Congestion

With little fanfare, California is considering a change in how it measures transportation impacts that could herald a major change in environmental law. SB 743, passed and signed into law in September, is a potential game changer because it could completely remove LOS — Level of Service, a measure of car traffic congestion — from the list of tools that must be used to analyze environmental impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act. As the state contemplates a broader, more sustainable metric to use for smarter urban planning, the public is invited to weigh in on what the LOS replacement should look like.

The best thing about hosting a Streetsblog podcast is getting to call on other Streetsblog reporters for the lowdown on the biggest news of the week. In this case, Jeff Wood and I called Ben Fried, Streetsblog's editor-in-chief based in New York, to provide some context for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's big announcement of the campaign to eliminate traffic deaths in the city. Note that the podcast was recorded before the recent outbreak of jaywalking tickets in Manhattan.

How will Americans get around in the year 2030? A recent report from the RAND Corporation lays out two "plausible futures" developed though a "scenario analysis" and vetted by outside experts. While RAND takes a decidedly agnostic stance toward the implications of each scenario, the choice that emerges is still pretty stark.

A few months ago, we told you that Building America's Future had released an app called, "I'm Stuck!" It allowed you to send a quick email to your Congressional representatives, telling them that you were stuck in traffic, or on an overcrowded bus or a delayed train, and you wanted Congress to approve more funding to upgrade infrastructure. At the time, we noted that there was no bike/ped component to the app, but BAF has changed that -- halfway, at least.

The Texas Transportation Institute's "Annual Mobility Report," which rates highway congestion in major urban areas across the United States, probably gets more press attention than any other piece of transportation research.

This is an excerpt from "Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy," by Elly Blue (Microcosm Publishing, December 1, 2013, bikenomics.com). See our interview with Elly from spring 2013. 

Many transportation reform advocates were disappointed in the performance measures included in MAP-21, which was signed into law in July 2012. They weren’t tied to funding, they gave states and localities too much leeway to set their own performance targets, and they measured the wrong things. But there’s still a chance for them to get much stronger.

The next time your subway car is overcrowded, or your train is delayed, or your bus is bogged down in traffic, you can access a direct line to your members of Congress and let them know you’re not gonna take it anymore.

Two weeks ago, transportation researcher Michael Sivak brought us the news that there are fewer cars per person in the U.S. now than there were a few years ago – and that the number isn’t expected to rise again.