This week we’re joined by Stephen Crim, Director, Policy & Analytical Reporting, Central Business District Tolling Program (CBDTP) at the NYMTA. We chat about the MTA’s one year data report on congestion pricing including some of the results and how the data was collected. Stephen also discusses the numerous government data partnerships and enhancements including air quality monitoring and what other cities can look to in order to consider future pricing schemes.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find it and all previous episodes on your podcatcher of choice or in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited computer generated transcript:

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This week on Mondays at the Overhead Wire we’re joined once again by Chrissy Mancini Nichols and Tracy McMillan to tackle a whole host of topics including the connection between VMT and safety, chrono urbanism, how navigating cities protects your brain, and Austin’s housing construction success.

Check out the show notes below:

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This week we’re joined by Vanessa Cooksey, President and CEO of the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and Chris Hansen, Executive Director at Kranzberg Arts Foundation. We chat about growth and investment in St. Louis’ Grand Center Arts District and talk about the people that make it work. We also discuss ensuring that the public can enjoy the arts while making sure artists benefit from their work in the community.

Regional Arts Commission St. Louis

Kranzberg Arts Foundation

Listen in to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find all episodes of the podcast in the hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited transcript of the episode:

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Numerous freight and trust deregulation laws of the 1970s and 80s led to the consolidation of businesses and emergence of big box stores. The changes mirrored suburban housing growth as land use became more spread out. But consolidation and monopolization increased and e-commerce companies gained market share.

Now even less tied to physical location due to home delivery, I believe we are seeing commercial and manufacturing detach even further from sustainable land use. In the suburbs, warehouses and data centers and manufacturing have been sprouting like weeds, seeking to increase the logistical power of big box stores and e-commerce companies without a care for the long term human impacts.

In cities, land values are increasing for industrial and commercial land as space for just in time delivery services expands for packages. The connective tissue between these far off warehouses and in city urban distribution centers is roads. Highways and arterials in the periphery used by eighteen wheelers and local roads used by package delivery trucks, app delivery drivers in cars and in some cases cargo bikes and scooters.

The movement of packages thus has impacts on the movement and quality of life of people. A new report from Street Light Data intimates that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and the reduction thereof, is the single most important factor in determining a street’s safety. City streets are safer, but they are getting more crowded with delivery trucks and even now autonomous taxis. Amazon just announced that they will open up 1 and 3 hour deliveries to compete with Uber Eats and Doordash. I would posit that rushed VMT is less safe than patient travel.

And even with the electrification of vehicles, carbon emissions and particulates increase with more VMT. So not only does traffic safety suffer, but public health as well. The Trump administration has moved to allow pollution and has targeted California tailpipe regulations that began cleaning dirty air in 1966.

But California is likely to push back. A bill in the legislature would regulate ports, and warehouses, and railyards for the indirect pollution they create. Though it’s decoupled from the trucks and ships themselves it is likely to promote electrification if it can stand up to legal challenges.

The tactic gets me thinking that there’s a way to regulate the half century of impacts of sprawling land use policy on both sides of the destination coin. What that looks like I’m not sure. But if we can regulate warehouses and ports, what’s to stop us from cleaning up VMT generators in new ways never imagined. It might just open up a way to clean the air and increase traffic safety. I’m always open to new ideas.

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This week I’m joined by Jeremy Wells to discuss his book Managing the Magic of Old Places: Crafting Public Policies for People-Centered Historic Preservation.  We chat the impact of old places on people’s emotions and the current state of the preservation profession. We also discuss the struggle in the field to legitimize the impact of environmental psychology on the built environment, classical architecture and white supremacy, and the differences between cultures in preservation approaches.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full transcript of the episode generated by AI and unedited due to time constraints…

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Where does the time go? It’s drained or bolstered by our built environment. It’s also a mechanism we don’t look much into considering that it’s often undervalued as a planning principle. How long does it take to get somewhere? What does that mean for the rest of your day? How does that impact your stress levels and well being?

Something interesting brought up in Chris and Melissa Bruntlett’s recent book Women Changing Cities is time poverty; the idea that you have too many tasks or responsibilities and not enough time such that health is impacted. One solution to this is planning with time in mind. Making sure transportation networks are fast and efficient, locating care infrastructure close to other areas of need, and scheduling life in a helpful way.

Barcelona in fact does focus on these policies and even has a Time Policy Agreement and a time policy officer that coordinates across city departments. And it allows for more holistic thinking about gender equity and unpaid and valuable care work that under girds the world’s economy.

And many of you are likely to be astonished at how much free care labor backs up the economics of life. Melissa and Chris’ book cites an amazing stat from a 2020 Oxfam report on India which states that unpaid care work amounts to 19 trillion rupees ($205B) per year from 3 billion hours of time.

Of course because of the switch to Daylight Savings last weekend time is on our minds. But perhaps time is even more valuable to cities than we really know.

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This week on Mondays at The Overhead Wire we chat about Zurich’s green roofs, zoning at 100, RTD’s missing service, and Madison’s electric bus lessons.  This and much much more.

Below are links to the items we discussed on the show:

Main News

FRA’s potential shakeup – The Travel

Zurich’s climate shield – Reasons to be Cheerful

Truck pollution in Australia – Guardian

Madison electric buses – Grist

How zoning won – Bloomberg CityLab

LA pavement may be unnecessary – LA Times

Denver missing transit service – Denver Post

What urban highways cost – Bloomberg CityLab

What makes a city beautiful – The Conversation

Bonus Items

Traffic tickets up in SF – San Francisco Chronicle

Decoding economic development corruption – Lincoln Institute

DART reorganization – KERA

The equity of trees – MIT News

Traffic signal tech – Tennessean

Squamish urban project – Globe and Mail

Carbon intensive coastal adaptation – Common Edge

Federal judge rules for congestion pricing – Streetsblog NYC

Self driving cars increase VMT – Vox

Housing includes childcare – Marketplace

This week we’re joined once again by Yonah Freemark. In Part 2, we talk about our predictions from last year and what we got right and wrong on high speed rail and transportation funding, then we make new ones for the coming year that include Seattle and Mexico.

Listen in to the episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our episode archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

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Listening to a recent episode of the Look Both Ways podcast with David Zipper and Wes Marshall connected me with some things I’d been thinking about lately, mainly the value proposition for certain transportation related to its location. In the episode they talk about why they believe robotaxis/autonomous vehicles, in the context of rural areas, would be beneficial versus in urban areas where they are just taking up limited available space. Right now these companies don’t find it profitable so they are focused on urban areas which are.

But that also gets me thinking about distances. A recent paper by Dana Rowengould and Harry Schukei in the Journal of Transportation and Land Use found that rural transportation is influenced more by regional access versus urban transportation more concerned with local access. This follows many overall discussions about access and to a certain extent Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography. “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”

They also found that local access in urban areas was more associated with mode choice and sustainable transportation than rural areas. What this tells me is that cars or car like options such as taxis might be one of many solutions for transportation insecurity and access improvements for non-drivers in rural areas. I don’t believe the same necessarily can be said for suburban areas considering many suburban trips are local access as well.

But distance is an interesting thing. At the moment there’s a heated discussion going on in many places around the country about what to do with the gas tax as it loses value due to reduced VMT and vehicle electrification. Many states are floating road user charges and the reflexive feeling from many rural communities is frustration because of the belief that they drive further and might pay more.

The Associated Press however found some unlikely allies of road user charges from conservatives who don’t believe that the gas tax is working for them. There are many more rural roads to take care of than there are drivers and in heavily tourist traveled areas people may not fill up at the local pump while traveling through. Additionally commercial vehicles and heavier trucks do a lot of damage to roads that can then damage farmer and rancher’s vehicles and produce they carry.

At the moment movement on this issue is aligning along partisan lines which is frustrating because there should be robust data driven discussion about what is needed and creating a broader discussion about access and transportation needs for everyone. A gas tax or even mileage tax discussion is going to keep us focused on a framework of vehicles alone instead of broadening the parameters to moving people. It might be the case that if we think about access in this local versus regional frame, we aren’t just talking about gas tax versus mileage tax but rather a system for funding accessible transportation.

In rural areas that might be funding for roads that facilitate commerce and autonomous transportation services. In urban areas that could be local street safety programs and transit in addition to non-agriculture freight movement. The need for people and goods to move around isn’t changed because of how we fund our systems. But perhaps the way we fund our transportation systems should change based on getting people safely to where they want to go.

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Our good friend Anna Zivarts has an Op-Ed in The Urbanist discussing how urban highways reduce most trip times for drivers and make using transit a slower choice. Additionally, investing in car infrastructure begets more cars. She asks that the new mayor make a directive that weaves the reduction of VMT into project planning and decision making. I applaud this ask and find VMT reduction and/or emissions reduction a valuable focus point to organize spending and priorities.

But one thing that I don’t think gets discussed enough outside of our circles is that the solutions need to give people a similar value to what people had before. That could be ease, speed, or convenience.  If not, people could perceive change as a loss and support for needed improvements are lost. And I don’t think it’s always chicken and egg because sometimes we can reduce cars and also it’s still slow or unsafe to get around with active transportation.

I believe this is part of what’s behind some of the backlash lately towards the amazing improvements we’ve made in bike and transit infrastructure. Legislators in states like Utah are trying to reduce the ability of cities to make safety improvements and are blaming bike lanes, lane width limits, and bus infrastructure for their inability to move a few miles per hour faster.

While I believe they are silly and wrong, you have to make sure that there are more people that vote that also think they are wrong in order to make sure progress continues. And to get people on your side, there needs to be tangible and social proof that any improvements are better.

From a bike perspective, this could be showing people how much easier and more convenient it is biking around a neighborhood. Proof that the travel times are comparable or faster and that it’s easier to park right next to your destination rather than on the other side of the block you circled for 10 extra minutes looking for car parking. Also proof that it’s safe to do so.

From a transit perspective, it’s huge travel time savings.  People bag on the Central Subway here in San Francisco and I will continue to believe it was the wrong investment when a Geary Subway would have been a better one, but I can’t deny that it’s infinitely easier to get to Chinatown now. I don’t get elbowed out or kneecapped by vegetable carts anymore like I used to on the 30/45 bus. I can’t deny that the Van Ness and Mission bus lanes made travel times way faster for people riding them. The proof is in the increase in ridership. The same with Caltrain’s electrification which increased speed and generated almost 50% more ridership.

I also think we’ll see with congestion pricing that both transit and car travel times have improved. They’ll get even better with bus lanes and investments in signal priority at bottlenecks.

So yes, I do want a public policy based on reducing driving, but I also want a public policy that increases accessibility by all other modes.  Because if we don’t, I can assure you zombie cars are waiting in the wings to take our mode share. And like the vehicles that preceded them, they are still taking up 250 square feet of precious urban real estate wherever they go to move just a few people.

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