After much anticipation, bicycle directions are finally live on Google Maps.
At the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC today, Google announced that its mapping tools can now provide bike directions in 150 American cities.
The software provides routes that point cyclists to bike paths or lanes whenever possible, avoid the busiest roads and intersections, and take into account hills, according to the Times’ Gadgetwise blog.
While New Yorkers can already get bike directions from Ride the City, you can count on two hands the number of other American cities with such luck. Google is expanding the coverage of online bike directions by an order of magnitude.
The bike routing is still in beta, and certain features, like a mobile version and a bike-specific Street View, haven’t been released yet. Additionally, bike routing is notoriously difficult, so there are probably some kinks to work out. Even so, Google’s strength has always been its ability to learn from its own data, so it’s safe to expect its bike directions to improve over time. Try it out and let us know how well it works!
It says something about the country that we live in that the simple act of walking to work can merit a blog post. But so it is. Today, at her fine blog The Naked City, Mary Newsom wrote about her experience walking the 4.2 miles from her home to her office. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. She often writes about planning and transportation issues and has a great understanding of livable streets issues. As she made her lonely way along the street, she was able to experience in a different way how completely dominated by cars her familiar landscape is, and what that means:
You see more when you walk, of course. I saw daffodils and crocuses and
some fruit trees (cherry? plum?) blooming. I saw two places that were
complete barriers to anyone wheelchair bound. They should be fixed.…
I didn’t get run over,
though I had to make eye contact with motorists a lot and a couple of
times realized that state law giving me the right of way in crosswalks
was irrelevant, when drivers were complete unaware I existed because
they never even looked. It felt like wearing Harry Potter’s
invisibility cloak.
I walked mostly along Morehead Street,
Queens Road and Providence Road. It was rush hour so traffic was heavy.
Almost every vehicle I saw carried only a driver and no passengers.
Maybe 5 to 10 percent had a second person, typically a child. All this
on a beautiful spring-like morning with a shining sun and temperatures
climbing from the 40s into the 50s as I walked. I started to wonder why
more people weren’t walking.…
No moral to this story, just sharing the experience, in hopes others might decide to give it a try someday, if they can.
I find the image of all those flowers blooming and all the people driving right past them quite sad.
Elsewhere around the network: Bike Portland has a write-up on the "People for Bikes" campaign announcement at the National Bike Summit. DC Bicycle Transportation Examiner asks, "Should your Senator be booted from the Senate Bike Caucus?" And Extraordinary Observations wonders if the recession is leaving suburban teens carless — and even more adrift than before.
The nation’s transit systems hosted 10.2 billion trips last year, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) reported yesterday. While that figure represents a 3.8 percent decline from 2008, APTA’s data showed light rail ridership rising in nine cities and the long-term increase in transit use continuing to outpace growth in population and vehicle miles traveled.
APTA President William Millar portrayed the new ridership figures as a win for transit, given the economic recession and the fact that fuel prices declined last year relative to their 2008 highs.
"Considering that nearly 60 percent of riders take public transportation
to commute to and from work, it is not surprising that ridership
declined in light of the many Americans who lost their jobs last year," Millar said in a statement.
Since 1995, APTA has reported a 31-percent increase in transit ridership nationwide, compared with a 15-percent increase in population over the same period and a 21-percent increase in highway miles traveled.
Nine cities reported light-rail ridership increases to APTA: Baltimore; Oceanside, CA; Memphis; Seattle; Philadelphia; Tampa; San Francisco; Portland; and New Orleans. Heavy rail networks in Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia also saw more riders last year.
- Can the Unions Upend Albany? (Daily Politics)
- News Names 24 Shameless Lawmakers Who Blasted MTA on Student MetroCards, Including …
- … Jeff Klein, Now Backing Bid to Exempt Private Schools From Transit Tax (Times Union)
- Shuffling the Deck Chairs: Walder Considers More Changes to Bus Cuts (News, Post)
- Schumer Nets Stim Cash for 2nd Ave Subway, Station Rehabs, East Side Access (SAS, Bklyn Eagle)
- School Bus Drivers Vote to Strike Over Health Care Bennies (NY1)
- City to Take Control of Brooklyn Bridge Park, Governors Island (City Hall)
- Speeding Drivers Are the Biggest Problem on Brooklyn’s Fourth Ave (Bklyn Paper)
- De Blasio Drafts Bill to Improve NYPD Oversight (AMNY)
- Detectives Don’t See Why They Can’t Park Wherever They Want (Post via Gothamist)
More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill
These bar stools are sold at DWR for $300 each, but here you are getting a pair for $350.
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When the state of New York announced in December that it would slice $143 million from the MTA operating budget, it may have seemed like a belt-tightening measure for lean times. But the truth of the matter — which often goes unstated, unreported, and unappreciated — is more insidious.
The overwhelming majority of the $143 million reduction in transit funding did not originate from the state budget. Instead, Albany took dedicated transit tax revenues from the MTA and redirected them to the state’s general fund. In effect, Albany stole $118 million from transit to subsidize the rest of the state budget. That’s enough money to restore all the subway and bus cuts currently on the table in the MTA’s austerity plan.
How did they pull off the heist? To explain, we need to give a short intro to the MTA operating budget.
In addition to fares and tolls, MTA service is mainly funded by an array of dedicated taxes, which total about $4.5 billion every year. A smaller portion comes from "state and local subsidies," of which Albany is supposed to contribute about $190 million. Already, we’re only talking about a small fraction of the MTA’s nearly $12 billion operating budget.
But here’s the thing — Albany’s "contribution" consists almost entirely of tax revenue that’s already dedicated to transit. This year, Albany put just $7 million from the general fund into MTA operations, according to the state Division of the Budget. The rest of its obligation to the MTA — $183 million — came from dedicated transit taxes.
So when the state made off with $143 million from the MTA budget in the December deficit reduction package, lawmakers were not reducing the state’s contribution to transit so much as raiding the MTA piggy bank and robbing transit riders of funds collected specifically to serve them. When all was said and done, Albany had taken $118 million from dedicated MTA taxes.
(The remainder was accounted for by a $19 million cut in state funding for student fares and the elimination of $6 million in state operating support.)
In a statement released last fall, Gary Dellaverson, who has since retired as the MTA’s chief financial officer, noted that this was "the first time that an existing appropriation to MTA has been
reduced under circumstances in which the money was derived from a
‘dedicated’ MTA tax and had already been collected by the State." In other words, the state didn’t pass onto the MTA the dedicated transit taxes it had collected.
The dedicated revenue source in question — the Metropolitan Mass Transportation Operating Assistance Fund (MMTOA) — was established in 1981 and consists entirely of taxes collected in the 12-county MTA region. (A report released by the New York City comptroller in 2008 [PDF] lays out how Albany has for years reduced the share of MMTOA that reaches the MTA.) So $118 million in downstate taxes, meant to fund transit exclusively, disappeared into the Albany money pit. Nothing in New York state law prevents the same thing from happening again.
What does it mean going forward? New transit funding would be great. But transit riders must also protect the transit funding we already have. Albany faces enormous budget gaps and is desperate to fund politically potent programs like education and Medicaid. Transit riders should beware attempts to steal more money from dedicated transit funds.
John Kaehny contributed to this post.
Graphic: Noah Kazis.
Even as the Obama administration ramps up its work on a sustainability initiative that treats transportation, housing, and energy efficiency as interconnected aspects of development policy, the effort remains without an official congressional authorization — a situation that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) vowed to fix yesterday.
During an appearance in his home state with Ron Sims, chief of the administration’s inter-agency Office of Livable Communities, Dodd vowed to work for passage of his legislation authorizing $4 billion in grants for Sims’ work.
"I only have about eight to 10 months," he said, according to the Hartford Courant. "My goal is to see the Livable Communities Act become law before I retire."
Dodd, whose panel has jurisdiction over housing and urban development, is working with that 10-month deadline as he anticipates retiring from Congress at year’s end. His push to create a long-term foundation for the administration’s sustainability effort also could run into resistance from rural lawmakers whose states have tended to benefit from a transportation spending system based on road-mile formulas.
The first stirrings of rural skepticism came on Thursday, when Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) questioned the administration’s move to emphasize "multi-modal" transport projects that would combine roads, transit, and bike-ped access.
Begich asked the U.S. DOT’s No. 2, John Porcari, to make sure that rural states are "not lost in the mix." That sentiment was echoed later in the day by Sen. John Thune (R-SD).
"It seems to me that [the Office of Livable Communities] is a program that’s going to overwhelmingly focus on urban areas," Thune told Porcari during the latter’s appearance before the Senate Commerce Committee, asking if rural states such as his own would "get some assurance or guarantee of funding."
Porcari assured the senators that the administration plans to include rural areas in its sustainability plans, describing the program as an opportunity to restore the "quality of life" once associated with small-town America. Nonetheless, the concerns raised by Begich and Thune could signal more requests for livable communities grants to be distributed among all states, as opposed to the more competitive process the administration has outlined for its first $150 million of funding.
The most significant test of Dodd’s ability to marshal support for his bill authorizing the livable communities office may come later this spring, as lawmakers consider the administration’s request for about $530 million in 2011 funding for the effort. Congress assented to the White House budget request for $150 million in sustainability grants for 2010.
DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan appeared on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show last Wednesday to talk about the agency’s plans to, as Lehrer put it, "spread the Times Square model." When Lehrer invited listeners to call in with their ideas for other streets that should be made car-free zones, "Steve from Manhattan" asked why the Central Park loop wasn’t being closed to traffic, calling it "obvious" and a "no-brainer." In her response, the commissioner said that Central Park’s loop road already is closed to traffic "98 percent of the time."
If this were true, it would invite the question why it’s such a big deal to finish the job, but in fact Sadik-Khan’s statistic is simply false. Worse, she’s clearly been using this inaccurate figure for quite some time, because she also cited it in a conversation I had with her back in October 2008.
Here are the facts: Because different sections of the loop are open to traffic for different lengths of time, the actual percentage depends on where you are on the loop and also on what you define as "the time" (for example, is it every hour of every day or only the hours when people are actually in the park?). Given this, the actual percentage of time that cars are banned ranges from a low of 25 percent to a high of 94 percent, depending where you are on the loop.
Let’s assume that "the time" means every hour of every day. With the West Drive now open to traffic for only two hours on weekday mornings, it’s closed to traffic 94 percent of "the time," which is the likely source of Sadik-Khan’s "98 percent." But as any recreational user of Central Park knows, the six-mile loop has an East Drive as well, which is open to traffic far longer. The East Drive north of 72nd Street is open from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., and the half-mile segment between the Sixth Avenue entrance and the E. 72nd Street exit permits vehicular access from morning until night, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. This means the section north of 72nd is closed to traffic 88 percent of "the time" and the southern section is closed only 64 percent of "the time."
The percentage of car-free time drops if we limit "the time" to weekday hours when people are actually likely to be in the park, and exclude weekends (when cars have been banned for 43 years), the overnight curfew (when no one is allowed in the park anyway), and the period from 10 p.m. to the curfews’ start at 1 a.m. If "the time" is instead defined as weekdays from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., the West Drive is closed to traffic 87 percent of the time, the northern part of the East Drive is closed 77 percent of the time, and the southern section is closed only one quarter of the time.
Whatever the percentages are, the fact remains that the drives are open to traffic during the precise hours when non-motorized use is highest: before the start of the workday on the West Drive; when kids are getting out of school and adults off from work on the northern section of the East Drive; and virtually all day on the East Drive’s southern corner. The commissioner’s implicit assertion that the park is almost completely closed to traffic is highly misleading and unhelpful.
On the more hopeful side, Sadik-Khan told Lehrer that closing the park to cars is "something we’ve been looking at," but she hastened to add that "it’s a balancing act in terms of understanding how the traffic flows through this important part of the city."
One wonders how much more data DOT needs before its understanding is complete. Over the past two decades the agency has repeatedly installed traffic counters both in the park and on surrounding streets. After each of its major adjustments to car access it has conducted detailed studies, none of which found any significant traffic problems. Isn’t it time DOT heeded the advice that urbanist Jane Jacobs offered me in a letter from 2002?
We had the same sort of fight in Washington Square Park in the late 1950s and in my neighborhood here in Toronto a couple of years ago: same prediction of traffic chaos, same result of no chaos, diminished traffic counts and no counts increased elsewhere in consequence. Isn’t it curious that traffic engineers are so loath to learn something new even after repeated demonstrations? Both in Washington Square Park and in my Toronto neighborhood we got our way by pressing for an experimental trial period. A trial, with traffic counts on the Central Park perimeter streets, will be more persuasive than any amount of talk, letter-writing, resolutions, and other endless wheel-spinning.
At Streetsblog Network member blog Planning Pool, this week is being billed as "Fail Week" — a full five days on "information about bad planning, lack of planning, and planning generally gone awry." We can’t wait to see what they’ll be doing. There’s certainly no shortage of potential topics.
Their first fail-related post actually has to do with a success of sorts — the use of Twitter to highlight problems in transit:
One of the more complicated aspects of Twitter are hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by the hash symbol, #, like #transitFAIL.
The purpose of a hashtag is to organize information and people. They are
often used to Tweet about current events, conferences, quotes,
activities, memes, and other things. Mashable has a good explanation about how they work.…
One of my favorite planning-related hashtags is #transitFAIL.
The purpose of #transitFAIL is to publicize where public transportation
fails its customers and users. It’s a particularly effective tool,
because you can use SMS messaging or use a web-enabled smartphone to
instantaneously tell the world about how transit just let you down.
Some smartphones can even take photos or videos and upload them to
Twitter, too.
Smart transit providers will use this feedback to improve their
service and see where the problems are. I’d like to see transit
providers use Twitter to notify people about service changes or delays,
too.
I didn’t know about the #transitFAIL hashtag, but it’s a good idea (we actually used "transitfail" as a tag in Flickr when we were putting together this user-generated slide show on lousy transit). Some transit agencies are using Twitter for service delays as well — @NYCTSubwayScoop is an example. Will this ever evolve into standard practice? Should it? Or is the reach too narrow?
If you know of more good transit-related uses of Twitter, drop them in the comments.
Oh, and we’re @streetsblog, in case you want to follow us.
- News Calls Out Lawmakers for MTA Hearing Hypocrisy
- Students Score MetroCard Meeting With Walder; Bloomberg and Paterson Still MIA (News)
- José Peralta vs. Hiram Monserrate: Pick Your Poison, Queens Voters (News)
- Subway Intercoms Deemed Less Helpful Than Station Agents (AMNY)
- Crane Operators Indicted for Manslaughter; Families of Diego and Hayley Still Waiting for Justice (NYT)
- Car Thieves Kill Bronx Teen in Horrific Hit-and-Run (News, City Room)
- "Simply an Accident": No Charges for Driver Who Killed One, Injured Four in Church Parking Lot (NY1)
- Urbanist Development in Flushing? Not If Merchants and CB 7 Have Their Way (Post, YN)
- Middle Village Parking Crisis Pits Neighbor Against Neighbor (News)
- Someone Tell Chuck: Gas Prices on the Rise, Expected to Hit $3 a Gallon by Spring (News)
Bike directions from the Empire State Building to City Hall on Google Maps.
