hidden in the prices for other goods and services.

� Free parking (or below-market-price parking) increases traffic because people drive more and spend more time cruising looking for parking spots.

� Don�t have off-street parking requirements. Let the market decide how much parking to provide.

� In congested areas where parking is tight, charge for parking and let market forces work. This frees up parking spots for the people who value them most, reduces cruising traffic, and generates revenue for a neighborhood or city. “You can’t manage parking if you can’t charge for it,” Shoup says in the Time article. Shoup recommends a price that will leave about 15 percent of parking spaces open and 85 percent of them occupied.

� Create Parking Benefit Districts with market-priced curbside parking. Revenue will go to improvements in that district or neighborhood, which will help to overcome political opposition to charging for parking.

� The barriers to implementing these changes are political rather than technological.

The first chapter of the book is available online.

I just learned of this September 4 New York Times article about New York City, “To Ease a City’s Traffic, Shifting from 4 Wheels to 2.” I’m impressed that the Big Apple is going so far as to make make provisions for bicycle parking, including zoning changes requiring indoor bike parking in large commercial buildings.

Below are some excerpts. The full article includes comments by some drivers and residents who aren’t so enamored of the changes:

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently “met” my namesake, Bill Ostrem, online a few weeks ago and was fortunate to be able to exchange some emails with him. I maintain a Google alert for my name and was notified of this nice profile of Bill in the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper. Bill appears to be willing to go the extra mile and pay extra costs to create better communities.

Here’s a quote from the article, which was published back in January: Read the rest of this entry »

Having visited Gold Medal Park, I’d say it’s a nice addition to the Minneapolis cityscape. It offers a great view of the new and impressive Guthrie Theater, which I have not yet entered. The park isn’t a tour de force like Chicago’s Millennium Park, which I first visited a few months ago, but it’ll do.

The picture above was taken early in the morning, so it’s rather dark. Notice the impressive cantilevered deck on the right side of the theater.

I came across one critical appraisal of the park at a web site called Cafeapolis.

Viewing this part of Minneapolis, between Washington Avenue and the Mississippi River, I was struck by how much it has changed, with other recent additions being bike trails along the river, the Mill City Museum, and lots of condos. Formerly the area was undistinctive at best, and its transformation is a great success.

On Saturday, August 4, our family made an early-morning trip to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, then headed north for a glimpse of the collapsed I-35W bridge. Sensitive to calls to stay away from the immediate area, we went to Gold Medal Park, near the new Guthrie Theatre. I had read in Nick Coleman’s StarTribune column that people were gathering there to view what they could of the disaster from the newly made hill that sits at the center of the park.

The picture above shows the view toward the bridge, magnified only slightly by the 3x zoom on my small digital camera. It’s not a great picture of the disaster, but if you look closely in the center of the photo, you can see the collapsed southern part of the bridge angled downwards. In the background is the 10th Avenue bridge.

For the last several days we’ve been hearing about Governor Tim Pawlenty’s indications that he will reverse his “no new taxes” pledge and support an increase in the Minnesota gas tax. Shamefully, the tax has been held at 20 cents a gallon since 1988. Inflation has eaten away at the ability of the tax to provide funds, and it’s at or near an all-time low in terms of its real cost.

How sad that it takes a disaster that costs many lives and hundreds of millions of dollars to realize that we need to increase funding for transportation infrastructure. Democrats deserve some of the blame for recently failing to come up with a compromise that might have overriden a Pawlenty veto, but the onus of responsbility for the disgraceful drop in funding over time goes to the anti-tax crowd and, more recently, its darling, Gov. Pawlenty.

Pawlenty is trying to keep this disaster from being an albatross around his neck. Would that he had made prevention his goal and not political reaction.

See a StarTribune story for more about Pawlenty’s political situation regarding the tax. The story quotes a poll showing that 57 percent of Minnesotans oppose a gas tax increase. Voters need to wake up to this issue too. The truth is that driving a motor vehicle imposes costs not only to the environment in the form of pollution but also to the transportation infrastructure in the form of wear and tear. A gas tax only begins to allow government to remedy the damage caused by driving.