The Oil Drum

In part 2 of "what the rest of the world could learn from Bogota, Colombia", here is a good video that gives an overview of how their bus rapid transit system works. In part 1 we looked Ciclovia, a weekly auto-free Sunday on main streets and boulevards opens them to cycling, skating and all sorts of public events. (much more discussion under the fold...)

Transit Oriented Development or "Smart Growth" is often cited as one of the potential solutions to dealing with peak oil by reducing suburban sprawl and creating more usage of mass transit and walkable communities. The idea generally is to promote development near existing transit hubs or along transit corridors.

According to TransitOrientedDevelopment.org, the components of TOD are:

-Walkable design with pedestrian as the highest priority
-Train station as prominent feature of town center
-A regional node containing a mixture of uses in close proximity including office, residential, retail, and civic uses
-High density, high-quality development within 10-minute walk circle surrounding train station
-Collector support transit systems including trolleys, streetcars, light rail, and buses, etc
-Designed to include the easy use of bicycles, scooters, and rollerblades as daily support transportation systems
-Reduced and managed parking inside 10-minute walk circle around town center / train station

There's a lot of talk about promoting transit oriented development (the other TOD) in theory, but how much is actually happening around the US?

There have been a couple of comments this past week that lead me from the question of my last post – “what if it doesn’t get better?” into the sequel “how is it going to get worse?” Because if the presupposition is that there will be some cataclysmic event that will carry us into the next phase of our evolving reality, I am not sure that this will happen. And yet, without this impetus, and a focus for public and political attention, it becomes more difficult to get action, or recognition, of the urgency of the problem.

I can perhaps simplify a picture of this evolution by a simple example. You are a farmer in the less populated parts of the country, and you drive over to your local gas station, after noticing that you have less than three gallons of gas in your tank. You get there to find that the station has closed, and there is a note on the door that says that the nearest station is now 50 miles away. If you can make it to the station, and if your car gets 20 miles per gallon, you will now use a third of your tank of gas, each time you fill up, just in filling up your 15-gallon tank. (Until you also start filling gas cans).

In one of the recent threads, I asked for good local statistical sources and got a few gems, including the Bikes at Work census data commute-to-work mash-up by zipcode. So I ran a quick search on the highest walk to work locations in the US for towns over 1000 population. The results were surprising to me in the lack of diversity:

Location	POP	% Walk to work
Naval Academy, Maryland	4264	82.99%
Houghton, New York	1730	67.84%
Alfred village, New York	3926	60.98%
West Point, New York	7138	60.25%
Air Force Academy, Colorado	7536	59.63%
Parris Island, South Carolina	4841	58.45%
Lackland AFB CDP, Texas	7132	58.09%
New Square village, New York	4707	57.28%
Hamilton village, New York	3510	55.56%
Avalon city, California	3181	52.79%

They are almost all locations that are centered around an institution, like a university or military academy where many people are housed very close to their classes or jobs and the concentration of people and buildings conspires to reduce the amount of spaces that could be used for roads and parking of automobiles.

Here is another guest post from Austin, Texas for TOD:LOCAL from Colin Clark.

Holding local elected officials accountable for their words and deeds can be a frustrating experience. One day they are standing up denouncing the Federal government for making the wrong investments in our future and not tackling global warming or our addiction to oil by signing the Mayor's Climate Change Agreement. The next day they announce the latest in highway funding touting new roads, less traffic, more jobs.

As we consider the collision course of peak oil and global warming, we should start look around our own communities and see if our transportation plans, policies, and construction projects are anticipating higher gas prices and a future with reduced vehicle miles traveled by automobile or stuck in the "building our way out of congestion" mindset.

With motorized transportation using 40% of US oil consumption, it's important to examine what we are doing on a local and regional level with transportation plans, funding, and construction. Are we digging ourselves deeper into the hole of oil dependency for mobility?

Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute: Not Exactly Transit Oriented!

Typically, when people think about how sustainable a neighborhood is, they probably think of neighborhoods with lots of organic stores, solar paneled roofs, small hybrid cars and a strong recycling/composting culture. And all of those ideas have their place, but I would argue that the most important is how walkable/bikable a neighborhood is. From Streetsblog, we discover a new website, Walkscore gives us a chance to calculate this aspect of different neighborhoods. While this is admittedly a crude measure and has some fairly obvious flaws, it is in many ways a good rough measure of how walkable a given location is compared to others.

Just pure density does not a walkable neighborhood make. It requires a healthy mix of residential, retail, services and office space. It means basically being able to accomplish pretty much any of your necessary daily trips by foot and not requiring an automobile.

For instance Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute gets a fairly low score since pretty much anyone that works there or wants to get lunch off campus HAS to drive there. However, most of Manhattan gets a 90+.

This is a guest post by Christopher Smith who is a Captain with the airline BA Connect. It was first published in December 2006, the discussion generated then can be read here. The post is based on a presentation (pdf) made to the oil depletion conference held in London last year.

Aviation is one of the fastest growing industry sectors in the world, growing at 2.4 times the rate of world GDP. The industry consumes over 5 million barrels of oil per day worldwide, almost one tenth of all the oil used for transportation. In the UK, according to the Department for Transport, the UK aviation industry is growing at approximately 5% per year while its fuel consumption is growing at 3% per year.

What a week we have had in New York politics! On Monday the Mayor went to Albany to try to forge a deal with the state's power brokers to get approval on his congestion pricing plan (as well as many other environmental initiatives). With neither legislative branch even holding a vote on the matter and a Federal deadline for $500 million passing by, it seemed that the whole ambitious plan may have crumbled under the weight of Albany's inertia and political wrangling.

But lo and behold, there is some sort of deal that is shaping up to let the Mayor's congestion pricing initiative live to fight another day. Streetsblog has a good summary of where the politics stand:

Today, the State Senate and State Assembly failed to act on passing any version of the Mayor's proposed congestion pricing policy, which would have received over $500 million in support from the Federal government if it had been passed today.

There still may be some flexibility for a few days extension by the Feds, but for now it looks like the Albany political gridlock has once again kept the state from enacting good public policy supported by nearly all the good government groups, all the major newspapers, health and transportation advocates here in the city. It had the support of all the citywide elected officials - the Mayor, the Speaker of the City Council, the Comptroller and Public Advocate. It even had the support of the Governor and the leader of the State Senate, Joseph Bruno.

So that's probably it. There are talks of a compromise sometime in the distant future, but for now, the momentum is completely lost. New York's Albany politics have conspired to condemn another generation to higher transit fares, less service, more traffic congestion, lower air quality and encouraging more people to drive into the city. July 16th should now forever be known as "Congestion Day"

To further explain my perspective on the benefits of congestion pricing, here's a video I did with Streetfilms about congestion pricing standing at the border of where it would be implemented.

Update 6/22: It's official, no congestion pricing agreement was reached before the end of the Spring legislative session and none of the state legislation needed to enable & fund much of Bloomberg's sustainability plan was enacted because of disagreements between Albany's power brokers.

Update 6/21: I'm getting numerous reports in the local news that Congestion Pricing is alive for today pending a compromise bill being debated today.

It seems for now that Congestion Pricing is dead (for now) in the NY State Assembly despite the support of: Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Spitzer, NY State Senate Leader Joseph Bruno, NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Comptroller Bill Thompson

Major NYC Newspapers:
NY Times, NY Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Staten Island Advance

And many community organizations, civic associations, business groups and environmental organizations

Sustainability and transportation advocates are now gearing up for a long hot Summer here in NYC to push for congestion pricing. Sheldon Silver will have to be dragged back for a special session. Line up the School buses, we're going to Albany in late July.