Yuri Chang, Author at Transportation For America

Ask USDOT to #MakeMeCount this Bike to Work Day

This Friday, thousands of people across the country will put on their helmets and take to the streets for National Bike to Work Day, an annual event promoting active commuting options and safer streets.

Will you be joining the event this week? If so, make your ride even more impactful by telling USDOT to #MakeMeCount and look at people, not just vehicles, when it comes to measuring how well a street works.

More and more Americans are choosing to bike — as well as walk, take transit, or share a ride — to work each day. Yet a recent USDOT proposal for measuring traffic congestion would ignore all these people when evaluating whether a street is working well or not.

If you bike to work this week, snap a photo and share it on Twitter or Facebook with the following text:

Hey @USDOT, I biked to work today! #MakeMeCount when measuring congestion. http://bit.ly/make-me-count #BTWD2016

USDOT’s proposed rule would make driving fast the ultimate goal of our transportation system—regardless of what type of street you’re on. That means driving fast could take precedence along streets where children are walking or commuters are biking, as so many people will be doing this week.

Don’t plan to bike this week but still support streets that work for everyone? Sign the petition to USDOT and then help spread the work with our gallery of shareable images.

I’ll be asking USDOT to #MakeMeCount this Friday. I hope you’ll join me.

Spokane is one of a growing slate of cities considering transit ballot measures to help stay competitive and successful

With a ballot measure for transit looming this fall, T4America Chairman John Robert Smith traveled to Spokane, WA to speak to city officials, business leaders, and other community stakeholders about the long-term economic and social benefits of public transit investments.

Spokane residents will be deciding on an upcoming ballot measure that would improve the city’s existing transit infrastructure and provide operating funds for a new bus rapid transit line. Echoing his appeal in an op-ed in the Spokesman that ran shortly after his visit, John Robert called upon voters to consider how important transit access is not only for connecting all residents to jobs, but also for staying competitive and helping to keep some of the thousands of students from the region’s universities in town after graduation:

Is Spokane the kind of place where young, mobile, talented workers want to stay after they graduate? Will the Lilac City be able to compete with other midsize cities in the Pacific Northwest and beyond to attract a younger workforce and prosper for decades to come?

While these questions may have been addressed to the city of Spokane, it’s a question that scores of other mid-sized cities are attempting to answer right now. As we covered last week, Indianapolis will be going to the ballot this fall to dramatically expand and improve their bus system. Atlanta voters could approve adding more than $2.5 billion in new transit service. Raleigh could join other regions in the Triangle region by raising a small sales tax to begin beefing up transit service in the booming region. And larger metropolitan areas including Seattle and Los Angeles will vote on whether to raise new money for transportation and transit.

Young, mobile workers are increasingly locating in areas — big and small — that offer connected and dependable public transit, a movement that cities ignore at their own peril. Mayor Smith continued:

I heard a story out of Indianapolis recently (a city facing similar talent retention challenges as Spokane). A younger resident testified in the Statehouse about efforts to build a new system of bus rapid transit lines across the region. Lawmakers were told that “selling a city without transit to millennials is like selling a phone without a camera.”

Along with Spokane’s upcoming measure, T4America will be following these measures closely and watching these cities attempt to take crucial steps towards securing long-term economic success.

Supporters spoke out for safer streets, and USDOT listened

Thanks to the action of supporters like you, all Americans will be safer on our streets. Yesterday the U.S. Department of Transportation released a much-improved ruling for how states and metro areas should measure — and be held accountable for improving — the safety of streets for everyone that uses them.

Back in 2014, 1,500 Transportation for America, Smart Growth America and National Complete Streets Coalition supporters sent a letter calling for the U.S. Department of Transportation to make the safety of all roadway users a top priority, and your voice has clearly been heard. Yesterday USDOT released its final safety rule for a new system of measuring the performance of our transportation investments that includes new and improved language to hold states and metro areas accountable for reducing preventable pedestrian deaths and injuries.

Under the last federal transportation law (MAP-21), USDOT was required to create a new system to govern how federal dollars are spent by measuring the performance of those dollars against tangible goals and outcomes. The first proposed measure dealt entirely with safety guidelines that would hold states and metro areas accountable for tracking their progress in reducing traffic collisions. But the proposal USDOT initially came up with was too weak to be effective.

That’s where supporters like you came in. Over 1,500 people mobilized to tell USDOT to make that measure stronger, and to hold states and metro areas accountable for the safety of everyone on the road — no matter how they’re choosing to get around. Smart Growth America’s President and CEO Geoff Anderson personally hand-delivered those letters to USDOT Secretary Anthony Foxx—all 1,500 of them.

Yesterday’s final ruling is leaps and bounds ahead of what was originally proposed. Some of the highlights include:

Five measures in total, and they include people on foot or bike: rate of serious injuries; rate of fatalities; total serious injuries; total fatalities; and the number of combined non-motorized fatalities and serious injuries.
States and MPOs must set targets for reducing fatalities for people on foot or bike. It’s treated as an equal measure to the others.
States and MPOs must make progress on four of the five measures.
Significant progress will be measured by beating targets. If that doesn’t occur, states must at least beat their baselines for each measure.
USDOT will not wait to finish developing the rest of the performance measures before they begin rolling out this safety measure.

Logged-in T4America members can read a more detailed memo on the final rule below.

[member_content]Members: Click here to access the policy memo.[/member_content]

Watch last week’s creative placemaking online discussion

As part of the kickoff for T4America’s brand new online interactive guide to creative placemaking in transportation, we hosted an online conversation on the topic last week. If you missed the webinar, you can catch up here.

Creative placemaking harnesses the power of arts and culture to allow for more genuine public engagement — particularly in low-income neighborhoods, communities of color and among immigrant populations — in the development of transportation projects.

T4America’s new online interactive guide, The Scenic Route: Getting Started with Creative Placemaking in Transportation, introduces the concept to transportation planners, public works agencies and local elected officials who are on the front lines of advancing transportation projects.

Watch last week’s archived webinar

Participants heard from James Corless, Director, Transportation for America; Erika Young, Director of Strategic Partnerships, Transportation for America; Duncan Hwang, Development & Communications Director, Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO); Luann Algoso, Community Engagement Manager, APANO; Laura Zabel, Executive Director, Springboard for the Arts; and Jun-Li Wang, Artist Community Organizer, Springboard for the Arts.

In the webinar, APANO shares some of the creative placemaking strategies employed to combat the pressure of displacement anticipated by a forthcoming high-capacity transit project in the Jade District of Portland, OR. Continuing the conversation, Springboard for the Arts discusses its grassroots efforts to advance the community’s vision for the Twin Cities’ Green Line light rail.

Watch the webinar, browse the guide, share it with others, and let us know what you think!

View the Guide

Congress permanently increases commuter tax benefit for transit riders

After years of effort from T4America, the Association for Commuter Transportation and scores of others, in late 2015, Congress finally raised the pre-tax benefit that can be claimed for commuting via transit, permanently equalizing that fringe tax benefit with the benefit for parking expenses.

This news got a little buried in the wake of the passage of the Fast Act, the new five-year transportation bill, but it’s an important change that will have notable impacts on how people choose to commute.

A provision in the annual spending and tax extender package, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama at the end of 2015, permanently establishes tax parity between drivers and transit riders. This means transit, vanpool, and parking will all receive pre-tax commuter benefit deductions of $255 a month in 2016. Though the benefit for transit riders had been temporarily increased to match parking benefits several times over the last few years, for most of the last decade, the value of the transit benefit was around half the value of the parking benefit — effectively putting a thumb on the scale for millions of people making a choice of how they’d like to commute.

These stacked financial incentives surely had an impact on commuting decisions, adding more congestion to roads and hurting low- and middle-income taxpayers in particular — people more likely to depend on transit, but under the former setup, receiving less tax benefits to do so.

As a longstanding and vocal advocate for permanently making these benefit equal and providing benefits to commuters, no matter how they choose to commute, Transportation for America celebrates this moment for commuters and for the positive impacts that it could have in communities across the country through increased transit ridership and cost savings.

2,100 letters delivered to FHWA in support of easing restrictive street design regulations

Earlier this week, with our partners at the National Complete Streets Coalition, we delivered nearly 2,100 letters to FHWA supporting their proposal to ease the onerous federal design standards that make it needlessly difficult for local communities to build safer, more complete streets.

Complete Streets director Emiko Atherton

National Complete Streets Coalition director Emiko Atherton on her way to FHWA in Washington, DC earlier this week.

It was an incredibly encouraging move by FHWA, and thanks to many of you who sent in one of the nearly 2,100 letters, FHWA will hear the message loud and clear that this move has broad support.

In case you missed the news back in November, FHWA made an encouraging proposal to scrap 11 outdated provisions in the current design criteria that local communities and states must adhere to when building or reconstructing certain roads with speed limits under 50 mph — adhere to, or go through an arduous process of requesting an exception from FHWA to do things like line a downtown street with street trees, reduce the width of lanes to add a bike lane, or curve a street slightly to slow traffic and make it safer for people in cars and on foot.

Communities of all sizes are eager to capitalize on their streets as economic assets and boost the bottom line by making them safe and attractive for everyone to use them. Under these current design guidelines for federal-aid roads, communities might adhere to out-of-date FHWA regs rather than fight for exceptions that can delay a project or even increase the cost.

Along with Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, we rallied our networks to show support for this welcome change. And earlier this week, National Complete Streets Director Emiko Atherton personally delivered all of your letters to the U.S. Department of Transportation — trying not to fall over while balancing the 15-pound stack along the way.

The overwhelming support for the proposed rule demonstrates the groundswell of bottom-up, grassroots support for designing safer, more complete streets. We hope FHWA will take note by moving ahead with adopting the rule as it stands and making no modifications.

Thank you to all who submitted a letter of support, we look forward to keeping you updated in early 2016 with the latest developments.

fhwa design guidlines thank you