To improve traffic safety and make streets more welcoming for walking and biking, Portland will lower speed limits on nearly all of its residential streets to 20 miles per hour, in most cases replacing a 25 mph limit.

The change was approved unanimously Wednesday by the Portland City Council. About 70 per cent of the city’s street mileage will have the new 20 mph limit.

“The severity of a crash is largely tied to speed,” Portland Bureau of Transportation director Leah Treat told Streetsblog. “Someone who reduces their speed from 25 to 20 miles per hour, that means a pedestrian is twice as likely to survive.”

Reducing residential speed limits is one of 32 actions in Portland’s Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2025. The city won permission from the state legislature to change its speed limits last year.

In addition to the safety benefits, Treat says the change will offer a variety of quality-of-life benefits to residents as well.

“It’s going to help kids get to school,” she said. “Lots of kids walk and bike to school, this will help kids get to school safely.”

By April 1, Portland will have 2,000 signs in place informing drivers of the 20 mph limit. The city is also planning a large-scale public awareness campaign, with radio and television ads.

Portland will continue to enforce traffic speeds, but police are going to be encouraged to remain focused on the most dangerous corridors in the city, and those are primarily arterial streets that won’t be affected by the change.

Treat says she expects the ordinance to gradually influence street design, as well.

“Lowering of the speed is going to have an impact on how the engineer assesses how a street works, when residents request things like speed bumps,” she said.

Portland has to reverse a recent increase in traffic fatalities. Last year, 45 people were killed in traffic collisions, up from 37 in 2015.

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But the curb serves purposes that extend far beyond car access. It’s where bus riders board and disembark, for instance, or where protected bike lanes typically make the most sense. American cities are getting smarter about how to use the curb, and in a new white paper, the National Association of City Transportation Officials lays out strategies to get the most out of this precious space [PDF].

NACTO recommends creating a hierarchy of uses for different street contexts, which can inform decisions about how to allocate the curb. For commercial areas where customer access and foot traffic are paramount, modes of travel that move more people in less space should be prioritized.

Two metered parking spaces might top out at 30 cars turning over per day, for instance, while a bike-share station that replaces them could be used by 40 people per day. A dedicated bus lane might speed service and improve access to a commercial corridor for thousands of people.

Even if the bus lane isn’t by the curb, cities need to rethink curb space to ensure the bus lanes work well. A turn pocket, for instance, can prevent drivers from blocking a bus lane at the approach to an intersection, like this example in San Francisco (see photo).

Prioritizing spatially efficient transit can help commercial areas thrive. But business owners often prize access for customers who come by car. NACTO recommends conducting “arrival mode surveys” to demonstrate the importance of access by other means.

In Los Angeles, for instance, business owners on Cesar Chavez Street guessed that 36 per cent of their patrons arrived by car and none arrived by transit, NACTO reports. However, a city survey of shoppers on the street found that nearly half arrived by transit and only 7 per cent drove.

To free up the curb, it can’t be reserved for people to drive up and park right next to their destinations. Metered parking can be shifted to side streets, and so can deliveries. Loading zones don’t have to be directly in front of storefronts. In New York City, the DOT surveyed merchants along one bus corridor and found many would prefer loading zones farther away from the store in exchange for longer time limits.

For commercial streets that retain metered parking, dynamic pricing is the key to maximizing the public benefit. Setting parking meter prices to respond to demand can cut congestion and improve transit service on the corridor by reducing the time drivers spend cruising for open spots.

There is no magic formula, but thoughtfully managing curb space to prioritize local needs and conditions, not private car access, will help more people get around crowded cities while improving access to commercial areas.

This article originally appeared on Streetsblog USA

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As the rescue effort unfolds (if you want to contribute, Slate has an overview of local charities helping victims of the storm), we should also be asking how to prevent or mitigate future storms. On a global scale, Harvey is another sign of the urgency of climate action to prevent superstorms from becoming ever more frequent and destructive.

Locally, while any city would be overwhelmed by so much rain in so little time, land use in the Houston region has made a difficult situation worse. Woods and prairies that used to provide a measure of resilience against stormwater are now covered in impervious surfaces, and development has sprawled into low-lying floodprone areas, increasing the public’s exposure. Last year, ProPublica reported that the region “has paved over over 166,000 acres of mostly former coastal prairie since 2001, land that held highly absorbent grasses.”

Jeff Wood, who grew up in the Houston region, has been thinking about how the city’s development patterns contributed to the current crisis. At the Overhead Wire, Wood writes that the problem is not Houston’s “lack of zoning” so much as a transportation and development paradigm that’s completely heedless of considerations like stormwater absorption and steering clear of the floodplain.

Wood flags a Texas development tool called the Municipal Utility District as one vehicle for runaway sprawl in the Houston region:

I’m sure MUDs exist in other places but they don’t seem to be as prolific as they are around the suburbs of Houston. The basic idea of a MUD is that it’s a way for developers to buy land and set up shop to build new development. Once they own the land they can request the creation of a MUD that allows them to sell tax exempt bonds for infrastructure…

So if a developer can just plop down anywhere in the county and build a massive development of single family homes, it stands to reason that regional drainage and water networks are not a top planning priority.

All this development gobbling up natural lands was enabled by the region’s expensive freeway habit:

But Houston as a region is currently working on its 3rd ring road and has made it a point of developing these roads to open up areas to development. The most recent example being the Grand Parkway, which organizations such as Houston Tomorrow have fought vociferously. The Grand Parkway now looks like an even worse decision considering it’s now opening up the Katy prairie land to more development, area that should really be left to its natural state.

This article originally appeared on Streetsblog USA

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Currently, Mexico City’s building code tips the scales toward driving with strict parking minimums throughout the city for both housing and commercial development, even though cars only account for about 30 percent of all trips. By reforming the parking requirements, Mancera aims to lower construction costs, make housing more affordable, and subsidize transit through a fee on parking that does get built.

In office buildings, for instance, the city requires one parking spot for every 30 square meters of leasable space. Once you factor in space for ramps and access lanes, that means about 40 percent of the square footage in an office development must be devoted to parking, said Andrés Sañudo, a Mexico City-based consultant who’s been working with the non-profit Institute for Transportation and Development Policy to help the city reform its parking policy.

In a recent white paper produced at the city’s request, ITDP recommended eliminating minimum parking requirements and replacing them with maximums. The parking caps would be lower in the central areas of the city. And the more parking developers do build, the larger the amount they would have to pay into a special fund for transit, sidewalk improvements, and subsidized housing.

The rules would apply to new developments, while allowing existing buildings to repurpose parking spaces.

An analysis by ITDP found developers in Mexico City rarely build more parking than the minimums require — a strong indication that the law is inflating the parking supply.

“Most of the developers are supporting this,” said Sañudo. “They know what effect it will have on the excel spreadsheets of their project.”

At an event at the end of February, Mancera said he expected new parking regulations to be unveiled in a matter of weeks. The reforms have yet to be finalized, but Sañudo believes many of the ITDP recommendations will be adopted.

“The proposal that they probably will publish is based on what we gave them,” he said.

And that would bring Mexico City’s building code in line with goals like reducing traffic and increasing affordability. “It will help people to start living closer to their economical activities, to their daily activities, their work, their entertainment,” said Sañudo. “This will translate into a lower dependency on car use.”

It would also make Mexico City’s parking regulations among the most progressive in the Western Hemisphere and could inspire reforms throughout Latin America, said Sañudo.

This article originally appeared on Streetsblog USA

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In 2017 the city is adding three more street segments to its car-free network, Mayor Denis Coderre recently announced, awarding $1.7 million over three years to pedestrianize them. The streets will receive seating, landscaping, and pavement markings that as public pedestrian space. This allotment follows the addition of five car-free street segments in both 2015 and 2016.

Under Montreal’s system, the first year of a car-free street is treated like a trial. The city observes how well the space is used, as well as the effect on motor vehicle traffic and local businesses. If the first year is a success, the city will commit to permanent changes or bring the car-free segment back on a seasonal basis every year.

The city reports that public opinion of the program is very favourable, and most of the pedestrian streets last beyond the pilot phase, either as permanent car-free spaces or seasonal pedestrian zones during the warmer months, according to the CBC.

The new additions under Coderre brings the city’s total number of car-free street network to 45 segments covering seven kilometers reports the Montreal Gazette.

This article originally appeared on Streetsblog

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That’s the takeaway of a recent data project featured in the American Journal of Public Health that examines crash and injury rates for cyclists in 10 American cities.

Researchers examined 10 cities that have been “especially successful at improving cycling safety and increasing cycling levels by greatly expanding their cycling infrastructure.” The above table shows recent changes in bike network growth, cycling rates, and crash and injury rates for cyclists in those cities. Minneapolis, Portland and New York City have seen the largest drop in injury and fatality rates among this group.

The change in bike trips in each city was determined using Census data about the number of bike commuters in a city. The authors assumed each bike commute accounted two trips per day and that these trips represented one-fifth of total bike trips. The assumption was based on the most recent National Household Travel Survey, which found that about one in five bike trips is work related.

Citing previous work by Kay Teschke, Anne Lusk, and other researchers, authors John Pucher and Ralph Buehler say it’s not just the volume of bike infrastructure that matters, it’s the quality as well.

“It is crucial to provide physical separation from fast-moving, high-volume motor vehicle traffic and better intersection design to avoid conflicts between cyclists and motor vehicles,” they write.

While American cities have made improvements to cycling safety, they have a long way to go to be truly safe. Currently, the fatality rate for cyclists in the United States is almost five times as high as counties like Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, which have more robust bike infrastructure. U.S. cities need to continue to expand bike infrastructure, especially protected bike lanes, say Pucher and Buehler recommend, if they’re going to keep on reducing cycling deaths.

This article was originally published on StreetsBlogUSA

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The financial burden works out to an average of $621 annually per household, or a 13 per cent rent premium – and it is concentrated among households that can least afford it. “Minimum parking standards create a major equity problem for carless households,” said Gabbe. “71 percent of renters without a car live in housing with at least one parking space included in their rent.”

Parking is typically bundled with rent, making the price of residential parking opaque. So Gabbe and Pierce set out to estimate how much people are actually paying for the parking that comes with their apartments.

Crunching Census data from a representative sample of more than 38,000 rental units in American urban areas, they isolated the relationship between parking provision and housing prices. They determined that on average, a garaged parking space adds about $1,700 per year in rent – a 17 per cent premium.

Looking only at carless households, the average cost is $621 per year and the premium is 13 per cent. On average these households earn about $24,000 annually, compared to $44,000 for the whole sample, and they get no value whatsoever out of the parking spaces bundled with their rent.

Gabbe and Pierce estimate that nationwide there are 708,000 households without a car renting an apartment with a garaged parking space, for a total cost burden of about $440 million per year due to unused parking.

So how can parking policy create fairer housing prices?

Gabbe and Pierce say cities should eliminate minimum parking requirements to make housing more affordable. Cities can also help by allowing and encouraging landlords to “unbundle” the cost of parking from the cost of rent — so people who don’t have cars aren’t forced to pay for parking spaces they don’t use.

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How is the U.S. doing on traffic safety?

To hear a lot of people tell it, we’re making great strides. President Obama recently referred to the reduction in American traffic deaths as a success story of sorts, contrasting it with the rise in gun deaths.

But while traffic fatalities in America are indeed trending downward, the improvement pales in comparison to what other countries have achieved, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control.

In America, the per capita traffic fatality rate fell 31 per cent from 2000 to 2013, nowhere near the 56 per cent improvement in 19 high-income countries over the same period. In fact, all 19 performed better than the U.S., with the best performer, Spain, managing to reduce the traffic fatality rate 75 per cent.

As of 2013, America’s traffic death rate per person was about double the average of the peer nations, the CDC reports. Even measuring traffic fatality rates based on miles driven instead of population (which makes the sprawling, car-centric U.S. look better), America still has the fifth-worst safety record of the 19 nations.

If America instantly achieved the traffic death rate of the safest country, Sweden, an incredible 24,000 lives would be saved each year.

CDC researchers Erin Sauber-Schatz, David Ederer, Ann Dellinger, and Grant Baldwin say American officials must respond:

Lower death rates in other high-income countries, as well as a high prevalence of risk factors in the United States, suggest that the United States can make more progress in reducing crash deaths. With a projected increase in U.S. crash deaths in 2015, the time is right to reassess U.S. progress and set new goals.

While the CDC emphasizes impaired driving and failure to wear seatbealts as primary causes of traffic deaths (repeating the dominant American traffic safety message of the past 50 years), the agency does single out excessive speed as a systemic risk. The CDC also refers approvingly to Vision Zero approaches to traffic safety, and the philosophy that “system providers” like transportation engineers are responsible for preventing the loss of life.

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Boris Johnson says that one of his goals as mayor of London was to make cycling “more popular and more normal.” As Johnson’s eight-year tenure winds down, it looks like the progress he made in his second term has accomplished that mission.

If current trends continue, bike commuters will outnumber car commuters in central London by 2018, according to a recent report from Johnson’s office [PDF]. Citywide, Transport for London estimates people already make 645,000 bike trips on an average day.

When Londoners head to the polls later this week to elect their next mayor, five candidates will be on the ballot, all of whom have signaled they will continue to expand the city’s bike network, reports the BBC’s Tom Edwards. Most of them have pledged to triple the amount of protected bike lanes in the city.

You can trace the London cycling boom to several factors, including the introduction of congestion charging under Johnson’s predecessor, Ken Livingstone, in 2003. But the big turning point came during Johnson’s second term, when bike advocates prompted him to get serious about installing protected bike lanes.

In his first term, Johnson championed the construction of “cycle superhighways” on some of the city’s busiest streets. But these routes, which offered little or nothing in the way of physical protection, didn’t live up to their billing. Cyclists were not satisfied with them and staged huge protests calling for safer bike infrastructure. The BBC’s Edwards recalls how cyclists booed Johnson when he was seeking reelection four years ago.

In recent years, Johnson has devoted more resources to protected bike lanes, upgrading the existing “cycle superhighways” and laying out a plan for more. He now says his “single biggest regret” was not doing so sooner.

Johnson has tripled the city’s 10-year budget for cycling, from £273 million to £913 million. The newest “superhighway” was set to open just days ago.

In addition to protected lanes on high-traffic streets, Transport for London is also building out a network of “quietways,” similar to what Americans would call bicycle boulevards — low-traffic streets where car speeds are kept in check and cycling is prioritized.

As more people get on bikes, cycling in London has never been safer. In 2015, nine people were killed while biking in the city. While still too many lives are lost, the fatality rate per bike trip is the lowest on record.

Despite the predictable “bikelash” from some quarters, public opinion is firmly behind the investments in biking. In a recent YouGov poll, 71 percent of London residents said they support the cycle superhighways.

Even the Automobile Association is on board. “Getting more people on bikes, getting more dedicated cycle lanes is better for everyone,” Edmund King, the president of the AA, said in March.

Whoever wins this week’s election, the next mayor seems very unlikely to change course. “Cycling is now a mainstream policy in London politics,” wrote the BBC’s Edwards. “That is quite a story.”

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Transit advocates around the country were transfixed by a story in Tennessee this April, when the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity made a bid to pre-emptively kill Nashville bus rapid transit. It was an especially brazen attempt by Charles and David Koch’s political network to strong-arm local transportation policy makers. But it was far from the only time the Kochs and their surrogates have taken aim at transit.

The Koch brothers, who owe their fortune to fossil fuels, are best known for funding global warming deniers and Republican insurgents aligned with the Tea Party. With their political influence under greater scrutiny during election season, now’s a good time to pull together the various strands of Koch anti-transit activism.

The Kochs fund a wide-ranging network of “think tanks,” non-profits, and political organizations. Their best-known political arm is Americans for Prosperity and its various offshoots and subsidiaries. David Koch was founding chairman of Americans for Prosperity, and both brothers provided funding for its launch. Among other activities, the group does plenty to manufacture Agenda 21 paranoia, which has cable subscribers around the country convinced that smart growth is a United Nations conspiracy that will lead to one-world government.

The Kochs also have plenty of ties to widely quoted, transit-bashing pundits like Randall O’Toole, Wendell Cox, and Stanley Kurtz — people employed by organizations that receive Koch funding, like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation, and who spout the same talking points against walkability and smart growth.

Fake experts like O’Toole and Cox have been making the rounds for ages, but the Nashville BRT story raised new questions. How many local transit projects are drawing fire from the Koch political network? And what impact is it having?

Ashley Robbins, policy manager at the Center for Transportation Excellence, which supports transit ballot measures around the country, said the Nashville case was an eye-opener. ”We’re definitely going to be watching it as we see more conservative efforts pop up in Milwaukee and Oregon as well,” she said. “We’re starting to keep an eye out to see if it’s going to be a trend.”

In Tennessee, the local Americans for Prosperity chapter failed to enact the transit lane ban, but it did undermine and weaken the Nashville BRT project, which won’t be as robust as first planned. The Nashville example got us wondering where else Koch-backed groups are attacking local transit projects.

Here are a few more examples we turned up:

Indianapolis

Americans for Prosperity Indiana was a leading opponent of efforts to expand transit in the Indianapolis region. The group lobbied state officials to kill legislation that allows Indianapolis to hold a tax referendum to expand its transit network.

Americans for Prosperity was unsuccessful in completely stopping the Indiana legislation, but it made its mark. The language of the bill that eventually passed was amended to forbid the Indianapolis region from pursuing light rail with any funds raised from the tax. Americans for Prosperity has been especially critical of rail, citing a Cato Institute study [PDF] that says rail projects are likely to run over budget (which road projects never do, of course).

Virginia

Americans for Prosperity Virginia fought a new tax in Loudoun County to pay for Metro’s Silver Line extension. The organization issued robo-calls calling the extension a “bail-out to rail-station developers,’’ according to the Washington Post. The county Board of Supervisors voted to proceed with the project anyway.

Boston

A report by the Pioneer Institute created a “manufactured controversy” over the costs of service at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Ellen Dannin wrote in Truthout earlier this year.

The Pioneer Institute is part of the State Policy Network, a group of think tanks with “deep ties to the Koch brothers” according to the Center for Media and Democracy [PDF]. According to one of the institute’s studies, maintenance costs at the MBTA are “out-of-control,” but Dannin, an author of two books on labor issues, wrote in Truthout that Pioneer relied on metrics that were bound to arrive at a predetermined outcome. For example, it chose to compare bus maintenance costs on a per-mile basis, a standard that puts a dense, crowded city like Boston at a disadvantage.

“Pioneer must have been aware that choosing a cost-per-mile standard would put the worst face on the MBTA’s performance and that neither a bus driver nor a mechanic could do anything to change that situation,” wrote Dannin.

The report also relied on some suspect comparisons. As the basis for its claims that MBTA’s pay was “out of control,” Pioneer compared costs with less expensive cities like Spokane, Washington, where the cost of living is about 22 percent lower than Boston’s.

Florida

Koch-backed organizations were instrumental in sinking Florida’s high-speed rail plans. In 2000, Sunshine State voters passed an amendment to the state’s constitution requiring the state to establish high-speed rail exceeding 120 mph linking its five major cities.

But when Governor Rick Scott was elected in 2010 in a wave of Tea Party governors, he fell in line with fellow members of the Republican Governors Association who were killing rail projects on Ohio, Wisconsin, and New Jersey.

Scott hired the Reason Foundation — where David Koch is a trustee — to write a report about the proposal. To the surprise of no one, the foundation’s Wendell Cox found the project would cost way more than projected [PDF]. Scott used Cox’s dubious claims as the basis for killing the project.

Since that time, private investors have taken up the project, which is, in itself, pretty compelling evidence of the financial feasibility of the concept.

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